David Crotty already said that there are too many redundant services on Science 2.0… Indeed, look at this page where an article can be collected in different online services:

from left to right: CiteULike, Complore, Connotea, Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Reddit, Technorati, Twitter

http://groups.diigo.com/group/history-teachers

http://groups.diigo.com/group/geschichtsunterricht

http://groups.diigo.com/group/history-exchange

http://groups.diigo.com/group/eTwinning

In order for your business to rake in customers, businesses need to be able to get to as many of them as they can first. Thus, many of these businesses have tried out various ways to reach prospective clients. This is pretty much true in the world of online marketing.

And to of the most common methods used by web marketers to gather customers is by using social networking and social bookmarking. However, many people, even those in the online circles, whether if these to are actually referring to the same thing. In fact, they are actually very different in their focus.

Social networking is basically building a network of friends over the web. On the other hand, social bookmarking is that gathering and sharing of resource links in a network. In simple terms, one is connecting simply for the sake of staying connected, while the other connects with the intention of getting something else. However, both methods are increasingly being offered together and integrated in many sites that this definition is now slowly becoming useless.

So what’s in it for the online marketer to know the distinction between this two then? It is actually not so much to determine which one is much better to use. Rather, what you are looking here is ways to make good use of these methods. In fact, you might find it surprsing that these two will actually work much better when used alongside each other. So how do you use both of them effectively then?

To start with, social marketing will be quite useful for building up your network of possible clients. In order to establish a stronger connection with them, you will need to interact with them closely without you having to immediately offer your services. This way, they will be able to think more of you as more than a raunchy salesman selling his goods.

Once you have established your networks and began providing your service, this is the point where social bookmarking enters. Satisfied clients will then start talking about you and telling people how to go to you. This means that, as more and more people share links to your site to others, you client base will also start to grow bigger.

However, this is not necessarily the only way to use both methods effectively. Your business might often require you actually spread the word first through social bookmarks, then strengthen your business’ reputation in social networks. It is really up to you to determine how to use both effectively to suit your business’ needs. And once you are able to find that perfect combination, you also need to develop ways on how to effectively maintain it.

Sources:

Experienced People.co.uk

http://www.experienced-people.co.uk/1073-social-networking-business/network-or-bookmark.htm

Center For Learning and Performance Technologies

http://www.c4lpt.co.uk/articles/sml1.html

Team Creatives Affordable Web Development and Programming Services

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=L._Howard

THIS IS TEST POST

Do not forget the social side of the Internet. On Flickr, pictures of important events, particularly involving the top people in your industry, will generate interest. On YouTube, the same style videos will generate interest, and maybe even make it into the Google Universal Search results.

Network in the real world with people in your field – network on Facebook or LinkedIn if you don’t have the chance to conduct face to face networking or attend industry conferences.

Interesting, insightful interviews will also bring in readers. When you have interesting, relevant content, your site will be submitted to Digg and other social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Ma.gnolia.com or AOL’s Propeller, which will give you great links.

In this time of social media the keyword for you is ‘to share’ with other people on the Internet. This can be largely done by blogging. There is an increasing number of blogs set up by a lot of people in your surroundings. And your goal is to share your thoughts and feelings with everyone on the web. For this need, there are several services for you who can bookmark your website for every Internet user. But this amount of services has been exploded lately. This explosion of services has become visible by the absurd large amount of social bookmarking icons beneath every single blog post.

There is an overload of icons on the bottom of every blog which make it seem like these icons are even more important than the content of the blog itself. These icons cause noise in your blog pages. If you desperately want your blog to be found by people, you should consider writing qualitative articles instead of wasting time with connecting to every single social networking bookmark site.

It becomes even worse for the people who are more or less isolated with social media but still are interested in reading blog articles. What will they think when a blog says ‘Add this to del.icio.us’? They will recognize maybe a few icons, but the most icons will seem meaningless for them. Take a criticized look at those icons to discover that they are certainly a threat to the rules of web-usability. And then remember what the web-usability specialist Steve Krug says, “Don’t make me think”. These icons will do make people think about the meaning of them and why they are always there screwing up the blog pages. 

So what bloggers need to do is to get rid of the majority of useless nonsense-making icons. They will not have any large advantage of keeping them beneath every blog post. It is better to have no more than three social bookmark icons, because then all the bookmarks will be on the same websites instead of small numbers of bookmarks spread over different websites. The large amount of icons only causes confusion, extra loading time, noise and after a while even irritation. Just get your circus of the road and try to move on with a blog with qualitative content and few bookmark icons that are really needed and wanted.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to speak to a class of entrepreneurs about social media marketing. I covered all sorts of things from how Twitter works, why you want a Facebook fan page, to what social bookmarking can do for a blog or website. When I give these lessons it is always interesting to me what the class will latch on to and really focus on. In this particular class, it was social bookmarking.

To demonstrate how StumbleUpon or Digg can help others find your blog/website, I pulled up my own personal site and clicked on the most recent post. I showed how easy it is to click “Like It” on StumbleUpon and categorize and label a post. I also demonstrated other uses for social bookmarking sites, particularly how to find other authoritative or popular blogs/sites. Today I randomly checked the visits to my own personal blog. The numbers were through the roof! In less than 24 hours from bookmarking my site, I had received a 100% increase over my usual daily traffic! Not surprisingly, it was all from StumbleUpon.

Apparently, social bookmarking really does work!

What is Bookmarking

Quite simply Bookmarking pages means that if you have a favourite page and you don’t want to remember all your the addresses this button is a simple way of storing all your favourite pages in one place.

Why as a Seller should I bookmark pages?

