Google+ moron moment – no it won’t replace your blog

It never, ever, fails.

No sooner than some new social media slash social network slash circle jerk comes along and it is being proclaimed as the big, awesome, incredible, replacement for your blog.

Uhm, No.

I realize we are all pretty well lazy and always looking for easier ways to do things; and of course maintaining a blog with intelligent thought out discussions is such a horrendous chore than anything that makes expressing ourselves in a coherent manner easier is of course, the next great thing.

The fact is that things like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Posterous, and now Google+ are really cool services and for the vast majority of people they are indeed the perfect outlet for limited forms of creativity and make sharing things drop dead simple.

None of them however is a replacement for blogs no matter how much the social media digerati might want you to believe otherwise.

Hey, like this post? Why not share it with a buddy?

googleplus

Twitter needs to worry about Google+ – Not bloody likely.

Google+ is only five days old at the writing of this post and hasn’t even through its trial by fire as it is still in limited field trials, and yet we already have the social media pundits writing ad naseum about how Twitter, and Facebook (but that’ll be another post), need to be watching their backs.

Really?

After only five days of being tested by the geekiest of tech geeks, bloggers, and reporters, we’re already claiming that Google+ is a threat to Twitter.

You people need to get a grip and instead of writing vaporous odes to Google+ and the imminent demise of <take your pick of social media network> do your readers a favor and get a cup of coffee and look at what you are talking; or pontificating, about.

Regardless of what Google+ does down the road it isn’t a threat to Twitter. Period.

As I wrote on Google+ a couple of days ago the only threat to Twitter is Twitter itself because of their own incompetence and the constant slapping around of their dwindling developer community.

Hey, like this post? Why not share it with a buddy?

quicksand

Google+ and the aggregation quandary

So it’s been a few days and Google+ (also referred to as G+) is still a hot topic in the tech blogosphere, from those already using the service and those wishing that they had gotten an invite. We’ve already started to see the gamification of G+ as leaderboards of who has the most followers have started to show up; and of course we have had to deal with the Scoble Effect.

One of the other points that has reared its ugly head is the question of how people can start aggregating their content from other services into Google+. It happens on Twitter, Facebook, and just about any network that has an API and lets you auto-post to it. Hit the publish button and within seconds your content can appear on multiple networks with no more thought than blowing your nose; well actually that might take more thought.

At this point Google+ doesn’t have an API for us to access whether it be through things like WordPress plugins or third party clients and as a result G+ isn’t suffering from the same type of non-stop flood of headlines or posts that have already shown up on countless networks. As a result a pretty incredible thing is happening – people are having conversations.

Hey, like this post? Why not share it with a buddy?

confused

Brand Power?

It is inevitable I guess but it seems that every time a discussion about social networks and social media takes place the phrase build your brand invariably comes up. With the launch of Google+ this past week brand once more becomes a talking point especially in regards to the validity of Google’s efforts with G+.

There is no doubt that Google+ has set off a pro and con discussion about this third effort to come up with a viable social network but that isn’t what this post will be discussing, that will come later. Rather I want to visit this concept of individuals as brands, brands that need to be marketed, because this idea of individual brands seems to be a major component of what social media is suppose to be.

First though let’s understand exactly what the word brand, or concept, means. From Wikipedia we get the following:

A brand is the identity of a specific product, service, or business.

The American Marketing Association defines a brand as a “name, term, design, symbol, or any other feature that identifies one seller’s good or service as distinct from those of other sellers. The legal term for brand is trademark. A brand may identify one item, a family of items, or all items of that seller. If used for the firm as a whole, the preferred term is trade name.” [2]

A brand can take many forms, including a name, sign, symbol, color combination or slogan. The word branding began simply as a way to tell one person’s cattle from another by means of a hot iron stamp. The word brand has continued to evolve to encompass identity — it affects the personality of a product, company or service.

Now let’s understand what a person, or individual, means; and again from Wikipedia we get:

Person - In philosophy, the word “person” may refer to various concepts. According to the “naturalist” epistemological tradition, from Descartes through Locke and Hume, the term may designate any human (or non-human) agent which: (1) possesses continuous consciousness over time; and (2) who is therefore capable of framing representations about the world, formulating plans and acting on them.

