I’m writing this post on an iPhone whilst watching Arsenal trail 2-1 to Stoke, a testament to the interconnected world we inhabit today. A world where we can interact w/ our networks from virtually anywhere, a world where the old constraints of modems and hard wired cables in a phone socket are but a bemusing memory of a place left alone in the roadmap of time.

Back then we usually had to wait before reading a response to a post or a comment. Facebook and Twitter, the proliferation of other nkotb like foursquare, gowalla, brightkite et al were just twinkles in the eye of their respective founders. Today all are becoming a mainstay of the online world, acting as sharepoints for the herds that flock to the power of their distributive connectivity; full of people chattering and networking, discussing themes and topics of their everyday lives. Lets face it, it’s nothing short of a technological social revolution; the web how it should be, as envisaged by the technerd visionaries striving to push it all that little bit further.

As a result of all this, quite a few of us have got excited by the opportunities that this activity presents. Never before has it been so easy to connect w/ people in their ‘moment’ never before has it been possible to identify so very quickly, people who are talking about you, your brand or topics and products important to your interests. The whole proliferation of listening tools that have sprung up is testament to the hunger and appetite for finding new ways of measuring, interacting and building relationships w/ those of import.

In terms of the tools available we have a wide and awesome array. Some do a good job and some simply overwhelm. Of the hardcore tools I’ve used I must confess that some ( even for a tech head like me ) provided too much. There weren’t any that I knew of that enabled me to simplistically look at a couple of important web nodes ( the blogosphere and Twitter ) and not only listen and monitor, but respond to, and share internally, to identify and classify as a CRM or Sales opp, a Marketing or Crisis management issue. All did lots of things really well, but none offered the kind of things I was interested in at a one stop shop.

See for me, at a keyword brand or product conversation level, there usually exists a need. A need to find, a need to share, grow, love, hate, acquire, enquire, inspire even – people tend to talk about such things in blogs, social status updates or forums w/ niche followings or interests. Brands especially can no longer rely on traditional offline media to build brand, neither can they depend on law to silence vociferous detractors, the option of sitting back and allowing conversations to develop w/ no awareness of or engagement w/ is a recipe for soon to be disaster.

Yet honing all that down and acquiring meaningful insight into such events, in the absence of some uber web understanding was and for many still is incredibly difficult. Could crowd sourcing and the wisdom of the masses hold the key?

You betcha! I didn’t know the stats to hand but I took a punt and said if anything of import is happening in the world today then it’s likely to appear in a blog a forum or in Twitter somewhere. With a little pipery and Tommy Cooper jush like thatery I was pretty sure that I could build something that not only allowed people to do the traditional response thing, but to also begin to understand some of the DNA beneath. The ability to identify friends and foes, the ability to extract positive or negative external references, the ability to measure the relative power and importance of what those referenced nodes were about. The ability to segment and take snapshots in time. Actionable insights into cause and effect. How f*#^%in cool to be able to say, right – we launched product x or initiative y and this is how the world/continent/country/region/town responded. These are the people who influenced things, these are the places where it happened and this is where we need to do better.

Of course in terms of the whole GEO thing it’s still early days but, wow, what an exciting time for both marketers and consumers. Anyone who even half gets this stuff who fails to feel the power needs to pack it in tomorrow.

Ok, so yes – it isn’t oauth yet ( I got this thing called a day job) it isn’t beautiful on the eye, it needs a bit more ajaxification, it needs a little negative matching and a few more reporting options (pretty PDFs anyone) but it’s getting there. I hope you give it a try and if you find it useful, support the effort

Cheers

Rob

Sent from an iPhone

I’m pleased to announce the fruit of a little recent xmas obsession. A social monitoring tool for those who are scared by huge datasets ;0)

I think it’s pretty cool, it lets you listen, monitor, respond and report.

It doesn’t go out and spider the web. It just lets you choose words that are important to your brand or your competition and take samples from twitter and the blogosphere.

My view is that if its on the radar then it’ll end up in blogs or twitter. Lots of people use twitter, but few track what they are doing, simply because there are few very easy ways of doing so. This for me, goes some way to adding to that conversation.

I’ve a list of to do’s and am adding extra value as and when I get the time.

I could have sat here and refined and refined for ever and a day but…you’ve  just gotta put things out there and see what they do sometimes.

If you encounter the odd bug, then do let me know. I’m working on it daily, so apologies if you find one. I might buy you a pint if I meet you.

It’s a chargeable, but it should make your life a little easier, especially if you are a PR, SEO, Marketing  or Sales person.

It isn’t a state of the art ‘grab the web’ tool. They already exist. I’m not re-inventing the wheel.

It’s designed to let you take stock of real time and deal with it in the here and now.

