Squidoo

Posted on July 4, 2010 by admin

: Image via CrunchBase

I joined Squidoo in its early stages and didn’t really follow it up, but a friend of mine has written many lens (web pages) for squidoo and makes quite bit of money. There are many new features.

The idea is to write about a topic and you share the revenues from Amazon and Google clicks with Squidoo. I don’t know about you, but my Google clicks are not producing much money at all any more. You can also use text linked ads provided by Squidoo.

I recently wrote about a trip I took to Castlemaine and a review of the DVD ‘Lilies’ .

You need to write quite a few lens to get your ranking up. There is provision to share on Twitter and Facebook and Squidoo takes care of your Google ranking too.

Create a Squidoo Lens For Your Nonprofit (ricksrss.com)
Add Squidoo lens to Technorati (slideshare.net)
Marketing your Business through Squidoo (web-workathome.com)

Does anyone really use RSS anymore?

Posted on August 29, 2009 by admin

: Image via CrunchBase

RSS : what is it? How to read it and how to use it

[I wrote this article some time ago and you will see how old it is now. Everyone uses Feedburner now, but since Google took it over, you need a google account. Personally I only subscribe to a blog if there is provision for email distribution, as my blog has. Do subscribe ]

RSS is the name given to a simple and well-established XML format used to syndicate news. Once a website creates an RSS file they have created a means to allow others to syndicate their news.

The first version of RSS (RSS 0.9) was released by Netscape in March 1999 as a format for adding news channels to their My.Netscape.Com portal.
Then in July 1999 Netscape released RSS 0.91, incorporating most of the features of a format called <scriptingNews>, which was created by UserLand. Shortly thereafter Netscape discontinued developing the RSS
format, however UserLand persisted and RSS continued to grow in strength.
In December 2000, the separate RSS-DEV Working Group released RSS 1.0 and Userland announced RSS 0.92. As of April 2001, Userland is now planning RSS 0.93. Although RSS is not clearly an acronym of anything, different
people have called it Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary and Really Simple Syndication at different times.

The lack of clarity in what RSS stands for or which version is the correct one to use can seem confusing to beginners. However these issues don’t need to addressed by a website wanting to create an RSS file. RSS is a very well recognized format, in fact it is often referred to as the most successful XML format to date. Some websites have a preference for oneversion, others create more than one RSS file and support multiple versions and a recent survey suggests that the first two versions of RSS (0.9 and 0.91) are still by far the most popular.

Everyone must have seen one of those orange buttons called XML by now. Why are they being used? I suppose it was in place of newsletters and a way to avoid one’s newsletter being dumped in a spam folder. That’s what happened
to some of my newsletters and they are not spam. It’s a way to make a page ‘sticky’. People will come back frequently. It’s also a way to let people know quickly if your site is updated. They are used most frequently on blogs, which have themselves exploded over the past year.

It’s a good idea to have an RSS reader just in case you see a site which you want to subscribe to, so let’s discuss this first. Most of them have items on them already, but you can delete what you don’t want. There’s the Google reader and another popular one is NewsGator. These are free.

Both readers explain how to get the news into your RSS readers, but the general idea is to click on the XML button or the place where the site directs you to get the feed and then open your RSS reader or aggregator and add that .xml file and the title of the site.

Okay, now you want to put one on your site, don’t you. Not many static sites would do this and nor would any that didn’t have an hourly turnover of new stuff on the web site. So you do, or you want to put it on yourblog.

Here’s a good link to learn from

http://www.webreference.com/xml/column13/index.html

RSS Wizard or Feed Editor or Feed Mix

If all this seems to difficult you can easily create, edit and publish rss feeds. New RSS feeds can be quickly and easily created with FeedForAll.
Advanced features enable you to create professional looking rss feeds quickly.
Existing RSS feeds can be repaired and enhanced with FeedForAll.
RSS feeds generated by other means can be automatically repaired, so that they conform to the RSS 2.0 specification. Existing feeds can be enhanced to contain advanced feed properties.

Ping aggregators to let them know that you’ve created an RSS feed. In order to let the world wide web know that your feed is up and running, you must give them a Ping. This is very easy to do – just go to http://pingomatic.com
and choose the appropriate sites to inform. Select blog related sites if you’re a blog and non-blog related sites for other content. Complete the information and Ping. Another site you should Ping is Yahoo! Simply visit the Yahoo!
RSS submit page and add your feed URL. This will let the big boys know that your syndicating.

