SEM

There seems to be a great deal of emphasis on social networking as a means to connect with people of share interests. For example: Sphinn targets marketers and allows bookmarking and networking as a means for internet and search marketers to interact. As well, there are many other forums and sites aimed at allowing greater interaction among marketers. But, this leads on to question: Does this really help the marketer? It appears to me that the usefulness of these sites is finite. This is not meant to undermine the importance of socializing with your peers, however this might serve to insulate marketers from what was really important. Furthermore, marketers might market themselves better by interacting with those people who might potentially require their marketing savvy. I don’t know many non-marketers checking out Sphinn any time soon.

What do I do different?

Well, it’s no secret that I don’t socialize with other marketers. Not because I am a snob or anything, but they are not my niche market. Furthermore, I doubt any of them will ever contact me because they need help with their search engine optimization, right? I socialize with people who are interested in other things. Music, films, travel, books, and so on. Not only am I also interested in these things, but it is the insights and experiences of socializing with these people that really lends itself to understanding the needs and desires of consumers.

That being said, there are some key points to consider when engaging in social networking online.

1. There is a lot to be said for a little personality. It is, after all, SOCIAL networking. An online social network can get rather large, and it always helps to stick out among the crowd.
2. Don’t be shy. Having one or two or three strong connections in your social network is not going to cut it. Be social. Try to make a few new connections each day, or each week, depending on your availability.
3. Social networking is not for getting other people to do stuff for you. Sure, that might happen down the road. But it is not a good idea to start out with “Hey, Digg this”. Generally, I disregard any request from someone I don’t know asking me to do something, and I will be disinclined to socialize with them in the future.

Social networking affords so many opportunities to anyone looking to reach out to a niche market. As social sites often include some form or another of folksonomic tagging, it is very easy to find and identify individuals of a specific interest, and often these individuals have joined themselves to social groups. Consumers are very savvy these days though. I would not suggest this as an opportunity for sending mass messages to people. But it is a great way to spot trends and learn more about the people you are looking to appeal to. And if you truly integrate yourself, there will be an audience for your ideas.

I find that most blogs have the comments and trackbacks mixed together after an article, which at times does look quite messy and ugly. Plus I find it difficult to follow the conversations when trackbacks appear in between comments.

So you may want to change your blog comments and trackbacks by separating them, there is several ways:

1. Change your template to one that will separate them automatically
2. Modify your current template

I come across hackwordpress.com which explains in a step by step process on how to separate your comments from your trackbacks on a WordPress blog. So if you would like to improve your layout and make it more readable to your visitors then you should jump over to their site.

Update:

Weblog Tools Collection has an excellent article, the topics they cover are on separating trackbacks/pingbacks from regular comments, and also how to remove trackbacks and pingbacks from a WordPress theme completely.

Post from: Yeepage Blogging & Monetizing Tips

How To Separate Comments and Trackbacks On WordPress

Oooh, even though Nic n I are but one short flight away, we are unfortunately not enjoying the festivities down south at SES London!  We can’t believe it!

But all not is lost, thanks to this new fandangled thing called the Internet, we are able to follow along from our living rooms in ’sunny Glasgow’.

We have been following session recaps on search engine land where Barry Schwartz has listed a few blogs covering SES London.  Including a post from Lee Odden in which he adds the visuals!

Almost feels like we’re there…almost.

Per chi volesse seguire l’ultimo keynote di casa Apple:

Live Streaming MacWorld Expo 2008

Streaming fornito da Daily Tech Talk

Live in italiano ma scritto

Come sopra ma in inglese

Il sito Apple in aggiornamento

Per il momento e’ stato presentato Time Capsule un sistema di backup con airport extreme e Time Machine e l’affitto (video noleggio) di film direttamente da iTunes (da subito in USA piu’ avanti per il resto del mondo).

POI ARRIVO’ LUI…

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Conrad Johnson, one of the centers of gravity in the Houston jazz scene, passed away on Sunday. I had only a few lessons with Prof and he kicked my butt, he must have been 80-something at the time.

Wy wife and I were recently doing some online shopping together. We were looking for lamps for our living room. My wife was the one at the controls, and at one point she got frustrated and said “This web site really sucks. I can’t even look at their furniture.”

I had mixed feelings about my wife’s comment. My shopper side was completely with her. The web site did suck. It was hard to look at furniture. My designer side, however, felt a pang of empathy for the poor designers who probably worked really hard building this.

This situation reminded me of the reality TV shows where they do house makeovers. On one that I remember watching, a couple was having a hard time selling their house. They had open house after open house, yet nobody was making an offer.

So the crafty real estate agent (as part of the show) decided to video tape the next open house. They taped people as they walked through the house, catching all the little comments that couples make to each other out of earshot of the realtor. This was just like the comments my wife and I were making to each other about the web site.

The raw comments were astounding. “This room is fugly”. “I hate these curtains…what a horrible sense of style”. Not only did people attack the style of the house, they attacked the people who were responsible, the house owners!

Obviously, those people wouldn’t make such comments to the face of the house owners. It just wouldn’t be polite and they would get kicked out of the house immediately. (In the same way my wife and I probably wouldn’t tell the site creators to their face that their web site stunk)

But what surprised me is that once the house owners heard these comments, they didn’t fight them. Sure, their ego was bruised. But they realized that they were seeing evidence of why the house wasn’t selling. So they quickly agreed to allow a house decorator to come in an redecorate their house (for a fee) so that it would show better. Their earlier reluctance to put more money into the house before the sale evaporated when they saw the tape.

