Quetico Internet Marketing » Mashups

Google Wave will be a Tsunami

Doug — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 10:57:13 +0000

What is Google Wave?

Was that an eMail? Was that an instant message? Is that a Blog? Or is it a team document production tool?

It is all of those things – and much more. Created by the developers of Google Maps, Waves WILL provide a fundamental change in the way communications are organized – in your very near future.

Will The Web Ever Stop Changing?

eMail was invented some 40 years ago, and remains the most common means of communicating online. That’s a fantastic product life-span, but we have all experienced the limitations and difficulties of a long conversation via email, especially when new people are added to the conversation. Instant Message services and Twitter have become a Killer App because of the new way you can communicate – but soon, we will forget about Gmail, Google Docs and we will ALL be speaking about Waves.

Ideal For Working With Organizations

Finally, we will all have a central place where a Board of Directors can all be kept abreast of the development stages of a project – without ballooning the project costs in endless meetings and time-consuming email trails.

More Traffic, More Subscribers and More Followers

Doug — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 13:24:43 +0000

Recent Updates

Recent changes to the CanadianFishingBook.com project have really made an impact!

Overall, the network of five themed fishing blogs and the Fishing Lodge Directory have seen a 47% increase in traffic! Individual Lodge Owners may login and view detailed stats on the performance of your listing:

New Strategies

Social Media is evolving every day, and CanadianFishingBook.com is keeping pace!

Our New Twitter Strategies are gaining over 60 new followers each day! Working in concert, our five themed Twitter accounts are providing a new and fast-growing source of traffic – directly to the member listings!

Better Conversions

The following three changes have boosted our eBook Download Rate by over 200%!

Traffic from Web 2.0 Tourism Marketing strategies converts better
Recent updates to the blog layouts improve response rates
Recent updates to the eBook Squeeze page and sign up sequence provide more perceived value and clearer directions.

7 RSS Feeds to Ongoing Website Traffic

Doug — Fri, 08 May 2009 02:05:02 +0000

Click To Play

This video outlines some of the basics strategies for getting your website message out into the places where people are gathering online.

Think of each Social Media station as a Sport Show, your RSS Feed as your ongoing brochure.

The RSS Mapping Strategy in this video is important to help your blog to get great search engine rankings, as well as a means to get the message out about your business.

In the full version of the video, you can follow along as I register and complete this process for a live blog. Members of Tourismmarketingvideos.com will see results and followups that are currently demonstrating great search engine rankings and a clear increase in website traffic.

Open Source Web 2.0 Social Media Scripts

Doug — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 13:14:43 +0000

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

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.

Create a Feed Aggregator Strategy

Doug — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 14:12:58 +0000

Today’s web gives you the power to create a detailed array of relevant links to your website thru the use of Blogging sites, Social Bookmarking sites, Social Networking sites, Photo Sharing sites, File Sharing Sites, Video Sharing Sites… and the list goes on.

In fact, the list is so huge, a host of new services have evolved to help coordinate and centralize the information flow from all of your various profiles.

These new Web 2.0 Sites are called Feed Aggregators.
They aggregate your RSS Feeds into one stream of updates.

Since I’m always seeking to better use the web for marketing, I set up a few Aggregators for a number of my feeds. After a short time, I noticed that I was getting indexed in Google within minutes of when I posted to my blog, and, to my surprise, the aggregator websites were also ranking within the top 20 search results! And so, following the principal “If it works, do more of it”…

Today I am reviewing a List of RSS Feed Aggregator services
as I go through the process of registering for all of them.

Because I market to a number of different niches, I figure it would be best for me to create an individual account at each Aggregator for each of the unique niche’s I focus on. Tedious? Rather! But I only have to do it once, and the Aggregator does its Search Engine magic for a long, long time without further maintenance.

GETTING PREPARED
Start by visiting all your blogs and profiles and collect up the URL’s for all your RSS Feeds. Save them all in a unique file that is easy to find and update when you add your business information to a new service.

