Mashing It Up
Mashups are very hot right now. Why? Because it is a natural evolution of the social networking phenomenon. You may have content on many social networking sites across the web. Friends and followers of yours don’t want to visit tens to hundreds of different sites to see what you have posted recently. Sites like Profilactic (which you can see to the right) and FriendFeed offer a way of taking the feeds from various social networks which you are apart of and putting it all in one place. If you are like me and are completely “ADD” about your web activity on a daily basis, you might benifit from one of these two sites or many other sites like it. All it takes is sign up and add the user name to each of you social networking sites. It only took me an hour to gather all of mine! Then you can use a facebook app, or otherwise embed this feed into your website or pretty much anywhere you want. See example below.
EDIT: Removed example. Slowed down page load, so on further thought, I don’t recommend it.
Links You Didn’t Know You Wanted
Social link sharing has become very important in recent years. Arguably even more important than the search engine in getting your brand out there and obtaining an audience. When I talk about social link sharing, I am talking about websites that allow you to find what you are looking for even if you didn’t know you were looking for it. Sites where your friends or a community guide you toward a web page based more on your interests or your friends interests. There are numerous different websites that do this, but in this article, I will concentrate on three of these: Digg, StumbleUpon, and del.icio.us.
If you are on this blog, you have probably heard of Digg. Maybe you even used it to get here, but for those who have not used Digg, I will explain. Digg is dubbed a “social news” site. In it’s earliest days, it was full of mostly links to articles and other web pages of interest to not much more than technology geeks. The way the site works is that the users of the site submit a URL of interest. The user enters a title and a description. Then it is posted to the upcoming links page of the site. Other users of the site then click on the hyperlink, review that submitted link, and if they like it, they digg it. There is a counter next to each link showing how many users have dugg an article. The more diggs an article has the closer it gets to being on the front page of digg.com. Being on the front page Digg is then like gold in terms of traffic to your site.
Digg has evolved considerably since it first came to be a few years ago. The site now has separate sections for news, pictures, videos and podcasts. Within those there are subcategories as well. Technology articles are still a pretty big part of digg’s traffic, but not even close to the majority it once was. Digg has grabbed the attention of many mainstream media organizations. Diggers often call out when major companies seem to be doing something unethical. Digg would appear to be a good thing in keeping companies honest, but some would also argue that the Digg community is nothing but a bunch of teenage whiners. Not only that but Digg has the constant cat and mouse game of stopping users, from gaming their site to get to the front page. I am sure that many websites have benefited greatly from a temporary hole in Digg which had allowed them access to the front page without the true user backup to get them there.
StumbleUpon is more of a toolbar than a website. The mere mention of the word toolbar might turn you away from this link sharing method immediately. I can relate. I didn’t like the idea of adding a toolbar to my browser either. At the time that I first heard of StumbleUpon, I was working in a computer repair shop. And working in a place like this, a person gets very tired of seeing browsers loaded with toolbars that have been installed by various malware programs. I was very resistant to the idea of a toolbar, however due to the request of the right friend, I tried it anyway. The way I usually describe StumbleUpon to folks who ask is that it is like channel surfing the web. When you sign up for it, you tell StumbleUpon what sort of things interest you based on which check marks you place in which boxes. After you are set up, it is as simple as pressing the “Stumble” button in the toolbar. StumbleUpon will then take you to a random page based on those interests. Some of the sites you stumble upon will be based paid for by advertisers, this is how the service is paid for. When you see a site you particularly like, you can click on “I like it” in the toolbar. Likewise, if you dislike a site you can click on the thumbsdown icon. There are other features such as sharing with friends who also have StumbleUpon accounts. You can stumble based on certain topics and more. There is a video site that StumbleUpon has which allows you to get random videos from various flash video sites. One of my favorite an maybe lesser known features of the video site is the special version it has that works with the Wii browser. It comes in handy on Saturday mornings when I want to find something to watch while I sip at my coffee.
Having your bookmarks on the web instead of stuck in a browser is exactly what del.icio.us is. There are many tools that allow you to integrate del.icio.us into your browser, and it also allows you to share your bookmarks with friends. On the front page of del.icio.us is a “Hotlist” which displays bookmarks that are currently being bookmarked alot by users of the site. del.icio.us also categorizes bookmarks used tagging. These days, everything on the web is tagged, including this blog post, but del.icio.us is one of the first sites that I saw incorporate tagging and introduced it to the web. I don’t use del.icio.us to my advantage as much as maybe I could, and maybe I will start. It is definitely something I could benifit from when trying to find links that I don’t know I am looking for.
These are just three examples of how the web is becoming more diverse and starting to depart from relying so much on the common search engine. Don’t get me wrong, the search engine will always be there, but there are many more ways that people find what they are looking for on the web, and business is not falling short of developing ways to use these models to get their name out. What are some ways that you find new links on the web aside from traditional methods?