We all want our products to sell at the highest price attainable and in the shortest time possible,to achieve this our adverts must be seen by as many people as possible. Whilst we at Hi-Fiadverts do as much as possible in the way of marketing and site optimisation there is still room for your to help market you products through Social Bookmarking.

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking is a legitimate way of showing your adverts to the world. This is done by saving your adverts as a bookmark on one of the many social bookmarking sites. This then creates a link to your advert that the search engines pick up on and add you advert to their search results so now when people do a search on your advert keywords your advert will be seen.

There is another advantage with Social Bookmarking, the way search engines work is to give higher priority to pages with more external links. This means that they will prioritise your advert over someone elses advert that is selling the exact same product. Of course it is needless to say but the more social bookmark sites you use the better the results you will see in links to you adverts.

Which Social Bookmarking sites to use?

We have found the best sites to use in terms of speed and ranking are as follows:

www.digg.com

www.folkd.com

www.oneview.com

www.linkagogo.com

www.spotback.com

www.delicious.com

www.furl.com

www.mister-wong.com

www.jumptags.com

So all you have to do now is register with the above sites of your choice and start Social Bookmarking your adverts.

Tags and Keywords

We have also found that using Tags and Keywords is very important in the number and quality of the links to your advert. As an example lets say we are selling a interconnect cable these are the tags or keywords we would use:

hi fi, audio, av, manufacturer, product, length, second hand, used, high end, advert, for sale, interconnect, cable, location.

We hope that this introduction to Social Bookmarking has helped you and now can advertise your products more effectivly.

“

— Hi-FiAdverts.co.uk

via Hi-Fi Adverts Latest, Search results for: bookmarking.

Flo, Ying2, Madd and SinK’s group enlightened us on the topic last week.

Here are some interesting tidbits that I would be sharing with you soon relating to that and other topics after this hectic week (hopefully):

• RSS Feeds
• Continuous Computing
• Continuous Partial Attention
• Social Bookmarking
• Globalization
• Is Google making us stupid?

Check back in soon!

Meanwhile, if you have anything you would like to share with me about these topics, do feel free to drop me a comment!

Welcome to Social Bookmarking Sites List

I am a link builder i am submit my site in many social bookmarking sites

i will give the information about the  free social bookmarking sites list

We Will Back Soon

Social Bookmarking Software

Going green seems to be the latest fad spreading across the world, but it’s not such a bad one, even if people start becoming environmentally conscious merely because it’s the ‘cool’ thing to do. So as people start to develop a genuine interest for environmental protection, and wish to find out more information about the environment and what they can do as an individuals to save their planet, where can they go? Anyone can do a web search on a well known search engine such as Google, but web results are usually based on page rankings and thus newer, popular articles with useful information get lost in the abyss of the internet. Thanks to social bookmarking sites, interesting and useful articles can be spread by humans rather than a page ranker, thus the articles have that much more relevance.

Social bookmarking sites are a great way to introduce relevant sites to others, and thus continue to build greater interest in those pages. As others read those pages they can rate them positively or negatively, adding value to the bookmark so that someone who wants to find relevant information can only visit those pages previously given high ranks by other viewers. These pages can be viewed chronologically, by ranking, or searched via their tags and categories. These bookmarks can be shared privately within a network as well, so an environmental group who wants to share articles with only members of the same group can do that.

An environmentalist, or potential environmentalist, would have a place to go to learn more about the latest innovations in going green, as even corporations now are trying to do their part to reduce emissions and increase energy efficiency. The service of social bookmarking has grown immensely popular because it gives a human touch and gives users a ranking of the page’s quality, as well as a brief of the material before you visit the page.

Social bookmarking is a very easy and valuable way to view a consolidated list of bookmarks, and has become an easy way informative links to members of different online communities. And with their increased popularity, social bookmarking sites are improving everyday to meet the competition and offer something that the competitors don’t. Today there are dozens of popular social bookmarking sites that appeal to a general audience, but few that successfully target a specific community or category, such as the environment.

Contact:

Ahsan Technologies

No. 16/3 Krishna Street,

Nungambakkam

Chennai – 600 034.

Tamil Nadu, INDIA.

Sales: +91 44 2820 7100

markit@agriya.in

http://www.markit.me/

Some SEO methods can get your website banned from major search engines. Utilizing ethical means of boosting your traffic and search engine rankings can help increase your site’s traffic or SEO. While it’s likely that social media/networking can help optimize one’s presence online, several people are not making use of it or perhaps do not really know about its benefits.  

Facebook is a good place to start your SEO Internet marketing tactic. Aside from the fact that joining is free, this social networking website has lots of members logging on it each day. This could really get your company or business name out to thousands of individuals at a time.  Although strategic web design can be the best means of getting your blog or website higher on search engine ranking, creating a Facebook profile for your business or company can help link back to your landing page and could help you develop a fan base too.

While some people think that Facebook cannot lead to a sale, this natural social networking tactic can be far better than word of mouth advertising since it cannot hurt to obtain FREE promotion! Many people have already succeeded using Facebook and more and more people are currently making use of it. So, why not give it a try. Just make sure you make use of it correctly and you will really benefit from it.

A lot of people have already failed using this SEO tool because they make use of it incorrectly. The key here is to build relationship and brand yourself or your business in order for others to get interested and see more what you can offer for them.

If you haven’t started an Internet Marketing Campaign, consider using Virtual Business Connections!

 
Let us be the building blocks to your business’s future!

The ever changing nature of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) makes today’s search practices out of use tomorrow. From a marketing perspective, it is quite apparent that emphasizing the role of SEO can have a negative effect on return on investment and visitor conversion. As a marketing tool, SEO combined with social networking must be used as situations impose, with steadiness which imparts better clout to call the right visitors.