www.Filtrbox.com – looks like a powerful service. It has two different paid levels – so I’m figuring it must have some great PageRank juice because of high trust in Google… but it’s not intuitive to set up, has how-to videos – and I’m on dail up at the lake right now. So I’ve added this one to my list so you can review it, but I’ll set it up further when I’m on highspeed.
www.Feedkiller.com – no registration required. Name your stream, add your RSS Feeds and click Build It. You are given an URL where your feeds are collected into one centralized RSS Feed stream… So I Stubbled the new feed page, and added the RSS Feed to my list that I’ll add to the next aggregators on my list! (note: this new aggregate feed didn’t work in Whereisme.com)
www.Feedtweeter.com – Feedtweeter says it’s ’A little service that allows you to link Twitter and Plurk to your other activities.’ Feedtweeter can now monitor your Identi.ca posts too: Post something in Identi.ca, and it will appear in Plurk and/or Twitter too. (with a few minutes delay). This is a cool service, but I’m already set up on www.ping.fm - a more comprehensive version of the same service…
www.lifestream.fm looks great. I’ve applied for an invitation code and Tweeted to my twitter followers to see if anyone has an invitation code they could send me.
www.whereisme.com - a web identity aggregator. It takes all the places you do things on the web and centralizes them for you to show off. This is a *great* place to collect the RSS Feeds from all of your blogs and a wide selection of the biggest Social Media sites, like Blogger, del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm and several other top names. Get a cup of coffee – this one’s worth your time.
www.daylife.com – a new way to explore the world, they say – which is pretty vague to me… it’s a collection on online news sources where you can “star” things of interest. I looked for a way to add my feeds, there was a link at the bottome right of the footer in the page where I suggested my feeds… If you are looking for an aggregator for your own feeds, skip this site.
http://linkbun.ch/ - lets you put multiple links into one small link which you can share over IM, Twitter, email or even a mobile phone SMS. So, I put all my fishing blogs into a bunch, and this service created an individual page, listing my bunch of links! Another easy way to create one-way links to your website.

Ok – I’ve gone over-time in writing this post. Here are a few more RSS Feed Aggregator Services that I’ll be registering with – I haven’t tried them yet, let me know which are best!

Managing wordpress blog subscriber privileges

Doug — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 16:13:23 +0000

I’m on a quest to find a way to permit premium subscribers to my self-hosted WordPress.org Blog.

First I searched out a few WordPress Plugins that I thought might help me with the task of managing wordpress blog subscriber privileges, thinking that someone may have a solution that permits you to selectively display one category of content to those who have paid to be upgraded to the Premium Subscriber level.

I found a plugin that make my entire blog into a membership site, and I found a wordpress plugin that lets you easily monitize single posts… but they didn’t permit me to single out one category…

So I’m thinking that since WordPress gives you the option of assigning users to several different User status, I was not able to find a way within the the WordPress Admin area to update or change or edit the permissions for the various user categories.

So back to Google I go. I was suprized at how I had to work my search to get details on the blog user privilages that covered the subscribers of a blog that was already installed.

When I did find the information I wanted, I realized that was simply uneducated about the correct terminology – I should have been searching for a plugin that will extend the WordPress 2.0 role and capability management .

WordPress 2.0 role and capability management Plugins

Now the searching provides me with some results: The plugin Just One Category (pause) Well, after installation, I have no idea what it does… I see no opportunity to assign users to various categories and not others.

And, after an hour looking, I’m putting it out to you.

Can anyone share a solution to my search?

43 Places

Doug — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 22:11:05 +0000

I’m starting my way through the growing list of sites listed on profilactic.com

My first start – 43places.com

This site looks interesting, in a random manner of flitting thoughts.

But I couldn’t find a common navigation system and found the site to be organized by a process as random. After a 10 minutes, I was glad to close it – thinking… wtf?

List of Tools to Combine, Mix, Blend Multiple RSS Feeds

Doug — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 19:14:49 +0000

I’m currently rebuilding a series of 5 fishing lodge directory websites and their blogs, and I want to put together a script that will combine feeds from several social media sites, mix them together, sorted by dates, and blending Multiple RSS Feeds from video, photo, weather and google map sources.

I didn’t take me long to find a list of 10 Tools for Mixing and Blending RSS Feeds

Feedblender.com was lookin’ pretty good until I opened Feedtwister.com and found that I could submit my RSS feeds where people might include them into their blend.

nice!

More Lists to Review

Doug — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 14:11:21 +0000

First, there’s a List of Social Networking sites, (see profilactic.com) then there’s a List of Social Bookmarking sites, (see addme.com), and several other lists of Web 2.0 style websites for video, audio, pdfs, photographs, business listings, news releases and the list goes on.

THEN there’s a list of Social RSS Feed Aggrigator Sites to tie it all together…

Here’s a List of web-based news readers I’ll be slowly reviewing over the next while:

My Yahoo!
NewsGator
My AOL
Rojo
Bloglines
Netvibes
Google
Pageflakes
Plusmo
FeedLounge
The Free Dictionary
Bitty Browser
NewsAlloy
Live.com
Excite MIX
Yourminis.com
Attensa for Outlook
Webwag
netomat Hub
Daily Rotation
Podcast Ready
Flurry
FeedDemon
NewsFire
NewsGator Outlook Edition
RSSOwl
Shrook