Individual - An individual is a person or any specific object or thing in a collection. Individuality is the state or quality of being an individual; a person separate from other persons and possessing his or her own needs, goals, and desires. In his statement Cogito ergo sum (“I think therefore I am”), René Descartes posits the notion of the individual subject, distinct from the world around him or her.

At no point does person or individual ever equate to being a brand, just as a brand doesn’t equal being a person or individual. Yet in our modern Internet world we are constantly told, especially when it comes to social media, that we need to protect our brand, that we need to get our brand out there.

Why are we suddenly placing more value on a thing instead of us as a person?

Hey, like this post? Why not share it with a buddy?

Old desk and chair

Sharing a little bit of home office goodness

Old desk and chair

Old desk and chair

The desk you see in the above image was already old and definitely less than pristine condition when I got almost five or six years ago after someone left it behind when they moved out of the apartment building where we live. The chair was one that my wife bought for me from a local second hand store about three years ago now and it has served me well in that time.

But, as with all things there comes a point when you just need to replace the old and broken with something new and with the help of my great wife Kim we went shopping for a new desk and chair the other day. It took a little bit but following my wife’s excellent taste I ended up with a new desk and chair that I am more than happy with.

Hey, like this post? Why not share it with a buddy?

man-pulling-hair-out-2

Lessons learned … the hard way

  • Category: Opinion
  • .
  • Comments are off for this post
  • .
  • Posted 725 days ago

I have been using WordPress for a long time and over a number of different blogs, some still running and others that have fallen by the wayside, and in the process I have installed a great number of themes and never had much of a problem.

Until last night.

On one of my other blogs I wanted to find a more suitable theme and found one through the theme repository on WordPress that looked to hold a lot of promise. So I used the theme page section of the blog’s admin section to grab a copy and install it.

Once installed, and without much further thought I activated the theme and headed to the option page for the theme to see what tweaking I could do to it that would bring it more in line with what I wanted.

I will admit that the theme has a nice setup when it comes to the option and after I changed a couple of options in one section I hit the save changes buttons and that is when everything fell apart.

The moment I hit the save button I was displayed the 404 page instead of the theme option page and nothing I did would return me to the Admin section of the blog. It was like the Admin part of the blog had totally disappeared but I could see after FTPing into the site that the wp-admin folder and files were all there. I couldn’t even get to any of the Admin pages by using a direct URL – I was screwed.

My next option was to try the supposedly reliable fallback of renaming the theme folder that was causing the problem but that didn’t work. My next step was to get my hands dirty and get into the database settings for the blog and change the various theme settings however once again it didn’t help.

As a last resort I was left with having to email my host and good friend and see if he could get his data center people to restore the site from backup and thanks to quick work from him and the data center the blog was back to normal, minus one post, in under an hour.

So what are the lessons learned you ask?

Well first off regardless of where you get your WordPress themes don’t trust them. Sure, I have never had a problem before this with themes I have installed from reputable sites; but never assume that that you will not have problems, even though my experience last night might have been one of the worst you could experience.

We have gotten so use to the themes we download, install, tweak, and use being reliable and well designed; and as a result we get lazy which leads into the second lesson.

Backups!

Not just once in a while but have a set backup plan for your blog(s) and live by it faithfully.

I was lucky in that my host does daily backups and was available immediately even though it was late at night. In very short order he was able to get the site restore queued up and finished in under an hour; but you can’t always rely on your host being more than an automated reply to a support ticket that is probably mixed in with hundreds of other support tickets.

Of course how often you do these backups depends on how busy your blog is but at a very minimum you should be doing a weekly backup of both the database and the blog files. You might lose a few posts but at least you won’t lose everything and should anything go really wrong as it did with me you can be back up and running in very short order.

Like I said – lessons learned.

 

Hey, like this post? Why not share it with a buddy?

Are you a blogger that doesn’t use StumbleUpon? Very Big Mistake!

