I’ve been immersed in some form of Social Media for the past 5 years. My latest experience; working with Social Media Marketing both interested and disappointed me. The potential of networking is amazing but it’s all moot if you have nothing worth sharing and you come off as a pitch man.

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It’s proved a busy week for opinionated people in the realm of social media. Two new sites have launched in the last week that afford users the ability to save and share their thoughts about products and places: Fablistic and SocialSmack.

Fablistic, geared towards social networking via ratings and reviews, aims to bring a more interpersonal touch to the format behind traditional opinion powerhouses like Amazon reviews. Fablistic has a five point approach: save, share, organize, remember, and explore. In essence, it provides users a way to remember what they thought about things like restaurants, books, movies, electronics, or other products and services. While they’re at it, they can let their voice be heard across the Fablistic site and discover other topics that might be of interest by viewing the opinions of others. read more

After 10 years of existence and releasing a bunch of features including activating real time RSS feeds, jump breaks (AKA expandable post summaries for you WordPress guru’s) and anointing BlogPress Lite as the Blogger app for the iPhone, Google is now asking for suggestions on how to improve Blogger. read more

Here’s a question. If blog comments are mini-resumes, which comments are bringing the most traffic to your blog?

When you leave a comment on a blog, there are three things at work.

1. Your desire to participate in the blog conversation and topic.
2. Your desire to increase your link credits through blog comments.
3. Your desire to encourage traffic from your comment to your blog.

A lot of pro bloggers cover the first two, but I want to explore the last one. If you really want to drive traffic to your blog through comments on other blogs, is it working for you?

Have you been paying attention to your blog referrals and incoming traffic to see where your traffic is coming from in relationship to your blog comments? It’s a very good question because we blog and comment on the premise that blog interaction helps drive traffic.
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Many of us who had lived through the first internet bubble of the late 1990′s and early part of 2000 probably weren’t surprised to see this coming – but the news hit last night when the Financial Times published a piece entitled Web 2.0 Fails to produce Cash.

As an observer of this interesting little (or not-so-little) global tech industry that revolves around the “Web 2.0″ concept, I’ve long been wondering when the sky would start falling on the notion that you can drive traffic and change online behavior without having a business model that enables you to actually make money. read more

Ironically, just when this author started to warm up to the Maverick (for entering into hostile territory), it looks as if they are encouraging their followers to post “positive thoughts” or at least actively defend McCain’s name in the comment section, an item that may not please many political (and non-political) blogs.

(JohnMcCain.com) Help spread the word about John McCain on news and blog sites. Your efforts to help get the message out about John McCain’s policies and plan for the future is one of the most valuable things you can do for this campaign. You know why John McCain should be the next President of the United States and we need you to tell others why.

Select from the numerous web, blog and news sites listed here, go there, and make your opinions supporting John McCain known. Once you’ve commented on a post, video or news story, report the details of your comment by clicking the button below. After your comments are verified, you will be awarded points through the McCain Online Action Center.

It’s not the fact that John McCain is encouraging followers to comment upon blogs/news sites that is disturbing. After all, its probably wise to have a volunteer army defending ones own name.

Its the part where users have to report back to headquarters, as if its some intelligence agency (like the KGB or CIA).

If McCain wants to be successful online (as well as off) then he should encourage passionate followers to simply voice their opinion without the need to receive a “pat on the head” by reporting their daily good deed.

Otherwise he just might find himself fighting the blogosphere once again.

(Hat Tip: Hot Air)

I haven’t been writing very actively on my blogs lately, being mostly working in the back-end of things (yes, Splashpress is an ever-growing network). With this I’ve come to realize that I can compare blogs to land or some other real estate property.

For one, land can sit idle, and so can blogs. I know some people who own land in the suburbs, but have not built any houses on these. They end up paying real property taxes every so often, but do not actually derive any direct benefit from the land, aside perhaps from being an asset in their balance sheets.

Blogs can sit idle, too. I actually have a handful of domains (not even blogs yet, but still domain names) that I plan to launch, but still don’t find time to do so. For the blogs that are already up and running, these mostly have just a few starting posts. And the “taxes” I pay here are in the form of hosting fees, and the fact that they sit on my server consuming a few megs of space each.

Land can be developed. One can build a house on a residential lot. You can spend up to a few millions here, depending on your budget or how lavish (or simple) you want your house to be. Or, you can go cheap, and fix things along the way.

