Okay well I hope it’s going to be great, but still I’m finding that using Social Media is a great way to organize people and share ideas and items. Myself and two other Social Media junkies, Neal Wiser and Phil Baumann are tossing around the idea to start a podcast for a small side project we’re doing together. This is still very much in the planning stages, because we only decided to do something last night. What struck me and gave me inspiration to write this post is how I’m using Social Media and cloud computing to get things off the ground (sorry for the pun).

There are a few tools that I’m using that hit a chord with me this morning.

First off Twitter. This is the main avenue of communication between the 3 of us (that and Skype too). Direct messages are a life saver and much easier than writing short emails to each other. I’m currently using Seesmic Desktop which really keeps my Tweeting in order and helps me organize this project and my life in general.

Second, I’m using a service called Dropbox to host files that we want to share amongst the three of us. This allowed me this morning to share an mp3 of a preliminary intro to the podcast with the other two members. Very neat.

Third, Google Docs. Google is a great resource, especially their Google Docs application. It allows us to collaborate in real time. A must for getting a project together.

Fourth, Delicious. Delicious is a social bookmarking cloud program/site that allows you to easily bookmark stories and sites that you want to go back to later and even share. This will be indispensable for sharing links to the stories we talk about in the show.

Fifth, Evernote. This is my brain online. Any Web page or online article I want to read or keep and read later goes in here. I couldn’t live without it.

Sixth, Facebook. This Social Media platform allows for Pages, we have an A2SM page (not too impressive yet) that will allow us to build a community around the blog and podcast. Very helpful and neat.

These are just a few of the items in the Social Media universe that I’m using to start this project. Do you use any of them? I’d like to hear what you have to say. Post your thoughts in the comments below.

Today marks the 8th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York, Washington DC and Western Pennsylvania. Many of us remember where we were on that fateful morning. I myself had just walked into the dining hall at the University of Delaware to get breakfast when I heard the news. I will never forget that day and neither should any other American. We are all lucky to live is a country that freedom is free and expected, but we need to not take it for granted and always be vigilant to make sure our country is safe.

May we never forget those who died 8 years ago. May their memories live on within us all, so that in some way they will live on.

God Bless the United States of America. United We Shall Stand.

Does Web design for next to nothing exist? Yes it does. Does it provide the quality and professional results that a custom site, coded from scratch provides? No, not even close.

Lately I’ve been seeing a trend. People have been trying to cut corners to save money in all the wrong places. In a small business group on Facebook one person touted her automated Web site builder and suggested that people cut out the Web designer and use her software. I responded, explaining that when you use an automated system, the code is often written poorly and your site will never get the results that you desire. These Website builders often use scripts written in PHP/MySQL to build the site. In my experience I’ve found that when code writes code it’s never as good as when a person writes the code from scratch.

Cheaper is never better and outsourcing abroad doesn’t solve the issues it creates more

Later that same day, the organizer of the group sent out another message from another member asking for a developer who could design a magazine site for less than $500. Now, I had to chuckle. Are these people for real? I understand we’re in a difficult economic climate but would you trust the building of your Website to  someone who is willing to build a complex dynamic site for that little? I wouldn’t because you won’t the get the desired final product you want.What’s more, when you complain about the quality you’ll probably be hit upside the head with point that you got what you paid for. You can’t expect someone to give you quality with out paying for quality.

Granted there are times when getting the cheapest price is the best thing to do, but when it comes to developing for the Internet, whether it be a Website or even a program, cutting corners and budget is never a great solution.

Those who know me know I’m not a big fan of outsourcing work abroad. There is a two-fold reason for this. 1) It takes jobs away from Americans. 2) The communication breakdown between the language and cultural differences usually results in more problems.

When people come to me for a quote and see the price (which is still very reasonable), some then respond by saying they can go to India or some place and get it for 3/4 the price. At that point I tell them that if they want to go that route they should, but they need to be aware of what they are getting into. Often I will hear from those same customers 6 months or a year down the road. As it turns out they didn’t get what they wanted for the price they paid and they then come to me to redevelop the site to the specs they wanted in the first place. Sadly, they are now  spending more money than they would have if they just paid for quality in the first place.

The moral of store is that sometimes getting the cheapest price for a project is not the smartest solution. Sometimes you have to spend money to get the job done right.

So the news just broke, Facebook the dominant player in the Social Media space has just bought FriendFeed a Twitter-esqe (although more robust) micro-blogging platform.

PALO ALTO, CALIF.—August 10, 2009—Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

Now not much is known as of yet to how the sites will integrate or what the fate of FriendFeed will be, but one can’t help but be cautiously excited for the ongoing innovation that this acquisition and merger will bring to Facebook and the social media community as a whole. One hope for me is that they keep some of the major features that FriendFeed has like the “feed/group rooms” and the ability to have one spot for your overall online life-stream.