  • Category: Opinion
  • .
  • Comments are off for this post
  • .
  • Posted 732 days ago

I don’t very often talk about numbers when it comes to my sites, mainly because like the majority of bloggers they aren’t anything to write home about. Also like the majority of bloggers out there I make as much use of social media type buttons to help spread the word about my posts; and again, like most of you, they help a little bit.

However, in light of recent events this past week I have come to one firm conclusion. Any blogger that doesn’t include StumbleUpon as an integral part of their social media outreach they are making a huge mistake.

How big of a mistake?

Well take the following graphic of my basic stats for the month of June to date. That huge hockey stick you see there in the graph .. that’s a StumbleUpon run on one of my posts.

June stats to date

June stats to date for WinExtra - click for larger image

But here’s the pretty incredible part – the post that sparked this run is over a year old, and it isn’t the only post on WinExtra that has had the same loving from StumbleUpon.

None of the other social media related mediums like Twitter or even Facebook come close to producing the kind of traffic that StumbleUpon has. Sure Twitter and Facebook might, and I say might, bring you a surge of traffic during the first couple of hours of your post hitting the web; but the beautiful thing about StumbleUpon is that it really seems to love the long tail.

Not only does StumbleUpon love the long tail but you can have it keep coming back again and again with whole new runs. I have had this happen with a couple of other post where I will get a good solid run and then a couple of months later it will happen all over again.

Of course, as with all the other social media outlets, you have to be careful and not flood StumbleUpon with pointless content, and it is always better if someone else “stumbles” your posts but as long as you are judicious and also spend time stumbling other really good posts from other site StumbleUpon will reward you.

Personally if I had to pick just one of the social media call to action buttons I would have to go with StumbleUpon because as you can see when the StumbleUpon loving starts it can be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Oh and this newest run .. while it has slowed down somewhat today it is still going, now on its fifth day.

Hey, like this post? Why not share it with a buddy?

So, Blippy is no more. Well color me surprised

  • Category: Opinion, Technology
  • .
  • Comments are off for this post
  • .
  • Posted 762 days ago

I just finished reading a long winded post over at TechCrunch about the waving good-bye to Blippy – the service that let you share your purchases with anyone who cared.

Things eventually quieted down as they are wont to do in media hype land. And then we kind of stopped writing about it, caught up in the hockey stick growth of Groupon and Facebook and Quora. We stopped writing about it so much so that we missed the fact that it pivoted from a purchase sharing site to a user reviews site, starting with the introduction of user reviews on July 23rd 2010 and then moving of the platform fully on to reviews by October of the same year.

“One of the reasons we switched to reviews was to increase user engagement, but that hasn’t really increased either, “ Kumar told me resigned, revealing that Blippy has 100K registered users and that 30% have shared a purchase — Numbers that are not spectacular. The service never had a clear business model, just an attitude of “get user adoption and we’ll figure it out later.” But later never came.

What did come was the sense (and the whispers and the TechCrunch tips) that Blippy was over and that it was time to move on. For co-founder Philip Kaplan this meant stepping down as CEO to go make a bunch of silly iPhone apps at the end of March, telling PE Hub’s Connie Loizos that Blippy was “doing better than most people could do … But it hasn’t, like, exploded into something huge yet.” Which basically meant that traffic had leveled off. And the loss of its figurehead left many, ourselves included, concerned about the service’s future.

Well the truth is it doesn’t have much of one.

Well gee, I seem to recall suggesting at one point that this had to be one of the stupidest ideas (at the time) and regardless of how many millions were poured into it there was no way that Blippy would succeed.

I’m sorry but there is nothing interesting or fun about this idea. Just as it is nobody’s business as to what goes on in my bedroom, my purchasing habits are just as private and personal. The idea that wrapping it up in a bunch of social media mumbo-jumbo makes sharing that kind of information any better is fundamentally screwed.

Blippy is currently in private beta and this is one person who thinks it should stay there or be prematurely thrown into the deadpool.

Chalk one up for the cranky guy.

Hey, like this post? Why not share it with a buddy?

← Newer entries
Older entries →

Follow Me On ……

Mail Google+ PayPal RSS

Advertising

Post Categories

Advertising