1st impressions of Plaxo

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My first impressions of Plaxo are it looks more promising then Facebook. They seem to have gone for a more LinkedIn type UI which I like.

I got an e-mail summary about what my cousin Tom Raftery has being doing online during the week. While the summary was interesting and I suppose useful It's a little scary how this could happen automatically via Plaxo. That is, I'm not connected to Tom via Plaxo but am via Facebook. I suppose Tom has some Facebook app/setting that arranges this type of connectivity?.

These social networking services seem to make alot of assumptions by default. One day I clicked on a link in a Joost e-mail to watch a Nelly Furtado video and automatically a notification was sent to my Facebook to that effect. I suppose it could have been worse (like Britney...as if ;-)). I didn't want this type of behaviour and it took a few minutes to find out how to disable it in Facebook.

Vodafone FREE Calls and Text

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Most Vodafone "Ready to Go" customers are probably aware of this ages ago...I always seem to be the last to know.

I enabled it last year but didn't realise/forgot it only kicks in if you topup by €20 or more, then you get 100% extra FREE :-) but it's only valid for 30days :-(.

I was wondering how do I check my balance and discovered all you have to do is text "BAL" to 50233 and you get an SMS back like this:

Your balance is 20.27 EUR; 13.94 EUR Free Calls and Text Credit

Pity they don't also say when it expires so you can ensure you use it all up!.

What's blogging all about?

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Okay I'm back after a long absence...hopefully I will do a bit more blogging from now on (...to my one or two readers?).

Anyway, I can't get over the amount of people that are not still familiar with "blogging", or just plain don't get it. I'm not very good at describing stuff but the following is a very good account of what it's all about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog

A blog is also categorized as social media. Think of a news paper or magazine in which you can comment on the articles. This is a very powerful form of communication that a lot of companies are adopting as part of their marketing strategy. With this link to their customers they can get right up to the minute feedback on what the client really wants.

Blogs seem to get a very good Google ranking. For example if you just type "tom" in Google, Tom Raftery's page appears in the top 5, now I think that is very impressive, especially when you consider how many pages there must be out there with the name "tom" in them!!!.

According to Tom: "The Google ranking is down to a couple of things - I have done a lot of work on SEO over the years and I have applied some of what I have learned to the blog. Having said that, blogging, correctly implemented, is the most effective seo tool I have yet come across!"...not giving away much there then Tom, ;-). Maybe I'll research it and do a post on SEO sometime.

Translation On-The-Fly

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According to InternetWorldStats.com

in their "Top 10 Languages Used in the Web" survey, English is number one but less than 32%. Therefore unless you translate your postings you are missing alot of potential readers (in the order of 100's of millions!).
The auto translation services have come along way in the last few years and there are several out there which are free and realtively easy to use. For example Google's Translate ( see related tutorial).

In an effort to make it even easier still for non-English speakers to read my postings I wanted to have translation links automatically embeded right into the posting itself, as I had noticed this in another blog. Sure enough I did a search for "translate" in Blogger.com help and came up with this.

If you have just clicked on one of those links to read this article and feel that the translation is poor, then please leave a comment and I will try and find a better solution.

NOTE: If you are interested in language related statistics see the following links:
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
http://global-reach.biz/globstats/index.php3
http://www.nationmaster.com

Trackbacks, Statistics and Tags

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This is a very comprehensive service that Google is providing, however there are a few features they don't support at present :-(. Fortunately there're are some very generous people out there who provide free services that fill in the gaps :-).

Trackbacks
Where would any blog be without this feature which takes advantage of the web by enabling blogs to reference each other in a dynamic way. Blogger.com have Backlinks but they are not as powerful as the real thing and can affect the performance of your blog adversely according to the following blog.
However HaloScancame to the rescue. Also see trackback tutorial.

Statistics
This is a more sophisticated feature but invaluable if you want to be able to determine if your blog is getting any readers at all, by tracking where they are coming from and what browsers and topics are the most popular etc.. Yahoo recently released a related service which I have yet to take for a test run, called SiteExplorer of course as I understand this can only analyse sites that have been indexed by their searchbots. I reviewed a few free (of course!) statistics services and settled on StatCounter as I like the look of it and their policies and attitude (I hope they don't let me down).

Tags
Technorati provide a great service whereby you can put tags in your postings and then ping Technorati, after sometime a reference to your posting will be added to their database thus hopefully directing some traffic to your blog.

For example to insert the tag "Customer Service" you would insert the following HTML:

< a href="http://technorati.com/tag/Customer+Service" rel="tag"> Customer Service</a>

Then do the ping after posting or here.

Inspiration

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I'm inspired by the endless creativity I discover every time I browse the web. There are so many talented people out there, it's difficult to stay focused on any one topic or to keep track.

In this Blog I hope to keep a record of what impresses me during my travels in Cyberspace...with the odd post on my travels in the real world ;-).

See also my cousins blog: http://www.tomrafteryit.net.