Recently a debate has been sparked about the impact of personalized filtering algorithms on the search results different individuals will get from seemingly universal search engines such as Google, Bing etc. The argument made is that these personalized algorithms learn from our online search behaviour and will increasingly modify results to better cater to our preferences, significantly changing overall search results per individual. If all search engines do this, the argument goes, then in the end, all of us are each trapped in a particular information bubble determined by what the filter algorithms perceive as our preferences. What if we add the effects of social and local to those of personalized algorithms to search? Read more…
I recently visited the IDC Cloud Conference in Amsterdam to get an overview of some of the major trends in cloud computing and it’s impact on enterprise IT. What is cloudcomputing? What impact does it have on my organization, processes and products? What do Amazon S3, Google Apps, Salesforce.com, Box.net, Microsoft 365, Sharepoint, Shopify and LinkedIn have in common? What are Saas, Paas? Iaas? Multi Tennant server environments? Virtualization? Why should I care? What risks and opportunities are involved? In the article below you will find some answers.
New economic opportunities are often associated with technological innovation and market deregulation, at least in the last few decades. But how does one compete in these markets without large funds or unique technological capabilities, as most small business owners must? Understanding the fundamental risks and opportunities beneath market deregulatory models and accessing lowcost technological means such as open source software and social media, could be the start of your own unique answer to those questions. Learn more…
Are social media revolutionary engines? Are the Egyptian protests a Facebook Revolution? Is this why the internet was shut down in Egypt? I decided to investigate this claim by the mass media and gather some statistics on social media usage by Egyptians on the topic of the protests from within Egypt in the last week.
Why limit your use of Skype to the time you spend behind your PC? With these simple steps you can enjoy access to your contactlists, calls and chat on your desktop phone and mobile with your PC turned off. If you use Skype for business networking, you’ll find some suggestions as well. Learn more…
Developing a website or service that enables web 2.0 social interactions and caters to mobile devices and other preferences of your audience can be either difficult or easy. Before you start off on a development rampage it is probably smart to make a few strategic choices that can save you time and money in the long run. These are some of them.
Professionals create a lot of specialized information that is locked within the organization and inaccesible to others. This could be much more of an asset then is currently the case for many organizations. Some suggestions and practical guidelines on unlocking the power of this knowledge for commercial purposes.
Is Mark Zuckerberg an evil genius? Is Facebook the defining entity of our times? There has been much talk about “The Facebook Generation” and the evil mastermind behind it. If the movie “The Social Network” is a true story then we can all rest easy: Facebook was just a mediocre idea executed to perfection and backed by the right people at the right time and initiated by a driven perfectionist.
Skype 5.0 is out of Beta and offers some great new functionality to manage your contacts, make (video) conference calls, group chats and keep abreast of your friend’s activity on Facebook. Where the Beta seemed somewhat unstable, the full version works like a charm. Learn more…
New Digg keeps annoying. Where we earlier reported they deleted your content with the transition to new Digg, we now find them auto-posting in your name. Determining for you which stories you Digg.
Microsoft seems to be opening up to third party Social Media in a big way. With Outlook 2010 you can integrate Social Media account information for your contacts in new and exciting ways. When you open an email for example social media account info associated with the sender is displayed and you can befriend them straight from Outlook.This functionality is even backwards compatible with Outlook 2003 and 2007.
In order to activate this functionality for your Outlook installation you have to do 2 things…
You probably have a Skype subscription or use some other VoiP (Voice Over IP) service. Now you have another alternative:Google Voice For GMail and Google Chat!It may very well be that this step by Google is a sign that the VoiP market for consumers is now maturing and will replace the landline and mobile infrastructures in the next few years. More cheap VoiP devices will be developed and cost of usage may be lowered even more dramatically. This will give home users and small businesses similar opportunities as have been around in the corporate market for years.Is it time to ditch your landline? Maybe (not). Learn more…
The problem with Google Wave is not so much on the technological side as it is in the distribution model.This month Google said it will drop the experimental service Google Wave.”Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked,” said Google senior vice president Urs Holzle in a blog post.Clearly Google Wave offers a promising combination of technologies, allowing you to chat, share, bookmark and collaborate in all kinds of other ways in a single stream of activity.Had Google taken a more open approach to the product’s introduction with many more third party plugins and options, more along the lines of Twitter’s business model, I think the product might have been a success.
Yoono offers some great tools to stay upto date and know what your friends are upto on several social sites and IM’s. It also gives you a powerful capability to multi-post updates to these platforms. There is a desktop app, a browser addon and an IPhone app available. It’s a free service so give it a try.
Digg have recently updated their site with some great new functionality, making it a more complete platform. All of this is great ofcourse but unfortunately it seems they have discontinued the Diggs/History of Digg members.
With so many Social Media out there: create accounts for the right reasons. These twelve ultra short reviews give you the main capabilities and drawbacks of each site in a few sentences each and links to an instant network and relevant tools.Part III in a series.
With so many Social Media out there: create accounts for the right reasons. These twelve ultra short reviews give you the main capabilities and drawbacks of each site in a few sentences each and links to an instant network and relevant tools.
In this post you’ll find a dozen very short reviews of Social Media networks and tools: their advantages over other networks and capabilities that you may be looking for. You can immediately see an example of this by following the links in each review. If you are looking for an instant network on each site: feel free to join our groups on each of them to find other Social Media Explorers.
Having a company blog makes a lot of sense. Wordpress.com offers a lot of value for a free blogging service but as soon as you need any functionality beyond the considerable free resources to give your blog some professional appeal, you have to pay a fee or there are limitations in place.Installing Wordpress.org is a simple process which only takes a few minutes. Adding functionality and customizing can be quite time-consuming. There are some implications to choices you make during the process which you may not anticipate. This blog could be of help to you to make the right decision between Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org.
