Chris Brogan is on a Roll

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Social Media rock star, Chris Brogan, is on a roll with his blog posts these days.

Yesterday he posted links to ten posts representing his Best Advice About Social Media.

Then today he followed it up with his Best Advice About Blogging.

If you aren’t familiar with Chris’ blog, you should definately check it out. Subsribe to his RSS feed.

Chris Brogan has his finger on the pulse of the social media world. And one of the things I like most about Chris is that he doesn’t have a huge ego about it, either.

He is very open about what he knows. And he tends to ask as many (or even more) questions than he answers.

I had the opportunity to spend some time with both Chris Brogan (and Chris Garrett) at SOBCon this past spring. They are two of the most genuine folks around.

And I made sure we got a photo of the three of us, well, it seemed like the thing to do at the time.

Sure it was a Chris thing. Maybe you wouldn’t understand.

Sunday Morning Goodness - July 6 2008

This week I’m bringing back our Sunday Morning Goodness feature that’s been on hiatus for nearly a year.

You see there is so much good stuff being published out there. And some of the things I find in my feed reader are simply worth sharing.

So grab yourself a cup of coffee, click through the links and enjoy your a great start to your Sunday.

Let’s start with a quote from an author who never fails to amuse me, Douglas Adams.

“He attacked everything in life with a mix of extraordinary genius and naive incompetence, and it was often difficult to tell which was which.”

Now on to some good blog postage…

• If you’re having trouble getting your blogging groove on check out Chris Brogan’s Sample Blogging Workflow. Not only does Chris address some good blogging strategy ideas, but he then goes on to share some critical tasks, and some tools to make blogging easier. Then he ends with some ways to get your creative juices flowing when you run short of post ideas.
• David Bullock give us a social media explanation using a senator, Twitter & you. David takes a look at how the radically different approaches of the Obama and Clinton campaigns towards social media in general, and Twitter in particular, produced an Obama victory. David’s spot on. Back in February I pionted out that Hillary’s approach to social media killed her campaign not realizing then that she’d hang on as long as she eventually did. Wonder if things might have gone differently for her if she’d changed strategies then?
• Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Webspam team, takes it offline for a bit analog advice with some great tips on How to Stop Junk Mail. Tired of a mail box stuffed  full of unwanted catalogs, direct mail pieces, and a flood of credit card offers? Matt gives has some great suggestions on how you can some headway towards reducing the junk.
• Finally there’s a fun post from Christine Kane called 22 Sparkly Ways to Shine Your Inner Bling. I had to include this one because the dog photo made Goregous laugh out loud when she read the post. (Click through and you’ll see what I mean.) And despite the, um, less than manly sounding title, there’s some good advice in there from Christine for all of us.

Have a wonderful Sunday. Enjoy!

Photo Credit: Konaboy

Down to Business at SOBCon08

Gorgeous and I spent this past weekend at SOBCon in Chicago. It was a tremendous weekend for the both of us.

This years event kept some of the best parts of SOBCon07 and yet was quite different in at least one key element, that of focus. Last year SOBCon was all about community with a little bit of marketing thrown in.

All About Business

This time around SOBCon was all about business. Sure there were several bloggers in the room whose focus was not on making money with their blogs. But having just made the break from corporate life to the entrepreneur world this year, Gorgeous and I were definately focused on business while we were in Chicago.

And we weren’t disappointed.

Still Made Connections

Just like last year we made new connections which will likely produce valuable exchanges to help mutually propel our various businesses forward.

It is interesting to me that the people I made strongest connection with were not the same folks that I set out to get to know. Because I set out with that intentionality I still met the people and started the relationships that may potentially be catalysts for growth in my business. Those connections were just with unexpected people is all. Read more

Yahoo Working on a New Kind of Search

Chris Brogan shared that Yahoo is considering a new approach to serving up search results. He describes it as The Sound of Content Ripping Free From Its Page. I’m not sure it will be as dramatic as all that for a couple reasons.

What’s at the heart of Chris’ concern is this short post over at Business Week about what they labeled Yahoo’s Linkless Search. Here’s the part Chris finds concerning

Yahoo’s goal is to build a vast universe of related information, so that we get the info we’re looking for, without having to click on links. Search engines are already moving toward this. More and more, the information pops up on the result pages. But what Raghavan is describing sounds very much like an effort to push relevant Web pages down, or even out of the equation. “We’re not giving you pages, we’re giving you information synthesized from other pages.”

I’ve emphasized the parts that I think probably give Chris pause.

Search Without Links

At first brush the concept sounds a little hair brained to me.

From a publisher perspective it sounds goofy because with this approach to search Yahoo is choosing what parts of my content their user really “needs” to see rather than showing them my site and letting them choose the relevant content in context with the entire page.

From a user stand point I generally prefer to have the option to click through to the raw data. The idea of a synopsis makes sense. But I’d still want to see a link where I can click through to the source material. However I wonder if the average internet user feels the same way.

