Thursday, October 9, 2008

Download - No Smoking 2.0

No Smoking 2.0
Provides some motivation to help you stop smoking.
About No Smoking
This is a very simple widget that gives you a count of the number of days that it’s been since you’ve stopped smoking. You enter the date that you last had a cigarette and it displays the number of days that have passed since then on top of a No Smoking sign.

Optionally you can now enter how much you typically spend per day and it will display how much money you have saved as well.

Widgets - WiiDiva Wii Strap Blinds You With Sassy, Bedazzled Luxury [Sassy]

Boss: You know what the Wii needs? A sassy-injection. Our market research suggests that divas are the most overlooked demographic when it comes to gaming. I believe we can fill that void. So, I am... Read More

Dashboard - Nintendo DSi Will Come Loaded With Extra RAM [Nintendo DSi]

Nintendo's DSi will be loaded with more RAM than the DS Lite, according to Opera CEO Jon von Tezchner. In an interview with TechTree, the man responsible for web surfing on Nintendo's handheld said... Read More

Dashboard - No Smoking 2.0

Provides some motivation to help you stop smoking.
About No Smoking
This is a very simple widget that gives you a count of the number of days that it’s been since you’ve stopped smoking. You enter the date that you last had a cigarette and it displays the number of days that have passed since then on top of a No Smoking sign.

Optionally you can now enter how much you typically spend per day and it will display how much money you have saved as well.
Read More

Widgets - Cool show, Cool Widget!

Cool show, Cool Widget!
If you haven't taken a look at the show "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia", now is the time. This show is awesome in the way that "The Office" is awesome. It's a brilliant comedy about four friends who own a bar who almost universally approach every problem with the wrong solution. If I had only one word to describe the show, it would have to be "Great!"


The widget is perfectly sized for a blog post, or placement on a Myspace profile and has tons of show related content and links.



Click the options to share this now, it's a live widget!
BIG Interactive and FX Networks created a SpringWidget to help promote the show.

Like the show, the widget is great as well. There are video clips to watch, Sunny tour dates, show information and links to the polls, website and Sunny Blog and even a sneak peak video.

I had never watched this show before seeing the widget, but the widget provided me with enough video and information about the show to let me know that I had to go out and buy the first season DVD set. I didn't realize until after I was at home watching one of the episodes that a "widget" had convinced me to buy the show. I had not even visit the website before I made the purchase.

The best part of the Sunny widget is that the developers at BIG Interactive really took advantage of our platform, building in some features that are only available when the widget is downloaded. So while the online widget is cool, only users who grab it as a download get the full experience.

Download the desktop widget and you get a second widget hidden in the right click menu made to look like the star characters. This second widget is not available online.

You can click and drag the widget by the characters "head" and some pretty neat physics take place, they wiggle and bounce off the side of your monitor. when the character stops, some pretty hilarious video clips start to play.

If you are reading this on a Thursday for the next few months, including This Thursday (tonight) the show should be airing on your local FX network. Take my word for it, it's worth watching.

-Don

p.s. You can find out more about BIG Interactive here and more about FX Networks here

Widgets - Shiver Me Timbers!

Shiver Me Timbers!
For the fans of Captain Jack!...

A SpringWidgets Pirates of the Caribbean countdown clock to put on your profile or blog!

Those of you who have seen my MySpace profile and noticed the skull and crossbones that I use as my profile picture, you have probably figured out that I'm a big fan of pirates.

So much so that I figured that we just had to create a countdown to what will probably be, in my opinion, the biggest movie of the year . . . Pirates of the Caribbean!

Being somewhat piratical ourselves, the team can really relate to the need for blue ocean waters, treasure and wearing silly three cornered pointy hats.

By the way . . . take a look at the bottom of the widget...

Fans of our widgets will notice that the "pop" button has moved from the upper right to the lower left of the widget and it now has a couple of friends, an "options" button and a SpringWidgets logo.

Don't worry, the Pop button will still give you one click downloading of the widget to your desktop if you have the SpringWidgets application installed . . . we just moved it so that it would look better on some of the odd shaped widgets that we are seeing in the gallery.

If you take a moment and click on the options button, you can see that we have added in a few, well... "Options" to the widget. You can now copy the code directly in the widget, download the widget from the menu, jump to the customize/share it page and learn more about the widget you are looking at.

I hope that you like the changes and find that the added functionality enhances your widget experience. If you like the widget and have a moment, stop by our community page and send a note to the team letting them know.

