Social Media

Big Brother is Everywhere

Privacy has been an online issue for a long time. Recently, Facebook revamped its privacy policies and Google Buzz was forced to revamp some of its policies as well. While all this goes on, there are other entities that are working towards stripping those privacies. No, this is not about the CIA, KGB, Mossad or any of those intelligence agencies. It is actually about a company called Teneros, which has released software called Social Sentry that allows employers to monitor the activity of their employees on social networks.

This app is so intrusive it can:

Inform employers when employees are on Facebook, Twitter or other social networking sites

Monitor social networking activity by employees regardless of the device they are using (Computer, iPods, Mobile phones, etc)

Monitor regardless of what network is being used to access the sites

Be configured with advanced rules that send out automatic alerts and notifications

Give detailed reports and statistics

Be deployed in under an hour and requires no hardware or software installation

Using this software to monitor employees’ behavior during working hours is acceptable. However, the software also allows monitoring of everything they are saying on the sites even after working hours. This amounts to an invasion of privacy. While that is the negative side, the positive side is that it allows employers to have tighter control on security especially when it comes to company news leaks.

The pros and cons of this software can be argued about for a while. But the significant fact that emerges from this is that – it is a sign of things to come.

Web 2.0 and the Multimedia Revolution

Although Tim-Berners Lee called the term ‘Web 2.0′ a piece of jargon that found prominence in 2004, thanks to the attention drawn by the O’Reilly Web Conference, one must say that the internet and what is has to offer has changed drastically.

Prior to this, the internet was largely used to get text and photos with very limited or no interactive opportunities available. However, all that has changed now, as the focus has shifted to creating a ‘rich experience’ for the user, so much so that they continue to use the internet in exploring the opportunities and enjoying information in the form of multimedia that is made freely available. Indeed, the internet connection has become more of a need than just a want amongst millions of its users in the world today.

Technologies such as CSS 2.0, XHTML, ,Ajax and Flex among others have ensured that the crossover is complete into a phase where information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration have become an everyday reality through the existence of web-based communities, web applications, social-networking sites, folksonomies, blogs, mashups, wikis, hosted services and video sharing sites.

Even mentioning the word blogging would be obvious because it pertains to a large part of information sharing through print, but the truth is that it has changed the way people look for written information on various topics. One can share art and photography using sites such as Flickr, Photobucket and Picasa, share audio (music) on sites such as Last.fm and MySpace Music, share videos on sites like Youtube, Viddler, Vimeo and most recently, conduct ‘livecasting’ on Ustream.tv and Justin.tv among many others that are possibly not that well known.

And the reason why this has taken the world by storm is because of its appeal to the masses, which will remain for years to come, not unless we find our future in the hands of Web 3.0…

Social Media – An Overview

The idea of consumers generating content only remained a dream until a blast of technology (thanks to Web 2.0!) has spawned a host of users that create content in the form of words, visuals and so on and so forth. Indeed, the world is gradually but steadily moving away from the times when the dissemination of information were purely through the medium of newspaper, television and film and where consumers could only access information and not necessarily use these mediums to produce valuable information themselves.

All that has changed with the advent of the internet (and specifically, Web 2.0), and with blogging in print and visual form, information does not rest in the hands of just journalists, but to common folks as well. Apart from just the communication of information, several other avenues of multimedia has sprung forth such as the sharing and broadcasting of video, photographs and music, that can accessed for no charge at all.

Although, the vision of social media is to help people share media freely, the issue of copyright has also come to the forefront. For example, when the Dark Knight was first released, despite blocking all the routes, it was made freely accessible to users with a broadband internet connection in a matter of 18 hours!

Finally, social networking and bookmarking are also ways by which the ‘online community’ can share ideas, thoughts; keep in touch with friends as well as save information that can have an impact on their lives on a daily basis.
All in all, it seems that we are smack dab in the middle of the ‘Attention Age’.

Facebook – The Leader in Social Networking

When Mark Zuckerburg started ‘Facemash’, little did he know that he was spawn a trendsetter of sorts in social networking, otherwise known as Facebook, that found itself online by February 2004. In April 2008, even though this ‘idea’ that wasn’t so well received initially, Facebook overtook MySpace (another social networking site) to become the most popular application to be used, with its unique visitors hitting almost 130 million in number.

It is obvious to point out that the word ‘Facebook’ which is proper noun, is now referred to as a verb (facebooking) due to its overwhelming popularity that has made it synonymous with the idea of ‘social networking’.

