In the never-ending search to bring my web visitors the latest and the best, I’ve been joining and learning about the various forms of Social Media Sites.

After joining groups and communities, learning what they do to build their memberships, I started creating groups and communities within the Social Media sites too.

Though my journey of registering at

• the sites listed with Profilactic.com,
• all the video sites fed through Tubemogul.com,
• all the blogging sites supported by flickr.com and YouTube.com,
• all the micro-blogging sites that Ping.fm distributes to and
• all the additional social media sites compiled by SecondBrain.com and lifestream.fm -

I’ve come to understand that I’m not in Kansas anymore.

Even as a full time web-nerd, I’m shocked at how different things have become.

Now for The Search
Given #1: I can install software and build websites on Linux and Windows servers.
Given #2: Open Source software exists for running a social media website.

I’ll start my search on Sourceforge.net – a great place for any Open Source software you may need, and I’ll work my way through testing out the demo software that I find.

Here are three systems I’m reviewing:

Truthfully social networking platforms, A SOA system for lover and friends.provide a reliable, fast, social networking package.Easy to install,use,manage,and have web service api raise your business to the next level.

IB Social Network System – Complete social networking system for school clubs, small in-school programs, and even entire schools.

Elgg – Elgg is an open source social networking platform developed for LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) which encompasses weblogging, file storage, RSS aggregation, personal profiles, FOAF functionality and more.

Another great place I search is HotScripts.com

With a quick search in the php area, I found a nice list of Social Networking software, but I don’t think these are Open Source, and they are not likely free. However, you do get to save a lot of headaches by surfing through some example sites that are already running on the software.

Many of these systems offer similar features to Myspace and Facebook, but, as I’m reading through, I don’t see one that also includes feed aggregation from other social media sources…

Many include features like social bookmarking, tag clouds, profiles, image voting, classifieds, events and calendar, clubs, e-cards, forum, polls, bulletins, flash chat and instant messenger.

Some of the better scripts also included audio and video blogging, voice and video messaging, audio and video comments, video chat, music and videos, FLV and MP3 players!

My favorite features -

• address book import (supports Yahoo!, GMail, AOL, Hotmail, MSN, MySpace)
• PayPal IPN support

Missing Features -

• Feed Aggregation from other sources
• Widget tool for users to share their content
• Clear mention of RSS Feeds created

I’ll let you know more as I experiment with different software and scripts -

but, if you have your own social networking website, and you are happy with how the site is working for you, please recommend the software here through your affiliate link.

Set up your own Free Hosted WordPress with a range of specialized WordPress Plugins pre-installed.

Aimed at a financial audience, www.forexfrat.com is a community of blogs on futures trading, stock trading and the forex markets.

I’ve been working all morning with upgrading websites and blogs that are powered by WordPress.

The new WordPress 2.5 is a big change from all previous versions.  The layout is much less cluttered in the administration area of the site

- and I’m completely thrilled
with the new automatic Plugins Upgrade option! 

My standard WordPress installation routine includes two dozen plugins, and upgrades used to be the bain of my love afair with WordPress. 

           First, I upgraded a static-page website using wordpress as a content management system rather than as a blog.  My first upgrade went from 2.2.3 up to 2.5, so I was expecting it to go smoothly after I read the upgrade directions. 

           My second upgrade was more nerve-wracking… I updated an older blog with almost three years and 205 posts… from WordPress 1.5 to wordress 2.5 – following the same directions -

And everything worked like a charm! Which is great for me, I’ve been putting off the upgrade to  www.douglampi.com - not wanting to mess up the site… However, it was time to take the plunge and see what repairs I had to do afterwords. 

Turns out that upgrading a wordpress blog that’s had no version upgrades in two years is just as easy as how to update a wordpress blog I installed last week!

I have another dozen wordpress blogs to upgrade today, I better pay attention to my ftp program and keep those files flowin’.  As I complete the upgrades across my client sites and my own blogs, I’m taking screen captures and video clips as I experiment with the changes in the new WordPress 2.5 update.

Cheerio!

Launching our eBook with Spugnort – JUST after out Venture Partners started sending out thousands of email.

Nice. 

THANKS Spugnort.

our Spugnort Review <edited June08>.

The anticipated Social Dashboard will strengthen the BlogCatalog community - the soon-to-be-released BlogCatalog Dashboard will help you keep up on the activities of your friends. It’s almost like having the ultimate social network feed reader made up of your friends.

In the next couple of days, BlogCatalog is launching Social Dashboard beta, a new feature that displays your latest activities across many social networks — Digg, Flickr, Last.fm, Twitter, YouTube, and many others. That means automatic cross-networking and promotion right from your personal profile page. It also means that the your post updates, Twitter comments, Digg submissions, and other activities will appear on the Social Dashboard of all your BlogCatalog friends, and maybe their friends too.

