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The blog WebWorkerDaily posed the question, is the word “social” overused in reference to social web sites? That seemed like an interesting question to comment on, and so I did:
I’ve noticed we humans tire of words quickly and to demonstrate, here is the question, “Is Social So Over?”
I think not.
Web evolution is causing us to evolve and invent language - to create shortcuts to describe sometimes nebulous concepts. Nebulous like computing in the “Cloud” one might punningly say. 
There’s a reason why Eskimos have over 30 words to describe snow. Snow is more important and ever changing in their world - as the web is in ours. They’re probably not so much tired of the word, but have found it not specific enough for many purposes.
A nice short useful word like “social” will be with us for a very long time, I’m guessing. But like Eskimos, we won’t be satisfied just to know there’s snow outside - we’ll want to know the color, texture, granularity, depth and more - and on the web, that the site is a dating site - or a social cause site - or a targeted community site like “a long haul trucker load board community site”.
Yeah, social’s a bit worn and saggy.
But still as good as snow.
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Tattoos are landing on heads at Air New Zealand.
We had a lot of fun working with Air New Zealand while developing their travel site. It’s easy to image why - just check out their recent ad campaign that rented billboard space on people’s heads.
These guys know how to shave and rock.
We have a lot to be thankful for. Besides having a really cool place to work, we have awesome clients. One in particular comes to mind, as they launch their site called APlaceToSayThankYou.com. Here’s wishing you and yours all the best from all of us here at topLingo Development.
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You wouldn’t believe how many times a day we’re asked about the Google search results page. So here’s a quick primer on the 6 key elements of a local search result. 
1. The first section is the search box, which for local searches will contain a reference to city and state or other geographic limiter such as zip code.
2. The second section is the “Sponsored Links” that appears at the top of page. To show up here, you first have to open up a Google AdWords account. Once you’re set up with AdWords, your ad has a chance of being placed here if you’ve bid high enough for the search term and your “Quality Score” assigned by Google is high enough. (Quality Score has to do with click through rates, website quality, reviews, and whatever else Google feels like jamming into their algorithm).
3. The third section is the Local Business Results listing, which shows the top 10 most relevant web sites according to Google’s algorithm. For your business to be considered for placement here, you must first add a free business listing on the Google Maps Local Business Center page and then mail back the confirmation snail mail you recieve.
4. The fourth section is known as the “Organic Listings” section. There have been volumes written and fortunes spent vying for top listings here. First, your site has to be architected with excellent Search Engine Optimization (SEO) fundamentals, must have rich search content, attained a venerable age, be getting lots of good traffic, have the right inbound links, and yada, yada, yada.
5. Section five shows you how competitive your search term is. Google in the example shown determined that 199,000 web pages were relevant to “house cleaning in Irvine California”. That’s more than two for every house and apartment in the city, but still less than a similar search for doctors and plumbers.
6. And finally section six lists additional Sponsored Links. The listing order is again determined by price bid plus quality score.
So there you have it – a primer for deciphering the Google search results page. For more information about this page from Google itself, go here. This introduction is brought to you by topLingo development, delivering over 400 custom web development projects for large and small companies since April of 2001. We create traffic…the good kind™.
As 30 million members already know, LinkedIn is a serious social networking site for the business crowd. According to Quantcast, it gets about 5.5 million unique visitors a month. Barack Obama’s a member. So’s John McCain.
Members should check out today’s launch of Apps for LinkedIn. Apps is definitely the lime in LinkedIn’s coconut and includes 9 well selected applications in this first release:
Never one to pass up a free lime, topLingo principal Mike Glezos wasted no time hitting the download buttons. He added the blog and presentation apps, which LinkedIn members can see here.
Check out more about LinkedIn Apps here.
According to this chart on TechCrunch’s CrunchBase, the number of unique visitors to topLingo has tripled, to about 3,000 per month. We think that’s a little amazing – especially this year – and we’re pretty stoked and thankful to all of you for that!
Want more visitors? Ask us. We create traffic…the good kind™.
Recently we talked about visual searching with SearchMe.com. Now they’ve added a MUSIC tab. A search for “Corinne Bailey Rae” returned this:
One cool thing is you get to listen to the full songs for free, right from the search results screen. And with the Stacks feature, you can save results for later listening. Want to buy something? SearchMe links to iTunes, Amazon and eBay.
