Disruptive Conversations

What's new in WordPress 3.1 that is currently in beta? How is it different from WordPress 3.0? My friend Sallie Goetsch recently gave a presentation to the East Bay WordPress Meetup (in the San Francisco area) and made her slides available via SlideShare:

It's a nicely done tour that can help all of us who are using WP to see what is coming up in the next release! Thanks, Sallie, for putting it together.

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It seems that a quick way to get a blog post loaded up with spam comments is to get it up on the first page of Google search engine results. Or at least, that's how it appears to me.

Recently I started getting a lot of comment spam, almost daily, on one specific post I wrote on Code.DanYork.com, a blog where I write about programming and other developer topics. It puzzled me because that particular post was really just an embed of a video and wasn't very deep or detailed. A trip into Google Analytics, though, showed that a significant driver of the traffic to that post were the Google search keywords "learning node.js" and "learning nodejs". So I popped those into Google and sure enough, there I was... #5 for "node.js":

And #3 if you drop the period and do "nodejs":

So perhaps, I thought, that was the reason that post attracted the comment spam when none of the other posts did...

But that doesn't really answer it to me. When I head over to the AdWords Keyword Tool, the reality is that pretty much almost no one is searching on those particular terms! So even though my post may place highly in the results, it doesn't really matter because only a trivial number of people are actually searching for that term.

I should note, too, that none of the blog comment spam had anything whatsoever to do with Node.js. It was all the typical comment spam linking to various silly products... watches, pharmaceutical products, websites, etc.

In the end, I don't know... perhaps some comment spammer is trying to post comments on blogs that have long-tail terms related to topics getting buzz these days. ("Node.js" is a hot topic in developer circles right now.) Perhaps that particular post just got tweeted or retweeted and caught someone's attention.

On one level, it doesn't much matter to me, since I moderate all comments from people who haven't commented before. So the comments are going live on my site... it's more just the annoyance of having them come in (and a number of them are not getting caught by Akismet).

Still, it's a curiousity... why that post? I'll probably never know...

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What should the social media marketer care about with regard to Search Engine Optimization (SEO)? How can you tweak your blog posts and other social media marketing to obtain the best search engine results?

Those are the questions addressed today by Jen Lopez in a great post over on SEOMoz entitled "The Social Media Marketer's SEO Checklist". She makes a key point right at the beginning (my emphasis added):

Normally in the SEO world, links are like money in that the larger the bill (more authority), the more powerful it is. So for a long time, most SEOs blew off links from social sites like Twitter and Facebook since they didn't have much direct SEO value because the links are almost always nofollowed. Now that we know that Google and Bing use Twitter and Facebook to influence regular search results, it's time to start thinking about how the person in charge of Social Media can start to think like an SEO as well.

The post itself is loaded with links to learn more about SEO and various related topics and strategies.

It's a great post and one that anyone working with social media should read. (The comments are good to read, too.)

Thanks, Jen, for writing this piece!

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Talk about volume! A post on the Twitter blog today indicates that on New Year's Eve the Twittersphere shattered a previous record with an amazing 6,939 tweets per second coming out of Japan! Followed by heavy tweeting in Europe and then later by the US East Coast coming in around 3,000 tweets per second. Pretty amazing quantity of traffic! (And Twitter stayed up! ;-) )

Twitter also provided this rather cool visualization of the traffic as the New Year's Eve greetings took place over several hours:

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As part of my 3 Words for 2011, I've set myself an aggressive personal goal for my "CONTENT" focus...

I want to publish at least one blog post every day of 2011.

To define that a bit better, my target is to publish at least one post across my personal blogs:

• Disruptive Conversations
• Disruptive Telephony
• DanYork.com
• Code.DanYork.com
• Seven Deadliest UC Attacks

(and any other personal blogs I launch in 2011). I'll also count any videos I upload to my personal YouTube account.

Additionally, I'll certainly publish posts at the Voice of VOIPSA blog and will be steadily churning out content over on Voxeo's blogs... but I'm leaving those sites out of my count.

Now the reality is that many days I'll probably publish more that one post across those four blogs... but there have been many days in the past when I haven't published any posts at all. And I generally have not been publishing any posts on most weekends.

To do this will take some discipline. I'll also be using the "scheduling" feature of my various blog platforms to schedule posts on weekends, vacations and when I'm traveling.

WHY am I setting this target? Partly just as a target to aim for. Partly to force myself to clean out the very large queue of blog post ideas I have. Partly to force myself to write and not get lost in all the distractions we have today. And partly as purely an interesting exercise to see IF I can do it.

Let's see how it goes... the good news is that you all will be very able to see whether I hit that target! :-)

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Note: Calendar image from Timeanddate.com

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Is Facebook reneging on our ability to "claim" community pages? Back on December 1, I wrote about how you could "claim" a community page on Facebook, after seeing an article B.L. Ochman wrote in Ad Age. But here's the thing...

Facebook has NOT contacted several of us who "claimed" pages.

Facebook hasn't contacted me in the month since I claimed a page... and according to others who have left comments on my original post, they haven't been contacted either.

And further...

Facebook has REMOVED the option to claim a page.

The bottom of the community page used to look like this (my emphasis added):

Today, with yet another Facebook user interface change, those options are over on the left sidebar... but look what is missing:

So what's the deal, Facebook?

Will we who are responsible for online marketing for companies ever have the ability to claim the Community Pages, as you said we would? Or are you yanking that ability?

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