From being a simple site providing a user with the platform to connect with school buddies that are in other states or countries, this site has expanded to the point of not only allowing users to create profiles and post pictures but also allow developers to create software as well. Not only can you access your Facebook profile on the internet but also through Smartphones as well.

Since users can post comments, join groups, play videogames, update their personal status from time to time, write notes on walls while also using the instant messaging, this can turn out to be source of much mirth and entertainment and has drawn the wrath of companies that do not want their employees wasting their on Facebook.

While being the recipient of several awards, it has been subject to criticism most notably in the form of Lamebook (parodied on the name Facebook) which post conversations on Facebook that one might find funny as well.

With the company financials in the ‘red’ since September 2009, it sure looks like things are looking up for the ‘grand-daddy of all social networking sites’, also known as Facebook.

Citizen Journalism

It’s evident that publishing has come full circle today ever since it was first declared in The Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776) that the freedom of the press is one of the greatest liberties that a human being is entitled to, and should not be controlled by despotic governments.

While our distinguished members of the Press continue to point out the apparent lack of ‘objectivity’ through citizen journalism, it still does play an important role in the fact-checking of any incident that causes concern on a national or global scale. Take for example the tragedy that struck Mumbai in November 2008, where instead of journalists providing us information, the blogs were written by normal citizens ‘in situ’ that gave people a play-by-play update of what was happening.

And one can only assume that in this heyday, the networks (read: despotic governments) that controlled the flow of information in one direction to the customer is now finding that they have no way to control the ‘nature of the beast’ while it expands exponentially through the power of the internet and creative applications (Read: Web 2.0) at their disposal in the quest for truthful journalism by letting people express their opinions as well, and thus creating an even playing field.

It’s obvious that the old cliché ‘history repeats itself’ makes itself apparent here, and thanks to the million of bloggers and those who share information both in the print and visual format, the world has turned into a place where people remain better informed while having the ‘freedom to publish’ once more.

After all, there is no room for double-standards when our goals in the collective aspire towards democracy.

Twitter Reaches 50 Million Tweets a day

As bizarre as the number suggests, Twitter has reached 50 million tweets a day, in comparison to the measly figure of 5000 tweets a day since its presence on the web in the year 2007. To put it mildly, this explosion in its number of users and these astounding stats is taking Twitter places since last year only further cementing its place as the ‘SMS of the Internet’.

For those of you who don’t know, Twitter is a micro-blogging and social networking site that is free of cost to sign up with, that allows its users to send and read messages known as tweets that are of no more than 140 characters of length, and is delivered to the user’s subscribers also known as his/ her followers. Its content is divided into sections such as News, Spam, Self-promotion, Pointless babble, Conversational and Pass-along value, of which ‘pointless babble’ heads the list with 40.5 of messages sent.

Perhaps the reason for its uninhibited success as of today can be attributed to the intent of its service as described by its CEO, Evan Williams, “What we have to do is deliver to people the best and freshest and most relevant information possible. We think of Twitter as it’s not a social network, but it’s an information network. It tells people what they care about as it is happening in the world.”

Regardless of reports that Twitter only manages to retain 40 % of its total users, as well as predictions that it will reach only 10 % of Internet users, its current figures of 600 tweets per second is staggering enough to conclude that it is indeed in the top 50 most accessed sites on the Internet.

90+ Social Media Sites

I covered a listing of twenty dofollow social bookmarking sites in another post. This time around i am listed 90+ social bookmarking sites, both dofollow and nofollow. Some of the biggest sites online are nofollow but if you do get your submission to the front page of the site, it can mean a massive amount of traffic for a short period of time. The usefulness of both depends on your overall plan for your site.

Here is a list of Social Bookmarking sites, the pagerank follows the name of the site along with the number of indexed pages appearing in google when I compiled the list, please note that I did this using the SEO addon for firefox so there might be some errors in the number of indexed pages.