I'm going to go dress up like a pirate now and try and find some buried treasure.

-Don

Download - We hit a million . . . and counting . . .

We hit a million . . . and counting . . .
We just had to share . . . SpringWidgets has had over One Million widgets viewed on webpages in less than a month - YEAH!!!! - and we're trending upward daily.

While that may not seem like a lot to some and is certainly a relative number depending upon your comparison group - we're are definitely pleased. It means you're enjoying the widgets, pasting them to your pages and others are enjoying your modifications by doing the same.

Don't forget to check out the widget gallery from time to time . . . we have a new Christmas Tree widget loaded and will be launching a Simply Hired widget very soon!

(Maybe we can make Two Million before Christmas!!!! That would be cool! Keep embedding and spreading!)

Download - SimplyHired "job search" widget launched Monday

SimplyHired released a widget on SpringWidgets this Monday (2/5/07) - a SimplyHired "job search" widget!!!!! More will be announced "officially", but wanted everyone that might drop by the blog to know they should go grab the widget and put it on their page or pop it into the desktop launchpad.

http://springwidgets.com/simplyhired



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Widgets - Critical Bug Fixed: "'mt_pluginmanager' doesn't exist"

It took me far too long to track down a simple error a number of people were reporting with Plugin Manager, but I did track it down, and did finally manage to fix it. Long story short, the deployment mechanism... Read More

Download - Get Media Manager

Media Manager is a free Movable Type plugin designed specifically for Movable Type 3.2 and above. Download Media Manager now!... Read More

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Widgets - No Smoking 2.0

No Smoking 2.0
Provides some motivation to help you stop smoking.
About No Smoking
This is a very simple widget that gives you a count of the number of days that it’s been since you’ve stopped smoking. You enter the date that you last had a cigarette and it displays the number of days that have passed since then on top of a No Smoking sign.

Optionally you can now enter how much you typically spend per day and it will display how much money you have saved as well.

Widgets - Feed Compare Feedburner subscriber graphs

Feed Compare Feedburner subscriber graphs

A large number of blogs and other sites now use Feedburner as it has a number of great Pro freatures and Feedburner also allows you to transfer feed ownership between users. Whilst you can see your stats in Feedburner the graphs are not that great and you can compare them.

There is a site called Feed Compare that allows you to view the RSS subscriber data for up to 4 feeds on a single graph. This means you could compare your competitors RSS subscriber count with your own feed.

To allow you to get a better idea of subscriber numbers you can also view a graph showing data for the last month, quarter, half year, year or 2 years assuming the feed has been in existence for that long.

The reason this is such a great tool is that you can now find out exactly how a sites RSS feed has grown over time. All you need is the sites Feedburner URL which you can get by right clicking on the sites RSS feed icon and copying the URL than pasting it into Feed Compare.

This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.


Widgets - AirG: The Wii Guitar that Fits in Your Palm [Wiimote]

AirG: The Wii Guitar that Fits in Your Palm [Wiimote]
While games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero require huge peripherals to play, the AirG for the upcoming Wii title PopStar Guitar fits in your hand. Just slip the Wiimote into the AirG case and you can...

Widgets - Nasa's Messenger Sends First Full Fly-By Image of Mercury [Space]

Yesterday at 4:40AM east time, Nasa's Messenger (MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry and Ranging spacecraft) flew by just 125 miles over the surface of Mercury, the closest planet to the... Read More

Download - Social Trends for September

Social Trends for September
Here are the trends for September. The first graph shows the evolution of the ranking for the top 10 social bookmarking services. We can clearly see the sudden rise of Facebook to the 4th position in September. Another interesting path is the one traced by Live, who was initially in the 6th position, was pushed [...]

Here are the trends for September. The first graph shows the evolution of the ranking for the top 10 social bookmarking services. We can clearly see the sudden rise of Facebook to the 4th position in September. Another interesting path is the one traced by Live, who was initially in the 6th position, was pushed down to the 8th position by Reddit and StumbleUpon in April, and then went back up all the way to the 4th position in July pushing down Digg and MyWeb.

As expect, September’s mover is Facebook, going from 5% in August to 7.1% in September. Delicious however lost a little bit of traction. Favorites (browser bookmarking) have also increased, but this is mostly due to the fact that Favorites are now also included in the drop-down widget.

Google Reader continues to grow and lead the feed reader market (up 1.4%) while MyYahoo and Bloglines are standing still. The mover for September is Live, which moved up 2%.

To see more trends, click here.

