LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

• Obsolete computer museum
• Memepool
• Simply Audiobooks

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Sites that you don't stumbe upon in your every day surfing. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.
And don't forget my web templates shop at http://www.bynapse.com/.

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. Guerilla Marketing
2. Webmaster Radio
3. iMusic

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at http://www.bynapse.com/.

MySpace .. YouTube, the real transformers of the web

The web is only 15 years old and it transformed the world. The first website, ever, was published in late 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee and has been preserved for the future by W3C and you can see a copy of it here.
Since then, websites have changed the world and now they’re changing the web again. Yahoo and AOL did portals, and they did them so well that they practically killed the competition until technology allowed for something like Google and Blogger to arrive. But before Blogger and with the right message, MySpace and YouTube have changed the way younger generation thinks about the internet. I remember a beer’s slogan “your friends know why” put that beer on top of the list in Eastern Europe for years and MySpace “a place for friends” has the same impact in cyberspace. YouTube generated a video community so well that members lived every transformation of it with passion.
A quote from News Corp. CEO Peter Chernin : “If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it’s Flickr, whether it’s Photobucket or any of the next-generation Web applications, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace.”. Read it all in We Don’t Need Web 2.0 and see that he might be right as they’re actually leading the Web 2.0 revolution.
The way the internet is evolving is by putting you at the center and bringing you the world, the way you like it. The emphasis is, finally, on beauty and usability, and sees the impact it has on everything else and on you as well. The best article I came across on the changes the web is seeing is written by Michael Rogers and he’s asking: Can Web 2.0 change the world?. I’m saying yes and MySpace and YouTube are the real transformers as they changed with a swift move, the way we think about it.

Here is but a list of sites that have changed my world:
· eBay.com - the auction and shopping site
· wikipedia.com. - encyclopaedia
· napster.com, the music file sharing website, this shook some ground
· youtube.com. the video-sharing network
· blogger.com, Blog publishing system and the following myspace.com, amazon.com, slashdot.org, digg.com, flickr.com, photobucket.com that came with the same wave. And I’m only mentioning a few.

The web is now a space for interactivity, sharp and clean WebPages with bold and simple designs centered in your browser and linking to one another to bring your content up front. Bandwidth is no longer a luxury so, when you consider building a web presence, look above the fence and see what others are doing don’t be afraid to use graphics as dial-up lines tend to be less used anywhere. Now you can play games online or just use a web template to build a website with little headache and great impact.

Which websites widened your world?

LinX BoX

This Friday’s Top 3 interesting sites I visited this week:

1. WordTracker
2. URL Trends
3. Hairy Mail

This list is published every Friday and values originality. Submit your suggestions for next week as comments.

And don't forget my web templates shop at http://www.bynapse.com/.

What is Social Media Optimization

Being a website owner or just writing a blog, like I do here, seems to be getting scarier. SEO - “Search engine optimization”, SMO -“Social media optimization”, “Content is King”, the right content to the right audience … wow, it could be frightening and it sounds like a ton of gold. I am a programmer so I’m not so much into marketing as I am into coding and yet I’m a fan of this world of fluid interaction. Knowing it exists and the effects it has on your blog or site is a must.

Some time ago I wrote an article on Web 2.0 that I’ve submitted to digg. The traffic spiked up as I got another 500 visitors in a day. That has to get you thinking, especially if you are into making some money. Was that “social media optimization”? I think it was just a taste of it. It’s a hot buzzword that adds up to SEO and sounds like a lot of time required to be invested.
SEO is about clearing the way for search engines to fully index your site, as well as using keywords in your text as often as you can do so without making it unreadable to the “internet scanner”, which is the way most visitors read articles (I’m among them). Social media optimization is about allowing your visitors to take away your content. Say what?! Well, yes, your content has to be easily shareable and commented on, even if this means implementing only the “Digg This” button on your blog, like the one at the bottom of this post. Tough to explain to your CEO, this should be an objective as visitors usually link back to worthy content, as long as the content is accessible. Adding tags and a Digg button, "Add to del.icio.us" or Technorati chicklet are the least you can do and it’s virtually painless. You can use a neat service like the one provided by AddThis.

Don’t get too excited though, most of the articles submitted to digg will only get one digg, yours. It’s not a recipe for success; it’s a way to get noticed.

Getting on the front page of social media sites offers credibility and visibility and those sound good to a site owner. A nice article about their experience with one of their articles and social media is shared by Daniel Tynski in the Anatomy of a Super Digg where, within five days, they received a total of almost 234,000 unique visitors.

Tips and tricks on how to get there are everywhere as bloggers are trying to monetize on the subject (what a free marketing campaign for those sites, huh?) and here are a few I find really useful an easy to read:

• 10 techniques for reaching the digg front page – Nice collection of articles


• Digg power user – Strategies to survive out there


• Become a del.icio.us power user – by David Brunelle

A comprehensive article on Social Media Optimization outlining the “5 rules of social media optimization” by Rohit Bhargava gets the tough part out of the buzzword.

The effects
Usually short lived and the traffic is barely converted. Links may be coming in, though, from quality sites, and people will at least get your newsletter or subscribe to your feed. You need to get the initial wave of visitors and convert them. Very few blogs are enjoying a constant attention and most of them never get any hits at all.

Free training
One of the real benefits to blogging and applying SEO and SMO is the training it provides to creating readable and inspired keyword rich content, increase expertise and encourages a discussion. Using social media certainly gets you a free training on using tags, providing a clean and comprehensive image of yourself and gets the word out.

Get back on the horse
Social media is about real life and living people. Digg has a feature called “bury” so life can be bitter in those communities as well as it can be sweet. Success is totally dependent on participation, on engagement. Compared to Search Engine Optimization, Social Media is definitely demanding more time.

It’s the ham and eggs paradigm, where the pig is committed and the chicken is only involved, it’s up to you to determine where you stand.