• Beyond TweetBacks: Introducing TweetSuite | Dan Zarrella – Nice plug-in for integrating Twitter and Wordpress.
• SocioFluid – another social bookmarking plugin for wordpress | ImproveSeo.info – A good looking plugin for Wordpress to display the social bookmarking buttons for digg, reddit, … I like the buttons because they are not too small and not too big.
• 10 Tools for the Social Media Marketer | Traffikd – If you are an avid user of social media and you are working to build traffic for your own website or blog with SMM, here are 10 tools to help make your work easier.
• SociBook Plugin For WordPress – Nice Wordpress plugin to share your posts on a ton of social bookmarking sites.
• 5 Essential Steps to Make Your Site Search & Social Media Friendly – The increasing demand for fresh, live web content as well as the expectation of consumers to interact with what they find in the search results requires that website owners and content publishers make their websites both search and social media friendly.( via Jeff Cohen @dgtlpapercuts on Twitter)
• Is Everything You Know About SEO Wrong? » aimClear Search Marketing Blog – “Do those old H1 tags still work? Actually word’s out, they don’t really count much anymore for SEO. Does quantity, power or diversity of inbound links take the hill for search engines ranking pages algorithmically for keywords? Actually, correlation data indicates that link diversity is a factor which has become more important.”
• 9 Ways People Respond to Your Content Online | Lateral Action – Breaks down the steps from acquiring web visitors to engaging them. Really awesome graph.

Technorati Tags: Content, Online, Online Content, SEO, SocBook, Social Media, SocioFluid, TweetSuite, WordPress

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Technorati Tags: analysts, AR

I was surprised that I did come in first in total traffic since there where so many SEO/SEM professionals in the competition I thought I would be much lower in the rankings. It still got me a seat at the table and a single vote for my article which even in my own opinion was infererior to Linda’s I have added her Get Elastic ecommerce blog to my RSS reader it seems like she and her mates are very sharp.

Just for a record here’s a listing of the winners and their scoring:

Maybe next year I’ll have a shot but for now I’ll take a top five finish.

Technorati Tags: analytics, Contest, Marketing Pilgrim, SEM, SEO

They four main provisions of the CAN-SPAM Act for commercial emailers are:

1. Bans false or misleading header information
2. Prohibits Deceptive Subject Lines
3. Requires an opt-out method
4. Requires Commercial Email to be Identified as an Advertisement an must include the senders valid postal address.

For other resources on SPAM from the FTC you can visit their SPAM resource center. MarketingSherpa has good article on CAN-SPAM compliance as well.

photo credit: KhE 龙

Technorati Tags: CAN-SPAM, Compliance, Email Marketing, SPAM

• The Marketing of Fear – “The challenge of marketing with fear isn’t efficacy. Of course fear marketing works. The challenge is ethics and brand.” My first “real job” out of college was working in financial services. Fear marketing worked, it also made me feel dirty, that’s why I switched career paths.
• Marketing Sherpa: How to Grow an Email List From Nothing to 2 Million Loyal Fans in 2 Years (Hint: Give Them Something They Enjoy) – I like the example of ice cream on your birthday. My wife always wants to go get her birthday club freebie on hers.
• Copy Blogger: How to Increase Your Blog Subscription Rate by 254% – The power of carefully choosing your words to elicit responses.
• Official Google Blog: Fresher Related Search Suggestions: “Recently, we improved our algorithms to process new information faster, and the result is quite tangible — you should now see fresher suggestions for queries on current topics of interest.” [via Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim]
• Poynter Online: Seven Traits of Highly Effective Community Managers – Good list of traits for community management superstars [via Connie Bensen]
• How to Build a Useful Site @ chrisg.com – “Track where your visitors come from and what they are after, and if you can actually talk to them. If you know why visitors arrive you will be in a better position to make them happy.”
• Web Ink Now: Search Engine Optimizing a crap-filled site just makes it a little less crappy – David makes a good point, easy to find crap is still crap. Starting with good content and then optimizing for that content is the key. See my post at Marketing Piligrim thinking like a reader, a marketer, AND a search engine. Otherwise you have a one-legged stool.
• Google Trends Adds Cool New Statistical Weighting Features : SEO Book.com – Google Trends announced a cool new feature for determining the relative search volume between keywords. Aaron Wall riffs on the new Google Trends features.
• Is Google Making Us Stupid? – It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. The supreme irony about this article is its length.
• SEO Tools. Link Checker. Check Backlinks for PR, Anchor & Nofollow – Tools for checking backlinks and their quality [via Chris Brogan]
• SEM Check – Service that provides an audit of your website from an SEO standpoint. (via Marketing Pilgrim)
• Andy Beard: Never Underestimate The Power Of The Dark Side of Search – If you removed all forms of search from the internet, finding information when you need it would be highly inefficient in response to Tim O’Reilly’s post.
• Why Arrington is Wrong about Yahoo!-Google Deal – O’Reilly Radar – Great Quote from Tim O’Reilly : “Create more value than you capture” the most succint and sage advice I could ever give a commerical open source company [via Aaron Wall on SEOBBook]
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Duplicate content summit at SMX Advanced – Suggestions for dealing with duplicate site content including sitemap specifications and robots.txt.
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Deftly dealing with duplicate content – How to deal with duplication of content as seen by Google.
• Google: we don’t know how to make money from YouTube – Times Online – Google has said that it is still unsure how to make money from YouTube, the enormously popular video-sharing website it owns, but hopes to be able to do so soon.
• Micro Persuasion: Friendfeed will Change Journalism, PR and Marketing -Amazing stats for how much credence we put in the opinions of people like ourselves — 58% of opinion elites 35-64 in 18 countries said they trust “a person like me,” according to the Edelman Trust Barometer.This has been growing steadily since 2003. People are increasingly turning to their peers for news, information and recommendations.