Blogs, meanwhile, can be designed and launched. You can spend a few hundred to several thousand dollars on a custom design. Or, you can also run on freely-downloadable themes, and just customize as you go along. Your building blocks here would also be the blog content that you would have to post initially and regularly.

Land can also be developed for business or commercial purposes. If you own prime lots in the city you can perhaps build apartments or commercial buildings. These can then be leased out and you can earn from rent income. Blog, too, can be built for commercial purposes. The rent income here would be the revenues from advertising, affiliate marketing, and sponsorships.

I also know some folks who buy land, build houses and sell these for a profit. That’s real estate development for you. It’s the same with blogs–some enterprising bloggers actually build blogs and blog networks for the purpose of selling.

So the analogy here is all about space. Both land and blogs can become personal space or commercial spaces.

There is one essential difference though. Land is physical property, and that’s while it’s called real estate. Blogs are virtual estate. How we define and value blogs can evolve over time. But then, isn’t that how it is in the case of land, too? The fact that land is valuable and “real” has also evolved through time, and this has differed from society to society. At present, though, most would agree that there is real value to land, at least for the foreseeable future. For blogs, meanwhile, it’s not as definite.

How much do you value your blog? Do you treat your blog as your personal space? Or a commercial space, perhaps? And do you think that value and that treatment will be the same a year from now? How about five years? Ten?

Michael Arrington, owner of TechCrunch has recently allowed readers to post video comments upon all of the blogs apart of the “TechCrunch empire.”

The feature is powered by Seesmic, a service that Michael has invested in previously.

While video comments will probably help enhance the discussion (as you will have the opportunity to see just how ugly some readers truly are, especially if they have not shaved in a while), it could potentially compound the blog trolling problem, as individuals could simply shout out their annoyances at you instead of typing IN ALL CAPS.

Even though other types of abuses could be discussed (ranging from shameless promotional video comments to hard core porn), video comments may a feature bloggers should seriously consider adding to their sites–just as long as they are up to the challenge of moderating video comments posted to their site.

As a blogger, links have been part of my daily blogging rounds. I click links on blogs to check out references and sources. And I use links on my blog posts to provide readers relevant information or alternative sources of information. Links have been so prevalent in the blogging culture that sometimes we tend to take these for granted.

However, not everyone is familiar with links, and the relevance of hyperlinking in blogging and the Web in general.

For instance, consider someone from the traditional media. How would they consider links? Would they think of links as relevant or important, even? Formal studies and print publications would usually include footnotes or even endnotes with references. Or, sources can be referenced in the bibliographies or appendices. But what about links? Well, you can’t hyperlink from paper, can you?

In fact, I have a few colleagues whose background involves traditional media of all kinds (print journalism, radio broadcasting). They’re prolific writers, yes. But in a way, they are still not that familiar with using links when writing blog posts. Or perhaps they are, but they just prefer to stick to their way of citing material. The way they reference sources and related information is a bit different. But that is not to say it’s inadequate. Being from traditional media, they tend to be able to do better research, and to dig deeper into the facts.

Referencing Jonathan Bailey’s recent post about lessons for and from journalism, I would think that effective linking is another lesson that journalists can learn from the bloggers. Having good sources and references is one thing. But giving your readers easier access to these would definitely be better, especially in a more interactive environment.

However, this should be the case for bloggers, too. Effective linking would mean using links more sensibly and reasonably, and thus ensuring the quality of the links. Just like how a journalist wouldn’t cite bogus information, we bloggers should try our best to link only to the good stuff. You wouldn’t link to a scraper site to cite information, would you?

So here’s a challenge I pose to our dear readers. Whenever you see a hyperlink on a blog or a webpage, don’t just click on it blindly. Try to think about the relevance of that link. Why was it there in the first place? What was the intent of the author? Is it relevant at all? Is it even appropriate?

The search engines have been looking into quality of linkages (both inbound and outbound). Shouldn’t we humans start doing the same?

Never since the days of the net bubble has the web held its collective breath (or prepared the popcorn) regarding the Microsoft-Yahoo drama.

The affair has become so large (or bad, depending on your point of view) that non-geeks are even starting to talk about it (at least around this author anyways). But while some argue in favor of the “inevitable merger,” the Microsoft-Yahoo deal (aka MicroHoo) may potentially affect the entire blogosphere–for the worse.
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