Social media & startups: It’s a different ballgame | Socialmedia.biz – I get asked a lot: “How do I make money off social media?” Uhmm, well, you use the magic wand of online web awesomeness, obviously. Or maybe not. We have all read a million articles pointing us toward tools we should be using, things we should be considering, and the best practices we shouldn’t ignore. We get it: Social media is valuable. I think by now we all understand the importance of social media as a visibility engine and viral message maker. It can be used to enable conversations, announce information, put out fires, and so on.
It can do a lot. But it has limits. Ohhh buzz kill.
DDoS Attack Takes Down Amazon, Wal-Mart – If you’ve been doing some last-minute Amazon holiday shopping on Wednesday evening, you’ve probably noticed that Amazon’s website was sluggish and, at times, completely down. The same fate greeted Wal-Mart, Expedia and a number of smaller sites. The reason? A severe DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack on the servers of Neustar, the company that offers DNS services to many major companies under the name UltraDNS.
The Pirate Bay Goes Retro for Christmas – Remember how one of the most popular torrent sharing sites, The Pirate Bay, looked back in 2003? Today, you have a chance to refresh your memory, because the pirates have gone retro, changing the layout of the site to the way it looked back then, when the Internet was innocent and there was no pile of lawsuits on The Pirate Bay’s desk.
Disney Wants Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg On Its Board – GigaOM – Disney’s board today nominated Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg to be its thirteenth member. It’ll be put to shareholder vote at the next Disney annual meeting, scheduled to be held March 10, 2010.
Add Clickable Links In YouTube Videos Without Using Annotations – While it is possible to add hyperlinks on YouTube videos via the built-in annotations feature, the only problem is that you cannot link to external websites from YouTube videos – that links should either point to a video hosted on YouTube or to a video search page that’s again on YouTube.
2010: Year of digital distraction? – CNN.com – The "real-time Web" is booming. From Twitter to Facebook to new search engines that discover information posted just seconds ago, it seems the 2010 Web will be fueled by our desire for instant gratification.
Mall of America Tweets Holiday Parking Updates – It may not be rocket science, but it is pretty cool: The Mall of America is using Twitter to tweet parking info for last-minute holiday shoppers hoping to avoid the ever-annoying quest for a space.
Digg’s Top 10 Most Popular Stories of 2009 – It’s the end of the year, traditionally a time for self-reflection. While many of us are making our New Year’s resolutions and looking back on what we accomplished, a lot of social media companies are sifting through their data and sharing what was hot in 2009.
FTC Inquiry Hinders Google’s Acquisition of AdMob – When Google formally announced their plans to acquire mobile ad network AdMob for $750 million, they didn’t expect any regulatory interference to impede upon the processing of the deal. Unfortunately they were wrong.
3 Powerful Social Good Trends in 2010 – 2009 saw a proliferation of online charity events, competitions, and “friendraisers” that spilled across Twitter and Facebook and filled email inboxes everywhere with more requests for money than any Nigerian prince could ever hope to make. And while it’s hard to argue that this is a bad thing — anytime someone gives money to feed the hungry instead of buying another digital potato seed in Farmville, global karma rises, if even just by a little — this focus on using the web as an ever-more elaborate means of getting people to fork over cash misses the much bigger opportunities just over the horizon.
Is Hiring a Ghostblogger a Bad Thing? – At any given time, there is usually an ongoing debate in some blogging circle about whether ghostblogging is a good or bad thing. I say it depends on how you’re using the term, and how you are using your ghostblogger.
Google News Will Not Accept Single Author Blogs – I put in an application to submit our blog to Google news, but it seems Google news will not include sites that are written and maintained by one individual!
Redesigning Your Web Site? Don’t Neglect SEO – Search Engine Watch (SEW) – Usability and SEO go hand-in-hand. Search engines want to rank Web sites that provide a quality user experience for the searcher. How that's defined can be somewhat subjective (every Web site is unique and its target audience will also be unique).