In pursuit to increasing your website’s traffic ratio to leads, it is beneficial to build relationships with other people through the use of social networking sites where you can find prospects and where you can promote products or simply build brand.  You can then convert your visitors or traffic that you have generated into leads, which is typically a matter of how you build relationships with others and answer their queries.

Keep in mind that both social networking and SEO are the two main factors that can enable you to drive traffic to your site because both are powerful enough to let your site be seen by popular search engines. In conclusion, it is important to sustain the vital role of social networking and SEO in ensuring better search engine ranking position. So to assist this, implement the right keywords in your site and make it popular by interacting with others in different online communities of social networking sites. Through this way, your site would be better indexed by search engines and would have higher search engine rankings.

If you haven’t started an Internet Marketing Campaign, consider using Virtual Business Connections!

 
Let us be the building blocks to your business’s future!

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.

Descriptions may be added to these bookmarks in the form of metadata, so that other users may understand the content of the resource without first needing to download it for themselves. Such descriptions may be free text comments, votes in favor of or against its quality, or tags that collectively or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, “the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content”.

In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some services feature categories/folders or a combination of folders and tags. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks.

Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.

1. Den første regl er læse retning. Tænk øverst til venstre først. Det vil sige, for at rangere højt på Google, så er det vigtigste din url og sidens titel tag. Der næst er det første overskrift og sidens andre overskrifter, så til sidst børdtekst.
2. Navngiv dine sider, varer eller artikler med de ord, som din brugere leder efter. Hvis du vil sælge brugerne vandhaner, så nytter det ikke at du helst vil kalde det amature. Det er der ingen der søger efter. Brug Google Insights til at sammenligne ord og synonymer, så du er sikker på at du bruger dine brugeres ord.
3. Udfyld dine meta-tags. Brug dit description tag med omtanke. Det er nemlig den tekst Google vil vise under linket til din side. Hvis ikke Google mener teksten i description passer til siden, vil søgemaskinen selv finde afsnit på siden, som robotten mener passer bedre. Selv om ingen søgemaskiner bruger keyword tagget til noget som helst. Så udfyld det alligevel. Nogle Social Bookmarking sites bruger dette tag, som guide til søgeord i deres systemet.
4. Få styr på teksten i dine interne links. Et link til en nyhed eller mere information om en varer skal ALDRIG angives med: “Læs mere…”. Hvem er det, der leder efter information om “Læs mere”? Lyder det ikke meget bedre med: “Ny intelligent skruetrækker – Læs mere”. Sådan. Nu er der tekst med der fortæller hvad der er bag linket, og det er klart for brugeren, at der kan findes mere information bag linket.
5. Trafik til din side har betydning for din placering og din PageRank. Skriv letlæselige korte afsnit, og hold øje med din afvisningsgrad. Design siden, artiklen og teksten, så du får en lav afvisningsgrad.
6. Brug Social bookmarking sites som Delicious, Propeller, StumbleUpon og Digg, der alle har god ranking på Google, til at skabe trafik og give dig PageRank Boost. Bookmark dit indhold og brug tid på at lave dine beskrivelse, titler og tags på de forskellige sider forskellige, så der ikke bare er kopier af det samme.
7. Brug Google Analytics og hold styr på dine indgående links. Det som kunderne og andre websites skriver i teksten, på links til din side, fortæller også Google, hvad din side handler om. Så du skal ikke være for genert til at kontakte sider, der linker til dig, og foreslå dem en tekst til linket, til din side, hvis de kun linker med “Læs mere” eller dit firma navn.
8. Brug alt tags på billeder til, at inkludere de mest almindelige stavefejl. På den måde kan du også ligge top 10 på ord, der slet ikke findes, men alligevel ofte søges.
9. Overhold W3C standarderne. Det gør det lettest muligt for Google at læse, forstå og indeksere dit indhold.
10. Brug micro-formats tags til angivelse af adresser. Dem bruger Google Maps til, at placere din virksomhed i verden, og tildele virksomheden kontakt information.

Overhold de 10 regler her, og så er du ikke bare godt på vej op i søgeresultaterne på Google, men du vil også opleve en fin stigning i trafik til din side.

I wrote once before about viewing our colleagues as a resource. As part of our professional development, I suggested tapping into an online teaching community to read about issues common to all classrooms, conducting peer observations to make us reflective teachers, and keeping a communication board in the staff room on which teachers could post tricky language questions for consideration and discussion. What else can our colleagues do for us? What can we do for them? Here are a few ideas.

• Share lesson plans. As an experienced teacher, your lesson plans may be so abbreviated that they may look something like a cross between a secret code and chicken scratch, but consider the benefits of rewriting a particularly successful lesson plan in a readable format and sharing it with your peers. Aren’t you curious to know what practices others are using in their classrooms? The exercise of reviewing someone else’s lesson plan makes you reflect on choices she or he made. You think about how you might have done things differently, but realize that this particular sequence of steps led to successful learning. If you’re part of a school staff, you can consider different platforms for sharing. For example, this can be done on a rotating basis at your monthly staff meeting. The presenter of the month can distribute hard copies for review. Online options for exchanging lesson plans include file sharing via a Yahoo Group, a wiki, or a virtual office at Tapped In. (Digital documents are great because they save paper and can be archived.)

• Share links. There are so many ESL/EFL-related sites out there. How can we find them? When you discover a good one, do you share it with your colleagues? The folks at TESOL’s Electronic Village taught me about social bookmarking. What a great concept!

• Exchange the favor of reviewing/ editing materials. Despite the fact that there are great printed resources out there, you still might find yourself (or choose to place yourself) in the position of writing original lesson or test material. Rule #1 about materials writing: proofread. Rule #2: Have someone else proofread when possible. It really helps to have a second set of eyes, and if that set of eyes belongs to a fellow teacher, she or he can also provide feedback regarding the overall quality of your work.

