5 Books and 55 minute of your time will provide you with Insight, Improvement, Inspiration, Influence, and Intelligence!

Prior to joining SEP, I traveled a great deal and always found time to read while on the road. I enjoy reading books on history, politics and autobiographies however the ones having had the greatest impact on me were short, simple and to the point. Each book had either been given to me by a Senior Executive or recommended by a mentor.

Social media is changing and evolving. In essence, social media sites like the search engines of 8-9 years ago, are growing up. They’re learning from their mistakes, and are constantly improving.

Source: NWCreation.net

Of course, this constant evolution means that users of social media must too change and adapt to the fluid landscape.

For anyone hoping to get their submissions seen by the masses on various social media, this means continuously expanding your network of friends.

3 Reasons to Constantly Build Out Your Base of Friends:
In particular, there are 3 reasons to continuously build out friends in various social media:

Here it’s Friday, the weekend is at the door and you know what I’m thinking?

Now I can get some stuff done without all the stress…

That’s the weekend I’m looking forward to.

I want to read up, and search about, AIRWeb 2008 because honestly an "International Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web" sounds just like my thing.

I want to revisit Word Order in phrase important? to parse some things Orion said there.

I want to spend some more time with Niall Kennedy’s proof-of-concept post sniff browser history for improved user experience.

So now you know!

source: pcweenies.org

In my last post covering the evolution of Linkedin, I talked about a whole slew of nifty features that are part of Linkedin 2.0. The Linkedin team has been working hard, working behind the scenes in bringing new functionality to the way you and I use Linkedin. The latest of these subtle features is the ability to share industry news with your colleagues among others. Now, that’s what I call internal social media for the office!

What is ‘Authority’ with respect to SEO?

The answer may surprise you!

Here’s what most SEOs can say with utmost confidence; we know that the concept of ‘authority’ is an important one to rankings and traffic from organic search.

Its comical though, perhaps even sad. Over time, “Authority” has come to mean something completely different to Google, than it does to SEOs. This is no one’s fault … just a condition created by imperfect information, and the need to suffice.

The Engines’ Definition of Authority:
To Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, et al, links are the consequence of being an authority, they do not make you an authority.

Is social media in danger of becoming more about the social than the media?

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about how social media had an increased propensity towards group think due (unintentionally) to it’s design. This got me thinking, how could the design of social media sites change in order to minimize this risk?

So what if I throw a little love at my friends?

It’s no big deal. Except if everybody is voting for their friends and not for the content then the quality of content will diminish. It’s inevitable. And there is no way to escape it. It’s the false positive effect.

Def’n ‘Addiction Marketing’ - Pronunciation [uh-dik-shuhn mahr-ki-ting]:
A strategy used by companies [read Digg], whereby a product or drug [read front page appearances] with near instant addictive properties is given away free or very inexpensively on the first few ocassions until the victim is addicted. Prices [read level of difficulty] are then raised, demand having been secured.

I’ll give credit for this terminology to Mike Myatt who claims to have coined this term a number of years ago.

Image courtesy: University of Sydney Australia

Credit: Pixel Addict

Is Facebook Getting Too Close to Our Interests?

Recently, when logging into my Facebook profile, I was greeted with a very targeted ad that got me thinking - Can Facebook read my mind? The ad in question was along the left sidebar, and was for Hostgator, a popular shared hosting company. What’s rather astounding is that this ad was displayed on my profile, which has little reference to the nature of my job, and my interests as webmaster, seo, or social media specialist.

Credit: Geek and Poke

For the visually impaired: a cartoon with 3 people is shown, depicted two friends wanting to pick up the 3rd friend.

Friends: "Hi, we’re about to drink a beer in a bar. Do you wanna come with us?"

Friend: "I have thousands of unanswered emails, I have not Twittered today, I have to write my more than thousand Facebook friends, I have to join Pownce, I haven’t blogged since… I have no time to drink a beer in a bar. I’m busy enough being social."

Friends walk away.