And, of course, after they redecorated the comments of the next round of people were very positive. “Oh, nice”. “I like this”. Etc. And, as you might expect, the house sold relatively quickly after that.

So while it was a tough pill to swallow to hear people complain and rip on the style of the house, it had a powerful effect of immediate change.

The same rules apply on the web. If you don’t know how people truly feel about your web application, you can’t make the hard decisions you need to in order to improve.

In a recent set of interviews I did for a client, we were hearing some of those negative comments. And since I was doing the interviews myself, I wasn’t sure how to communicate this extreme displeasure back to the site owners. Should I tone it down? Instead of saying “people hated it” should I say “well, there’s a lot of work to be done”?

In the end, I thought about this TV show and let all the comments go through untouched. The site owners heard the true feelings of the people who were using their web application, and realizing that they had a lot of work to do, set about immediately doing it.

Sometimes the only way to make the necessary changes is to take a direct hit to the ego. It hurts, but boy is it effective.

With the news of mergers happening here and there round the globe the developer community is not far from getting affected. The latest news of Oracle and BEA acquisition is bound to leave developers amidst some sort of uncertainty as to why has this taken place at all and what effects will it have on them.

BEA is known for its well diversified technology stack of Weblogic Java Application Servers, SOA products and the Aqualogic suite of ESB and BPM products. Also to mention that BEA holds a strong integration of all the above suites into its Weblogic Workshop which has been built around the Eclipse platform.

Oracle on the other hand too has an array of similar products including Appservers, ESB, SOA and BPM. Then the question arises as to why Oracle is acquiring BEA? Some insights to the things apart from the product suites clash should be taken in consideration here to understand Oracle’s point of view.

Oracle entered into an acquisition with BEA Systems after it offered $19.375/share which is nearly a 40% premium over the October 2007 price when Oracle had done its first bid. This can be seen as a state of urgency on the part of Oracle to acquire BEA. Some speculation can be allotted on to the latest SOA offerings of BEA which could have made Oracle think for a big upgradation in their services.

Thinking other ways, Oracle might just be preparing for a tussle with the other giants such as IBM and SAP for gaining the market share in providing SOA infrastructure. With the BEA acquisition, Oracle will be in ready position to flash a list of clientele from BEA’s portfolio to match with the competitors. With the future plans of BEA for SOA, Oracle’s merger plans must have been really thought out.

It might be also a case of killing the competition. Big players often tend to downsize the smaller fish by making them surrender. This can be a case with Oracle too. Having a chance to get the customer base from BEA, it can simply kill off the competition by either junking off all BEA products off the line or by carefully integrating BEA products with its middleware and offering separate flagship services, just as it has done after acquiring PeopleSoft and JDEdwards.

Organizations today are keen to have a single suite of products to manage their businesses and middleware competition is on the rise. This probably makes Oracle’s target to claim for a one vendor many solutions more justified. But for the developers its more than a platform choice because now it would be choosing between their career paths too. I also have worked on Weblogic App server with Oracle database as the backend. With this acquisition, developers like me will have to decide on which path to opt for.

If Oracle junks off BEA products for killing the competition it might give rise for fear within the Weblogic community. Hopefully, if Oracle makes a decision of providing a flagship line of BEA products, the developer community will be more than happy to flash the name of Oracle on their resumes. This will be clear only in the mid of 2008 when the acquisition will be completed. The major question now lies as to what would a Java EE developer do in such a situation?

This edition of Ask nextSTEPH covers accepting credit card payments online.

A client of mine asked:

I have a client who wants to pay for a service with American Express. I have a PayPal account. Can you tell me what to do to take credit cards?

Send your client this link:

https://www.paypal.com/xclick/business=username%40domain.com

With “username” being your email username and “domain.com” being your domain.

You can also have your webmaster code it into your website.

Ask nextSTEPH by submitting your blogging questions via the comments. One question will be selected to be featured next month. The person who asked the question will also receive a complementary blog consultation valued at $120 US.

Tags: paypal, credit card, payment, digital coaching

The Congress-Bundestag Program has a branch specifically for career and technical education post-high school training, The Congress-Bundestag Vocational Youth Exchange Program. This is an all-expenses paid opportunity for post-high school training - students need bring only spending money! Congress-Bundestag is an awesome program!

From Nacel’s website:

This unique program, funded by the United States Congress and the German Bundestag, allows graduating high school seniors to spend a year in Germany living with a host family, participating in a training or school program, and most importantly, getting hands-on work experience through an internship with a German company. Participants have been placed in fields as diverse as the arts, architecture, auto mechanics, carpentry, child care, computers, culinary arts, early education, health care, hotel management, international affairs, journalism, and veterinary science, to name a few.
To be eligible to apply, students must be U.S. citizens and meet the following qualifications:

• Graduate from high school in January or June
• Be between eighteen and nineteen years of age (some flexibility available)
• Have a “B†(3.0) academic and/or vocational grade point average
• Be highly recommended by their school
• Demonstrate leadership ability and willingness to serve as a young ambassador of the USA

The program encourages applicants from all economic, ethnic, religious, and social backgrounds

The application deadline is January 31, 2008

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The buzz created by the million SEO Contests over the year partly died off. But a new SEO Contest has risen to start an annual competition for Search Engine Optimization.

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Technorati Tags: SEO, SEO Contest