Facebook in addition to picking up a great service, Techcrunch points out that the senior FriendFeed team is of  extremely high caliber:

But the biggest win here for Facebook is the FriendFeed team, which includes an all-star cast of ex-Googlers. Perhaps best known of these is Paul Buchheit, who is responsible for creating Gmail, pioneering some of Google’s early (and incredibly lucrative) advertising products, and coining Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto. Other ex-Googler co-founders include Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh.

It’s an exciting time in the social media space. I’m really excited to see what comes of this latest development.

What are you thoughts on this tech development?  Is this merger Good, Bad or Ugly? Post your comments below.

You should never stop reading. Yes reading in general. In today’s world many of us forget how important reading is. You need to stay up on your industry and make sure you know what’s going on. If you don’t you will be left behind.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about Tekzilla is a weekly technology, gadget, geek Internet show on the Revision3.com Network. It’s my favorite and I can’t wait until Thursday night to watch it. Every week they take viewers questions via email or video on YouTube. Having become frustrated with trying to edit my wedding video, I shot them a video question. Guess what they put it on the show!

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So stoked. What’s also really neat is that my video was the thumbnail for this weeks show!

SEOMoz puts out a good product and shares a lot of great data on different topics in SEO and the Internet as a whole. Today they had a post originally from their YouMoz blog (written by users of their service) and promoted to their main blog.

The author points out an serious issue with combating spam with Captchas.

We’ve all seen them, the often extremely hard to read random letters or words, aimed to combat spammers from junking up a site or a blog. Countless times we’ve all struggled to get them right.

The data the author is referring to in their post points out an alarming fact, that though the catchas are blocking spammers they might be also deterring legitimate comments.

This is not an easy issue to answer because the options are few. You can leave the captchas on and run the risk of having some people not leave comments because of it. You can also get rid of the captchas and just do more policing of the comments. Both have their pros and cons and honestly there doesn’t seem to be an easy answer.

There are other spam blocking programs out there, but what’s saying that these programs don’t block legitimate comments as well.

I’m curious what all of you think. Post your thoughts in the comments.

The case study was done over 50 different websites that I either manage or have access to. These websites range from less than 1 year old to over 5 years old. All forms were a collection of common information such as name, address, city, email address and a comment area.

The study was done over the course of 6 months, half of the website started with CAPTCHA’s on and the other half started with no CAPTCHA’s. After 3 months the CAPTCHA was switched to the other CAPTCHA setting. I recorded the amount of successful, failed, and SPAM conversions for each of the 50 web forms.

A SPAM conversion was recorded when the submission had excessive links or was a solicitation for a service. A failed conversion was recorded when a user/bot entered an incorrect CAPTCHA or never correctly entered the correct CAPTCHA after multiple tries. A successful conversion was when the information given in the web form was the required information minus any spammy information.

On to the data!!!!

* 2,134 total conversions were entered while the CAPTCHA was off.

* 91 total SPAM conversions while the CAPTCHA was off.

* 0 total failed conversions while the CAPTCHA was off.

CAPTCHA Turned On* 2,156 total conversions were entered while the CAPTCHA was on.

* 11 total SPAM conversions while the CAPTCHA was on.

* 159 total failed conversions while the CAPTCHA was on.

From the data you can see that with CAPTCHA on, there was an 88% reduction in SPAM but there were 159 failed conversions. Those failed conversions could be SPAM, but they could also be people who couldn’t figure out the CAPTCHA and finally just gave up. With CAPTCHA’s on, SPAM and failed conversions accounted for 7.3% of all the conversions for the 3 month period. With CAPTCHA’s off, SPAM conversions accounted for 4.1% of all the conversions for the 3 month period. That possibly means when CAPTCHA’s are on, the company could lose out on 3.2% of all their conversions!

via SEOmoz | CAPTCHAs’ Effect on Conversion Rates.

Murphy-Goode Winery in the California wine country ran a social media contest to find a social media consultant who knew how to tap into the pulse of social media. In this processes, they managed to not only miss the whole point of social media, they might even have damaged their brand.

Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht on Diggnation (07/14/2009) discussed what happened when social media junkie, tech-tv alumnus, and all around goof-ball Martin Sargent applied for the job, garnering the most votes but not making it into the Top-50. Here’s their take (warning foul a bit of foul language).

Here is Martin’s video application:

What are your thoughts? Did the winery just do an excellent belly-flop or did they prove how much help they really do need with Social Media or was this all planned? Conspiracy theory anyone? Post your comments, thoughts and haikus below.

Happy 4th of July (Independance Day)! May you all have a joyous day and remember how great it is to be free. Please have a safe holiday!

Hendrix playing the national anthem at Woodstock

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Seth Goldstein
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