One of the main steps to become a successful online publisher is to build a strong online identity. The more you establish yourself as a reliable source of information, the more the people will seek you for help and visit your site. Photo credit: Robin Good In this short video tutorial, Robin Good explains how to build a strong online identity. Is it all about a fancy name or writing good content? No. What really matters is your passion and desire to share your knowledge and explore. And don\'t be afraid to get your hands dirty, it\'s part of the game. Want to know how to build a strong online identity while increasing your credibility and reputation online? Here is a short video from Robin (with a full English text transcription) sharing with you some simple advice: Intro by Daniele Bazzano Building A Strong Online Identity Duration: 6\' Full English Text Transcription Hi guys this is Robin Good for MasterNewMedia, answering your key questions received from my email inbox at Robin.Good(at)masternewmedia.org, and focusing mostly on professional online publishing and related topics. This time I\'ve got an interesting request from you: "Let\'s say I want to create a strong online identity. How do I do that? Is it all about having a fancy name like yours? Is it so?" That\'s a great question I think. The Identity Is Not A Name Let\'s re-focus it. Topic is: Online identity. How do you build one. Is it about the name? Is it about the content? Is it about the overall personality, impression, feeling that you give out? It\'s probably about all of these things. An online identity is not so much built by thinking up a fancy, memorable name, that reflects who you are, and what you\'re trying to do, but it can be enabled also by that. In fact, I generally suggest people who are opening a new blog, not to start with their name. because the blog name is quite important and nobody is going to search for your name outside of your own friends. If your focus is in video publishing, call your blog "Video Publishing - by Jerry O\'Hara", but put video publishing as the main thing there because it\'s the topic you\'re talking about. Develop Your Identity Along The Way Many times people are trying to built an online identity thinking that this is something that they can strategize from the very beginning. I don\'t think this is the case, and it wasn\'t the case with me. MasterNewMedia was out there before Robin Good existed for a long time. Until I realized I wanted to have and identity, that the person behind MasterNewMedia was for many people ore important than the MasterNewMedia brand, realizing that MasterNewMedia was not easy to memorize, and to spell out again, and to pronunciate for many people to this day, also knowing that my name was very long and complex, and not easy to pronunciate for people that are not from my country, then I put that mechanism in place. But, otherwise, you should always state that first. The Identity Is What You Do You should do something valuable, and good, and great, and then, once you\'ve done that, you are probably going to develop your own identity and personality naturally, to which you can inject more character, a better name and so. But you can\'t really build a personality by deciding a fancy name, or a cool logo, or that. That character, that identity, is a result of something you do, not just of a name you have. It can be as fancy, and a memorable as you want, but unless it is deeply, and strongly, and repetitively associated to something that characterizes, that matches up, reinforces that name in some way, then is going to have no value. Always Give The Best You Have So Robin, how am I going to build my online identity? You build your online identity by bringing out the best you\'ve got. The best you\'ve got about the things that you\'re most passionate about, and you\'ve decided to cover on your site, on your newsmagazine, on your blog, or e-zine, whatever you got. You should come out, using your own singular pronoun for yourself, and not talk always like you\'re a team. Come out yourself, show your face, say what you think, take a stand, defend some people who are not in an easy position, challenge somebody, bring in tremendous gifts to your audience. That\'s what you can do to build an online identity no matter what\'s your name. That\'s really how you can do it, by really having a conversation with them, not just publishing stuff, putting content out there. But trying to come up as a direct human being there that has some special traits, whatever they are: that you scream all the time, that you complain all the time, that you find only the greatest tools, and you\'re always amazed by them, and you analyze why they can be so great, whatever that is. Be Like Robert Scoble Give space to a personality to give out, and that\'s how you can build a strong online identity. Robert Scoble didn\'t think up it\'s name. Why does he have such a strong online identity? Because he has dedicated his recent life just to this. To share, to give to other people, to explore, to make mistakes, get criticized, get squashed by other people who don\'t appreciate what he does. And not defending, not trying to o fight, but just trying, and trying, and hopefully learning something from all out of this. That\'s the way I think anyone, without expecting to become as popular as Robert Scoble, can develop a tangible, memorable, unique online identity. It\'s not in the name. It\'s in what you do. That\'s what I strongly think, and I recommend you do it. This is all from Robin Good. Write me more, ciao! Do you have more questions you want Robin Good to answer? Post them here below inside the comments area. Do you want to learn more about other key strategies in professional web publishing? Check out POP, a new video blog site where Robin Good shares his expertise with "in-depth" video tutorials to help professional online publishers to monetize their sites. Originally shot and recorded by Robin Good for MasterNewMedia and first published on December 10th 2008 as "Building A Strong Online Identity: Robin Good Video" ...

