I really wanted to attend the Citizen Journalism Academy presented by the Society of Professional Journalists in Greensboro, NC today but after a hectic spring travel schedule I thought better of it and stayed home to visit with my family. Luckily local social media maven, Wayne Sutton’s (@WayneSutton on Twitter) been sending tweets with the commentary from the program.

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Technorati Tags: Blogging, blogs, Publishing, Section 230, Title 47

Random Links from April web surfing.

• Stop leaving out the valuable breadcrumb trail – Breadcrumb trails are still a vital part of on page SEO. They provide backlinks to the homepage and help it’s authority status.
• Omni WordPress Theme | Premium Design Templates – A premium Wordpress theme with a web 2.0 feel.
• Best practices when moving your site from Google – Planning on moving your site to a new domain? Lots of webmasters find this a scary process. How do you do it without hurting your site’s performance in Google search results?
• Bookmarkit – The Social Bookmarks sidebar widget for WordPress allows you to select a number of social bookmark sites which are displayed in the sidebar.
• Idealware: Comparing Open Source Content Management Systems: Joomla, Drupal, and Plone – Open source content management systems can make creating and managing your website a lot easier – and there’s no licensing fee involved. But which should you use?  We look carefully at Joomla, Drupal, and Plone to compare their strengths and weaknesses.
• Psystar Corporation – Open Computer: The Smart Alternative to an Apple – Why spend $1999 to get the least expensive Apple computer with a decent video card when you can pay less than a fourth of that for an equivalent sleek and small form-factor desktop with the same hardware. This turned out to be a sketchy drama as documented here by Gizmodo.
• StumbleUpon Alerter – Blog – Adamant Solutions, Adelaide, South Australia – Web design, custom software development and website hosting – StumbleUpon Alerter is a small tool that sits in the system tray. It keeps an eye on all of your discoveries on StumbleUpon and plays a noise whenever someone reviews or gives your sites a thumbs up.
• Monochrome Pro | Graph Paper Press – Another WordPress theme I have been digging.
• Which RIA Tools Give Us the Best Bang For Our Buck? @ ENTERPRISE OPEN SOURCE MAGAZINE – A number of emerging frameworks seek to tame the browser and make it a suitable platform for a rich client application. The biggest fish in this pond is currently Google Web Toolkit (or GWT)….
• How to write a press release – Nice how-to for those who don’t know the in’s and outs of wrting press releases.
• BitNami makes it easy for mom & semi-geeks to use OSS « rand($thoughts); – As OSS ISVs began to use BitRock’s InstallBuilder, they started hearing that customers didn’t just want the standalone ISV product. Customers wanted the whole stack that the ISV product runs on. In response, BitRock now offers ISVs Custom Stacks.
• What’s That Noise?! [Ian Kallen's Weblog] – Technorati is still seeing a steady flow of hacked blogs showing up in Technorati crawls. The ones that we can identify as symptomatic of the compromise aren’t getting their crawls processed. 2.5 is a way to clear up the problem but not the only solution.
• Unconfirmed: Lenovo’s Entire New ThinkPad Line Leaked, X300 Gets Siblings – Lenovo is rumored to be releasing a whole line of ultra-portable’s based on the small form factor X300. Maybe they will give Apple’s MacBook Air a run for their money.
• The Server Room – Forum Powered by eve community – The Server Room is Ars Technica’s forum for large scale IT.
• Jiffle – Scheduling Made Simple – Jiffle™ makes scheduling appointments and meetings quick and simple.
• How Google Blogsearch ranks your Posts… In their own words! – How does Google know how many people are subscribed to your feed? Answer: Google Reader, the most popular feedreader at the moment, with a (loosely) estimated 30%+ share or the newsreader market.
• Gartner Explains Why Windows Is Broken – CIO.com – Business Technology Leadership – Interesting take on why t
• TagCrowd – make your own tag cloud from any text – TagCrowd creates a TagCloud from a URL, uploaded file, or text. [via Sam's blog]
• WPZOOM ›› WP Themes & Showcase, Blogging Tips & Hacks – Nice site about Wordpress themes and blogging tips.
• Forecast: IT Operations Management Software, Worldwide, 2007-2012 – IT operations management software market revenue will reach $18.1 billion in 2012, reflecting a compound annual growth rate of 7.2% from 2007 through 2012
• 451 CAOS Theory » Qlusters waves goodbye to openQRM – And then there was three? Qlusters, the former(?) open source systems management vendor has handed the development of the openQRM project over to the open source community and announced that it will no longer be involved in the project.
• GapingVoid: How Does A Software Company Make Money, If All Software is Free – Hugh talks about software companies without business models, more on this later.
• James Governor’s Monkchips » Building a Social Media Platform and Community: Three Legs – The three-tiered architectures and developer communities. I think maybe the in more general terms you need an extensible application, a medium for collaboration, and a call to action. Then what do I know I’m not an analyst .
• LifeType | Open Source Blogging Platform – Open source blogging platform.
• My Essential Twitter Tools – If you’re using Twitter for personal, corporate use, or to manage the brand of a client.
• In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop – New York Times – A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy
• In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop – New York Times – Bloggers at some of the bigger sites say most writers earn about $30,000 a year starting out, and some can make as much as $70,000. A tireless few bloggers reach six figures…
• 10 Open Source Education Tools | John M Willis ESM Blog – Interesting list of open source software Moodle, Edubuntu, FreeMind.
• Logic+Emotion – “Once upon a time, we were consumers. We consumed things. We took in the messages that were communicated to us. We didn’t really get to talk back. If we had a good or bad experience with a product or service—we told a friend.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Microsoft, SEO, Twitter

I was referred to the origins of the term Social Media Optimization(SMO) from an old ProBlogger article about Google’s treatment of blogs.

The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.

While I think video and other tactics are important especially given Google’s inclusion of video in search results. One trend of growing importance is optimizing web pages by including microformats:

Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.

Examples of microformats are

• hCard – For people and organizations
• hCalendar – Calendars and Event
• XFN – Social Networks

A broader list of microformats can be on the microformats wiki.

I think the key thing to consider when optimizing your website for audience (Whether it be readers or search engines) it’s important to make it easier for the website to be be consumed. That means syndicating content, offering multimedia when and where appropriate. Now I have one more TLA (Three Letter Acronym) to throw around along with my geek-speak laden vocabulary.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, optimization, SEO, Social Media

I normally read Tech Teapot for their systems management content but this week I have been looking for a widget that compliments the Popularity Contest plug-in for Wordpress. I was surprised to find that Dean Sykes of Open Xtra had a nice widget for displaying your most popular posts. I just cranked it up on my sidebar and it’s working like a charm.   

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Plug-in, Popularity Contest, Tech Teapot, tools, Widget, WordPress

If you are a social media hound you probably have a Flickr Uploader, a web browser chock full of extensions, maybe a Twitter client like Twhirl, and a slew of other tools for interacting on the web. Maybe it’s time to consolidate all these tools into your web browser. That’s where Flock comes in it’s a web browser for the collaborative web. 

Open Source  Collaboration

Flock is an open source web browser built on the same Mozilla architecture that Firefox is built on so many of Flock’s features should be familiar, like tab-based browsing and the ability to add extensions. However, there are a number of cool new features that appeal to the social networking crowd. First their are additional tools that can displayed in a tool bar on the left hand side of your browser (RSS reader, People feed, Web Clipboard, and a media bar that displays your photos and video across the top of your browser window.

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Technorati Tags: Blog, Blogging, del.icio.us, Flock, review, RSS, Social Media, Twhirl, Twitter, Web 2.0, web browser, WordPress