Clippings from the BetterComms garden – 13th Dec

G'day! Thanks for returning!

Amit Argawal reminds us that putting in links to advertising revenue-generators (e.g. affiliate links to Amazon, etc.,) may penalise our Google rankings — ouch!

I personally don’t do a lot of linking like that, but will make sure to include Google’s recommended “rel=nofollow” tag when I do.

No idea what I’m talking about? Then don’t worry… it won’t affect you. But if you link to advertising on your blog or website, you really should read Amit’s post.

Amit then excels himself in my eyes by detailing exactly how to track the popularity of any topic in the blogosphere over time. Exhaustive, comprehensive, easy to follow… nice one, Amit!

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Trevor Cook points me off to Seth Godin and his take on why Dell is just a brand that people use but Apple is a brand that people ‘live’. It’s all about mythology and the idea that some mystical life properties (‘coolness and hipness’ in Apple’s case) will magically osmote to the owner. Kathy Sierra also talked about this about six months ago, when she was talking about ‘The Nod’ (of recognition). It’s not what the product/t-shirt/etc says on it or the fact that you and someone else have the same thing, its about what having that thing says about you. Whereas Seth gets all mystical, Kathy lists 17 different attributes that can help your product or service earn The Nod.

Oh, and thanks, Trevor, for linking over to the RSPCA of SA’s post about domestic violence and pets [disclaimer: the RSPCA SA Inc. are a client of mine].

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My friendly bearded fellow FIR contributor Dan York has uncovered a little gem of a website. Zoominfo is a search engine for discovering people, companies and relationships. Not much comes up when I searched for myself, although I did find a couple of sites that were using articles of mine (with permission) and that I’d forgotten about. Try running a search on yourself and see what shows up.

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The affable and all-round good guy Ben Hamilton recently found a dead-handy security website that allows you to check your software for vulnerabilities and updates. The Secunia Software Inspector took a while to deep-search my pc, but uncovered 10 insecure applications plus gave me advice on what to do about it. Nice one.

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Marjolein Hoekstra gives an extremely useful overview of one of the latest buzzwords in blogging circles, ‘River of News’ feeds. She is a fan of mySyndicaat:

Even while preparing this post I discovered things I didn’t know about mySyndicaat, as it can do much more than just create River of News feeds:

• it can generate a feedbot on any topic or name, so-called Ego Feeds a.k.a. Topic Radars, pulling in results from blog search engines and social bookmarking sites
  
• it can generate a feedbot containing inbound links to any url, so-called Buzz Monitors, pulling in results from social search engines
  
• it can generate a feedbot from generic search engines, newspapers and social networks
  
• it lets you scrape RSSless websites
  
• it lets you create your own feeds from scratch
  
• it lets you edit and delete any item and any feed element in your feedbot

Once you get the hang of mySyndicaat, you can export your feedbots to a local OPML file on your hard drive, or you can have mySyndicaat host that OPML for you. In the latter case mySyndicaat in fact creates Reading List of its own.

A great chunk of info — thanks, Marjolein. But please turn your CleverClogs blog’s rss full-feed switch on; partial feeds are really annoying! (and see Amit’s post on the subject, too).

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And finally, on a small personal note, I cracked the 500 mark today. Nothing compared to Trevor Cook‘s 713 (as I type this) and many other bloggers, true, (Amit has 6433; goodness knows how many Shel and Neville, Kathy Sierra, Seth Godin and Steve Rubel have!) but a small milestone for me nonetheless.

Despite my repeated assertions that Trevor, Paull Young and I are the only players in the Aussie PR echo chamber, and my belief that we are five years behind the rest of the world (which Steven disagrees with but Mark Fletcher, over at LeWeb3 in Paris, concurs that we are a long way behind European fifth estate, especially in the political arena), it is heartening to know that in just one and three quarter years I have been able to start from a zero base and entertain and inform five hundred other folks — folks just like you.

Thank you for sticking with me, for encouraging me and for helping me showcase the real multi-dimensional, conversational nature of the internet nowadays. May I continue to inform and entertain you with my blogging, podcasting and vidcasting (and whatever other social media tools arrive that business communicators need to know about) so that you continue to ‘stick around’ and perhaps encourage others to do likewise…

Technorati : amit agarwal, apple, australian newsagency blog, ben hamilton, breakaway content, cleverclogs, dan york, dell, fir, for immediate release, full text feed, kathy sierra, leweb3, marjolein hoekstra, mark fletcher, micropersuasion, mysyndicaat, neville hobson, partial feed, rel=nofollow, river of news, secunia, seth godin, shel holtz, software inspector, steve rubel, tag, technorati, trevor cook, zoominfo

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