Top Social Bookmarking/Sharing - Ranking Over Time

Top Social Bookmarking/Sharing - September 2007

Top Feed Readers - September 2007


Dashboard - Production Paradise Search Widget 1.1.3

Production Paradise Search Widget 1.1.3
With the Production Paradise Widget the world’s finest visual media professionals are at your fingertips.
About Production Paradise Search Widget
With the Production Paradise Widget the world’s finest visual media professionals are at your fingertips.

Widgets - Google Maps Terrain Downloader 4.81

Google Maps Terrain Downloader 4.81
A tool that help you to get small tile terrain map images from Google Maps A tool that help you to get small tile terrain map images from Google Maps (read more)

Widgets - WiredDeals

WiredDeals
Keep track of tons of daily deals from FatWallet.com and SlickDeals.net!!! This simple Widget lists top deals as rated by the deal aggregator WiredDeals.com Current version lets you configure: • Number of deals to display • Forum (All, Hot Deals, Finance, Free Stuff, etc) • Deal age limit (deals posted in last 1 hour, 2 hours, 4 hours, etc) • Deals update frequency • Widget appearance (colors) • Widget width Numbers before the deal title are current deal rating and 2-hour rating increase.

Dashboard - Reviewing an Item in Your Queue

Reviewing an Item in Your Queue
Media Manager provides the ability to review any item on your queue. Creating a review automatically creates a post and associates it with an item. When create a review post in your weblog, Media Manager inserts a simple "Media...

Download - Sizzling Classic 45s 0.5

This widget lets our Mac customers stays current with the daily changes in our inventory of classic 45 rpm records.
About Sizzling Classic 45s
Each 45 published in the widget includes the artist, title and label, as well as the year of issue. It also shows the record condition and price. For many of our new records, the widget displays a detailed description and commentary on the music, as well as a scan of the record label or picture sleeve.

Click on the song title to see the detail info, and click “Return To List” to see the full list of the latest 30 or so records. To visit Classic 45s, click on the song title when viewing the detailed info.
Read More

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Dashboard - SpringWidgets loves iGoogle

There is a lot of press today on Google Homepages... oops... I mean "iGoogle"

Since we at SpringWidgets are really big fans of Google and everything they do. I thought this would be a great time to officially say how much we love the iGoogle page by letting everyone know that we have recently added in support for automatic posting of all SpringWidgets into your personalized iGoogle page!

Just choose the widget you are interested in, configure it however you like it to look and function and then select the Google icon in the share it box.

The whole process takes only a few seconds and is one of the easiest ways to put one of our widgets on a page that we have available. Way to go Google!

With all the recent focus on widgets, it's not surprising that everyone is building a widget destination of some sort. We at SpringWidgets will continue to build support for each new destination as APIs become available and look forward to helping enable 2007 truly being the year of the widget.

Here is my iGoogle page. Complete with today's MLB games and a countdown to the next episode of NBC's Heroes!
Read More

Widgets - Access Manager for Windows 8.01

Password protect your PC & Restrict access to to key features of Windows Password protect your PC & Restrict access to to key features of Windows (read more) Read More

Download - Nintendo DSi Not Coming To US Until 'Well Into' 2009 [Nintendo DSi]

Nintendo DSi Not Coming To US Until 'Well Into' 2009 [Nintendo DSi]
digg_skin = 'compact'; digg_bgcolor = '#f1f8fa'; digg_url = 'http://digg.com/nintendo/Nintendo_DSI_Not_Coming_To_US_Until_2009'; Here at the Ninendo Media Summit in San Francisco, NOA President...

Dashboard - How to display your RSS subscriber count

How to display your RSS subscriber count

You've all seen the little FeedBurner subscriber counters on sites that display a site or more often a blogs number of RSS subscribers. Whilst this is a nice widget to display on your site there isn't much in the way of customizing to display something different.

Plaint text subscriber count

There is a way to display the number of readers you have for your feed by using FeedBurners API. This means you can display your subscriber count within some text, for example as part of a blog post. You could also have a separate message somewhere on you site saying X number of readers subscribe to this site.

You can use the PHP code below. You need to have PHP5 otherwise the SimpleXMLElement command will not work.

//get cool feedburner count
$whaturl="http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=YourFeedburnerFeedLinkHere";

//Initialize the Curl session
$ch = curl_init();

//Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
//Set the URL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $whaturl);
//Execute the fetch
$data = curl_exec($ch);
//Close the connection
curl_close($ch);

$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];

//end get cool feedburner count
?>

The next line of PHP needs to be located where you want the subscriber count number to appear. This code needs to occur after the code above for it to work.