• Share your knowledge. There’s so much we can learn from one another. Sometimes it’s a small piece of information, such as some insight into pronouncing foreign names because you know a language that a colleague doesn’t. Other times it could be a set of skills. For example, I mentioned in another posting that colleagues may be able teach you how to use the technology you want to bring into your teaching. Perhaps you want to share links with colleagues and students. You’ve heard of social bookmarking, but never tried it. Try asking another teacher. Maybe she or he has an account on Delicious and can show you how it works.

So much of our time is spent in the company of our students or alone as we prepare our lessons and correct assignments. The time we spend with our peers may not amount to much in comparison, but it’s important. Whether it’s a staff room at a school or a virtual office, we need a place to interact with one another. Through our exchanges we can offer support and even promote one another’s professional development. Of course, realistically, not every shared moment is going to be work-related…and that’s fine. Enjoying one another’s company through a recap of a fun weekend or a discussion of recent news has a purpose, too. It creates comfort and familiarity. Our relationships grow, and we then feel more secure in taking and offering support. Besides, conversation and shared laughter add a warmth that every work environment needs.

The explosion of the web may have caught out newspapers and a lot of journalists, but early adopters have been able to thrive in an environment where one man’s threat is another’s opportunity.

Certainly the web has caused a lot of problems for media and journalists, but the tools to adapt to this changing market have been provided for us.

What’s more, the vast majority of the most important ones for bloggers, journalists, editors and even PRs and marketers are freely available, easy to use and – perhaps most importantly – free.

Some of these tools are suited to building traffic, some for measuring traffic, some for sharing or collecting information and others to add value to traditional content.

Some will suit you, others will not. A couple may even be irrelevant and I will make no claims for what they will do for your traffic, brand, revenues or social life.

But these are all tools that I use, in some cases vital tools, and if you accept the metaphor of modern journalist as media Swiss Army Knife you need to constantly develop your skills and make use of the largely free tools you have at your disposal.

There are, literally, thousands of them out there and it can be confusing as to which may be of help and which – in all likelihood – will not.

These are the tools and applications I find most useful and I’ve tried to keep the apps, and descriptions of them, fairly basic. There may be some obvious ones I miss out, which just means I haven’t got round to making use of them or I don’t consider them worth flagging up for starters.

There seems to be a lot of suspicion surrounding social media and Web 2.0 apps. All I have to say to that is this: They are tools. How, and whether, you use them is up to you.

The only criteria are that they’re predominantly free and they are basic, widely-available online tools or apps.

Anyway, without further ado here’s the selection. Dive in.

Twitter and related

Twitter is, to my mind, so important now for online media types that it’s got a category of its own.

Twitter

The Web 2.0 Telegraph is the most fitting description I’ve seen of Twitter. Twitter is simply the platform of choice for important communicators interacting with one another: promoting links, sharing information, asking for help or shooting the breeze.

If you’ve built up good contacts in relevant fields on Twitter it’s the most important tool you will use.

• See: Twitter
• See also: Robin on Twitter

Twitpic

One picture is worth a thousand words, or 140 characters. Show Twitter followers what’s got your attention by connecting up your phone to Twitpic.

You can set up Twitpic so it directly and instantly feeds to Twitter, even old mobiles can do it.

• See: Twitpic
• See also: Robin on Twitpic

Twitterfeed

If you have multiple blogs and multiple Twitter personas you need to make sure the correct blogs are feeding to the correct Twitters. Doing it manually can be pain in the backside, so automating a feed to post to Twitter is worth investigating.

There’s some debate as to whether automated posting goes against the grain a bit on Twitter. As with anything, moderation and common sense are key.

If you’re using Twitterfeed you don’t want more than a couple of automated posts a day. A deluge of links will get you unfollowed. And Twitterfeed is no substitute for proper engagement on Twitter.

• See: Twitterfeed
• See also: Twitterfeed on Twitter

Hootsuite

If you manage multiple accounts it’s simpler to manage them from the same place, rather than logging in and out and juggling usernames and passwords.

I initially used Tweetdeck but it’s awkward and buggy. Hootsuite is easier to use as it’s on a webpage; simpler; customisable; and has useful add-ons like stats, URL shortening and scheduled posting.

• See: Hootsuite

Bit.ly

Essentially anointed by Twitter as the link-shortener of choice, Bit.ly is probably the best too. It will take your long link and make it into a 20-char link that won’t eat up your 140 chars in a tweet.

A simple interface and some basic metric-tracking and sharing tools are the cherries on the cake.

• See: Bit.ly

Twitterholic

Looking a bit rough around the edges now but this is the tool I used to build a following on Twitter by finding people in similar places or with similar interests to me.

It’s always easier finding people who will reciprocate if you have something in common, an area where a lot of people trying to build a group of followers fall down.

• See: Twitterholic
• See also: Journalists on Twitterholic

Social bookmarking sites

Using social bookmarking sites simply to try and drive traffic can be fruitless and potentially damaging. All have unique communities and all are different, even if they don’t initially appear to be.

If you’re representing a brand you may want to think twice before submitting ill-fitting links to Digg, Reddit and Fark. If you’re not going to engage or observe how things work, don’t bother.

Also be aware that chasing traffic, as an end in itself, can be somewhat self-defeating. Choose your bookmarking carefully.

Digg

Using Digg to its maximum potential – in terms of traffic – takes time, effort and patience. As with Twitter, it’s about building a community and using that community to promote your links.