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Google, MSN, Yahoo take notice. A lot of people will love this visual way to search.
If you go to SearchMe.com and enter a search term like “food” or “chocolate” or “topLingo” you’ll get a screen like this:
SearchMe instantly presents relevant categories for the search string. For “topLingo” it presented “web development”, “advertising”, “real estate”, etc.
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Whether you just enter the search term, or refine your search by clicking a category too, what you’ll see next is a very visual results page:
We could be wrong, but we think a lot of people – like artists, photographers, creatives, and the analytically impaired - are going to love this.
Twitter’s been around since 2006, but still somewhat of an enigma to many of us.
For the uninitiated, the one essential thing you need to know about Twitter is this: it’s another way to get you and your company noticed. This is the sex, sizzle, and lure that draws us to it.
Twitter lets you publish and read tiny posts – up to 140 characters in length – from cell phones and computers. Users get to set up simple profiles that are searchable by others. They also get to subscribe to (“follow” in twitter parlance) other bloggers posts. Twitter keeps a running total of how many people you’re “following” and how many are “following” you.
Who’s using it? Forrester Research Senior Analyst Jeremiah Owyang has 12,000+ followers of his “Tweets”. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has over 26,000. There are over 2,000,000 others in this demographic. And in case you’re wondering how to leverage Twitter in the enterprise, check out this post by Ed Kohler about his recent experience at a conference at Best Buy’s corporate headquarters.
Twitter tips for the first time users:
1. Create your profile with the intended audience in mind
2. Make posts that are relevant and interesting to that audience
3. Develop a consistent “voice” and don’t deviate too much from it
Want more? Here’s 35 Twitter Tips from Darren Rouse at ProBlogger. Or Google twitter. I did, and now I seriously think I’m being followed.
We’re a web development company. As you might suspect, we’re dialed into K-W-E-B nonstop. All web, all the time.
So when a new Web 2.0 application hits the net, we’re all over it like yellow on yam. Today, we’re messing with Yammer, a new Twitter-like application targeted at enterprise users who share company email addresses.
So what is it? Where Twitter’s your personal network and answers “what are you doing”, Yammer’s your company network and answers “what are you working on”.
Say, you’re too busy (or inert or cool or what-EVER) to walk over to the next cube or office. Just browse Yammer and you’re all clued in.
Course, the real communication happens between the guitar licks when we get together for a little topLingo jam session. Sometimes we’d rather jam than yam.
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We could be talking about Ellen Page’s quirky character Juno MacGuff, but we’re not. Instead, we’re talking about Google’s new lightweight, fast, and pretty stable browser, Chrome. Currently it’s the fastest browser on the planet – by far. If you’re running a Windows PC and want to see what all the buzz is about, download a beta copy. Then strap yourself in, sit back, and enjoy the ride.
Why Chrome and why now? The ease of downloading and setup, the lure of speed (especially with Google Apps) and the ability to gain firsthand knowledge of something everyone will be talking about for months and years to come. To ease the transition, stored favorites and passwords can instantly be copied in from IE and Firefox. And like most of Google’s “beta” versions, it’s pretty stable.
Longer term, Chrome’s open architecture is bound to germinate a gazillion 3rd party enhancements and provide a viable alternative for business people looking to lower the cost of maintaining their desktops.
Will Microsoft take Chrome lying down? Doubt it. Redmond is sure to challenge Google’s plan for world dominance.
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Podcasts are powerful online marketing tools. Plus, they’re easy to make and similar to - but infinitely better than - gum on your shoe.
Podcasts are just like other audio and video content on the web, but with one big-fat-marketing-jackpot of a difference: People SUBSCRIBE to them. And not just any people. These are people who are really, really interested in learning more and hearing more and thinking more about what you have to say, show or teach.
People watch (or listen to) podcasts everywhere: at home on their PCs, on their iPods at the gym, on their way to Lake Tahoe and walking around Costco.
The ultimately cool and useful thing about podcasts is that – like gum on a shoe – they’re STICKY. Podcast subscribers use personalized readers (RSS aggregators) like Google Reader and iTunes that automatically update them when your new podcast is available. So getting someone to subscribe to yours is like having them add your tv or radio show to their personal cable package.