I borrowed this code from Mark over at 45n5 so thanks Mark.

This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.


Widgets - Currency Converter 0.9.8

Currency Converter 0.9.8
Easily calculate currency conversions between more than 200 world currencies (almost every traded currency in the world), including all the old legacy European currencies.
About CurrencyConverter
Easily calculate currency conversions between more than 190 world currencies, plus all the old legacy European currencies, some world legacy currencies and even unrecognized currencies and virtual currencies (like the Linden Dollar from Second Life).

- Automatically updated exchange rates
- Support for almost all the traded currencies of the world
- Support the old legacy european currencies (like Italian lira, Deutsch mark, French francs)
- Support multi currencies conversions (you can add all the currencies you want to the conversion table)
- Support inverse conversion (just type an * before the value to convert to enter the inverse mode)
- Support math expression evaluation: just enter a simple math expression and the result will be converted
- Support multiple widget instances, so that you can keep open more than a conversion table, each with a set of preferred currencies
- You can choose the desired decimal precision, from one to five decimals
- You can choose your preferred interface theme
- The widget displays the currencies signs and the country flag
- Added support to the computation of the exchange taxes
- Localized in English, Italian, Portuguese, German, French, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, Greek, Serbian, Polish, Traditional Chinese and Japanese (all the currency names are localized, too).

Widgets - His Compass Bible Search

This Widget allows you to search the Bible using His Compass Bible Search from His Compass Ministry Read More

Download - Access Manager for Windows 8.01

Access Manager for Windows 8.01
Password protect your PC & Restrict access to to key features of Windows Password protect your PC & Restrict access to to key features of Windows (read more)

Dashboard - TextCatch 2.6.4.1

A powerful windows TEXT capture program with many features and options A powerful windows TEXT capture program with many features and options (read more) Read More

Download - Access Manager for Windows 8.01

Access Manager for Windows 8.01
Password protect your PC & Restrict access to to key features of Windows Password protect your PC & Restrict access to to key features of Windows (read more)

Widgets - "Plugin Manager Enabled" Badges

Are you a Movable Type plugin developer? Have you built in support for Plugin Manager yet? If so, consider adding one of the following badges to your plugin's web page to signify the your plugin is "Plugin Manager Enabled." This... Read More

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Download - Bar2D2, the R2-D2 of Failed Space Operas [Robots]

Bar2D2, the R2-D2 of Failed Space Operas [Robots]
Remember that time in Star Wars when R2-D2 shot out the lightsaber to Luke Skywalker? Yeah, well the only problem with that scene was that lightsabers don't freaking exist. And until they do, robots...

Dashboard - ExpressWidgets from SpringWidgets!

It’s a day to “Express” change . . .

Today we’ve launched our ExpressWidgets service…

http://springwidgets.com/express/getFeed/

Up until now you could use our RSS Reader Widget to brand and add a blog to your site or desktop, but you could not add that finished blog widget to our gallery so that other people could find it and share it.

Today we changed all that!!!

As of right now you can use our ExpressWidgets process to create your own uniquely-branded Widget(s) and have those widgets instantly added to our gallery just like any other widget. Build as many as you want and add them to our growing gallery of blogs and desktop Widgets so other users can embed, pass along and bring them to the desktop.

It’s pretty cool. We “expressed” the RSS Reader first. We think it’s the easiest build process for you to quickly syndicate and distribute your blog or audio and video podcast content. Best of all, you can uniquely brand your ExpressWidget to match your website or blog, making it a truly one-of-a-kind Widget out in the WidgetSphere.

To make sure that the end product is as good as it can be, we've added a new way to customize an Express RSS Reader - you can now skin the "chrome" around the content so that it better matches your blog or site. (This is a feature that has been requested for a while and we are happy to be able to push this feature live today).

And for our many Feedburner users, your burned feeds will continue to give you the industry leading analytics and metrics for which Feedburner is known. If you have your Feedburner feed handy, drop on in to the ExpressWidgets process now and add your blog to our gallery to get some free exposure.