I think Digg has a fairly narrow band of opportunities for editors or journalists. Funny, techy or sporty stuff seems to do best as Digg users tend to use it to share distracting, fun stuff.

The obscene amounts of traffic The Onion and Cracked get from Digg seems to bear this out.

Occasionally I happen to write something I think will do well on Digg, and I make sure I write a header and description that will appeal to Diggers.

A well-placed story on Digg will send you hefty amounts of traffic, and it’s good for in-bound links too. Also bear in mind the reason it’s there – it’s fun.

• See: Digg

Delicious

Of very little use for generating traffic in the way Digg and Reddit are, Delicious has probably grown into the most pure social bookmarking application.

It’s beautifully simple and, because it’s searchable, is a great repository for valuable information.

It tends to be used by people working in media, PR, programming and marketing so it’s a gold mine of peer-approved guides and information in these areas.

• See: Delicious

Reddit

Not a million miles away from Digg, Reddit has an arguably broader focus and is easier to get into for newcomers.

Reddit’s community is not to be messed with however. Get a link submission wrong and you’ll know about it.

• See: Reddit

Fark

Digg on speed, or maybe acid. Fark consists of ‘not news’ chosen by a community and as such a very difficult tool to wield with any success.

In fairness Fark is not a tool at all, but can be used as such. Many international media have successfully harnessed Fark as a tool to drive vast amounts of traffic.

A story on the front page will deliver tens of thousands of hits over a very short space of time, which often leads to servers being ‘farked’ – brought down by the deluge of traffic.

A very good understanding of the community is required, and there’s a good opportunity to sharpen up your headline-writing skills. Only the very best stories and write-ups are greenlit, but the resulting traffic can be huge.

• See: Fark

RSS, alerts and readers

Tracking the websites that are important to you, and sharing your own content with readers is an important element of the online Swiss Army Knife.

Netvibes

I say Netvibes because it’s the one I use and I think it’s smart, but any reader or personalised home page will do – they’re essentially much of a muchness.

If you’re in media or PR you need to keep up with events on a daily basis. That means browsing potentially hundreds of feeds a day.

Grabbing an RSS feed and displaying it in your reader alongside 50 others is a lot easier than going to those individual sites.

Add-ons like widgets, increased sharing abilities and clever use of APIs from other apps like Facebook and Twitter means you can potentially browse, and interact with, all the relevant bits of the web from one page.

Most have a public setting too. As a result I have a public homepage on Netvibes that displays all my various online real estate around the web.

• See: Netvibes
• See also Robin’s public page on Netvibes

Tabbloid

Takes your feeds and displays them in a newspaper format. A bit clunky, and there are a few similar tools out there, but handy if you get square eyes looking at a normal reader.

Can also be used as a promotional tool to round up your output on a regular basis.

• See: Tabbloid
• See also Tabbloid sample

Feedburner

Allows you to track and edit your RSS feeds, share links and embed ads in your feed. No earth-shattering, but provides far more control over RSS feeds.

• See: Feedburner

Google Docs

Put e-documents online, quickly, easily and – er – freely.

• See: Google Docs

Google Alerts

Track a developing story, stay abreast of any news concerning particular companies or trends or steal a march over others on breaking news relating to your chosen keywords.

• See: Google Alerts

Twitterfeed

Again. See above for details

Multimedia

There are a hundred ways to tell a story these days. Use images, videos and music to bring yours to life.

Youtube

There are half a dozen good apps out there that will allow you to upload and share videos, but for simplicity’s sake I’ve gone with Youtube.

Youtube as a platform is only really as good as your videos, but as a tool it’s probably more versatile than you’d think.

Most obviously it provides some fantastic, free, embeddable multimedia content. If you can’t do something with that you’re probably in the wrong job.

Insight actually provides some useful metrics – the one measuring the attention span of watchers per video for one – while playlists, audio beds and annotations allow for some personalisation.

Add a customisable channel page and Youtube becomes a valuable tool in branding and hosting.

Live Stream and Vimeo may be more obvious, and going forward will come into their own, but for ‘quick and dirty’ Youtube is good enough for most.

• See: Youtube
• See also MotorTorque on Youtube

Flickr

Please be aware of what Flickr is not – a free image bank. If you’re going to use Flickr to source images you need to have a thorough understanding of Creative Commons licences, and some form of contact with individual authors.

Also, Flickr is not a link-building tool. Any links are nofollowed and business accounts are frowned on.

With that in mind Flickr can be invaluable for finding good quality images to accompany articles and is also a pleasantly simple image storage and presentation tool.

Image sets can be presented as embedded slide-shows, which can be a great visual dimension to a story alongside a static image.

Flickr can also be used to create links within photographer communities and can be used to promote photographic work.

Again, its largely self-policed by one of the more righteous online communities, so ensure you know what you’re doing.

• See: Flickr
• See also Robin on Flickr

Pixlr

Essentially an online Photoshop but cheaper (free actually), faster and simpler. Great tool that’s good enough for most photo manipulation.

• See: Pixlr

MPEG Streamclip

Good tool for video file conversion and some very basic editing features. Plays virtually anything. Can also be very good at capturing online videos if that’s your thing.

• See: MPEG Streamclip

Spotify

Weren’t expecting that one were you? But any new free app should be considered for the possibilities it provides.

A few brands have flirted with playlists, and I’ve done a couple of articles involving playlists to accompany articles.

There may not be a huge amount more scope than that, but Spotify is a free resource that offers free access to millions of tracks. Who saw that coming a couple of years ago?

• See: Spotify
• See also Crucial Three article on Liverpool Culture Blog

Morgue File

A good free image-bank site. The value of a good image to accompany an article can make all the difference. If you have access to a free image bank you’ve really no excuse. Remember to add a credit and check licenses though.

