How Bloggers Can Help During Times of Tragedy

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On April 25, tragedy struck Nepal as a 7.8-magnitude earthquake destroyed residences and buildings (including the UNESCO Word Heritage sites) in Kathmandu and took the lives of around 5,000 civilians (and counting). The earthquake is the most devastating natural calamity that hit Nepal since the Nepal-Bihar earthquake in 1934.

Relief efforts from all over the world are underway but frustration is boiling in some parts of Nepal who have yet to receive the assistance they badly need.

If you wish to help your Nepali brothers and sisters, below are links to online media outlets pointing to trustworthy organizations collecting donation or the victims of the earthquake:

Before sending out your donation, read this post at NPR first to understand how your donation is received and processed by these organizations.

While these are the steps that you can take in order to lend a helping hand to those in need, the question now remain: what I can do to help as a blogger?

If you are an authoritative blogger with a sizable readership and clout to influence your audience, you can use these to make an effort and increase the assistance to the victims of the earthquakes. Here’s what you can do:

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4 IFTTT Recipes to Boost Blogging Productivity

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blogging lessons

As a blogger, you want to make the most of your time producing the best possible content for your blog. This means increasing your productivity and getting rid of roadblocks along the way that prevent you from doing your job.

Enter IFTTT.

This web-based service lets you create conditional statements referred to as “recipes” using third-party apps. Using recipes help you cut time in doing certain tasks online. For example, there is a recipe that lets you automatically save all your Instagram photos to your Dropbox. This way, you don’t have spend time manually transfering the images to your Dropbox. Using this trigger, IFTTT will do it for you.

Aside from using these indispensable time-saving recipes, there are specific conditional statements that will help you how to blog the right way. Below are four of them.

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Why SEO Pros Should Be on Reddit

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There is no discussion necessary when it comes to the entertaining merits of Reddit. The front page of the Internet has a lot of subpages, to be sure, and depending on which page/s you frequent, you will have various experiences. The bottom line is that you can find yourself browsing and reading Reddit for hours on end without realizing it. The epitome of a timesink.

Reddit

But, aside from the entertaining value of the site, there are actually a lot of benefits to spending time on Reddit, especially for SEO professionals. It is no secret that search engine optimization, or SEO, has received a lot of flak over the years. While there are legit practices, there are some rotten apples (whether it’s an SEO company or individual) that have tainted the scene.

That is no reason to totally ignore SEO, though. The niche still has its merits and there are SEO pros who are actually good at what they do without having to resort to shady practices. If you’re one of these SEO pros, where do you go to interact with likeminded people? More so, where do you go to exchange ideas with people who are not shady at all?

Believe it or not, the answer is Reddit. [Read more…]

Gnip Adding Instagram, Reddit, Bitly And Panaramio To Its Data Pipeline

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GnipGnip has added Instagram, Reddit, Bitly And Panaramio to its firehose of data licenses. The company was previously collecting data from  Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress and Disqus. Data collected by the company was then sold to brands so they could better understand how their products are being discussed on social media.

Gnip will now use public posts from its new services along with their APIs to fold further data into its subscription based reports.

In a blog post Gnip notes:

“Our customers care about every public conversation that happens online.”

Using the new platform marketers will be able to monitor Instagram posts by keyword or by geolocation. With Bitly and Reddit brands will be able to track links that are being shared about their products.  [Read more…]

RedditRewind Aims To Pull Up Old Memories From Weeks Past

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Reddit Rewind

RedditRewind is yet another reason for site visitors to spend their time endlessly clicking through Reddit posts. Developed by platform creator and back-end developer Parham Negahdar and front-end developer Morley Zhi, the RedditRewind feature allows users to use Reddit as a virtual time machine. Redditors can find old photos, videos, and links that have been posted to popular subReddits over the last few months.

Speaking about the need for such a platform Negahdar explains:

“I saw there was lots of interest in such a thing so I launched my existing project as quickly as I could. At the time it was purely a utility. The UI was simply a list of links with dates, months, and years to visit a cache, and the result was simple list of links on the page (think 4chan-level UI). I knew the design sucked and made an edit to my post asking if anyone would be willing to design the site.”

Negahdar not only created the platform, his front-end developer made it look so nice that they actually use it instead of the Reddit Enhancement Suite and the actual Reddit website.  [Read more…]

Reddit Reveals ‘Top 500’ AMAs

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Reddit AMA Top 500 ListOne of the most popular features on social sharing website Reddit is its use of AMA (Ask Me Anything) showcases. During those events actors, comedians, politicians and other well known and lesser known people receive questions from Reddit users and then answer those questions.

AMAs have been used by everyone from President Obama to Arnold Schwarzenegger and now Reddit has chose to share its “Top 500” AMAs of all time.

Reddit breaks each list down into different categories with Actors/Entertainers and the “other” categories dominating the list with 80 and 130 mentions respectively.  [Read more…]

How Reddit Was Born [Video]

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Reddit FounderReddit came about by accident, a beautiful and flawed merging of original ideas and concepts taken from other popular sites at the time of its launch such as Slashdot and Delicious.

Founded bySteve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian the network was built around forming user identities while at the same time sharing the web in a simple to understand manner.

In a candid video released on Friday Reddit’s co-founder talking about their first failed attempts on the web and then dive into how they generated a billion pageview website that now sites at the cornerstone of social engagement.

As Ohanian notes:

Reddit was not created to do good works. But I cant help but be really, really pleased with how much good Reddit has done for the world. [Read more…]

Hootsuite Announces Reddit, Stumbleupon Support

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HootSuite Adds New Support

Hootsuite users now have the option to follow their Reddit and StumbleUpon accounts directly from their HootSuite dashboard. The social monitoring company announced support for both social news feeds on Tuesday.

The company has also added support for the lesser knownScoop.it, CMP.LY and Nexalogy platforms.

Hootsuite has come a long way from its Twitter roots, the company now offers support for 35 applications which includes Flickr, Tumblr, YouTube and Instagram among others. [Read more…]

Reddit Was Built On Hundreds Of Lies, Says Co-Founder

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Reddit LiesReddit was founded on a lie, hundreds of lies actually. Reddit Co-founder Steve Huffman was speaking on a video for online educator Udacity when he revealed that he and co-founding partner Alexis Ohanian used fake accounts to populate the site with links users wanted to read.

According to Huffman:

“You would go to Reddit in the early days, the first couple of months and there’d be tons of… fake users.”

By creating fake accounts Huffman and Ohanian not only made their social network look less like a ghost town, they created the “direction” of the high-quality links they wanted to attract.

Huffman does admit that simply creating a few hundred fake accounts is not enough to make a community take off, according to Huffman:

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Reddit Is An Effective Tool For Social Change, It’s What Blogging Wants To Be

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Reddit bullyReddit is more than a social link sharing platform and micro-blogging service, it’s a platform for change that helps social issues gain momentum and the platform proved that point once again this week when it helped a bullying victim target their bully.

A student under the pseudonym “Sarah” posted about a bully who was bothering them offline and online. As evidence mounted about the bully and their propensity towards death threats the Reddit community stood behind the victim.

The students school was soon flooded with emails demanding that action be taken, ironically some of those requests were “a little nasty” and “bully friendly” on their own.

Regardless of the email attacks and their often nasty message, Sarah showed up at school the next day at which point the schools principal called the police, allowed all victims involved to share their stories and ultimately have the police called in to question the bully.

According to the final outcomes report: [Read more…]