Aggregation May Be Dead, But No One Has Told the Advertisers (cloudave.com)
Subscription & email updates (openparachute.wordpress.com)
Google Reader Officially Supports NewsGator, NewsGator Dumps Online Version (techie-buzz.com)

What is Second Life?

Posted on August 23, 2009 by admin

: Image of Susanna Duffy

Second Life: is it safe? What is it?

I have known about Second Life for a while now, but what with other things being of more importance and my own reluctance to get hooked in there, I have put it off. A web designer friend of mine however has been using SL for some time and loves it. What’s more she makes real money out of it.

I was wondering how students may be able to use it and avoid all the bad press SL has had, so I asked my friend to write a short article about it.

Firstly, for a more detailed explanation of it read the wiki definition of Campus : Second Life and explanation.

This is what she said. I asked her to direct the article to teachers as many of you are of that persuasion.

“I’m often asked why I spend time in an online game. Firstly, Second Life is not a game. Its roots can be traced back to games such as The Sims, but SL is a new form of online interaction, a social environment where you can be who you want to be, a platform to examine, redefine and experiment with identity, a virtual world where everyone is beautiful and I am in complete control.

Second Life is part of a broader trend towards user-generated content, (pundits predict 80% of internet users will be in virtual worlds within four years) and for educators it’s a startling innovation in interaction and expression. Compared to distance education and traditional forms of online learning the 3D globally networked virtual classroom has endless possibilities. Often online learning doesn’t require much engagement with course material, but in Second Life there is real-time interaction, which means students need to engage in the discussion. And the interaction is genuinely exciting.

The Teen Second Life Grid is strictly for teens (13-17), with no adults allowed. Both worlds are separate from each other, and no inworld travel or communication is possible between them. For educators who work with Teens, Linden Labs clearly state ” there is the opportunity to buy a private island on the Teen Grid and participate, but you will not be able to leave that island and visit the Teen Grid mainland. Teens from the mainland will be able to visit your private island if/when you choose, but they will be automatically informed that there are adults present. Also, if you are planning to use a private island on the Teen Grid, you will need to provide a background check for security and safety reasons.

But it’s not all about expanding your brick and mortar classrooms for a science lab on Mars or a thatched hut in fourth century Britain, learning is a constant factor in Second Life. My happier experiences include coming to grips with Feng Shui and understanding the physics behind surfing waves. It’s give and take n the virtual world. I teach you, and you teach me, that’s the basic principle in the Second Life Community”.

………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Written by Susanna Duffy, virtual assistant. Smooth stuff is where you can find her if you want her help.

Recently Susanna has become a prolific Lens master at Squidoo

Susanna is an excellent writer and is very conscious of educational issues.

If you are worried still about kids being where they should not be, in SL, keep your credit card safe.

SL is one of the many new Web 2.0 second generation web sites. They are interactive, social and have much user content, like wikipedia.

Exclusive: Internal Second Life Data Shows Returning Growth (gigaom.com)
Second Life Takes Aim at Skype (gigaom.com)

Just discovered Zemanta

Posted on August 22, 2009 by admin

: Image by Chris Gin via Flickr

Where have I been? Zemanta is wonderful. It can be downloaded as a Firefox add on. It can work on any blogging platform. It suggests photos (from Flickr) for your blog, tags and related articles from other blogs, including Amazon Books with your own referral ID on them. I love it. See the reblog sign down on the right. That’s what it does also. That’s how I discovered it. I reblogged someone else’s article.

Also it allows you to easily put your link on Facebook, Twitter and Mashable or almost anywhere you want.

And you can apply links to the content of your blog, which are mostly definitions from wikipedia or the URL addresses. You don’t need to code them. They just happen.

Below are some of the related articles.

Zemanta – Enhances your writeup with suggested images, links, videos… (techlads.com)
Zemanta (gfpiv.com)
Zemanta Update (dickstersrandomthoughts.blogspot.com)
Testing Zemanta (blogging.robertosblogs.net)

TinyFav

Posted on August 21, 2009 by admin

I have tested out the site and you get thumbnails for all your web sites.