From Yahoo’s perspective it might make sense. IF they are looking at search as a way to corral people onto their site rather than as a gateway to other sites. If Yahoo’s intent is to build cull-de-sacs where “all roads lead to Yahoo” then this is probably one way to accomplish that goal.

Solving a Non-existent Problem

Here’s the thing. It seems to me that Yahoo is attempting to solve a “problem” that doesn’t exist. Here is an example of the “problem” as Yahoo sees it:

In the current mode, when we’re looking for, say, a restaurant in Hoboken, we query, read a web page, query again for reviews, and then again for directions.

Sounds like a huge burden, right? Yahoo claims that if someone is looking to check out a restaurant then they have to do 3 separate searches to find the information they need to make an informed decision. Why not simplify that to 1 search?

The thing is you already can get all that info from one search. Let me demonstrate.

Take one of my favorite local restaurants, the New South Cafe right here in Savannah. When I enter in “New South Cafe, Savannah, GA” into Google I get links to the following info on the first page:

• Restaurant Website
• Directions
• Several Reviews
• Some Community Involvement Info about the Restaurant

And that’s with one search, not three. Looks like Google’s already accomplishing what Yahoo is “researching” and is still ushering people to the content creators’ web sites. Everybody wins.

And here’s something interesting. Search for the same thing in Yahoo, “New South Cafe, Savannah, GA” and you get similar info. I see the restaurant’s web site, directions, and reviews all on the front page.

Yahoo’s Faulty Info

The top Yahoo results point to pages of info that are still on Yahoo web sites, though. Interestingly one of the top results gives a bogus address for the restaurant. Notice the phone numbers for the two entries are the same.

But folks following their directions to that location wouldn’t find the restaurant because it isn’t there. You’d have to click through to the restaurant’s main web site anyway to find out which location is the correct one. Or I you could just go over to Google and double check your search I suppose. They seem to have the location right somehow. Of course they aren’t pushing users to another Google page.

If the current Yahoo web sites can’t contain a simple piece of info like the location of a restaurant that’s been the same for at least the 4 years I’ve been in town, how do they expect to amass relevant data on their sites for the millions of searches that internet users conduct every day?

Bottom Line

I don’t think folks should get unduly worried about Yahoo! turning the search engine world on its ear with this new approach to search. It seems more likely to me that Yahoo will be collating masses numbers of pages with dubious content value this way.

If this is really what they are counting on to break the strangle-hold Google has on the search market and fend off a hostile take over from Microsoft then they are probably in worse shape than most folks give them credit for.

Networking to Promote Your Blog

One of the facets of blogging that doesn’t get as much attention as it deserves is the networking aspect. Networking is a huge part of promoting your blog.

Successful bloggers read other blogs they are interested in, especially those in their same niche, and actively comment adding value to those blogs.

Many are also active on various other social media type web sites that are relationship oriented and make new connections there as a result. Two of my personal favorites are Facebook and Twitter.

Often conversations that started in a comment box, or on one of the other sites spill over into emails with different folks.

Or maybe it might even lead to a phone conversation like it did the other night when Chris Brogan Twittered his cell phone number and asked who wanted to give him a shout. I called his number and chatted with Chris for a few minutes.

And now I have a friend and professional contact in the Boston area that I doubt I’d have met without blogging.

Promoting your blog takes time, sure. But that time will equate to new contacts that your business could never make via traditional marketing approaches.

Is it worth it? I sure think so.

The Pursuit of Happiness

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness…
–The Declaration of Independence

A Different World

This holiday I can’t help but think that the men who hotly debated the content of that formidable document and ultimately passed it 231 years ago were living in an entirely different world than we are today.

There are differences over and above the obvious technological changes. But just to help get your mind around how different the world is now, let’s do an imagination exercise.

Try to imagine how different your world would be without any of these things: cell phones, internet, email, computers, cars, trucks, electricity, air conditioning, refrigeration, television, antibiotics, anesthesia, contact lenses, air travel, plastic, synthetic materials, self propelled ships, artificial lighting, recorded music, radio, mass transportation, telephones, the list seems endless.

But living without all of those things would make for a radically different world to be sure. Read more

Momentary Flashes of Twitter Brilliance

Twitter is all the rage these days. Several big blogging names are fully on board tweeting away. And a few others have not embraced the idea. The die hard Twitter converts would probably add a “yet” at the end of that last sentence. We’ll see.

Fortunately for me their IM connectivity is still not working, at least with GoogleTalk, which has been good for me from a productivity standpoint because I’m not all up in the madness non-stop throughout the day.

Most of what goes on there is only of passing interest to me. And I see an interesting principle that seems to be in play over there. I’m open to other names, but for now let’s call it

The Cree Principle of Twitterization

Your Twitter posting frequency will be directly proportional to the length of your friends list.

It seems those folks on my friends list who have hundreds of friends (and huge followings) tend to be the heaviest Twitters. And that makes it easy for me. I can just check in a couple times a day, skim through, glean the interesting stuff and disregard the rest.

A Moment of Brilliance

Read more