1. Slashdot – PR9 – 188,000 links
2. Digg – PR8 – 3,470,000 links
3. del.icio.us – PR8 – 1,540,000 links
4. Reddit – PR8 – 1,040,000 links
5. Technorati – PR8 – 760,000 links
6. Stumbleupon – PR8 – 725,000 links
7. Blinklist – PR7 – 1,620,000 links
8. Furl – PR7 – 1,210,000 links
9. Propeller – PR7 – 322,000 links
10. Rojo – PR7 – 6060 links
11. de.lirio.us – PR7 – 3770 links
12. Folkd – PR7 – 410 links
13. Netvouz – PR6 – 912,000
14. Mister-Wong – PR6 – 898,000 links
15. Simpy – PR6 – 867,000 links
16. Bibsonomy – PR6 – 469,000 links
17. Kinja – PR6 – 438,000 links
18. Backflip – PR6 – 227,000 links
19. Clipmarks – PR6 – 121,000 links
20. Rawsugar – PR6 – 50,300 links
21. Searchles – PR6 – 32,000 links
22. Searchallinone – PR6 – 18,800 links
23. Tailrank – PR6 – 10,900 links
24. Linkagogo – PR6 – 6790 links
25. Web2List – PR6 – 4780 links
26. Spurl – PR6 – 38 links
27. Faves – PR5 – 1,280,000 links
28. Megite – PR5 – 753,000 links
29. Clipclip – PR5 – 323,000 links
30. StartAid – PR5 – 637,000
31. Linkroll – PR5 – 147,000 links
32. Sk*rt – PR5 – 104,000 links
33. Listible – PR5 – 60,400 links
34. Feedmarker – PR5 – 58,800 links
35. Markaboo – PR5 – 48,400 links
36. Bringr – PR5 – 16,500 links
37. Gabbr – PR5 – 5000 links
38. Mybookmarks – PR5 – 916 links
39. Buddymarks – PR5 – 907 links
40. Tallstreet – PR5 – 408 links
41. Mylinkvault – PR5 – 71 links
42. Ma.gnolia – PR4 – 818,000 links
43. Web2Announcer – PR4 – 305,000 links
44. Diigo – PR4 – 276,000 links
45. Plugim – PR4 – 120,000 links
46. Lifelogger – PR4 – 86,700 links
47. Dropjack – PR4 – 65,000 links
48. Indiasphere.Net – PR4 – 45,900 links
49. Otavo – PR4 – 35,000 links
50. Butterflyproject.nl – PR4 – 34,500 links
51. Lookmarks – PR4 – 32,700 links
52. Myvmarks – PR4 – 28,200 links
53. Blurpalicious – PR4 – 25,300 links
54. Cloudytags – PR4 – 24,100 links
55. Mysitevote – PR4 – 20,000 links
56. A1-Webmarks – PR4 – 15,200 links
57. Philoi – PR4 – 12,400 links
58. Oyax – PR4 – 12,000 links
59. Gravee – PR4 – 9940 links
60. Votelists – PR4 – 6150 links
61. Gd-Sites – PR4 – 5840 links
62. Contentpop – PR4 – 5490 links
63. Gaddiposh – PR4 – 3130 links
64. Urlex.Info – PR4 – 654 links
65. Connectedy – PR4 – 636 links
66. Connectedy – PR4 – 568 links
67. Unalog – PR4 – 162 links
68. Bookmarktracker – PR5 – 314 links
69. Marktd – PR3 – 130,000 links
70. Getboo – PR3 – 96,500 links
71. Listerlister – PR3 – 19,100 links
72. Bookmarkplace – PR3 – 15,100 links
73. Jigg.In – PR3 – 9220 links
74. Stirrdup – PR3 – 9220 links
75. Chaamp – PR3 – 7770 links
76. Ez4U – PR3 – 6520 links
77. Socialogs – PR3 – 5200 links
78. Business-Planet – PR3 – 4740 links
79. Articlesnetwork – PR3 – 3670 links
80. Wirefan – PR3 – 3030 links
81. Fritterware – PR3 – 2970 links
82. Sitesays – PR3 – 1560 links
83. Bookmark4You – PR3 – 948 links
84. Crowdfound – PR3 – 782 links
85. Authorcontent – PR3 – 513 links
86. Info4It – PR2 – 91,100 links
87. Palbe – PR2 – 9300 links
88. Dealoid – PR2 – 9270 links
89. Barksbookmarks – PR2 – 7370 links
90. Articlesarchieve – PR2 – 5350 links
91. Article-Publishers – PR2 – 4380 links
92. Latestramblings – PR2 – 3180 links
93. Xlmark – PR2 – 2120 links
94. Ebizgo.Info – PR2 – 1150 links
95. Actualtopics – PR2 – 749 links
96. Projecthear – PR1 – 19,600 links
97. Wordsjournal – PR1 – 14,100 links

You may also be interested in a service that will do social bookmarking services for you. If so take a look at iclimber.com.

