Twitter Debutes In Dilbert

Nick Wilsdon — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 11:31:54 +0000

AFAIK this is a first time Twitter has appeared in the world of Dilbert. Goes to show how far the service is progressing into the mainstream. A recent report by eMarketer suggests that Twitter user numbers could exceed 26m in the US alone. Global estimates have been put at 35-45m current users. Even with the hype, the platform has gone from a niche social site to a global player.

Coming back down to earth though, Dilbert is probably closer to the reality for most bosses who jump on the Twitter bandwagon. If you’re not already getting Scott Adam’s masterpiece through your email each morning, then sign up here.

Technorati Tags: Twitter

SocialMedian Review: First Impressions Of The Next Big Thing

Nick Wilsdon — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 14:10:01 +0000

What is SocialMedian.com?

From Mashable.com:

You can follow different topical news groups – which are a collection of activities from people interested in the same topic (called News Networks) – or subscribe to updates from other users (called Newsmakers). On your homepage, you can then filter between the activities in your News Networks and the activities among the Newsmakers you’re tracking. Activities tracked include “Clipping” a story (akin to Digg with bookmarklet and all) or commenting on something on Socialmedian.

Looking beyond those features – which on the surface seem like a hybrid of Digg and Friendfeed – is where Socialmedian potentially gets very interesting for news junkies, and it comes in the form of providing feedback to the service. You can vote on each story’s relevance, rank topics in the order of importance to you, and upgrade the frequency at which you’d like to see stories from specific sources.

So SocialMedian has got a bit of everything in there; social submission, voting, news aggregation, sharing and groups. I’d also mention that it delivers a handy email summary of articles every few hours or daily. KillerStartup suggested these notifications would be via Twitter but they either got this wrong or this feature will be coming in the future. I hope it’s the latter. On the face of it this mashup is doing nothing new but the way they have combined the features works.

Who’s Using SocialMedian.com?

SocialMedian.com was launched publicly on the 31st July but already reports 5537 users. More importantly, the site has attracted some well known early adopters, such as Steve Rubel and Robert Scoble and Louis Gray. The owner Jason Goldberg is also very active on the site and doing a heroic job at drumming up the activity. To start you off, here’s a list of 25 SEO/SEMs on the system. Feel free to add your SocialMedian URL in the comments.

SocialMedian themselves encourage new sign-ups to follow the most active users on the site, so early adopters can use this to their advantage in building their network.

Articles are delivered via newsgroups. These are some of the most active SEO/SEM and Social Media groups I found with user numbers in brackets. Follow the links to sign-up.

http://www.socialmedian.com/network/seo (79)
http://www.socialmedian.com/network/search-engine-marketing (60)
http://www.socialmedian.com/network/seo-2-0 (39 – well done Tad!)
http://www.socialmedian.com/network/social-networking (859)
http://www.socialmedian.com/network/social-media-watch (909)

Enough Good, What About the Ugly?

I’ve experienced some strange activity on the site. Once where a news item was sent to the wrong newsgroup and another time where I was unable to edit a comment. Also SocialMedian.com is having some obvious issues with the current load, this reduces the site to a crawl at times and is probably the underlying cause for these other issues. More than once I’ve been left staring at the default Ruby on Rails error page. Hopefully the fact they have not chosen to customise this with a Fail Whale indicates this problem to be temporary.

Another issue which bugs me is connected to the sharing story functions. If you choose to tweet or email links from SocialMedian, the recipient is required to sign-up to follow the link to the source story. This is true for any non-members casually browsing the site. As Paul Silver twittered back to me, “that smacks of link hoarding/user grabbing”. I think he’s right. I won’t be using that function again to send links to my Twitter feed.*

On the subject of nofollow, the site is sea of pink using the Search Status Plugin for FireFox. However links to the source article are left followed. With so much nofollow plastered about I’m not sure how much linkjuice will flow down to the article pages but hopefully this is a show of respect to the original content producers rather than an oversight.

Conclusion – Should I Sign Up?

I was impressed with the site. As I wrote before, it brings something new to the table in an already overpopulated niche. I really like the level of maturity and number of professionals in this community. These are articles on venture capital rather than LOLcats or iPod rave reviews (although there is already an Apple group). I haven’t read their policy on submitting your own material but the audience looks receptive to commercial sites or marketing related posts.

SocialMedian also encourages you to explore topics through their grouping system. After you read an interesting article you can subscribe to that group feed. It maybe the early adopters but I found myself reading posts on marketing, investment and blogging that wouldn’t be in my usual news sources.

While SEO/SEM/Marketing communities are always going to be my passion, I enjoyed the way SocialMedian pushed me in other directions. With all the banal blogging recently this was a breath of fresh air and an exciting opportunity to meet people outside my immediate SEO/SEM circles.

In my opinion, SocialMedian is a serious contender.

Update: Jason has just twittered me to say they are working on removing the signup requirements. He’s also acknowledged the speed issue. Thanks Jason. You can follow the SocialMedian twitter account here.

Technorati Tags: Beta Launches, Jason Goldberg, News Aggregators, Social Media, SocialMedian, SocialMedian.com, Twitter

Check Your Feeds: Latest WordPress 2.5x Blanks RSS

Nick Wilsdon — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 12:35:10 +0000

Sorry if it’s seemed a bit quiet round here recently. The latest WordPress versions 2.5.0/2.5.1 have a bug which kills off some RSS addresses. If you look at the feed URL in a browser it will have no posts there or errors. It may have done the same to your blog too, so have a check.

Some of the feed addresses in WordPress, namely wp-rss2.php, wp-rss.php and wp-rdf.php no longer work in these versions. The www.yourblog.com?feed=rss2 or www.yourblog.com/feed/ addresses still work. As Otto42 one of the WP Moderators writes:

The fix for this will be in 2.5.2.

And you should never have been using wp-rss2.php in the first place. The correct feed URL, for all WordPress blogs, is either ?feed=rss2 or /feed. It has been that way for all versions since 2.0. The wp-rss stuff is a left over from the old 1.5 days, over three years ago. We really should remove it, IMO.

BTW, if you are using non-default permalinks, then you can simply DELETE the wp-rss.php and wp-rss2.php file, and all your feed users will get redirected to the correct URL of /feed the next time they hit the site. Those got integrated into the permalinks, there’s no need to keep those files around anymore. This will fix it right now, no waiting around.

Of course this issue is a major problem if you are feeding one of these ‘legacy’ addresses into FeedBurner, as I was on this blog. Update that to yourblog.com/feed/ immediately. Deleting the problem files as Otto42 suggested didn’t work for me, returning a 404 “page not found”. Instead, I’ve updated my .htaccess file as follows to point everything to /feed/ and then onto my FeedBurner URL

# BEGIN Redirect Feeds Redirect 301 /wp-rss2.php http://yourdomain.com/feed/ Redirect 301 /wp-rss.php http://yourdomain.com/feed/ Redirect 301 /wp-rdf.php http://yourdomain.com/feed/ Redirect 301 /feed/ http://your-feedburner-url/ # END Redirect Feeds

You could probably do the same job with the FeedSmith Plugin but you would still have ensure that you are not using a legacy feed URL as the source in FeedBurner.

Update 30/06/08

Grrr…just realised that updating the empty FeedBurner URL may have sent some of you some of the old posts your missed. Sorry about that, didn’t mean to flood you.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Feeds, WordPress

Nick Wilsdon» Blogging

Twitter Debutes In Dilbert

SocialMedian Review: First Impressions Of The Next Big Thing

Check Your Feeds: Latest WordPress 2.5x Blanks RSS