Networking is supposed to be fun but with the growing number of Social Networks and profiles we have to keep up to date, the commercialization of platforms and the huge amounts of spam and other uninteresting or even damaging crap we are bombarded with: is it still…fun?
By taking control of our online data and having access to it in a single place we could:
Work more effectively and more organized
See the true commercial potential of our network and benefit from it
Have more fun networking because we have more time to socialize instead of agonize
Since we all spend so much time using and enjoying Social Media, I would like to give those of you that haven’t seen it yet a tip: www.flock.com has enhanced it’s browser for optimum social media usage.
Blogging can be a very fulfilling activity: but what’s the point of laughing out loud at our own wit when no one else reads our posts? The sad reality of many blogs is that they are not read at all. So much for your hard work…
Now SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is an industry for a reason: it’s too boring and complicated for anyone to be interested in pursuing it seriously except SEO experts and nerds. So let’s look for a quick and easy fix for mere mortals!
Trying to combine Business and Social Media can feel like a slippery slide as mixing friendship and business holds some risks: nobody wants to risk a friendship for a crappy product and nobody wants to offend their friends by saying no to them. So: what if we could reduce this risk? What would it take to make this risk into a negligable calculated risk? Basically it all comes down to ballistics…
Widgets can be an excellent way to create some attention online for yourself, your site, your products or your services. Even if you’re not a skilled programmer or otherwise gifted nerd or guru of the web, widgets can help you get your message across because they are spread by others creating a viral distribution. But where can you find easy and effective tools to create and distribute them? Here are some examples we made with a great service that could have you create effective widgets in no time at all. Not inspired? Check out the hundreds of widgets on our free network…
Internet in general and Social Media in particular hold the promise of a sense of frictionless and effortless movement through a world without obstacles between you and your success: but are they? Here are some easy shortcuts to avoid financial, social and technological obstacles and turn them to your advantage.
Facebook’s versatile micro-blogging service FriendFeed and Twitter’s trendsetting service have put micro-blogging in the forefront of the Titanic struggle for domination of the internet by some of the largest Social Media sites. But what does Google bring to the table when it comes to Micro-Blogging? Buzz…
With these five alternatives you can prevent the cost of your Social Media usage to spiral out of control. Wether you are looking for ways to create a powerful online presence that you host yourself, are interested in making new business friends or are looking for ways to monetize your online presence: this blogpost offers a number of viable alternatives to suit your needs.
A network for professional networkers and networking professionals can’t go without tools and opportunities to utilize these tools both to make the experience of Social Media more effective and more pleasurable and to do business on a level that suits your needs. These are three such opportunities revolving around tools that unite business and social media.
The surprisingly intricate Science of The Retweet may give you some new ideas on how to utilize Twitter and Twitter search as a resource for your business.Find out about the best URL shorteners, keywords and other statistics on the best ways to attract attention with your tweets and how you can influence the likelyhood that you are being retweeted.
Managing Your Presence On Many Social Media: A Problem? Not at All!
Lately I have seen messages of people on all kinds of networks saying they can’t manage their presence on all those networks anymore and are leaving some of them because they simply can’t manage it anymore.You can save a lot of time networking if you do it a certain way: the easy way!
Five tools to save time networking while maintaining an effective presence on a large number of Social Media.
What can ordinary small business people learn about the adoption of social media for business purposes from trends in the social media markets such as the recent purchase of FriendFeed by Facebook and the rise of Twitter?
The HOB.Biz now has it’s own Online Office Collaboration Space where you can edit and share many kinds of documents and even websites. All of these capabilities are fully integrated with MS Office environment and you can edit and store the documents from within MS Word, Excel etc. It’s called The HOB Networker PRO Silver Edition and is part of a series of solutions for professional networkers as well as networking professionals.
Our “Instant Network” principle might be of significance to your own networking efforts:
The principle is best encaptured in the My Social Media page.
On this page you can choose an activity or subject on the basis of which you can make a selection in a large number of internet clubs and social media which you can log into directly.
But that’s not all: each of the social media has (or will have) a companion Social Media Club in The HOB.Biz as well as The House Of Business or The HOB.Biz facilities on the network itself.
This not only means that we have about twice as many members: it also makes it excessively easy to find a network of people you know wherever you go and instantly be in the know about how to best use and benefit from networks, social media and internet-clubs,and other insider information!
In business school one of the most iconic examples of the failure of a technologically superior product at the hand of a technologically inferior product cited is that of the Philips Video 2000 facing Sony’s VHS system. The reason cited: that Sony was smart enough to make sure thousands of video’s were available for it’s inferior system where Philips paid less attention to distribution and more to technological development. Consequently the VHS system reigned for a decade and the Video 2000 withered away. The one system starts from a top down engineer’s mindset, the other from a bottom up user interest approach. Similarly social media generate huge amounts of content: to each his own, where websites who don’t cater for user interaction have less content and fail to cater to each individual’s taste.
At The HOB we are always innovating: integrating new ways to leverage Social Media for Business, adding new applications and amassing a vast amount of business know how with an excellent group of professionals and business owners. Learn more…
Every sales person could tell you that a client gives of signals and that those who know how to play into them could sell a refrigerator to an eskimo. But: do you really want to sell fridges to eskimos? Wouldn’t you rather control which precise audiences you target? A well defined target audience could be the solid basis of your organization’s success. But it doesn’t stop there…What about Social Media?
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