BasBasBas.com

Tag: Digg

  • The Death of SEO?

    As the regular readers here know very well, I’m quite the techy and invest a lot of time in the social web and the web 2.0 landscape. Doing that, I realize we sometimes take things for granted, so to speak. We feel like YouTube or Facebook have been around for an eternity, but neither of them are more than 5 years old (or open to the public for that amount of time).

    The web changes, fast and so does the world around us (which this video reminds us of). Many bloggers and web fanatics, see search engine optimization (SEO) as something holy. If you just figure out the right keywords, manipulate your site’s content in such a way so that the search spiders will crawl your site and give you high traffic rankings, then you’ll be successful.

    One of the most important ways in which Google gives page rankings, is links! If your content is linked to often, then it’s worth more than content that is not talked about a lot. To Google, the only content more valuable than that is the content whose publishers will pay for to promote it. Basically, Google assumes that your content is worth talking about, based on the links. The problem that arises now however, is that Google’s becoming less and less able to track the links coming from the most valuable conversations: those on social networks.

    Earlier I mentioned Facebook. If you click a link on Facebook, it sends you to the page with a nice and shiny Facebook bar above it. On Facebook a link to this post would look something like this:

    http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=123091020346&h=ukq9m&u=L423Y&ref=mf

    Instead of like this: http://www.basbasbas.com/blog/2009/07/20/the-death-of-seo/

    Popular social bookmarking service Digg also does something similar. Actually, they’re worse, because Digg is actually hijacking traffic.

    Probably the most common SEO killer is the Short URL. Services like TinyURL, Bit.ly, is.gd and tr.im make URLs shorter so they fit into the 140 characters that Twitter offers, or just so that long and ugly URLs look more elegant or are easier to paste somewhere (sometimes email clients tend to mess up really long URLs).

    Where will this lead?

    • Google’s PageRank algorhithm depends on determining what’s worth talking about.
    • Google tracks this by the number of incoming links and their weight.
    • Short URLs are becoming increasingly popular, making it increasingly difficult for Google to track what’s worth talking about.
    • As Google starts having trouble determining what’s worth talking about, people will start using other ways to search for relevant content.

    Half the time I’m looking for something, I use Twitter’s search engine. Why? Well, it’s time relevant, personal, let’s you interact with those that share the content and it can reveal trends. Twitter’s engine is still a bit basic and I expect to see some marvellous services that will start rivalling Google in the coming years. OneRiot could be such an engine. Maybe it will be Friendfeed if they reach critical mass so that Friendfeed will not be just for techies anymore.

    What do you think? Will social networks mean the death of SEO as we know it? What is SEO anno 2009 and what will it be five years from now? What role will social media play in this?

    Share this story on Twitter or Facebook! Here’s the short URL: http://bit.ly/QJ4u0

  • Politics 2.0

    The influence of new media on current day politics

    An essay by Bas Grasmayer

    The 20th century was the age of mass media. The impact of radio during the first half of the century and that of television during the second brought politics closer to home. Starting from people grouping around the one radio in their neighbourhood, to the radio in their street, until the point that everyone had a radio in their home. The same happened for television and through these media politics entered the living room. Through sound at first, but later through moving images which became more detailed and more accurately coloured over the course of the last century.

    We’re now close to ten years into the new century. Television and radio are still important, but there is a new player in the field of mass media: the internet. This essay will look at how the internet has already influenced politics and hopes to answer, in part, the following question:

    How is the World Wide Web as a medium influencing
    politics and the government right now?

    New Media

    In the 2008 US Presidential elections, politicians were seen embracing new media. Barack Obama became microblogging service Twitter’s most followed user and YouTube set up a site called You Choose ’08 dedicated to the elections. On the latter, campaign teams posted videos hoping they would go ‘viral’, a term used to describe the phenomenon of certain content on the internet being spread out through huge networks of users, which is often initially an exponential process. Ron Paul, who was running to become the Republican presidential candidate, had so much support on the internet that TIME magazine at one point commented that due to “his  success  recruiting  supporters  through  new  social  media  channels” he was “the  new  2.0  candidate”.

    (more…)

  • EntreCard my way

    EC LogoWhile using EntreCard, I’m doing a couple of things to add even more value to my actions or drops. Since it’s rainy and grey outside (can’t wait to go to Turkey), it’s a perfect day to write about it.

    Firstly, I’ll explain what EntreCard is. Secondly, I’ll go through some of the basics for all the readers who are not members yet. Thirdly, I’ll explain what I do in the form of some tips and pointers, so hopefully the whole EntreCard experience will become better for all of us. 🙂

    I find it extraordinarily hard to explain what EntreCard actually is. It’s a blogging community, it’s an advertising system, it’s a way to network with other blogs… On the main page Entrecard talks about themselves as “your businesscard 2.0”. The most essential thing about Entrecard is surfing to other community members’ blogs and “dropping” a card on their Entrecard widget (see top right sidebar). By dropping cards, you earn credits, which you then can spend to advertise on sites that are on Entrecard.

    Entrecard partnered with SezWho, a comment tracking system, so that it can give you credits every time you comment on another person’s blog. Great way to stimulate community-forming on members’ blogs! So as you’re going through your daily dropping, be sure to leave comments! Maybe you get tons of comments nowadays and they don’t mean much to you, but remember that time when one or two comments did matter. Comment on other blogs and experience the gratitude and reciprocation.

    Something else I do regarding comments on my own blog is I generally give them 5 stars through SezWho. What can I say? I love every one of them. This helps people to build their rep on the net.

    If you like a certain post on someone’s site, or like the whole overall site… Stumble it! Digg it! Whatever you use… Just do it! Write a Tweet about it, it doesn’t matter. When using Entrecard, many people are so wrapped up in it, that they forget to give a “thumbs up” for content they like. Start Stumbling content you like of other Entrecard users and you’ll notice that the next time people you stumbled visit your blog, they might leave a stumble before leaving.

    If you place an ad on a site… Stumble or Digg the site! Either when you apply for it, or on the day it’s actually running. Increase your chances of visitors in any way you can.

    Reciprocate drops. Check your inbox and reciprocate. That’s the easiest way to get a basic reader community on your site via Entrecard.

    Put some statistics on your website. I generally check for three things:

    • Number of subscribers to the site.
    • FEEDJIT. Since my blog’s about Istanbul, Turkey, it helps me to assess where most people’s visitors are from. I find that Europeans are generally more interested in my site than people from Indonesia or the Philippines.
    • BlogCatalog. It allows me to see how often the blog gets visitors. It shows the names of BlogCatalog community members and shows how long ago they visited the site. It gives me an indication of the traffic the site gets.

    When none of these are present, I can be a bit wary about spending my EC credits, but not always of course. A lot of Entrecard is about experimenting! After all, it’s just credits you’re spending, so spend away.

    Monitor your EC statistics, award your top ten droppers publically (giving an incentive for others to drop on your site regularly), and make friends! Because EC offers such a friendly environment, if you’re the least bit active, it’s impossible not to make friends. 😉
    If you liked this post, consider subscribing by RSS or email.

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