Archive for: community
Social sharing is what has made social media and the Web 2.0 era so successful. Rather than rely on emailing content we find interesting online, we are afforded the opportunity to share that same information with a click of a button to a global audience. It’s not uncommon for stories to gain traction extremely fast due to how widespread the social networks are. Driving traffic to your site, to a specific post, has never been easier with the access to the numbers of people we have today.
That being said, I’m sure Facebook never imagined it would be in the position it is today. Currently Facebook stands at a whopping 44% of social sharing activity. That’s almost two times more than Twitter and simply dominant over Yahoo and other sharing methods. With almost half the market, data is being shared at unimaginable rates online as people “Like” “Share” or “Comment” on content that their friends are posting.
Search engines don’t even really fall onto the radar with as much that is going on in Facebook. Some pundits are event commenting how Facebook may be where future users source their information as opposed to Google, Yahoo, or other methods. Twitter with it’s millions of users and faster response rate has nothing on Facebook.
So do you find yourself sharing more dominantly on Facebook than any of your other networks? Is this a shift in how people are consuming content and a tell tale sign of how people are engaging online? Should be interesting to see how long this can keep up and where Facebook will go with this.
The coming year is sure to be filled with big things for all of us. One of my personal goals is to publish my work in book format. As a writer I’ve
Self publish your work.
spent years collecting works on my personal sites that would work well in book format. The idea is to take out the middleman, publishers, and put your work in your hands by giving you the options you need to get your work out to the world. But it’s not just for writers, opportunities are abound for photographers as well who want to feature their work in magazine or calendar format.
Lulu has offered self publishing opportunities for all of us for many years now, and since its launch, has expanded it’s offerings. Take your work in one of many formats, books, ebooks, calendars, photo books, cookbooks, cd’s and dvd’s. Lulu also offers distribution services to get your book out in as many markets as possible, and the fees are minimal compared to what you’d get having to work with an agent and a publisher. I don’t want to take anything away from the traditional models that exist for publishing, they definitely have a place in the world of content publishing, but self publishing offers us so many new opportunities.
At the pro level there are many great options you have, should you choose to go this route, that mimics what working with a real publisher is like. Services include publishing packages, retail listings, children’s book packages, and all inclusive packages. Each of them come with their own distinct professional connections that as a self publisher allows you to truly get a hands on the process of getting your book out to the masses.
What’s amazing in these times of new and innovative web applications is the ability to share your knowledge, your processes and your abilities without having to get out of your chair. Screen casting has been an extremely popular way to explain something to someone using desktop visuals and such to relay the message. The type of cam you’re using is irrelevant since screen casting actually takes place internally with regards to what you see on your own screen.
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For those of us writers who find ourselves seeking new content to relate to what we write, it was a huge breath of fresh air when Zemanta was released. Zemanta not only offered us links, but it offered up keywords we might want to highlight, along with images the engine though we should include in our post. Zemanta was unlike anything we’d ever seen in terms of its wide use and availability across browsers and blogging sites.
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There’s a lot of apps out there, both mobile and desktop, that use the Twitter API to make it more “functional” for power users. What’s a power user? Well if you’ve got more than one account on Twitter, have over 1000 friends, and like to have your posts link to other social networks where you have a community, then you are probably a power user.
In the race to be the most dominant desktop application for Twitter, TweetDeck is definitely one of the leading contenders. Having been around for about a year, TweetDeck has taken the Twitter experience to a whole new level. It’s integrating the use of multiple columns, and attaching itself to URL shorteners, photo posting apps like Twitpic, and the ability link to other network like Facebook, all under one app. But just recently TweetDeck has evolved again, and this time, making it even more useful for power users to extend their reach further into the social web.
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In a famous song it’s stated that “I found the law and the law one,” but what if you could actually win? What if your interest and voice actually meant something?
It’s not uncommon to find communities where apathy has set in and people just don’t seem to care. Alternatively there are communities where the inhabitants take their voice to the streets, airwaves, online, anywhere that can give them a platform to be heard. CitySourced.com is now a way for you to take your civic engagement online, but more than that, you can be mobile and capture your concerns the moment they become a factor.
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Google Wave has taken the online Google community by storm. For many months there was teasing from Google on the development of a collaboration tool that would tie into all of their existing Google Apps, and revolutionize how we communicate with our colleagues, community, and groups. The release of Google Wave was nothing less but…interesting.
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It was earlier this year that I reviewed an online community for pet lovers, and in that time span since, we’ve seen online communities pop up around the internet for just about any specific niche thinkable. Ning is a popular niche community building site, and in that popularity we’ve seen interests mix, people network, and relationships build. The arena of real estate is one such niche that is getting it’s online community presence established thanks to BiggerPockets.com, where investors, professionals, and afficionados come together to talk shop.
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I’m a huge fan of music. I’ve got several versions of the iPod for a variety of occasions, I’ve got streaming music players all over my computer, I’ve got sites bookmarked that stream audio from overseas; for me, there’s just nothing better than paying music for inspiration, clarity, and nostalgia. To increase my music listening abilities I’ve used plugins such as FoxyTunes to give me access to my music straight from my browser, but what if I’m not home or on my laptop. There’s a good chance I’ve got my mobile on me and I can stream from there, but for those of us always changing computers, or using public computers, there’s now an interesting option that we can participate with.
Stereo8 is a new stream audio web app that streams straight from your browser. No downloading, no installing, no problems. Just about any browser should work (I tested on Safari, Firefox, IE6 and IE7, Opera, and Chrome). Simply select a genre of music you want to listen to, and let the music play. You can interact with the music by voting on what you like, and those votes determine what’s played. Stereo8 calls it self a true internet radio with a twist. That twist is that listeners can vote and share music with one another making it a social community of sorts.
As I write this article I’ve picked the video game category and have listened to some of the biggest games from my present and past. In some of the other categories I was listening to songs that perhaps I was not a fan of myself, and some more obscure songs that I never even knew existed, which is not always a good thing. But if you’re looking to be introduced to something new and unique, far from the beaten path you’re used to traveling, then perhaps Stereo8 is for you. A few stations I found really solid, and just now they started playing the Terran theme from Starcraft, so that’s just an idea of the kind of music you’ll be listening to (at least on the game channel).
Heard of Twitter? Sure the whole world has by now. Lone tribes on far islands have heard about Twitter. This massively immersive and widely used micro-blogging network has become a staple for both our personal and professional lives. The world seems to still be feeling the “Twitter effect” as industries adapt their existing messages to fit the fast paced world of this social network.
But do you ever feel like you’re being left behind? Perhaps not enough time to get the right message in a timely fashion? Now there’s a solution to that.
Twuffer presents itself as the buffer between you and your timed messages. By using the web application, you are able to preset messages on a timed schedule to be released on your network at the times you think most important. The possibilities of this type of functionality are as endless as your creativity.
The web app is easy to use and can serve you to better time your announcements, set reminders for yourself or others, engage in timed online activities, or, as the site suggests, make it appear as if you never sleep. The practicality of this app seems pretty straightforward.
The application is currently in beta, but your able to explore what it has to offer pretty seamlessly. I suggest you give it a try to announce regular days when your podcast or blog post will go live, or perhaps some other similar campaign to see if Twuffer is right for you!