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Classified ads for jobs offer bloggers a new way to monetize their websites. Job boards like Personforce, JobThread, SimplyHired, and JobCoin offer independent web publishers an interesting new revenue making opportunity - an opportunity with the potential to add anything from a few dollars to a few hundred dollars per month to your bottom line. Today I will be comparing four job boards (Personforce, SimplyHired, JobThread and JobCoin) so that you can choose the best job board for your site. Photo credit: Elnur edited by Andre Deutmeyer The economy today sucks. As search ad revenue drops and recently even once invincible Google sees its share prices rocked, web publishers who depend on Google AdSense for income may begin to see rough times ahead. So the need for new sources of income have never been greater. Job boards offer web publishers a viable way to make revenue as well as add useful content to your site. It will not supplant your Google AdSense revenue, but it will supplement it in these trying times. And even if you aren\'t hurting, you have to admit... the promise of extra money is attractive. According to the Financial Times, VentureBeat charges $200 to post a 30-day ad directly on its site through SimplyHired. So the potential to make money here is real. So how do these job boards work? The idea is fairly straightforward actually. Companies who want to hire new people place ads with one or all of the job boards (either through your site or through the job board directly) These job boards then distribute the jobs to blogs and other publishers who have signed up for their service Publishers get paid for having these job ads on their site How much do you get paid? Well that depends on the job board, but there are three ways that you get paid: Employers can take out a job ad directly on your blog via the job board, whereby you get a cut of the listing fee. Employers find blogs attractive because blogs tend to attract readers focused on a specific industry niche, and this means that their job ads are better targeted. If you don\'t have enough direct buys for job ads on your site, then some of the job boards autopopulate your board from their own list of job postings in their job directory. For these jobs, you get paid per click, meaning that anytime a jobseeker clicks on one of the job postings you will get a small percentage of the revenue, similar to Google Adsense. You get paid every time someone applies for a job through your job board. Although Personforce, SimplyHired, JobThread, and JobCoin are all very similar services, each does have its own unique advantages and disadvantages. The full review is below. Here all the details: Job Board Comparison Personforce Personforce is a job board solution serving a bunch of large web publishers including college newspaper sites like the Harvard Crimson and blogs like Techcrunch. Personforce is a hosted solution, so there is no installation required on your end. And like the other job board solutions, Personforce handles all the dirty work. Personforce handles all the credit card and payment processing when someone posts a job to your job board, so the only thing you have to worry about is getting paid. Unlike SimplyHired, Personforce only works on a direct sell model, meaning that Personforce does not autopopulate your job board with job listings from their database. The only jobs that they list on your site are those that have been specifically targeted to your site. If an employer posts a job listings directly to your site, you receive 80% of the revenue. For these job posts, you decide how much and how long the job ads will be up for. If Personforce brokers the job listing for you, the revenue is split 50/50. Even though in both instances, Personforce powers the job board, the difference is where the employer creates the job listing. If the employer goes to the Personforce site directly and creates the job their and selects to have it displayed on your website, then in that case Personforce is responsible for brokering the deal and so you would split the revenue 50/50. If however, the employer creates the job listing from your site, then you brokered the deal so you get 80% of the revenue. Like the other job board solutions, Personforce offers fully customizable widgets for your site so that the job board blends in seamlessly with your content, as well as a branded URL. Personforce does have some unique advantages over other job board solutions though. First of all, Personforce offers the largest revenue share of any of the job board solutions (80%) which means more mullah for you. Furthermore, Personforce goes beyond a traditional job board and offers you your own "yellow pages" to connect your community with services, jobs, websites, research, events, and more. As with the job board, Personforce works with you to setup your own-branded URL for your