This is the kind of networking that can make posts go viral. 

And that’s just for starters.

http://blogcatalog.com

The Tourism Keys Seminar in Thunder Bay last week resulted in an explosion of research, here at Quetico Internet Marketing.

The comprehensive view of utilizing all the various forms of media opened a full set of doors, all at once. Producing your content in the form of Video, photos, audio, pdf and text can provide your visitors with your information in the form they prefer. This strategy is literally Super-Powered by using RSS feeds in both directions!

But other forms of media exist where data and information are pooled and accessed by millions.

The Marketing Keys Tourism Marketing Seminar also explained the astonishing leverage that the connectivity in social networks can provide to help get your message out. For example, if your business has a Business Page Listing in Facebook, people can join as a ‘Fan’ of your business. If they comment on your Wall, all of their friends are notified about this comment – and your word can spread far and wide, very quickly.

(profilactic.com provides a central service collecting over 120 social networking websites.)

After some research, I found a WordPress plugin that will update your Facebook account via RSS feed whenever you post to your blog… excellent… that saves me one step of updating my content in to many places. After I set this up, I’ll test and see if my Facebook Notification RSS Feed includes these updates – so I can pull the Facebook RSS feed and link to myself three levels deep, automatically.

%%awsomnews%%

Then Marketing Keys introduced yet another bombshell. A form of media that takes the entire world into scope, in every detail. Maps. Particularly Google Maps.

Todd Lucier, the creator and presenter of the Tourism Keys Seminars, introduced us to the simple, but detailed, process of adding your business data to the Google Maps database. But further, Todd demonstrated how travel providers can utilize these maps to create detailed trip guides, such as canoe routes. Travel routes can be mapped and points of interest can be flagged. Each map entry can be tagged with descriptions, images, audio, video, podcasts, links to further resources… you name it!

Todd showed us an amazing virtual canoe trip in Algonquin Park using Google Maps RIGHT ON HIS OWN WEBSITE! Using a simple embed code, Todd demonstrated how you can add your own custom Google Map to your blog or website – in a few simple steps.

Follow-up Research into Google Maps resulted in some completely unexpected discoveries.

By following the Google Maps embed code backwards, searching for RSS related information, I uncovered a deeper layer to the internet. I have found myself another step closer to accessing the ROOT of the largest databases in the world. I feel like I’ve exposed a part of “the machine” where only Heavy Mechanics work – it’s called GOOGLE DEVELOPERS API’s.

If an RSS feed lets me pull the last 20 posts from a news source, the Developers API’s will let me write a query that lets me pull every post that was ever made… If my picasa RSS feed pulls the last 20 images, the API feed query can pull ALL the images, all the YouTube Videos and on and on.

I figure that, if I’m just learning about it, someone else already knows AND they already have applications built around it… and yes, after some searching I’ve found some powerful examples of how people have pulled API’s from several sources to create very useful Niche services!

Next – I’ll share the list of WordPress Plugins that I have collected to pull images from picasa, videos from youtube, niche-specific social bookmarking activity, news from Google, weather from environment Canada, events from Google Calendar, podcasts from iTunes, and Social Feeds from multiple sources – all this content comes to your site automatically!

Everything you need to provide amazing content FROM everything Web 2.0 and become interconnected INTO everything Web 2.0 – and at the same time, utilizing every one of the various sources of Media and connection between people.

Thank you Fednor, for bringing Todd to us.

I’m dropping Scribd from my list of favorite Web 2.0 News Release Sites.

Yesterday I returned to Scribd to post a new document and I noticed that the option to enter rich text has been removed.  I uploaded my document in Word format – and the links did not work when I checked the article after it was published on Scribd.  Well, I thought, what a waste of my time!  Not to be easily daunted, I re-saved my document in .rtf format and uploaded it the same way as the Word Doc – with the same results – no working hyperlinks in my article. 

Then I spent 30 minutes looking for an account setting or an option somewhere that I’d heard about on Scribd, where you could turn off the option of your document showing up their special flash-viewer.  No Luck.  I could not find that option anywhere.

So I’ve removed Scribd from my list of Hot Web 2.0 Favorites – and moved it back into the Research and Monitor mode.  It may be possible that the links work on the document once it’s been downloaded from Scribd, and the service may still have some small marketing value.  We shall see.

I’m sure Scribd HAD to do this.  I’m sure they had to remove the functionality of the working links in order to protect themselves from bad spammers.  But now all us ‘good’ spammers who made Scribd the service that it WAS – will now be moving along, for this pasture that once was Scribd is nothing but a dry gravel pit now.