Through using it you can:

• Identify sales opps
• Identify marketing opps
• Deal with Crisis Comms
• Send messages to internal depts
• Check activity overtime and get learnings
• Identify Retweeted Links
• Identify Social Influencers
• Identify the most active people  for a keyword in a timeline
• Export Reports to Excel
• Create Charts and Graphs
• Detect sentiment automatically
• Mark Sentiment
• Interactwith Twitter
• Create up to 5 campaigns
• Use Multiple Twitter Accounts
• Use a Single Login with multiple aliases

Additional add ons in development are:

• The ability to add negative keywords
• The ability to geo target keywords
• Linkedin Integration
• Foursquare Integration
• Email reports
• Customise reports

The GEO targetting aspect mightn’t be as effective for keyword purposes, simply because of people not geo tagging their tweets. Know a tweeter? et them to geo tag their tweets!!

Initial price during Beta is just £45 per month for early bird users

I’m going to go freemium but need to recode aspects of the sign up process watch this space.

All those who sign up before the end of January will get a free month too. You can get it here

If you don’t find it useful, then after 5 days, just cancel your subscription.  Stay longer and it’s a one month rolling commitment.

Use it and it gets interesting, choose your keywords judiciously and see what it puts together for you.

For those who want professional insight over and above what you can glean by yourself, there are additional custom social media reports available at extra cost.  These are written by people like me and are not cheap.

If you want a great list of other tools on the market then you can find a great list here .:)

So it’s Sunday morning, my kids have had a change of plan and I’ve got two hours to kill before going off to the ‘Wood’ for dinner with Dad and co. So in true it’s almost Christmas what the hell do I buy for everyone style, here are seven gift ideas for dudes and geeks.

Looking for gifts for ones dad or brother, or boyfriend or husband  at Christmas is never easy – I’m not saying this post will make that task any easier either and most of these ideas for Christmas gifts are quite probably a little out of the budget range for some, but…,you might be feeling generous so what the hey. There’s a mixed bag ranging from a tenner up to a couple of k, so fill your proverbial boots.

150 things every man should know

First off here’s a book that looks a lot of fun and is probably going to be a big success -”150 Things Every Man Should Know: Telling You the Things Your Best Friend Can’t” .  Fundamentally a lot of us are a little bit dumb and could do with reading stuff like this, just to remind ourselves or save face of asking a smartass who does. Not quite worked out the how to shave without cutting yourself bit yet? (see below for another answer)  or not sure of your ‘having a piss etiquette’ or what about more mundane topics  ‘tie tying’, ‘tyre changing’ . The dude it seems has written a book to solve all these woes. I haven’t read it, but if I got it in my Xmas stocking, then I’d probably smile and read it.

Macbook Pro

I must say I’ve always like Apple products , they are stylish, reliable, cool and geeky. My daughter has a mac book, she’s had it for a while. I’ve never used it but it does have a certain style and difference to it that for whatever reason, traditional PC manufacturers just haven’t quite managed to emulate.  We had a visitor to the office the other day who was raving about the coolness of his new apple macbookpro saying how fast and light and generally brilliant it was and I must confess I did start to think, hmmn, I see where he’s coming from.

In any case, you can buy a Macbook Pro for as little as £775 for a 13inch or for £1759 you can get a new MacBook Pro 17inch with its 2.8GHz processor 4GB ram 500GB hard drive.

iPhone 3GS

Next up on my I’d love to have is the IPhone3GS – I have an iphone 3g, it’s a work phone – I like it, it’s very cool, it has bundles of apps and does lots of cool stuff. It is kinda deficient though in some respects, it’s missing the whole video thing. I can’t upload video content to places like youtube and posterous,  it isn’t as fast and it’s really crap for battery time. That said, it’s an amazing piece of technology that I can read emails on,  read webpages, tweet, facebook, audioboo etc.

So please, any budding Father Christmas’s out there who’d like to treat me to one,  I’m pleased to tell you that you can buy the  iphone 3gs new from just £499-00. Yep, a lot of money for a phone, but this is no ordinary phone after all. This is a phone on steroids. I’ll be getting Amber one for her birthday and in the UK the market is at last opening up a little with Vodafone, Tesco and Orange all soon to be selling the thing on contract too.

Android Phone

Or maybe you don’t like Apple stuff – perhaps you are turned off by the whole idea and want something a little bit more flexible – Android smartphones look pretty cool and their functionality is pretty much on par with iPhones.

