The Technology You Need to Know

by Sherry Heyl

When I was 16 my dad and brother re-built a 1980 Mustang for me which had a 302 boss engine in it. To this day I do not know exactly what that means in technical terms. What I know was that the benefit of that engine was that I could outrun most cars on the road. My dad claimed that the reason I needed such a fast engine was so that I could quickly get myself out of trouble. The downside was that I could literally watch the needle on my gas gauge drop to empty.

As a new car owner I had to know what a transmission did, how to take care of the engine as far as when to take it in for an oil change, when to get the tires rotated, and so forth. Although many of us are not mechanics, we do know enough about cars to be able to make wise purchasing decisions and to care for our purchase.

The same needs to be true about the technology we use. I often hear people suggest that we focus less on the technical aspects and more on the benefits of the technology. Although I agree, I do feel that there are a few key technical "parts" that are important for everyone to understand before they get behind the driving wheel of online communications. Just like knowing when to add gas, what kind of gasoline to choose, when you need to bring your car in for maintenance, and the best way to get the most out of your driving experience requires some basic knowledge of mechanics, knowing what makes social media work and how to use it most efficiently to enhance online communications requires some basic technical knowledge such as;

RSS – (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds contain information from frequently updated websites that can be subscribed to using a Feed Reader or RSS Aggregator.

Tags – Tags are a way to categorize content within social media platforms. They are freely chosen keywords that link content to other communities or content that share the same tag.

Syndication - One of the first steps to optimizing your website for social media is by syndicating your web content. Anything on your site that changes, from a blog or a press room, to events, to service updates can and should be syndicated.

Online content is syndicated through RSS (Really Simple Syndication). There are a number of ways that you can add an RSS feed to your site. The easiest ways are to simply use a blog platform such as Word Press or Blogger for your content.

However RSS is basically a type of XML code and Metadata. For more technical specifications you can visit the IBM Developer’s site at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/w-rss.html


Aggregators
RSS feeds are usually received by feed aggregator, such as Google blog reader or Bloglines. However a site can be optimized so that it can aggregate content from other sources, such as media sharing sites, collaboration wikis, or partner or news sites.

A more advanced web design can enable the users to customize their web experience as well as create a brand online community complete with reviews, wikis, and social networks.



Social Networks – The most well known online social networks are MySpace, Facebook, Orkut and so forth. However there are several niche social networking sites. Although these sites many not have the critical mass as the more popular ones, they do have a very focused interest group.

Individual blogs are actually loosely connected social networks in that they read and respond to individual blogs that are related to their mutual interests.

Social Bookmarking – Social Bookmarks are a way users can store unique links to a shared server. The advantages to social bookmarking include being able to access your links from any computer that is connected to the Internet, the ability to easily share content with your social network and the ability to discover other related content.

Some of the more well known social bookmarking sites are:

•    Del.icio.us – User centric bookmarking and social discovery
•    Digg – “wisdom of the crowds” source for popular news
•    Stumbleupon – Web site rating and social discovery based on past browsing history of the network   

Top Social Bookmarking Sites
del.icio.us– One of the first social bookmarking sites to spark the world’s attention is still a favorite.

digg.com– Digg has several categories for the 8.7 million visitors it gets monthly to browse through to find the information and statistics they need quickly. Digg also allows its members to post to their blog through this site when a visitor wants to leave a link to a webpage or article on their blog.

fark.com– With categories such as sports, politics, music, and business on the main page, this site allows users to browse others bookmarked sites by topic to help you easily find what you are looking for.

ma.gnolia.com– The ease of use makes this smaller site attractive. Ma.gnolia.com allows the user to become familiar with the whole social bookmarking process making it a great site to start with if you are new to social bookmarking.

mybloglog.com– Combining social bookmarking and blogging into a social networking package makes this site a great place to promote your pages while finding other sites that may interest you.

reddit.com– users can view what’s new or what’s hot at the moment as well as see the weekly stats on this social bookmarking site.

stumbleupon.com– A relatively new site that combines myspace and social bookmarking where users can make multiple pages on any topic.
However many, many more are popping up everyday.

You can encourage your audience to bookmark and share the content on your site simply by including a widget such as Add This:

Social Calendars – Social Calendars allow people to post events to a public calendar, invite friends, post and view comments, and RSVP.

Examples include:
http://eventful.com/
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/

Allow people to post events to a public calendar, invite friends, and see comments and RSVPs about such events.

A recent event, Barcamp Atlanta, was posted on Upcoming. You can visit http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/227647/ to see some of the people who attended, comments, and Flickr photos from that event.

Many of these calendars also allow the community to request a specific event to come to their city.

Microblogging
A form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually 140 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. These messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging, email, MP3 or the web.
Source: Wikipedia
Twitter is the most common microblgging platform, but many competitors are starting to show up including:
Plurk
Jaiku
Pownce
Hictu
Mobile Marketing
InfoTrends/CAP Ventures projects that worldwide camera phone shipments will grow to over 860 million units in 2009.

By 2009, camera phones are expected to account for 89% of all mobile phone handsets shipped.

MediaSharing
Media sharing communities such as;

Photos – Flickr, Photobucket
Videos – YouTube, Blip.tv
Podcasting – Podcast Alley, Odeo, iTunes


are set up so that you can have your content aggregated into the relevant online communities as well as aggregated onto your website. For example, you can have photos in your Flickr account that also go to your site as well as into relevant groups.


Widget
Widgets are chunks of code (DHTML, JavaScript, or Adobe Flash) that can easily be added to any site. A Branded Widget such as this can add value to the community or user that chooses to include it on their site through an update calendar of events, aggregated news content and more. As each member of a community puts the widget on their site the organizations’ brand is extended.















By understanding these basic tools, communications professionals can make informed decisions about how to manage communications and leverage their investment in the online world for maximum effectiveness.

Comments

[affordable webdesign]

I have the knowledge in social media.But I have no idea about RSS feed.I have never worked with that.

[Sherry Heyl]

RSS, RSS Readers, and Tags are “the math equation” a person needs to learn to go any further in the world of social media. The conversations within the social web are organized and discovered through the use of Tags. A simple definition of a Tag would be to say that tags are keywords, category names, or metadata. In essence, a tag is simply a freely chosen set of textual keywords which link related content together throughout a site, a network, and ever throughout the web.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds contain information from frequently updated websites that can be subscribed to using a RSS Reader (also known as an RSS Aggregator). By subscribing to RSS Feeds instead of email notifications, you can stay up to date on the latest news and other information from the web quickly and easily without visiting each site to check if they have been updated and without creating too much noise in your email inbox.

The feeds go into a single interface (RSS Reader), and can be sorted and scanned through quickly.

[Sydney SEO]

What about Myspace? i did not find this one in your list.

[Sherry Heyl]

MySpace - and Facebook, LinkedIn and so forth are social network/communities, place people join. This post was focused on the technology that people need to know, not networks they need to be in.

When deciding what communities you should be in you need to look at who is there already, your customers, your competitors? MySpace is not for everyone - at all. As as popular as Facebook has become, even Facebook isn't the right place to put a lot of energy for everyone.

But back to the focus of this post, if you should be in Facebook or MySpace, there are certain technologies you need to know to be successful in those spaces.