WebProNews has put out a great video interview with Google’s Rick Klau, at the Blog World Expo in Las Vegas, about how to use blogging as a great supplement to Twitter and how the two can be a great communication tool for people and businesses. Rick points out great points about how blogging isn’t dead. In fact it’s still a very important part of the Web and communication.

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Source: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/

With the recent turmoil in Iran over the election results, there is much talk and communication on the Interwebs about what’s going on over there. It is important that the truth gets out. Please if you’re going to Tweet or participate in ANY WAY, please follow these basic guidelines:

The purpose of this guide is to help you participate constructively in the Iranian election protests through twitter.

1. Do NOT publicise proxy IP’s over twitter, and especially not using the #iranelection hashtag.  Security forces are monitoring this hashtag, and the moment they identify a proxy IP they will block it in Iran.  If you are creating new proxies for the Iranian bloggers, DM them to @stopAhmadi or @iran09 and they will distributed them discretely to bloggers in Iran.
2. Hashtags, the only two legitimate hashtags being used by bloggers in Iran are #iranelection and #gr88, other hashtag ideas run the risk of diluting the conversation.
3. Keep you bull$hit filter up!  Security forces are now setting up twitter accounts to spread disinformation by posing as Iranian protesters.  Please don’t retweet impetuosly, try to confirm information with reliable sources before retweeting.  The legitimate sources are not hard to find and follow.
4. Help cover the bloggers: change your twitter settings so that your location is TEHRAN and your time zone is GMT +3.30.  Security forces are hunting for bloggers using location and timezone searches.  If we all become ‘Iranians’ it becomes much harder to find them.
5. Don’t blow their cover! If you discover a genuine source, please don’t publicise their name or location on a website.  These bloggers are in REAL danger. Spread the word discretely through your own networks but don’t signpost them to the security forces. People are dying there, for real, please keep that in mind.
6. Denial of Service attacks. If you don’t know what you are doing, stay out of this game. Only target those sites the legitimate Iranian bloggers are designating.  Be aware that these attacks can have detrimental effects to the network the protesters are relying on.  Keep monitoring their traffic to note when you should turn the taps on or off.
7. Do spread the (legitimate) word, it works!  When the bloggers asked for twitter maintenance to be postponed using the #nomaintenance tag, it had the desired effect. As long as we spread good information, provide moral support to the protesters, and take our lead from the legitimate bloggers, we can make a constructive contribution.

Please remember that this is about the future of the Iranian people, while it  might be exciting to get caught up in the flow of participating in a new meme, do not lose sight of what this is really about.

(http://reinikainen.co.uk/2009/06/iranelection-cyberwar-guide-for-beginners/)

Okay, now I am a fan of John C. Dvorak. I’m a big fan of Cranky Geeks and TWIT and his blog. But I do think he is a bit full of cow poop sometimes. Especially when he decides from one bad experience withe “SEO” that SEO and those practicing it are a bunch of crackpots. Now I respect his opinion, but I really think Dvorak is shooting from the hip here with no real aim. Now I have to admit that he is a bit of an aquired taste, and though many might think he’s a total jerk and crank, I feel that he’s just a bit off with this accusation. Mark Jackson over at Search Engine Watch has a great column responding to Dvorak‘s crankyness. Here’s a excerpt:

An article in a major publication last week disparaged SEO, calling it “snake oil” once again. How did the columnist decide SEO doesn’t work, and that its practitioners are a bunch of snake oil salesmen? Well, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named (I hasten to give him any attention, as that’s what he and his editor are after) had rewritten his URLs to make them search engine friendly, but lost traffic in his efforts.

Here’s his exact quote:

Search engine optimization (SEO) has turned into a big business, and from what I can tell it’s the modern version of snake oil. The unproven nonsense spewed by so-called “SEO Experts” simply doesn’t work. And worse, it’s screwing up the elegance of the Web.

Ugh. Here we go again.