Technorati Tags: Links, marketing, SEO

One thing that caught my eye was a link to Section 230 of Title 47 of the United States Code (47 USC § 230) part of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has some commentary on it. First the relevant part of the law:

No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” This federal law preempts any state laws to the contrary: “[n]o cause of action may be brought and no liability may be imposed under any State or local law that is inconsistent with this section.” The courts have repeatedly rejected attempts to limit the reach of Section 230 to “traditional” Internet service providers, instead treating many diverse entities as “interactive computer service providers.

What that means to bloggers:

Bloggers can be both a provider and a user of interactive computer services. Bloggers are users when they create and edit blogs through a service provider, and they are providers to the extent that they allow third parties to add comments or other material to their blogs.

Your readers’ comments, entries written by guest bloggers, tips sent by email, and information provided to you through an RSS feed would all likely be considered information provided by another content provider. This would mean that you would not be held liable for defamatory statements contained in it. However, if you selected the third-party information yourself, no court has ruled whether this information would be considered “provided” to you. One court has limited Section 230 immunity to situations in which the originator “furnished it to the provider or user under circumstances in which a reasonable person…would conclude that the information was provided for publication on the Internet….”

So if you are actively going out and gathering data on your own, then republishing it on your blog, we cannot guarantee that Section 230 would shield you from liability. But we believe that Section 230 should cover information a blogger has selected from other blogs or elsewhere on the Internet, since the originator provided the information for publication to the world. However, no court has ruled on this.

There’s more commentary on the site but unlike some laws that deal with electronic communications their have been numerous court decisions that have established precedent.

I think it’s a good practice for the “new media” to understand the legalities of all media. I also think it’s a good idea to understand the ethics that good journalist practice and that our spelled out by the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics that boils down to four main themes.

1. Seek Truth and Report It
2. Minimize Harm
3. Act Independently
4. Be Accountable

I believe that Citizen Journalism has gained increased popularity as a result of the accountability factor, remember the Killian documents from Rathergate.

Anyhow, I am sorry I missed the conference especially since I am sitting here blogging and my wife went for a pedicure, quality time bah…

Technorati Tags: Blogging, blogs, Publishing, Section 230, Title 47

On Mac OS X I prefer Twhirl which allows me to send tweets to separate accounts from individual windows. So I can send tweets for my @zenoss and @mrhinkle accounts. Twhirl is an Adobe Air application which now is available for Linux as an alpha. Thanks to Seth Yates I now have Twhirl running as an AIR application with Adobe Air running natively on Ubuntu. the only downside seems to be that the notification windows are a little “flutterly” I really don’t care for them anyhow so I turned them off and everything seems to run well.

Technorati Tags: Adobe Air, gTwitter, Linux, Twhirl, Twitter, Twitux

I have to wonder if the reason Twitter suffers is from the number of services tapping into it’s API and not actually the people using it. Anyhow as I write this I am staring at the whale once again…

Technorati Tags: Twitter, Whale

Here’s what I expect to get out of today’s conference (paraphrased from their website)

• How Social Media is impacting Marketing and Communications Strategies
• How Community can serve as a model to improving organizational productivity
• Network with experts in the fields of On Line Reputation, Search Engine Optimization, Web 2.0 Technology and On Line Community Building

Not sure what the program will be like but just the fact I get this kind of content five minutes from my house seems very cool to me.

Technorati Tags: Andy Beal, BlogCarolinas, online communities, RTP, Social Media, trackur

You can see the list of video types in the Video Embedder Settings. Over 20 Types including the most popular like YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe, BlipTV, Viddler, etc.

Technorati Tags: Embed, video, WordPress