Archive for August, 2006
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Linux - Fedora Goes Live
The Live Fedora CD is a product of the FedoraUnity.org community group, which
is composed of site maintainers, Fedora Project contributors and interested users.The Live CD is part of the Fedora Unity “re-spins,” which are ISOs of Fedora Core releases with additional up-to-date applications
already bundled in.With a Live CD, users can
run Fedora from their media drives without the need to actually physically
install the OS on their hard drives. This will enable non-linux users to give it a try!http://www.fedoraunity.org/
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The revolution will be downloadable
“Starting today, you can go to Google Book Search
and download full copies of out-of-copyright books to read at your own
pace. You’re free to choose from a diverse collection of public domain
titles — from well-known classics to obscure gems.”Interesting to see Google position itself with the (inevitably beta) launch as a modern equivalent to the rise of the public libraries.
As Google makes clear, ‘this is only the beginning’ - and the inevitable challenge to resistant publishers is who is going to embrace this first and see the market opportunity open to them.
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We’re all bloggers now
Derek Powazek highlighted recently the work of the Pew Internet & American Life Project on Bloggers: A portrait of the internet’s new storytellers - essential reading if you are interested in where blogging in particular, and ‘participatory media’ more generally, is going.
His own analysis of the research - 10 insights on blogs from PEW - is well worth reading and it is number two on Derek’s list that particularly caught my eye:
The blogging population is evenly split between women and men, and racially diverse
More than this, the figures for the ages of bloggers is fascinating:
- 30 per cent of bloggers are aged 30-49
- 14 per cent of bloggers are aged 50-64
I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn in saying that I think there is a widespread (mis)conception that bloggers are, in no particular order: geeky, white, teenagers and male.
Oh no they’re not.
As Powazek says: ‘We’re ALL in here’.
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Trusting the community
I’ve been waiting to see Miami Vice since the first time I heard they were taking the idea behind the show and making it into a movie. I wasn’t too sure about the casting (not a huge Collin Farrell fan and Jamie Foxxx is hit and miss - I liked Ray and Collateral, but anyone who stars in a movie called Bootycall is a little suspect in my books). But I liked the fact that Michael Mann was in charge - since he was the brains behind the original show.
So when a friend of mine told me last week that he hated the movie I wasn’t sure whether or not to still dish out the dosh to go and see it. So I went to the only place I could think of for help, metacritic. Metacritic’s great, it gathers critics opinions from a large number of north american news outlets, as well as from users. It then gives a rating combining all the criteria it has access to.
Metacritic’s not the only one. Wikipedia and Amazon are other sites where you can inform the community about a product, service (or in Wikipedia’s case person, place, event etc as well).
The great thing about this is that it reduces risk. I don’t have to listen to one source about something, I can take the views of many into consideration before consuming.
So with all that said, Miami Vice has a rating of 65/100. Sounds like a wait till its on DVD to me.
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SEO or SMO?
We’re all familiar with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), because of the wide spread use of search engines. And there is no question about how valuable SEO can be to a company and how extremely important it is to rank high on the search engines to build traffic (it’s an established fact that most people, after they’ve done a search, won’t look at more than one page of a result list). However, companies that have products and services that revolve around social mediums should become acquainted with a new concept, and that is: ‘Social Media Optimization’ (SMO).
The concept around SMO is literally being mapped out on different blogs as we speak (write, read?). It started with Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations and his 5 rules of social media optimization which declared that:
“The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches, on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.”
His five suggestions for social media optimization:
1. Increase your linkability - This is the first and most important priority for websites. Many sites are “static” - meaning they are rarely updated and used simply for a storefront. To optimize a site for social media, we need to increase the linkability of the content. Adding a blog is a great step, however there are many other ways such as creating white papers and thought pieces, or even simply aggregating content that exists elsewhere into a useful format.
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy - Adding content features like quick buttons to “add to del.icio.us” are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier, but we go beyond this, making sure pages include a list of relevant tags, suggested notes for a link (which come up automatically when you go to tag a site), and making sure to tag our pages first on popular social bookmarking sites (including more than just the homepage).
3. Reward inbound links - Often used as a barometer for success of a blog (as well as a website), inbound links are paramount to rising in search results and overall rankings. To encourage more of them, we need to make it easy and provide clear rewards. From using Permalinks to recreating similarly, listing recent linking blogs on your site provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you
4. Help your content travel - Unlike much of SEO, SMO is not just about making changes to a site. When you have content that can be portable (such as PDFs, video files and audio files), submitting them to relevant sites will help your content travel further, and ultimately drive links back to your site.
5. Encourage the mashup - In a world of co-creation, it pays to be more open about letting others use your content (within reason). YouTube’s idea of providing code to cut and paste so you can imbed videos from their site has fueled their growth. Syndicating your content through RSS also makes it easy for others to create mashups that can drive traffic or augment your content.
As I said previously, more rules are being added (I think there are 13 rules at the moment) and I’m not going to list all of them in this post. However, you can follow the latest additions or add your own suggestions on Rohit’s blog
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3 new live sites!
DCMS (www.culture.gov.uk) – The site has been designed to make it easier for those users who are unfamiliar with the Department of Culture, Media & Sport to get an understanding of their work, but still cater for their important specialist audiences.
They held a number of staff workshops and Precedent facilitated focus groups to gain feedback on the design and content. The feel of it was also helped along by user testing of the dummy pages and accessibility testing to ensure that everyone can use it.
As you can see, broad theme areas such as “culture”, “media”, “sport”, are used on the Homepage and in “About us”. Under these themes, key initiatives can be identified to inform people and/or get them involved.
All the information for specialist users is still available in “What we do”, while the reference library contains all publications, consultations and media releases. So it will contain everything the old site had, with lots more, all in a format that makes sense to their audiences.National School of Government (www.nationalschool.gov.uk) – have launched a refreshing design for their website to reflect the new look and feel of their publication material. Their internal web team have taken our proposed design and incorporated it onto the website themselves.
MWB Meeting Venues (http://meetingvenues.mwbex.com) – This is the second site to go live for MWB in a series of sites we are developing for their number of workplace solutions. Our recommendations have been focused on building on MWBex’s current successes and producing a suite of brand consistent websites that are more audience focused and move from lead generation to, ulitmately, income generating in their own right. The first site was http://virtualoffices.mwbex.com for Virtual Offices, and still to come are the Serviced Offices site and the main corporate site.