• See: Morgue File

Stock Xchng

Another great free image bank, with a premium level.

• See: Stock Xchng

Mash-up and added value apps

Add value to your content with embeddable mash-ups and media that complement your content.

Dipity

Great for building timelines for events that can be embedded. Connect up RSS feeds to feed a topic or add manually.

The added value it can bring to a running story is not to be underestimated – it’s shiny and it’s useful, especially if you’re using your own content to build timelines.

• See: Dipity
• See: Dipity US car industry timeline

Google Maps

Google Maps should be subtitled ‘not just maps’. Any amount of mash-ups can be created with the API, but it’s just as easy to create interactive co-operative maps using the site itself. Also works well with Google Earth.

As with Dipity, you can add value to content and tell another dimension to a story. A no-brainer for travel reports and write-ups.

• See: Google Maps
• See: Half Map Half Biscuit

Cover It Live

The ability to cover an event live on a self-hosted platform can be invaluable. Cover It Live allows administrators to host guests, guide discussions and moderate reader comments.

While Twitter may be a more obvious platform for micro-blogging, Cover It Live can be embedded into a web page, customised and managed in terms of who can contribute. Images and video can also be embedded in the stream.

Again, it can add another dimension to traditional coverage and bring live events to life.

• See: Cover It Live

Xtra Normal

A tool that allows you to convert to text spoken by an animated character may be gimmicky, but it can be fun.

Any blogger worth their salt should be able to think of something at least funny to do with it.

If Xtra Normal had been around 20 years ago we could have had animated reports of Gerry Adams speaking to the UK via an animated avatar.

• See: Xtra Normal
• See: Worried about acid erosion? on AdTurds

PollDaddy

Encourage user feedback and drive user-generated content with a poll – it can provide valuable insight or be used to drive original content itself.

Easy to configure and embed, you can stick it in the middle of an article one day and write a follow-up the next day based on the results.

• See: PollDaddy
• See also: Widget on WordPress

Metrics, web editing and SEO

If you’re running a blog or website you want to be able to track its performance over a number of metrics. A basic understanding of SEO will benefit any journalist too.

Google Analytics

Or any decent analytics package that allows you to track, compare and dig down into various metrics.

Analytics will do all of that and more – you can’t seriously run a large website without something at least as powerful and detailed as Google’s statistics tool.

Analytics can be used at a very basic level for tracking your traffic and website performance, or can provide intricate details into what’s going on in the deepest reaches of your site if you drill down.

Makes a great pairing with Adsense.

• See: Google Analytics

Webmaster Tools

Webmaster Tools allow you to get your hands a little more dirty with the intricacies of web design and SEO.

If there are any obvious problems with the navigation and accessibility on your site, Webmaster Tools should flag them up, along with some SEO information on backlinks and keywords than may give you a different perspective on how your users – or search engines – view your site as opposed to how you view it.

• See: Webmaster Tools

Adsense

Making money from a blog or website can be something of a double-edged sword. I don’t have Adsense on any of my personal blogs, but do use it on other sites.

Simply put Adsense offers the ability to make money from your blog or site with a few clicks.

Style your ads, decide on what keywords you want to include on your ads, settle on placements and Adsense will generate code for you. Stick the code in your blog, verify your account and watch the cash roll in.

Don’t expect vast sums unless you’re doing thousands of impressions a day, and bear in mind the downside of changing your blog to a money-making device.

• See: Adsense

Google Trends

Stuck for blog topics or want to research a trend? Google Trends is a good way to track what’s popular, although Twitter Trends can be used in much the same way.

Comparing two or three different terms can be instructive if writing about brands, TV programmes or pop bands.

Trends also pairs up well with Insight, an advances search facility currently in Beta, which allows you to drill down into search data over different periods of time or by region and country.

Both are probably of more use to marketers, but keyword searches and tracking can also be useful for giving a fresh perspective on an article, creating unique content, driving Adwords campaigns or simply finding out who is currently winning out of Doctor Who and Star Trek.

• See: Trends
• See also: Who is winning out of Doctor Who and Star Trek?

Website Grader

A good all-in-one tool that will grade your site against others in terms of traffic, search engine placements, page rank and a dozen other metrics.

Can provide a good introduction to basic SEO and an insight into what you may be doing correctly or incorrectly.

• See Website Grader

Platforms

If you’ve not made the leap you’ll need a platform on which to host your blog or site. Make sure you pick a good one.

WordPress

So far in front of other blogging platforms it’s not even funny. WordPress hosted or self-hosted is easy to figure out, has an interface so intuitive it’s almost beautiful, good support and a peerless range of plug-ins.

If you’re a journalist you need a blog. If you need a blog, use WordPress. That is all.

• See: WordPress

Tumblr

Ultra-simple blogging platform that makes the easy-to-use WordPress look like quantum mechanics.

Tumblr’s simplicity and efficiency is its greatest strength, so if you need something that works out of the box and don’t need the extra bells and whistles, look no further.

• See: Tumblr
• See also: Robin on Tumblr

Promoting yourself

Much as it pains me to say it, you need to be a brand these days, and that means at least providing people with the means to browse your skills and experience.

I use this blog to do that, but there are a couple of other tools around the web worth a look.

LinkedIn

I’m not actively searching for freelance or seeking a new job, so I’ve not got much out of LinkedIn so far.

If and when I do I’ll no doubt investigate further as this is what everyone uses. I’m not clear how much business actually gets done on LinkedIn, but for now I’ve got a page on there with the basics on.

• See: LinkedIn
• See also: Robin on LinkedIn

ReTaggr

Unsure about ReTaggr at the moment, but it does what it says on the tin – essentially an online business card.