SEOmoz | Google Quietly Pushing More Links + Data in Snippets – The last 3 months have heralded a bevy of new tests and features from Google's search results, and it's worth taking a review of the most frequent of these and examining what it potentially holds for optimization of the future.
ReadTwit: All the Links From Your Twitter Stream in A Filtered RSS Feed – ReadWriteStart – In these hard times, it takes something pretty nifty to get us to write about a Twitter app; our eyebrows rose an inch or two when we were told about ReadTwit, an RSS application that makes Twitter smaller, faster, and better for those who need to find and consume interesting links.
Personal Relationship Manager Gist Launches to Public – Gist is not a system for the casual email user whose main communications involve sending email forwards to friends and pictures of the kids to mom and dad. Instead, Gist is designed to help the professional email user who often opens up their inbox only to feel like it's helplessly out of control. How do you know what the most important communications are? How can you stay up on what your email contacts are doing? Gist aims to solve these problems.
New Facebook Application Creating Massive Volumes Of Photo Spam – The photo tagging phenomenon has officially jumped the shark on Facebook with the All my Friends! application which lets you instantly tag your friends in pre-made images. It’s not exactly a new concept but for some reason this iteration of the application has been extremely successful having attracted over 5 million users so far and growing daily.
Make Google Search Real-Time With This URL Hack – Google web search results can be limited by timeframe using the "search options" link on every page, but one startup company CEO discovered today that searches can also be limited to results indexed minutes or seconds ago by making a simple change to the search results page URL.
Ask.com Powers Breast Cancer Cause-Search Campaign – According to Ask.com spokesperson Nicholas Graham, while companies are expected to help community organizations, it's not unheard of for these cause-related partnerships to also benefit the companies. After donating $25,000 to Autism Speaks through a targeted awareness campaign, 80,000 visitors changed their Ask home pages to Autism Speaks-related skins and 63% of campaign visitors became permanent users. Despite the fact that the promotion lasted only a few days, Ask saw a 10% increase over other holiday and non-cause related skinning promotions. In anticipation of October and Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Ask is building upon its community successes and teaming up with Susan G. Komen for the Cure in "Search for the Cure".
Security Threat: WordPress Under Attack – To prevent this attack, if you have not done so already, update your WordPress install immediately to the latest version. Change all your passwords to a strong password (cough), including WordPress blog access for all users, database, FTP, control panels, etc. These are all highly recommended procedures.
WordPress › Blog » How to Keep WordPress Secure – Right now there is a worm making its way around old, unpatched versions of WordPress. This particular worm, like many before it, is clever: it registers a user, uses a security bug (fixed earlier in the year) to allow evaluated code to be executed through the permalink structure, makes itself an admin, then uses JavaScript to hide itself when you look at users page, attempts to clean up after itself, then goes quiet so you never notice while it inserts hidden spam and malware into your old posts.
Improve Keyword Conversion Rates with Google Analytics – When you check all of your carefully selected and researched keywords, the results put a smile on your face because they are in the top spots in each of the search engines. You then look at your site traffic numbers for these keywords, and they are higher than ever. Then you scratch your head and ask, “Why are conversions so low?” Take a breath: the answer can be found in your Google Analytics data.
Bit.ly Launches J.mp to Save You Two Characters – Need to save two characters in a tweet? You could rework your wording a bit (change “people” to “ppl” or “for” to “4” for example), or, if your tweet includes a link, you could turn to a shorter URL.
Bit.ly, Twitter’s default shortener, is already plenty short, but if you want the same experience in two less characters, you can now use j.mp, which appears to simply be bit.ly rebranded with a new URL.
Bad Neighborhood – Link Exchange Tool – Text links are an important factor in today's search engine optimization, and exchanging links with other websites is a good way to get them. However, doing a link exchange with a website that is penalized can have some detrimental results.
Is Google Using A Privacy Double Standard? – On one hand Google doesn't abuse your data and personal information, other hand if the government and legal system comes knocking your information might not be safe from their eyes.