Find a Web 2.0 news release service

The next leg of my Web 2.0 Education will involve a systematic day of registering for all of the following publishing websites:

• Bubbl.us
• Campus Reader
• Clipmarks
• Digg
• Gabbr
• Hypeshpere
• NewsGator
• Newsique
• Newspicker
• Newsvine
• Now Public
• Propeller 
• Reddit
• TXT Signal
• VFlyer
• Video News Live
• Wired

Once I’ve completed all the registrations, I’ll return to each site and post variations of the same article to each service.  The articles are intended to act as news releases with links to the full story on Site A.

During this process I plan to take careful note of which services have a Tag system in place, and where I can draw RSS feeds from the Tag pages.  As I post my article in each service, I’ll collect the URL’s for the Tag page RSS feeds.

After each article is posted in each service, I will bookmark it with OnlyWire, using matching tag phrases.  Again, I take note of the RSS Feeds of the Tag pages in the various social bookmarking services.  (that is one short statement that encapsulates four hours of *really* dreary data collection).

Finally, once the articles are all posted and all the bookmarking completed, it’s time to organize all the RSS feeds from all those Tag pages. I like to create a new section on a similar website that I have hosted on a different server – call it Site B.   This new section consists of themed pages that pull together several RSS Feeds from various Tag pages for the same keyword phrase.

In other words, Site A has the real article, the real product, or the real ‘action’ that we want the visitor to take.

All of the (15) News Release Services contain various clips from the real article and link back to Site A.  With variations in Tag phrases, let’s say we end up with Ten different three-word phrases that we use to Tag these News Release services. 

Step Three – Bookmarking each News Release with (12) Social Bookmarking services. 

12 news releases x 12 bookmarks each = 144 instances of places on the Net with your marketing message.  In addition, more than 1440 variations of the Tag pages will be created, which also link back into your new mini-net.

It is a massive process – and JUST as tedious as it is BIG.

Initial results demonstrate that the excitement on the other end will be much greater than the tedium required to get there!

And so on I stretch and pull myself - like a happy inch-worm!

Cheers

If (1) a method of presenting information on the internet produces a number of top ranking positions in Google for one set of phrases – and then (2) much the same methodology is applied to an entirely new and unrelated set of phrases, and a number of new top ranking positions in Google are established…

THEN -  
Another brand new experiment (3) is in order – just to make sure I’m not seeing things.  After Experiment Three was intentionally planned out and tightly targeted – with screenshots collected from the current rankings for the intended target phrase before any marketing was initiated… and THEN The Methodology was applied on the third target phrase.

After the strong results of Experiment Three were coming in – I was confident enough to bring my preliminary findings to two trusted clients who are also leading experts in their field of the Canadian tourism industry. 

Now I have Project Four.

Project Four is two things:

1. A Professional Marketing Strategy
2. A Case Study Compilation

The Marketing Strategy itself has grown from a fuzzy mess of two Marketing Ideas, three web publishing platforms and an over-complex  series of new blogs, into a careful mash-up of blogs, special php scripts, a huge bank of new images, social bookmarking, RSS feeds, News Release Services and Web 2.0 Social Networking sites, to name a few.

Project Four - will follow the identical methodology as applied successfully in Experiment Three, over a pre-determined span of services.  This project differs in that all accounts, blogs etc must be newly set up and registered to a special new email address.  Project Four is also different in that, in the end, it must be simple enough for a regular blogger to manage from just one site.  With in-person training and six months of the Anytime Support Package, I will hand over the controls my client’s staff, hand-hold them for the first ten weeks – and will be available for ongoing support and help in the unlikely event that they run into trouble.

Starting from scratch is a good thing at this stage - in order to set the record straight.

Is this methodology repeatable?

Let’s find out by starting with a brand new gmail account, two brand new domains hosted on two brand new accounts on the same server. 

The new gmail account comes first (I’m biased – I just love love love gmail) as a place to store all the new account registration information I’m just about to generate.

Next, one hour is dedicated to each of the new hosting accounts.  Each account has the latest version of WordPress uploaded and installed.  A range of my favorite WordPress plugins are included as well.  This set-up hour (pending, as of this writing) will leave both domains with one post in the blog, tagged with 6 or 8 of the central keyword phrases.  Several of the new categories will be created, a few links in the blogroll, an introductory paragraph in the About page, and at least on RSS feed widget activated – on the RSS feed from a related search on  Google News, if nothing else…

The first hour of setup gives the domain a ‘splash page’ presence that is correctly tuned to it’s target phrases right off the start – just incase any wandering search engine spider should come crawling by before I’m ready (ya – nvm nofollow robot things – it’s a light switch I never turn off because I’d forget to turn it on again).  In addition, this becomes an ideal place to start adding content that I may come across as I’m going through the phase — setting up Layer Two Of Five.

… but that will be content for next post