woosha!

It is no surprise to any publisher that many of the conversations about their content and within their audience are occurring off their properties. Increasingly, social hubs such as Facebook, Twitter, and Digg are found in the top 3 traffic drivers, and their influence is only likely to increase over time. At PostRank, we’ve been monitoring and recording all the off-site engagement since mid-2007 when we first launched our service. Since then, we’ve observed a number of interesting trends, which are worth paying attention to, especially if you are a publisher yourself.

In absolute terms, when we sample over the top 1000 of the most engaging feeds for the past three years, we see approximately a 30% year over year growth in engagement –- a sign that more people are participating in the social web. The “share, and like this” phenomenon, which is sweeping through Facebook, Twitter, and dozens of other social hubs, are all facilitating this trend.

Coding Clean and Semantic Templates

If you are the guy who uses <div> tag for everything, this post is for you. It focuses on how you can write clean HTML code by using semantic markups and minimize the use of <div> tag. Have you ever edited someone’s templates, don’t those messy tags drive you crazy? Not only writing clean templates can benefit yourself, but your team as well. It will save you time when you have to debug and edit (particularly the large projects).

How to write Link Bait for Digg, Reddit & StumbleUpon

11 November 2009, 7:55 am

Want to be on the very first page of Digg.com? You’d be famous, right? Here’s how to do it.

Link Bait has one specific aim — get me to the top of Digg.com. The idea is that once you get there, others will click through to your site and you can reap the rewards once they arrive. Of  course, it’s not that simple but if understand the mechanics of how Digg works —and what interests Diggers—then you’re one step closer.

So, pull up a chair, grab your coffee and sit back.

Creating a social media strategy: Map it out first

I just read Rick Telberg's Five Things CPAs Need to Know About Social Media and, as ususal, he is right on point. His fifth "thing" is, "Social media marketing needs to be driven by objectives, not tactics." In other words, it all starts with strategy.

Why are you getting into social media?

Social media can be a powerful tool to accelerate your firm's (or organization's) strategy.

Consider these questions:

1. Is it to enhance your marketing (Download Marketing Strategy 2.0)?
2. Is it to position you and your organization as thought leaders?
3. Is it for recruitment and retention of young professionals?
4. Is it to develop a niche market?
5. Is it for communication with your customers, prospects and team members?
6. Is it to keep on top of rapid changes in the profession and environment?
7. How will you use social media tools to accelerate your strategy?

By Javier Carbonell, November 10, 2009 2:15 pm

Yesterday I was reading El caparazón, one of the most relevant blogs about semantic applications in Spanish language, when I found this post about “Education and Web 2.0”. Undoubtedly this is an area where semantic technologies will have an important say in the future.

Some experts state that most of the knowledge that an elementary school student will need to perform his job when he will grow up, don’t exist yet. How can we focus the education in so a rapidly changing environment?. Certainly knowledge is advancing so quickly that it is an almost impossible task trying to keep the pace. This raises a fundamental change in the education approach, as its key task will be to transmit information to the students, to help them to manage all this information, to help them to distinguish useful one from useless, to help them to extract knowledge from all this information… This is, learning how to learn.
No doubt Internet will change education approach at all levels. No longer students will go to university to pick up some notes, or to listen a one way explanation in which the teacher talks and students listen. Because to access to information we have Google, and to hear lectures, we can easily access to those of the outstanding experts in each subject.
Any country that wants to maintain a high level in the knowledge society must be capable of integrating technologies within education systems at all levels. We’re going to be bombarded along all our lives with millions and millions of information bytes, this is a real fact we must live with. In this situation it will be paramount to extract useful knowledge from this information, indeed this will mark the difference among efficient and no efficient people. In this environment semantic technologies will play an important role, because they will help us to navigate through information and to adapt it to our needs, that is to contextualize it. Nowadays, semantic technologies have got an important level of madurity and standards as RDF, or OWL will help us to give the jump form a “textual” management of information to a “concept” treatment of this information. This is a first step and a very important achievement. However, some years will be required to settle these concepts, and to develop technologies allowing us to extract knowledge from all the information around us: this means tools to show us to learn.

A Semantic Wiki Wiki Web

Platypus Wiki is a project to develop an enhanced Wiki Wiki Web with ideas borrowed from the Semantic Web.

It offers a simple user interface to create wiki pages with metadata based on W3C standards.

It uses RDF (Resource Description Framework), RDF Schema and OWL (Web Ontology Language) to create ontologies and manage metadata.

Platypus Wiki is an ongoing open source project started on 23th December 2003. The project is actually hosted on SourceForge and licensed under GNU GPL.