• See: ReTaggr
• See also: Robin on ReTaggr

• Image by Noodlepie on Flickr via Creative Commons

NB. There are 38

Naar aanleiding van een artikel ben ik eens gaan zoeken naar informatie over “social media” en kwam terecht op http://www.social-media.nl/ .  Bekijk deze pagina eens en klik ook de “categeorieën” aan! Er staan 2 of 3 vormen in die voor een werkomgeving (volgens mij!) niet geschikt zijn zoals “social dating” en “social gaming” alhoewel de laatste nog zou kunnen als iemand een leuk spel wil/kan maken over het zoeken van een boek of artikel. Hebben we niet ergens een fanatieke gamer met ambitie? Onder de links ook de vermelding van NING (sociaal netwerk ontwikkelen, http://www.ning.com/ ) en BOOMR (http://www.boomr.nl/ ,muziek). Ik noem wat namen : YouTube, Wikipedia, Hyves, Linkedin, Facebook, Librarything, Del.icio.us, Twitter, enz. allemaal vormen van “social media” waar men informatie kan vinden en verspreiden. Specifiek voor de EUR kun je nog op MyEur naar Blackboard, Sin-online, Osiris. En er is meer ! Persoonlijk heb ik de grootste moeite met het onthouden van alle wachtwoorden en inlogcodes, maar dat terzijde. Zouden we als biblitoheek of als GOS alle of veel van die media willen/kunnen/mogen inzetten ? Bijv. reageren op een Hyves bericht over de UB, een hippe (dat is nu een ouderwets woord, maar “vet” heeft weer niet mijn voorkeur!) film op YouTube plaatsen, een wiki maken voor de gebruikers, Macgebruikers volgen, opgenomen Webinar-filmpjes maken met instructies over bijv. het maken/volgen van een RSSfeed (volgens onderzoek veel te weinig gebruikt) of over het kiezen van een databank, het gebruiken van de catalogus, het maken van een VPN. Waarbij ik er persoonlijk van overtuigd ben (als ervaringsdeskundige met 2 pubers) dat de huidige student veel meer heeft aan informatie die wordt aangeboden in beeld en geluid (zie ook pag. 60 van het onderzoek hieronder) dan aan statische pagina’s met tekst (ze lezen niet!). Kijken doen ze wel,  zeker als er wat “schwung” in zit met op de achtergrond wat leuke deuntjes.  Kortom, wat vinden jullie ?

Het onderzoek naar social media : http://www.slideshare.net/mickstravellin/universal-mccann-international-social-media-research-wave-3

So, you are looking for auto social bookmarking and you probably want to know:

a) Why do we need auto social bookmarking? There are a few simple reasons:

1. You can get a lot of high quality backlinks to your websites, or websites without wasting your time on manual social bookmarking. And you do know, that the more backlinks you get, the higher your website is shown on a search engines result page, right? )
2. You can choose correct anchor text, I mean titles, so you could help your pages to rank higher for the keywords, they are optimized. You should definitely optimize your pages for some keywords, like a few pages for one keyword – than submit it to social bookmarking services. Than the other pages for the second keyword – than submit each and every of them to social bookmarking services. And you just keep optimizing and keep submitting, you would be shocked with the results!
3. You can do that fully automatically in a few minutes! I mean really, if you do this manually, manual submission of every webpage you want can take days. With auto social bookmarking this takes minutes, literally.

b) How do I use this powerful technique? What are the rules? Can I get banned for this?

1. You should use auto social bookmarking wisely. Never try and submit those of your pages, that has never been optimized for any of the keywords, because, basically, the effect will be weak, and you will be dissapointed. So you should at least place your keyword into the title, h1, h2, h3 tags and use the keyword in a content for a few times.
2. Social bookmarking services were created so you could add as many different websites to them, as you want, so you will never get banned if you know your limits. I mean it’s ok to post a few URL’s per hour, but it’s definitely now wise to submit like hundreds of them in a 15 minutes period.

c) So, how can I start promoting my pages fully automatically? Is there an auto social bookmarking software for this, or else?

Actually, there are a couple tools that can be found via the internet. Some of them are online services, and I, personally, do not recommend using online services just because you never know when do they get banned via all those social bookmarking services they submit to, cause the more users they have, the more submissions from the same IP’s appear, and proxies might not be enough for those online bookmarking services.

Auto social bookmarking software, a desktop software, is what I recommend. There are a few tools that has been written just for sale, meaning that they can be effective, but they were not really tested for the real job.

But there is this one tool, that has been available for just a narrow circle of SEO specialists and now it’s public. So you can check our the professional software that has been tested and it really works.

There is some info that tool available now, just Click Here to check it out.

Social bookmarking has become a web phenomenon over the past few years. It seems as though everyone and their mom is doing it. Celebrities are doing it and they’re getting a lot of attention from it. They are sharing the news of their newest movie or simply attracting attention to themselves simply because their career needs a bit of a boost. Whatever the reason, the are not the only web savvy people noticing the amount of coverage they can get by using social bookmarking. Thousands of online businesses are doing it. So what is it?

Well, let me explain social bookmarking so that it’s easily comprehensible for those of you that don’t know exactly what it is. I’ll then explain exactly how it can help gain more exposure for your website. Now, just imagine, you go to a website and you want to bookmark it on your computer. So, you want to basically save it to your favorites. On your browser, a lot of times it’ll have a thing called Bookmarks or Favorites, which will allow you to save your favorite websites so that you can reference them again at a later date. However, when you do that, only you or whoever is using your computer will be able to see what websites you’ve saved inside of your favorites.