The first thing to decide is what podcast format is right for you: audio (only) or video. If you have questions about how this might work in your company, give us a call.
And there you have it. So better than gum.
 Lot’s of unbelievibly cool apps have been created with the Google Map API. Here’s one that’s cool AND timely - go to DrivePricing.com and fill out the simple form.
Enter the start and end address, the zipcode where you buy gas and the average MPG of your vehicle.
Whamo, it calculates the gas cost and displays the trip on a Google Map!
Not that anyone’s talking about gas costs these days, but DrivePricing should be called DriveTraffic. What a simple, clever way to get eyeballs to a web site - and sell a boat load of AdSense advertising too.
The only thing that would bum me out about this site is if I found out it was owned by some billionaire oil dude like T. Boone Pickens.
In “Crash Into Me”, Dave Matthews sings, “Hike up your skirt a little more and show the world to me.” We can dig where Dave’s coming from, but are pretty legs enough to get site visitors coming back in 2008? Sure. Maybe. Well. Hmmm.
Put into historical perspective, here’s a brief timeline of the web we live in:
1998:
Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn” topped the charts. Web sites that didn’t crash and that loaded the same day were hot.
2002:
Justin Timberlake’s “Justified” was a hit. Web sites that looked nice got plenty of hits too.
2008:
Pretty isn’t enough. Sites that rule have found ways to be both pretty AND social.
The list of social web technologies grows daily and encompasses such things as user profiles (the bigger, fatter, more preference laden the better), forums, polls, reviews, ratings, quizzes, wikis, blogs, webinars, social graph exchanges, widgets/gadgets, chats, ad infinitum.
So what’s a “social” web site? It’s about as easy to define as what’s “pretty”. Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn are sites that often come to mind. Here are some lesser known sites that exploit the social aspect of the web very effectively:
Lance Armstrong’s livestrong.com - This site engages visitors in creative ways, giving them plenty of reasons to register and keep coming back. There are how to videos, forums, support groups, food journals, challenges, and featured experts that yap and give links to their blogs. If you’re into health and fitness, Lance makes this site hard to resist.
Threadless.com - Threadless entices consumers and designers with a format of show it, critique it, vote it, buy it, model it. Kind of American Idol meets custom t-shirts online.
Is social networking right for your site? Good question and one that only you ultimately can answer. If you’d like to brainstorm with successful web developers, we invite you to contact us. When you get to the “comments” part of the form, just type in “Takes More than Pretty Legs”. We’ll know what you mean.
Got divisions around the globe? Want to Internationalize and Localize your web presence to other countries and languages? Maybe you’re just looking to address a non-English speaking audience right here in the U.S.
Here are eleven things to consider:
- Language/country combinations – which ones will you support?
- Accurate translations – think about building a company process that ensures accurate and eloquent translations for the populations you’re targeting.
Here’s an example of what you don’t want: “Localization support in .Net Framework 2.0 become much more easier and brings fun during localization process.” Ironically, this was pulled from a site about building multi-language sites. Yikes!!
- Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) – Determine the fonts you’ll need to accommodate in your CSS. For example, most Latin based languages require special characters (Spanish, German, French, etc.) ; Chinese and Japanese require symbol support, and Arabic is written right to left.
- Design Standards – Corporate site design templates should anticipate content size differences. Size disparity can be significant from language to language.
- Video, Audio, Image Content – country/language specific versions are often required. Develop this content with an eye towards localization when possible.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – country/language specific sites should be tagged with localized meta data, titles, images, links, video, etc.
- Content Management Systems (CMS) - make sure your CMS supports all the languages you’ll be maintaining and that user authorizations can be assigned and managed by country if necessary.
- Ecommerce Solutions – does your shopping cart offer the necessary languages and currencies for product browsing and checkout? Can product descriptions be maintained in different languages and assigned to the appropriate countries?
- Site Navigation – can navigation text be easily customized by country/language?
- Store Locators – will your U.S. solution support users in other countries? Will the integrated map still work overseas?
- Site and Product Search – will search solutions still work for non-English sites?
The list above should get you started down the right path. More questions? Contact topLingo…
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