My Favorite Link Building Lie – While it is pointless to seek links (via email or any other method) for crappy content from other sites with equally crappy content, link building via email does in fact work perfectly – but only under one perfectly obvious and sadly overlooked circumstance: when the link seeker represents meritorious content and the link granter is looking for that type of meritorious content to link to. It’s so painfully obvious to me, that I fight the urge to laugh out loud when I read quotes like the one above.
Amazon Adds A Virtual Private Cloud – ReadWriteEnterprise – Amazon has created a hybrid cloud that can work securely for the enterprise, balancing the need for encryption with the low cost and scaling power that the cloud provides.
The Twitter Exploit That Could Have Stolen Your Info and Much, Much More – Found by David Naylor, the vulnerability exploits an issue with a recently added an HTML tag to all of their links (rel=nofollow, which tells GoogleGoogleGoogle that links on Twitter shouldn’t count in its algorithm). The result is that David was able to change the links in such a way that it generates a huge cross-site scripting vulnerability.
Over 80% of Americans Use Social Media Monthly – The demographic data follows the trend we see overall—younger people are more heavily involved, but over-35s and over-55s are becoming more and more active in social networking. While 10% or less of online adults aged 18-34 are “socially inactive,” the older age ranges are showing high growth. Among adults 35-54, participation grew 60% over last year:
Top 5 Current Email Scams You Should Know About – There are numerous ways to be scammed nowadays. Pyramid schemes, ‘too good to be true’ investments and of course the good old internet. There are literally millions of websites that will gladly take your money, personal info, bank details and a host of other things from you and then skedaddle.
2009 Facebook and Twitter Growth by Age Group | Ignite Social Media – The following chart by Nielsen shows that audiences above 25 have experienced a whopping 84% growth in Twitter adoption over the past 6 months. Also interesting is the 20% growth happening within the 55+ age range, compared to the 16% increase in 2-24 year olds. This slight discrepancy in growth doesn’t mean that younger audiences aren’t interested in Twitter, but suggests that they have already adopted it. (Also, after seeing the age ranges listed on this chart, I now want to see what a two-year old would tweet.)
Facebook Acquires FriendFeed (Updated) – Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, weve learned. Were gathering details now.At this point details on the acquisition are still very sparse, but its clearly a good match. Over the last year or so, Facebook has borrowed quite a few of features that FriendFeed popularized, including the Like feature and an emphasis on real-time news updates.
6 Twitter Directories To Add Yourself To – Everyone is always looking for new ways to get more Twitter followers. Well, one of the best ways to do this is by getting discovered through Twitter directories. There are many out there to choose from and its very quick and easy to add yourself to them. So, here are a few to get you started. Feel free to share your favorite (whether listed or not) in the comments.
What is a Natural Link Growth Profile? | SEO Book.com – 3 Common Link Building Strategies1. spiky. if the spikes are associated with news and viral marketing then that is not a big problem, but if they are sorta bought links, low quality links, etc. then this is sorta the worst way to do it.
2. linear. not as bad as spiky…but not as good as geometric. this is where a webmaster tries to build the same number of links each month.
3. geometric. this is where link building starts off slow, but then keeps getting better each month.
Company Boasts it Sold Twitter Followers to Michael Jackson – With the increasing popularity of social media sites and the power of marketing on them, more and more people have been investing in services which can increase their rankings faster than they could do on their own.One such service is the highly-controversial paid Twitter follower service which has been offered by web promotions company uSocial.net for several months now. Now theyre claiming theyve had the attention of some of the worlds largest names, including one interesting one in particular.
Reporting SERP Spam: Know How to Report & Reclaim Your Rankings – Below is a guide about spam results, how to detect them, and finally where to report them. If you want all the links to submit a spammy site, theyre at the bottom (but if you skip all the interesting info you might not know what to look for!).
Twitter Co-Founder: Attacks Continue to Change in Nature and Intensity – Apparently, were not out of the woods just yet. While Twitter itself has been working reliably for most of the day, some third-party applications remain impacted by measures the company has taken to defend against DDoS attacks.
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