Talking about exposure… We’ve also added in a few familiar buttons on the display pages for your widget. Anyone can now Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us and otherwise bookmark your widget directly from the widget view in the gallery – guaranteed to lead to at least a couple of hundred eyeballs on your content ;-)

Go get’em tiger! Read More

Dashboard - Atom Feed XSL Stylesheet

One of the key features of Feed Manager is the ability to render a virtually illegible XML feed as HTML so that it is more easily understood by a person. The secret behind this feature is a simple XSLT stylesheet... Read More

Dashboard - Netflix To Open API and Databases To The Public [NetFlix]

Netflix To Open API and Databases To The Public [NetFlix]
Netflix will introduce their API to the public tomorrow at the Experience AJAX conference, and according to ReadWriteWeb, it will allow free access to movie data and stats stored on their servers....

Widgets - xCuts 1.2g

xCuts 1.2g
Puts a full reference of Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts at your fingertips in the Dashboard.
About xCuts
A utility for looking up Mac OS X keyboard shortcuts, something that recent switchers from Linux or Windows probably need to do quite a bit! This widget lets you easily browse or search the contents of its MySQL-powered database, which it accesses over the web using Ajax. The xCuts are organized by Category, Scope, and Object, and you can even drill down to a second cross-referenced level if you need to. Or just use the fast live search form.

xCuts includes tips on the use of certain shortcuts, and it’s designed to let you copy and paste shortcuts to external documents. This resizable widget uses the terrific Script.aculo.us effects library to work its visual magic. When you’re done, click the title to compact xCuts down to a tiny lozenge for later use.

Dashboard - Redefining the Widget

Last year at Widgets Live, the announcement of the SpringWidgets platform redefined what a widget could be. At the time of our launch there were three categories of widgets: desktop widgets, web widgets and a special subsection of web widgets that would work on social networking profiles.

We changed all that by inventing a widget platform that allowed for the first time, the ability to use a single, updatable and configurable widget file to reach all of these destinations. We took it further by incorporating in the ability to “pop” any SpringWidget you find on the web onto your desktop with just one click.

Since our release, there have been a few companies that have announced a similar product offering - YourMinis and Netvibes are examples we feel are well done.

I'm going to give you a little sneak peak behind the curtain where we are quietly working on redefining the widget once again, and perhaps in the process spur another round of inspiration.

For the most part, online widgets have been exactly what the limited definition has made them out to be …

A web widget is a portable chunk of code that can be installed and executed within any separate HTML-based web page by an end user without requiring additional compilation.

Thanks Wikipedia

Reading this, I’m thinking about the widget landscape and in my head I’m starting to challenge the entire box that we have collectively put widgets into, trying to look past the simple definition and look at the transformative nature of what a portable chunk of code can do.

Is the widget just a visitor on the web page or can it be much more and control and interact with the web page it’s on? If widgets are like parasites, can a parasite define the host?

Can a widget be a portable “experience?”

Envision if you will a Widget that no longer sends the user off to another site to personalize itself. Imagine a widget that is not content to stay within the confines of it’s own little box, but rather can interact with the page it lives on. The “Transformative Widget” would take over the page it’s on; integrating it's content within that page and transforming it based on a click.

If the Widget is not just a chunk of code, but rather a portable experience, imagine the infinite ways we can expand the brand experience within the social network itself. Moving code and embedding Widgets can create a better way to immerse the user in an extreme brand experience. The widget then becomes an ad that is user embedded, user selected and more powerfully engaging and interactive than any traditional advertisement that is available - and just as performance oriented.

If a user allows the widget to brand the entire page, is that a "Widgetview", an "Ad Impression", or a "Pageview"?

So if SpringWidgets is ready to challenge the Widget Landscape it’s safe to say that the launch of THE FANTASTIC FOUR Widget is the next step in redefining the Widget. The transformative nature of TFF Widget is completely apparent once you start using it on your MySpace profile and the brand experience is more immersive than anything possible with a widget prior to the Fantastic Four widget launch.

This is only one of the many transformative widgets that we are engaged in and only represents a small amount of our R&D efforts. Over the weeks and months to come, we'll be rolling out some truly fantastic products that will not only transform the widget, but transform SpringWidgets as well.