Free Tools to Speed Up Social Media Submission

Do you own a website or a blog and as a result spend a lot of time submitting your site to all the social media sites? What if you could cut down the time it takes to submit your pages to half an hour from the current two hours it takes? In this post I will be looking at two free tools which can drastically speed up the time it takes.

First up on the list is Socialmarker found over at socialmarker.com. I initially came across this site during my first attempt at the thirty day challenge, when one of the members created it to make his submission process easier.

Socialmarker has an interesting way of going about the submission process. First of all you enter all the main details of your submission, page title, url, keywords and other details. Then you can select from a range of social media sites, either via select all or individually. There is also the option of selecting only dofollow sites. Once you have completed your selection, you can start posting.

The way this works is that using javascript, socialmarker opens all your selected pages at the same time in the background in the same tab and at the top of every site you are submitting to is a small horizontal frame which lets you go forward and backward between the sites you selected. Once you have completed one submission you can simple click next and finish another one. If you have already logged into all the sites, this process can be very very fast.

The other service is called Socialposter, available at socialposter.com. The selection process is much the same as socialmarker except that there is a link next to every social media site which submits your information. This might not be as fast as social marker but has the added benefit of not opening fifty or so pages at once in the background. If you are on a slower internet connection then this might be better suited for your needs.

In the end this is the most important difference between the two as they support most of the same sites and the initial process is quite similar. Try both out and see which one feels better for you.

If you are short in time to do your own social media marketing, we also recommend hiring a professional company to do it for you.  iClimber, is a social media marketing company, that offers social media profile creations and social media bookmarking service.

20 Do Follow Social Bookmarking Sites

Social bookmarking sites were all the rage recently, with every single article, blog post and web page out there being bookmarked. Users bookmark sites to contribute to the social fabric of the internet and to keep a proper list of sites and pages that they have visited and liked, while webmasters have been bookmarking their own pages for traffic and for the inherent value that comes from the link to the page from the social bookmarking site.

For those of you are new to the world of search engine optimization, dofollow links are those which carry google’s pagerank and authority from one site to another. It is also well known that google gives a much higher weighting to links coming from social media sites and so a dofollow link from a social site carries a lot of benefits.

Once the top social bookmarking sites realized that webmasters were gaming their sites for better rankings on google, most converted their links to nofollow, removing and pagerank and link authority benefits from those links. Fortunately there are still many social bookmarking sites out there that have dofollow and have every intention remaining so. Here are the best twenty that I have found so far and I will add more as and when I find them.

This list is in order of pagerank, which you will within the brackets after the name of the site.
1. Folkd [V] (7)
2. Oneview (German) (7)
3. Spurl (6)
4. Feedmarker (6)
5. LinkaGoGo (5)
6. SpotBack (5)
7. Connectedy (5)
8. Blinklist [V] (5)
9. MyLinkVault (4)
10. A1 Webmarks (4)
11. OYAX (4)
12. Pixelmo [V] (4)
13. TeDigo (2)
14. MyPIP (3)
15. SyncOne (3)
16. Yattle (3)
17. Memfrag (3)
18. Ziki [V] (1)
19. i89 (0)
20. Chipmark (0)

We also recommend hiring a company like iClimber, that offers social bookmarking services. This way you can spend your time running your business and have a professional do what they are best at.

Using Social Media for Ideas to Making Money

People are social animals. Have you not seen them on their cell phones walking on the street or driving in their cars? You can cash in on this human desire to be in social contact with people at all times. Start a dating service website. There are some out there already, but it is an industry that has room for more competitors, especially in the realm of social media. It will be your job to match them up according to what they have in common. You need to charge for advertising on the website and for people to pay a fee to be processed for dates. It is a sure moneymaker.

In a similar vein, a website that groups people together according to their interests is a real possibility. When you get advertising on this site and charge a fee you will begin to feel like a real entrepreneur. Once categorized according to their first, second and third choices of interests, you can proceed. It might be wise to begin with organizing tours by interest. For example, for the outdoors type, a whitewater rafting outing would be good. Assistants to go out and organize the trips are needed, this is why a membership charge is needed along with as many advertisers to your site as possible.

Something as simple as organizing square dances or modern dances at a set venue would be a successful venture on your part. When you go out and meet the clients at various times they will have no shortage of suggestions. You can feed on these ideas. Once digested the clients’ ideas can be incorporated into your social media website, widening your areas of interest and hence your base of clients. Anything associated with social media is a growing industry with no decline in growth and revenue for the foreseeable future.

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