I’ve seen a few videos over the past year or so, one in particular that caught my eye was augmented reality – in plain speak this a feature that overlays what your camera see with map and locational data. So lets say that you are in location x and want to get a better feel for where you are, then this phone hooks up with things like Google street view and has the ability to label places and reconfigure the vista as you move. Another neat function was the ability to hook it up to Google base and get prices from shoips without even entering the store – need to get the best priced camera in Tottenham Ct Road? No problem just walk down the street, enter the product name, point and scan the high street and the various prices will flash up on your screen overlaid on the shop it locates. This HTC Hero Sim Free Android Smartphone is listed at £369.99 from amazon.

iBlock Dock

These look different – they are like big lego blocks, you stick your ipod or your iphone in them and they charge your tech. They come in all shapes sizes and colours too. Not that expensive either.  Ideal for people who like the whole retro non wirey approach or who are just looking for a different non standard dock – charges standard MP3 players too. These things are priced between, £12.99 and £29.99 so could form part of a wider bundle for someone looking to get a lot of little things for someone rather than one big gift. Iphone add ons and attachments are definitely one of these growing sub markets, evident by the range shown here.

Braun Series 7 Shaver

I hate shaving, most men do. Show me a man who enjoys a shave and I’ll show you a man who erm..has too much time on his hands. My daily shave ritual usually entails, lathering up, plugging in a new mach 3 shaver head bought at the exorbitant price of around £9 for 5 shaves. Every now and then ( more often than not) I cut myself. It’s a pita – face bleeds, tissue gets stuck to said cut, and you sit on the train looking like the dummy who cut himself shaving again. So, no more of that methinks, it’s time to save on my shave! ( ok poor choice of pun but you get the enthusiasm, no? ) Enter the Braun Series 7 790cc Shaver in addition to the fact it has the words 790cc in its title ( WTF motorbike engine size speak) it also sounds like it belongs in a start trek episode and is adorned in the same colours as what miss 7 of 9 used to wear. It has  an almost robot R2D2 look to it, leading me to conclude that the designer was definitely a trekkie and star wars fan too. It isnt cheap mind, but over time It would certainly save some time, pain and money too.  It’s priced at £165 ( reduced from the RRP price of £249.99) so even if you spend just £5 per week to shave, you’ll be quids in within a year and have less war wounds too. Jesus look at me, I sound like a fonkin salesman.

X Rocker Pro Gamer Seat

I like the look of this – I might even buy Jord one for Christmas. Its a seat for gamers. I’m not that much of a gamer myself, but I could just nestle down and have more of a go with this thing. It has surround sound, sub woofers, wireless, it even vibrates too which is bound to push any gamer experience up a notch, and for fat boys like me, might even be adaptable to some kind of massage game. Do they sell massage games for Xbox? You can buy the X-Rocker Profor £129.99 or get it at boys stuff for £199.

So there you have it, just a few ideas for xmas gifts. If you happen to make a purchase from any of these links I should point out that I do get a small commission ( painfully small I might add). That said I have shopped around and believe it or not amazon in most cases was often cheapest simply because of the various relationships its established with product providers.

I can’t tag this post, my db is borkden, so please no whinges or whines about my lack of categorisation or tagging, ta! Happy shopping!.

The reasons behind Mr shoes ban seem to have their roots in him posting various exploits that can be applied and used to basically, fuck with how mbl works. I don’t think this is a bad thing generally, in fact its good to have people point out flaws; especially when they can be patched with relative ease. Constructive criticism is always good.Its a delicate balance though, if someone took it upon themselves to attack and criticise with regularity, posting things that made me look dumb or stupid then my gut might be inclined to say hey do me a favour blokey, just piss off out of it if you don’t like what I am doing. That would of course ( as appears to be panning out to be the case) , be a mistake as I’d open myself to all kinds of attacks from followers, detractors and cronies.

John Andrews nails it with his comment at Andy Beals.

wow… it’s amazing to see so many users adopting our service so fast. We are really excited to see the validation that the MBL platform is capable of so much more, and also how amazingly innovative the blogging community is. We’ll have to fix some of the loop holes of course, and we’ve got great people working on keeping things moving forward, but keep the feedback coming and let us know what we’re doing right and what you need from us…

People like Matt Cutts have been using similar approaches for years, we all know where it got those guys too.

MBL’s crime it appears is that they didn’t code things perfectly and that enabled people to do things like, surf as other people using a cookie exploit, or add co-authors without consent or add other sites to peoples accounts, again without their consent.

Ok, so yes, not the best things in the world to have had happen, it undermines faith and trust in whatever else could be ‘leaking out’ but come on lets face it, its not exactly the end of the world, or a reason to be filed under heinous crimesville but it’ll gain one a little attention if you come out and support a position one way or the other.

My personal take is one of so what who really really cares, who died even? I’ll still use mybloglog I think its a bit of harmless fun and a good way of getting new eyeballs on to what you do and say. Its a cracking little site that created a lot of interest and buzz in a segement that is continually evolving and growing. So it has a few holes that tech head nerds will point at and say OMG, how bad is that..yeah – so – and.