First off, dear readers, I exchanged e-mails with his editor-in-chief, and even offered to rebuke this column in a column of my own on his Web site. I just can’t let false claims such as his stand uncontested. When people write columns like this, it affects our industry.

We, as an industry, accept that many people have jumped on the SEO bandwagon, calling themselves SEOs when they have a difficult time even writing compelling title tags. We know that some people will quickly respond to RFPs, get a prospect to cut a few checks, and deliver little in return. Then, there are those of us who have studied for years to understand what good SEO is and worked hours helping our clients achieve measurable results.

OK, time to respond to the column. Begrudgingly, I’ll link to it so you can read it for yourself. At least we can discuss something that works for SEO: good URL structure.

Optimizing URL Structure

The columnist refers to the “fact” that long URLs don’t work. Here’s what he wrote:

My blog had typical, efficient WordPress default URLs, such as http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=3100 or some such thing. Now on my current blog, that particular URL — which used the simple story ID number to access the post — has been supposedly SEO-optimized behind this URL: http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2005/10/20/hollywood-unions-want-cut-of-itunes-pie/.

From what I can tell, this guy did at least one thing wrong — and possibly two — with this one element of proper SEO. I wish I could speak with him directly to confirm my suspicions, and perhaps even teach him a thing or two about what real SEO involves (much more than just one thing).

First, there’s really nothing “wrong” with his original URL structure (/blog/?p=3100). There are only two trailing backslashes.

So what if the URL has a couple of dynamic characters in it (the question mark and equals sign are referred to as “dynamic” characters). Search engines nowadays do fine indexing and ranking these. So long as you’re keeping your content as close to the root as you can, you should be in good shape.

However, it’s not “optimal.” How do we make this optimal? We “optimize.”

via Ignorance: The Trouble with People Who Claim SEO is Snake Oil – Search Engine Watch (SEW).

Image Credit: Max-Bro.net

Today across the Web, people have been buzzing about the new Terms of Service over at Facebook. Upon reading the TOS, the legalese makes it appear that Facebook owns your content once it’s put on the service. The TOS also states that Facebook can use the data for whatever it wants.

Now, as expected, people were outraged at this new clause. There were strong debates across not only throughout the Internet, but the Twitterverse and the Blogosphere.

Finally, Facebook head honsho Mark Zuckerberg, obviously seeing the chaos that the TOS has caused, released the release below on the Facebook blog to set the record straight (the post is below in complete). Users own their data on the service.

Now in the post, he says that they are trying make the rules more understandable. They are? Did I miss something.

I’d  like to hear your take below in the comments.

A couple of weeks ago, we updated our terms of use to clarify a few points for our users. A number of people have raised questions about our changes, so I’d like to address those here. I’ll also take the opportunity to explain how we think about people’s information.

Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information.

One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.

In reality, we wouldn’t share your information in a way you wouldn’t want. The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work. Our goal is to build great products and to communicate clearly to help people share more information in this trusted environment.

We still have work to do to communicate more clearly about these issues, and our terms are one example of this. Our philosophy that people own their information and control who they share it with has remained constant. A lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective of the rights we need to provide this service to you. Over time we will continue to clarify our positions and make the terms simpler.

Still, the interesting thing about this change in our terms is that it highlights the importance of these issues and their complexity. People want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time. At the same time, people also want to be able to bring the information others have shared with them—like email addresses, phone numbers, photos and so on—to other services and grant those services access to those people’s information. These two positions are at odds with each other. There is no system today that enables me to share my email address with you and then simultaneously lets me control who you share it with and also lets you control what services you share it with.

We’re at an interesting point in the development of the open online world where these issues are being worked out. It’s difficult terrain to navigate and we’re going to make some missteps, but as the leading service for sharing information we take these issues and our responsibility to help resolve them very seriously. This is a big focus for us this year, and I’ll post some more thoughts on openness and these other issues soon.

via The Facebook Blog | Facebook.

A must watch: