Disruptive Conversations

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day here in the U.S. and while there are many reasons to celebrate and commemorate the life and message of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for communicators there is perhaps a particular aspect of King to reflect upon, namely his tremendous oratorical skills. Over on Ragan.com today, Andrew Dlugan analyzes MLK's most famous speech in "‘I Have a Dream’ holds 5 lessons for speechwriters and the post is well worth a read.

If you haven't listened to that speech in a while, it's worth the 11 minutes:

As a public speaker myself, I admittedly stand in awe of King's mastery of oratory.

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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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There is one gift that we all can give this season that is far, far, far greater than anything else. It is a simple gift to give... yet it is by far one of the hardest to give.

That gift is very simply...

our presence.

Not "presents"... "presence".

The act of being there, in the moment...

... with whomever we are with.

We live in an age of distraction.

There are so many new tools (or toys)... there are so many channels of communication... there are so many things going on. There are status updates to post, tweets to read... Oh, look, there's a butterfly....

We live in an age of "busy".

We all have busy lives. We work hard and long hours. We play hard. We have zillions of events going on for school or work or church or community groups or sports or friends or charities or nonprofit orgs or ... or ... or ..

We have deadlines at work and "to do" lists that can never be completed. Projects abound that take all of our "work" time and carry over into our "personal" time... we are always thinking about them.

We live in an age of "multi-tasking".

Our ubiquitous mobile phones are always within reach.

Always tempting us.

Always available for us to "just check one more email message"... or to scan our Facebook NewsFeed... or to reply to a tweet... or see what friends have checked in nearby on FourSquare.

We email while we drive... and check web sites while we are ostensibly in a meeting with other people.

We live in an age of continuous partial attention.

Always on. Always connected.

We don't want to miss whatever comes next. Whether or not it matters whether we miss that or not is a different question.

We are plugged in ... connected... wired...

... and almost never giving anyone our full attention.

And yet... in this attention-starved world, that is in fact the greatest gift we can give each other.

To be there.

In the moment.

Right then.

Paying attention to what others are saying or doing.

It is insanely hard to do, for all those reasons listed above.

I definitely struggle with it... beyond all those reasons above, as a writer, my head is always exploding with new ideas, and it often involves a substantial effort to consciously park those ideas to remain present.

Yet, if we can do it, that is the greatest gift we can give.

The presents will fade. The toys will break. The clothes will be outgrown. The jewelry will be replaced. The electronics will become outdated.

But our presence - or lack thereof - will linger.

Will you give that gift this year?

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It is apparently not enough for Facebook that they are so many people's main portal to the Internet... their most-used site... etc. They seem to also want to be the home page in your browser, too! At least, that's what this bar tells me that now appears on top of Facebook when I go to the site:

If you can't read the image text, it says:

Drag this to your home button to see what's happening with friends as soon as you open your browser.

Translation: Do you really need to view any other site than Facebook?

Smart move on Facebook's part... encourage people to make Facebook their home page so that whenever they open a new window, odds are that they'll be sucked into what's happening in Facebook rather than doing whatever else they were going to do.

All Facebook, all the time...

Needless to say, I haven't personally made this change. I like my home page as it is (Google Search). But the war for the eyeballs will continue...

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With the word out today that Yahoo will be shutting down Del.ico.us at some point in the near future (per TechCrunch and AllThings D), the buzz on Twitter tonight has been all about how to backup your del.icio.us bookmarks... and what other services to use. Having been a long-time user of delicious, with literally thousands of bookmarks over many years, I was naturally concerned and followed the conversations closely.

The net of all that is that there are two simple ways to backup your bookmarks today (and I've done them both).

First, you can simply go to:

https://secure.delicious.com/settings/bookmarks/export

You will get a HTML file that includes all your links and notes and, in the HTML source, all your tags.

Second, for the more technically inclined with access to the "curl" command from a command prompt, you can issue this command:

curl https://[username]:[password]@api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all > bookmarks.xml

which will get you a nice XML file full of all your bookmarks, tags and notes. This worked like a charm in a terminal window on my Mac. (Hat tip to @andrew_k on Twitter for this tip and to @pfhyper who retweeted it.)

Now that you have either or both an HTML or XML file you can then import those into some other service... or at the very least have access to your bookmarks. You obviously don't have the "social" aspect of del.icio.us, which is where so much of the power lies... but you do have all your bookmarks.

Note that in theory you should be able to issue these commands up until Yahoo! shuts down the service... so if you keep bookmarking sites in the weeks ahead, just remember to re-issue these commands from time-to-time to keep a local backup.

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