Some might wonder why MBL is such a focus, why are these evil seo types so interested? Well, SEO’s types tend to be the ones who push and poke and prod, its the nature of getting up where you need to be that drives it. SE algos are that little harder to get at these days,the requirement to gain traction and influence within their algo parameters dictates that people will look at the most cost and time efficient ways of increasing their scores. Like it or not, MBL offers a means of gaining attention. Attention = links, links = better scores, better scores = more money blah blah blah. Digg, reddit, delicious, wikipedia, dmoz all had or still have even, similar issues. Its the downsided price of success on the net.

Thankfully for MBL at least, most users are just happy to stick the thing on the their blog and leave it at that. They love the stat functionality, love the little people icons, love the little community and ‘blog love’ thing in general. I think its cool too, which is why I’ll continue to use it until something better comes along.
Overall, a storm in a teacup methinks. Could have been handled better, on all sides.

Update:Mybloglog reinstated Shoemoney

Lots of papers out there on PageRank and theories and counter theories on how linking out can effect your PR adversely/positively and all that, so I’m not going to rehash any of those arguments.

I have to confess, there was a time when I was kinda obsessed with the whole SEO PR leakage thing too, worring about ‘bleeding’ precious PR and all that jazz, however I do think the ‘game’ has moved on a little, in terms of the SE algo’s have matured to a more considered examination of what is and what is not a good or a bad page worth ranking. Why do I think this? Well just go and look at a few well ranking sites and see how they link out. One immediate one that springs to mind is Wikipedia, although their recent decision to stick a nofollow tag on their outbounds may come back and bite them ( I hope) .

Following on, I was looking at a few blogrolls on various blogs just the other day, most had a few links here and there numbering between 6 and 15. Some like Bill Slawski’s SEOByTheSea had a big long blogroll in excess of 30 links.I don’t have Bills ranking figures to hand, but I’m sure he hasn’t been too adversely affected by linking out so extensively.He provides quality viewpoints that others link to. If a Search Engine happened to penalise on the back of such extensive outlinking then it would, IMO be a little harsh, not to mention poor for its users. Its how the web works after all, links links links!

That said, I think generally it might be a sensible idea to maybe look at ensuring perhaps, that ones blogroll, especially if its pretty long, doesn’t appear on every single page for example, as this could help cut down on any sameiness factor, which could be a determinant in any subsequent ranking considerations. I’m thinking duplicate block/content issues here.

It may also be useful to bear in mind, that not all sites have an equal footing in terms of any authorative weighting system, so what one site may be able to get away with, may not necessarily apply to another with a lower hub/authority score.

One thing we can all be assured of is that this ranking in the Search Engines game isn’t a static target, it moves and shifts with subtleties that we mightn’t see for months or weeks after its happened. Toolbar PR for example is widely recognised as not being a true representation of ones actual pagerank, which again isn’t the magic bullet that people once assumed it to be.

Sure, links do indeed power the net, but its now a question of the types of links you are getting too. The days of mutliple footer links from low quality sites being able to boost you up a serp are long gone.

The advent of Digg, Reddit, Technorati, MyBlogLog, Myspace and all manner of other different types of Social Media platform that enable mass participation and citation dictate that the ground is a whole lot more fuid than it once was. These too are excellent pointers towards what is and what isn’t current. Who is ‘buzzing’ and who is not. Matt Cutts wrote a blog post about writing articles that users will love the core message being that if you do then people will pick them up in their readers and link back to you and talk about what you have to say – rocket science huh?

I’m reminded of something I read some time back. It was a thing called Block Level Analysis a process whereby a page is broken down into various sections and elements. The condensed version is that some links are worth more than others dependant upon where they are within a page. So navigational links may not be as semantically valid as a link found within a block of text in the upper part or main body of a block of text; if this, or a variation of were factored into an algorithm, then the placement or length of any blogroll ,could well be academic in any case.

From time to time, maybe we are all guilty of worrying about how a search engine may or may not interpret what we do or say. I’ve worked in affiliate spaces. I know that you can get cabin fever riding the ups and downs of the Search engine algo change waves. In many ways too there was a time when you just had to, there was no other way, if you wanted to keep ahead you had little other choice. They were continually evolving and we had to second guess their movements in terms of how they were weighting this aspect or that. Today, whilst its a whole lot harder, it is also a whole lot more straightforward too. The vagueries and theories relative to KW densities and tag structure and word placement are largely on the wane. The search engines seem to be applying a hell of a lot more weight towards what is current and who is creating buzz and new link juice. Authorities and white lists have been established, probably via some DMoz or Y! directory snapshot. New sites wanting to perform well in the competitive spaces, better be pretty hot. If they are, then they will create that buzz and will be talked about within social media spaces. Everything that follows will have been earnt by dint of being linkworthy.

IMHO of course