We would love to have you on board as we make these transformations, so please feel free to download our API and put your own thoughts to work in redefining what a widget can be. Read More

Widgets - Twitter Tweets

Twitter Tweets
21:21 Blogging & WordPress Twitter Tweets: 12:26 Getting ready for my keynote at #word.. tinyurl.com/3pv5y8 # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter Posted in Blogging Tips      

  • 21:21 Blogging & WordPress Twitter Tweets:
    12:26 Getting ready for my keynote at #word.. tinyurl.com/3pv5y8 #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Posted in Blogging Tips������

Download - Twitter Tweets

Twitter Tweets
21:21 Blogging & WordPress Twitter Tweets: 12:26 Getting ready for my keynote at #word.. tinyurl.com/3pv5y8 # Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter Posted in Blogging Tips      

  • 21:21 Blogging & WordPress Twitter Tweets:
    12:26 Getting ready for my keynote at #word.. tinyurl.com/3pv5y8 #

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter

Posted in Blogging Tips������

Download - John Chow vs Shoemoney RSS competition

John Chow vs Shoemoney RSS competition

RSS is now one of the most valuable metrics on the net. Increasing your RSS subscriber count is a measurable way to show the popularity of your site. As RSS is an opt in way for readers to view your site contents, they can easily stop being a subscriber at any time.

It shows how far RSS has come when John Chow and Shoemoney start a competition to see who can get the most new subscribers in a month. Notice how it wasn't a competition to get the most traffic or the most subscribers to an email list but who can get the most RSS subscribers.

Why RSS subscribers

John and Shoe are both canny marketers and know the value of RSS. RSS is a transparent metric that shows a loyal readership. If a site starts to slide in it's content then readers will no longer subscribe. They would rather gain an RSS subscriber than an extra visitor.

Whilst the challenge is a bit of fun there is also a serious reason John and Shoe have gotten together to run this little competition. At the end of the competition they will both have a larger loyal subscriber base. This competition has gained them a large number of new subscribers which generally means more revenue for them.

This post is from the Newsniche website and should not be reproduced elsewhere. Why not subscribe to the RSS feed and get this information delivered straight to your News reader.


Dashboard - Social Media: The New Path of Economics and Marketing

In A Rubric for Social Media Expertise, Liz Strauss is exploring how we use social media for our blogs and our businesses, especially how we organize and structure social media to work for us. As the living web begins to seamlessly integrate into our concrete cultures and as our lives become globally intertwined, businesses are beginning [...]

In A Rubric for Social Media Expertise, Liz Strauss is exploring how we use social media for our blogs and our businesses, especially how we organize and structure social media to work for us.

As the living web begins to seamlessly integrate into our concrete cultures and as our lives become globally intertwined, businesses are beginning to investigate what this means. Though the idea of markets as conversations may have started with Cluetrain ten years ago, but it has only become business credible with the advent of what we’re calling Web 2.0 and social media.

In recent years, major enterprise, telcos, cablecoms, and mainstream media have found more reason than not to look at social web models as unsound. Meanwhile we’ve been exploring concepts such as influence, authority, transparency, permission marketing, and experimenting with social media tools and networks to understand how a customer-centered market actually works.

Part of her work in developing educational standards for writing social media training materials, Liz explains that we are walking down a totally new path of economics and marketing which is returning to the “culture of a village” and changing the whole marketplace. You can watch from the outside or jump in - either way, you have to understand that this is the same as business techniques of the past while being totally different. In her words, “Can you spell paradox?”

She takes it even further with a quiz in Have You Organized Your Social Media Thinking Lately?

As we are all questioning where social media is taking us, and how much we should invest in the various types and forms, it’s time to organize your thinking around social media.

The keyword of the three day Blog World Expo event a couple weeks ago in Las Vegas was social. People were desperate to understand how to connect via the web with their customers and potential customers, and how to build the networks they so desperately need to build their business - yet they don’t understand how it works, why it works, and what will work specifically for them.

Are you questioning all that time you are spending on Twitter, fixing up your Facebook page, requesting LinkedIn connections, and trying to be all things to all social services and networks? Is it really working for you? Or are you spending a lot of time being social without the return on the time investment? Where should you really be putting your social energy?

When I was planning for my college options, I struggled with two challenging realizations. A higher education was important. I needed to take the basics and quickly move down my chosen educational path to secure my future career. Yet, I realized that all the knowledge in the world won’t help you when it is who you know not what you know that makes the difference. While I could get the basics of a great education at a community college or lessor known college, making connections with a sorority and my fellow students at a well-known, established (expensive) university were connections that would last a lifetime. Understanding that the relationships made during those crucial university years may benefit me more than the education itself helps move me in that direction.

The same applies in the online world. It’s the relationships formed through the social media that help you with your work and life, not just what you learn from the experience.

Maybe it’s time you started re-thinking about this new social world we live in to make wiser choices.

We’re becoming a global village. Who are your neighbors? Who have you been chatting across the virtual picket fence lately?



Site Search Tags: liz strauss, social media, social networking, social network, social, network, connections, business, business of blogging, blog business

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won't Tell You About Blogging.

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