Posted by randfish

First off, I hope everyone among our US (and expat) readers had a great holiday weekend, filled with tryptophan and football (I know mine was). Second, I'm very excited to announce that SEOmoz PRO is launching our first ever webinar on Thursday Dec. 10th at 11am Pacific (2pm Eastern, 7pm London/UK). We've heard from a number of our members that they'd like to do some live reviewing of strategies and recommendations and get questions tackled in this format. I'll be running the webinar personally, but I haven't quite decided on a topic, and that's one thing I need your help with.

Below is an embedded Google form (they're pretty spiffy) with three short questions. We'll use your feedback to help determine the content and format for the webinar, as well as gauge interest level.

We'll have another blog post in the next few days announcing details (based on your requests + votes), as well as an email to all PRO members with a registration link.

Of course, if you have anything to add in the comments or any recommendations, we'd love to hear from you there, too. If this webinar goes well, we're certainly planning to make it a monthly event for PRO members, and possibly offer some free webinars to the entire community. A future subject that folks have been asking about is training on the SEOmoz toolset - that's something we want to do, but we have some changes + additions coming in January, so we'll get those released first, then follow up.

Thanks for your feedback and happy hol/> [...]

Sat Nov 28, 2009 15:20 pm

The tools we use for social media have empowered us to be steady-flow commentators. Watch Twitter or Facebook during any event, and you’ll see our added commentary rolling along in time with the experience. At times, such as the US Presidential election, it was exciting to feel that experience, of everyone participating all across the world in an event. There are many more times where it feels like that.

In blog comments, on Twitter, all over Facebook, Yelp, YouTube, and several other sites, we’ve been groomed to give our opinion. We spit it out everywhere. We share, rate, criticize, deride, praise, and everything in between. Forrester’s Ladder graphic suggests that critics are second on the content ladder, just below creators.

But if you look at the ecosystem, and what we’ve built, are we “starting conversations” or are we inviting commentary? And what’s the difference? To me, one is an exchange of knowledge, whereas the other is more of an end product. Make sense? Commenting and giving opinions becomes an “object” or “artifact” or “creation” of its own. See where I’m going?

So the question becomes: if we’ve built all these tools, these comment buttons, these like buttons, these “share and add notes” buttons, how is this impacting our interactions and our communication? Now that we’ve gone from not having a voice to having tools to give our opinion about everything, how does this change us? How does it impact how we interact with people? What does it mean to the larger ecosystem?

Photo credit Hashmil

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Thu Nov 12, 2009 20:05 pm

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Don't Count Out Facebook as a Competitor to Google

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In case you were wondering, Facebook is pretty popular. Google is of course the undisputed king of search market share, but Facebook has the edge in some areas. Social media is the obvious area.  While Google is hoping to make some serious headway here with Buzz, Facebook is far and away the dominant being in the world of social networks.

Compete shared some data with us that emphasizes just how big Facebook is, and just how seriously it should be taken. If these stats from Facebook weren't enough for you, Compete points out that Facebook has surpassed Yahoo as the #2 site online in the U.S. in terms of unique visitors, just under Google.

In December, according to Compete, Facebook's unique visitors in the U.S. had increased by over 121%. That's pretty incredible, because I seem to recall Facebook being pretty popular in late 2008 too.

In terms of social media sites, none of the others even come close in the U.S. - not even the world's second largest search engine, YouTube: 

So Facebook is already bigger than the second largest search engine. Add to that, the fact that search on Facebook itself is rising. According to comScore, Fac/> [...]

Tue Feb 16, 2010 14:00 pm

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YouTube Gets Short(er) Links, Too

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Almost in the immediate wake of Google's announcing short URLs (goo.gl) and Facebook experimenting with fb.me links, YouTube has made a gesture toward shorter web addresses, as well.

Today, the video site announced it's launching youtu.be links. They're not as short as the super-brief URLs users might see from Bit.ly or is.gd because each one contains a unique ID for the video it links to. But this extra bit of information makes the URLs more useful for developers, too.

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While the resulting URLs aren't significantly shorter than a regular YouTube link, users will have the added benefit of knowing exactly what kind of content they're being redirected to, which isn't always the case with many shortened URLs.

Also, with the video ID as part of the short URL, writes YouTube engineering manager Vijay Karunamurthy, "developers can do interesting things like show you thumbnails, embed the video directly or track how a video is spreading in real time."

End users can shorten links manually simply by putting the video ID (the part of the YouTube URL that comes after the equals sign and before the ampersand, if there is one) after http://youtu.be/. For example, "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1acVM7_rWw4" is the regular URL of an interview we did over the summer with a great startup advisor in Boulder, CO. The short version of that link would /> [...]

Mon Dec 21, 2009 21:20 pm

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