Well, just imagine having a page on the internet where you can go and save your favorite sites so that you can always easily go back and refer to them. Wouldn’t that be convenient? You’d be able to access this site from anywhere in the world! Basically, that’s kind of how social bookmarking works. So, instead of saving it on your browser – on Internet Explorer or Firefox Mozilla, you’re saving it to the internet. This will allow anyone to be able to see what websites you have saved and that are of interest to you. This is a bonus as it allows like-minded people to meet and network who share the same interests.

So, the question remains, how does it help your website? Well, basically how it can help you is that it allows you to rank higher in the search engines. And as you may or may not know, one of the best ways to get high up in the search engines is to basically have links pointing to your site. However, you don’t want to have just any link; you want to have links from authority sites or from sites that Google is searching all the time. Most social bookmarking sites are very well-trafficked, therefore when you do that, you’re getting a link back to your website and it’s helping pull it up higher in the search engines. So really in a nutshell, that’s how it can help you.

If you’re not already using social bookmarking you should really consider it. It’s a great way to stay organized but also leverage those efforts to make your existing website gain more exposure

Satheesh Kumar Adepu

+91 994 975 3143

adepusathy@gmail.com

Career Objective

Looking for a position of Senior Project Lead/Manager in SEO, utilizing my strong analytical and interpersonal skills to contribute using my knowledge and hard work, while gaining hands on exposure, and interested to perceive new skills with full enthusiasm and hard work, willing to take up challenging role towards career.

Career Summary

• 3.5 years of industry experience in Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Reputation Management (SERM), and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
• Knowledge in Web-Analytics, SEM, PPC Campaigns.
• Excellent client handling and team co-ordination skills.
• Expertise in Handling On-Page & Off-Page tasks for the projects.
• Knowledge of LSI, SILO.
• Very good exposure to project management overview.
• Excellent communication, analytical, interpersonal and presentation skills.
• Excellent Leadership skills.
• Has been rewarded with the Achiever of the Year for 2006-07 and 2007-08 in Ani SEO.

Work Profile

Name of the Organization: Cat Technologies Ltd.,

Position held: Sr. SEO Developer

Sep 2009 to present

Role & Responsibilities:

• Handle Client Requests (voice, email, chat) – being Resident Organic SEO Expert in NC, US.
• Coordinate with the Marketing team to build new contracts.
• Prepare SEO/SEM proposals for the projects.
• Prepare budget & timelines of the projects.
• Handle SEO for Non-English projects.
• Active participation in the Project Meetings (Voice conference)
• Update the SEO plans according to the Google updates and Matt Cutts announcements.
• Handle on page & off page optimization tasks..
• Generating Monthly/Weekly Analysis (reports).
• Web promotion by posting blogs, forums, newsletters, press releases, message boards etc.
• Preparing preliminary website analysis & competitor analysis.
• Bringing websites in to top ranking on major search engines.
• Finalizing keywords & Meta Tags.
• Keyword analysis & selection.
• Competitor analysis.
• Meta tags generation.
• Handle link building campaigns.
• Keyword analysis for PPC campaigns.
• Research on SEO tools.

Name of the Organization: Ani SEO Consulting Pvt. Ltd.,

Position held: Sr. Search Marketing Engineer.

June 2006 to July 2009

Role & Responsibilities:

• Handle Client Requests (voice, email, chat)
• Prepare SEO/SEM proposals for the projects.
• Prepare budget & timelines of the projects.
• Update the SEO plans according to the Google updates and Matt Cutts announcements.
• Handle on page & off page optimization tasks.
• Coordinate with the graphics and programming team to build search engine friendly website.
• Generating Monthly/Weekly Analysis (reports).
• Identify spam activities in website & remove.
• Web promotion by posting blogs, forums, newsletters, press releases, message boards etc.
• Preparing preliminary website analysis & competitor analysis.
• Bringing websites in to top ranking on major search engines.
• Finalizing keywords & Meta Tags.
• Keyword analysis & selection.
• Competitor analysis.
• Meta tags generation.
• Handle link building campaigns.
• Handle a team of 15 for Article Syndication and Social Media Optimization.
• Directory submission (paid & non-paid).
• Keyword analysis for PPC campaigns.
• Validation of the websites which are using Black-Hat techniques.
• Research on SEO tools.

Software Skill Set

Operating Systems

Windows 2000/XP/Vista, and Windows NT.

Languages:

Web/App servers:

Scripting Languages

Java Script, PHP

Markup Languages

HTML, XML.

Databases

Soft Skills

Presentation Skills, Communication and Client Interaction Skills.

Tools

IBP, Google Analytics, Easy PHP

Educational Qualifications

• B.Tech in Computer Science and engineering with 61.89% (Affiliated to J.N.T. University, A.P.).
• Intermediate Education with 87.3% aggregate (Board of Intermediate Education, A.P.).

• SSC with 83% aggregate (Board of Secondary Education, A.P.).

Extra Curricular

• NCC Army ‘C’ Certified.
• Participated in State Level Athletics (Shot-put), Held at Suryapet, in 2002.
• Second Topper in School.

For Complete Resume:

Satheesh_Resume

–By Tobie James Wednesday Nov. 11th, 2009

The MagaBlog is now on Del.icio.us!

What is Del.icio.us you may ask? Well, it’s what’s called a “social bookmarking” site that lets users bookmark, tag, and share web pages all from one place.  It’s extremely useful and easy to use.  Simply create an account and start sharing.  Not only can you share bookmarked pages with friends, but you can also subscribe to other people’s Del.icio.us pages if you like what they’re bookmarking.

Another great feature of this site is that you can see the most popular pages by looking at the tags.  You can also browse the tags to find topics you want to read about.

So, if you want to see what MagaBlog is bookmarking, head on over to our page!