Source: tastefullyoffensive
23 Blog Directories To Submit Your Blog To
Gaining exposure for your blog is critical to building a following and revenue. After creating compelling copy, titles, descriptions and link strategies, it’s time to list your blog in one or more directories.
There are many paths to building links, such as link baiting or blogroll-link swapping, but few are as easy to implement and cost effective as submitting to blog directories. And good link juice makes for a growing blog.
Here are 24 directories you need to know about:
1. Best of the Web Blog Search remains a powerful tool for sharing your blog, especially since this director’s very selective, listing only mature and valuable blogs. A link from here is majestic.
2. Bloggeries is one of the most respected blog directories. The layout is clear and concise, and readers are able to find what they are looking for in a snap.
3. EatonWeb Blog Directory is a powerful list. The fee, currently $34.99, pays for a review of your blog.
Visualization of Twitter chatter about the Olympics as compared to the NASA Mars landing. It’s great to see so many people excited about science! Created using TopicWatch.
(via sunfoundation)
Source: noahmp
Meet the company that wants to destroy Twitter. It's Twitter
For the first few years, while a web service is gaining users, it’s reasonable to cut it some slack while it figures out what to do. Google actually muddled along for even longer – five years – until borrowing somebody else’s idea and finding the right mass market for it. I think astute commenters realised that confidence in Twitter’s commercial prowess was misplaced round about here, in July 2009, when a hacker leaked dozens of strategy documents to a sympathetic news site. Of course the “strategy” revealed by all those personal and corporate documents raised more questions than an exam paper.
“Strategy? Don’t ask us - we only work here!”
We learned that Twitter wanted to be “the pulse of the planet”, but it didn’t elaborate on what this meant, or how it might be achieved. The strategy gurus at Twitter must have been so pleased at coming up with this banality, they all went home. Was it going to embed itself with the world’s leviathan telcos? Become a gateway? An infrastructure host for applications? Or what?
It’s now quite clear what Twitter wants to do. And I can’t think of a dumber corporate strategy decision ever.
Could it be Twitter doesn’t understand why it’s popular?
Twitter wants to be a publishing platform, not a communications network. And not just that, but a one-to-many platform in which the lucky ‘ones’ are hand-picked. This is not only going to annoy people who like to use it - for short, many-to-many communication - but it also requires a skillset that Twitter has never, ever demonstrated. It’s a decision to make anyone doubt whether Twitter itself has even an inkling of why it’s popular.
The big idea is to augment the basic messaging particle of Twitter, 140-character tweet, with a proprietary container, called a “card”. The cards will host “rich content” - from hand-picked Twitter partners such as New York Times and CNet [soporific content, surely? - ed], and of course advertising.
There’s a vestigal hangover from earlier indecisions when Twitter toyed with becoming a platform for applications. The card containers will in the future host applications. But not yet.
So in short, Twitter is deprecating the very thing that made it popular in an attempt to duplicate what lots of other people specialise in doing, to people who get that sort of thing quite happily somewhere else. As the saying goes: “What could possibly go wrong?”
Tweeting for Student Health Care Coverage
An Arizona graduate student with advanced colon cancer turned to Twitter when his insurance company stopped covering his medical bills. Surprisingly, the insurance company’s chief executive responded.
What ensued was a fiery multiday exchange that not only resulted in full coverage of the student’s medical bills, but cast light on gaps in student health care coverage and the complexities of the country’s private insurance system.
A doctoral student at Arizona State University, Mr. Guha was insured under an Aetna Student Health plan for which he paid $400 a month. The plan initially covered his care, but in February, Mr. Guha’s treatment costs reached the $300,000 cap on the insurance plan, leaving the student with $118,000 in medical bills.
More than a million students are covered through college health plans, according to the federal Department of Health and Human Services. Although the Affordable Care Act does away with coverage caps, the rules are still being phased in and don’t yet apply to all student health plans.
When Aetna began denying his claims, Mr. Guha took his frustrations to Twitter. Using the Twitter handle @Poop_Strong, he posted his first message on July 22.
@Aetna has now denied $118k in claims (in just 5 mos) since kicking me to the curb. Gotta preserve that $2 billion annual profit somehow.
Read the whole exchange here.
Did you know that, when challenged, social media as evidence for search warrants holds up in court 87 percent of the time?
Social media has rapidly changed the world, and law enforcement is no exception to its charms. Authorities use platforms such as Twitter and Facebook to identify associates with persons of interest, track the location of criminal activity, gather photos or statements to corroborate evidence, solicit tips on crimes and better understand criminal networks.
It’s very much a work in progress, as 80 percent of law enforcement professionals are self-taught when it comes to using social media for investigations. Still, two thirds believe these tools help them solve crimes more quickly.
This infographic from PoliceOne.com takes a closer look at social media use by law enforcement.
The Future of Search: Context Clicks?
As search and social media continue to evolve (and merge), Twitter takes a leap in front of Facebook (and Bing) and Google (and G+) - all indirect competitors. Above is a side-by-side comparison of a search for “Facebook”. The Twitter folks know what Google’s engineers may not yet realize. If you are searching “Facebook” on Google, you want information, news, and perspective. Not necessarily a link to Facebook.com - you have an app for that. This thanks to mobile operating systems moving to Macbooks and PC’s. Score one for the Apple + Twitter collaboration. You want “context”, a concept that Robert Scoble is currently writing about.
ShortFormBlog: Nigerians Condemn Senate President David Mark’s Call To Censor Social Media
David Mark, Nigerian Senate PresidentBy Karen AttiahNigeria, with a population of nearly 160 million, is one of Africa’s giants when it comes to the use of social media. Nearly 4.6 million Nigerians are on Facebook. Twitter is the 6th most popular website…
Source: saharareporters.com
Mark Zuckerberg Asks Facebook Users to Save Facebook by Drinking
MENLO PARK, Calif. (The Borowitz Report)—After Facebook’s shares plummeted in after-hours trading today, Facebook C.E.O. Mark Zuckerberg issued the following personal letter to all nine hundred million Facebook users: http://nyr.kr/MN1Pek
“Facebook only makes money if people click on its ads. Do you know what Facebook ads are? They’re those things on your Facebook page that you have never clicked on even once.
But at Facebook we’re looking to change that. After doing extensive market research, we learned that there is one time when people actually do click on Facebook ads: when they’re drunk. This is the same business model that iTunes is based on. I’m sure a few of you have had the experience of using Facebook late at night, only to wake up and find that you’ve gotten seven auto-insurance quotes or enrolled as a criminal-justice major at the University of Phoenix.
Why am I sharing this information with you? Simple. If you want to save Facebook—and I know that you do—I need you to start drinking now.”
Wow… just… wow….