TinyFav is a site where you put in all your favorite links, and get one tiny little link back! With this single new tiny link, whenever you go to it, it will randomly select one of the sites you put in earlier to visit, or optionally, display a list of all the sites you entered! This is great for affiliates masking their hoplink URLS, setting your homepage, or when you just want to share your favorite sites with other people without sending them 20 different links!

The other thing which TinyFav does is cloak your affiliate links.

Have One Link For All you Favorites Links (5min.com)

More on Twitter

Posted on August 7, 2009 by admin

: Image via CrunchBase

I have examined Twitter‘s search capabilities in an earlier post. I was initially wrong in what I said about its capabilities in this regard. But I still wonder how useful Twitter is. On the surface it looks like a mobile SMS service. You can only use a short sentence or two. You can include a web address, if you want to. When you twit a web page or blog, the URL is a tiny url, thereby disguising the nature of the URL. I’m not sure why this is.

The thing is, some people developed Twitter as a basic unit and left others to make other applications to go with it and it is those other applications that make it more useful. More and more of these come out on an almost weekly basis.

Let’s look at TwitScoop. Twitter concentrates on news in real time : weather conditions, tragedies, deaths, sport results, celebs, movies. Twit Scoop concentrates on what trends are rising and falling. You can integrate it into TweetDeck. On the Tweet Deck toolbar, you can access Twit Scoop.

Now what are those #hashtag things you see on Twitter. They are for the very cool people who know all about Twitter. They delineate keywords. So I might add to my Twitter post #photography if that is what I am tweeting about. Others can also search that way. They can just put in search #photography. These hashtags can be somewhat annoying, I think and you can still search by subject in Search, but these tags are filling up by twitter users and you have to learn that language. No subject categorisation by a librarian here, but I see the need for one. I mean, what does #journchat mean. How is anyone to know to search for that.

So you have to search for the hashtag currently in use on Search, before using it or not as the case may be. You can just add your own if you want and maybe it will catch on. Might be quite an excerise for anyone with nothing much to do.

To use some of the other applications you need Adobe Air which is a free program and installs when you download Twitter.

Let’s look at Twhirl Twhirl is so you can switch back and fro between multiple twitter accounts. Why have more than one, I wonder. It works with some social networking sites and that’s useful.

Okay, TweetDeck. This one can get content from Facebook. My friends use Facebook mostly. I think MySpace is going out of fashion except for the young maybe. This one is like Twhirl and they are competing at the moment.

So now there is Spaz This one specialises in skins and CSS swapping. People create them and swap them.

Twitterific? You have to buy this and it for Mac users and iPod Touch and iPhone and iTunes. It gets information from social networking sites.

Digsby actually looks quite useful. It’s for Windows. It combines many social networking sites : IM, emails, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, AIM and Yahoo.

I might head off to Digsby I think. Do you like Twitter?

Twhirl’s successor unveiled: Seesmic Desktop (thaibrother.com)
HOW TO: Simplify Your Social Media Routine (mashable.com)
Digsby IM now broadcasting your status updates (thaibrother.com)
5 Tips for Getting More From Twitter (ducttapemarketing.com)

What social networking sites will survive the financial crisis?

Posted on March 22, 2009 by admin

I haven’t done a real study of this, but I watch as some networking sites in my demographic become more and more popular and others decline.

Firstly, there are those people who have jobs and are not that interested in making money from the internet. More and more of them appear to be joining Facebook. My age group isn’t going for Myspace. My friends are using it for advertising social events and it seems to work quite well. Then again there are still those real life friends of mine who would never join Facebook because they don’t want their information anywhere on the net. A natural fear, but one which doesn’t have to be frightening if one is very clear about what one writes down and shares in terms of their lives.

These sort of people would probably use Skype as well. Skype has improved a lot with video and webcams so that you can see your companion. Skype too is used by people who do actually find people in the world who they would like to become more familiar with in real life. There are at least two people I know who have created romances using this form of communication.

Blogging is really for those who hope to make money from the internet. Well, I don’t know about you, but my Google cheques are really drying up and I’ve heard the same is so for other bloggers and web site owners.

Twitter is really taking off and there are so many applications for Twitter. It combines well with Facebook.

There’s been at least one traffic generator I know of which has closed down – BlogRush. So there must be more.

Here’s a list of social networking sites from wikipedia

Do contribute with your thoughts about who will survive and who won’t and what is happening out there right now.

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