business directory page and a website widget. Advertisers than go to the publishers directory, upload and pay for a listing, and reach their target audience. Unfortunately the "yellow pages" solution is only available to publishers with over 250,000 visitors a month and who are working a niche. Hopefully, we will see this service expanded soon. http://www.personforce.com SimplyHired (aka Job-a-matic) Job-a-matic is SimplyHired\'s solution for distributed customizable job boards for individual publishers. Like the other solutions reviewed, Job-a-matic is a hosted solution. As a hosted solution, Job-a-matic takes care of all the grunt work. They handle all credit card and payment processing, and they also email receipts and reminders to you when necessary. The job board is customizable so you can modify the header and footer, as well as pull in your own CSS file, so that it has the same look and feel as your website. You can also create customize the URL so that it look as if it is part of your site. Like each of the other job board solutions reviewed here, Job-a-matic provides you with widgets that you can easily place anywhere on your site. If you have a Blogger, Typepad or Wordpress powered blogs, Job-a-matic lets you install these widgets with a single click. And, if you use FeedBurner\'s FeedFlare product on your blog, you can add a "flare" that links to your job board, and advertises the number of new posts. SimplyHired also provides some code snippets that insert simple text links or button graphics onto your main website, promoting and linking to your job board. With Job-a-matic you have two ways of making money: For jobs posted directly to your job board, you receive fifty percent of the revenue. For these types of job ads, you decide the price to charge for each postings to your site, as well as how long the job postings will run. Addtionally you will also receive thirty percent of the revenue when a visitor clicks one of the sponsored job posts that Job-a-matic automatically provides to you through their database. This option to have your job board autopopulated with job posts from the SimplyHired database is one of the greatest advantages that Job-a-matic offers over its competitors. These sponsored job posts ensure that your job board is never empty. And although these job listings are not as profitable as those that your bring in yourself, you do get paid each time a visitor clicks on one of these jobs. Finally Job-a-matic provides a convenient dashboard feature that allows you to monitor the performance of your job board, so you can see how many job listings you have, who\'s posting them, when they\'re expiring, and how much money you\'ve earned. http://www.jobamatic.com JobThread JobThread is the job board solution behind multiple Read/Write Web. JobThread is a fast and easy way to setup a job board for your group, organization or site. Like the other job board solutions reviewed here, JobThread is a free hosted solution. There are no setup fees, hosting fees or maintenance fees of any kind. You choose how much you\'d like to charge people to post jobs on your site and JobThread shares the revenue 50 - 50. JobThread also offers large sites a special pricing option, which means that if you bring a lot of traffic to your site, you could potentially get a bigger cut of the revenue share that JobThread offers. Like other job board solutions, JobThread handles all payment processing for you, so that your site can accept credit card payments and payments via PayPal for employers who wish to post jobs on your board. Although JobThread is a hosted solution - JobThread does all the grunt work - you can create a custom URL for your job board on your domain, as well as customize that job board to match the design of your site. And you can also place a customizable widget anywhere on your website to advertise the fact that you have a job board and display your job classified ads to your visitors. One of the advantages of JobThread over its competitors is that the JobThread widget displays local classified jobs that are located close to the specific location of the person visiting your page, rather than just displaying the most recently added job ads. http://www.jobthread.com JobCoin JobCoin, like the other job board solutions reviewed, is a hosted solution. JobCoin lets you style your job board so it uses your site\'s CSS template and lets you set up a custom domain (i.e. jobs.yourdomain.com). You can also embed a widget anywhere on your site that displays job posts and links to your job board. Unlike the other job board solutions, however, you do not get control over how much it costs to display a job ad on your job board. Employers pay a set amount of $99 to post a job to your site or to any other site in the network for that matter. Like Job-a-matic, the jobs on posted on your job board do not all have to be jobs that were specifically targeted by employers to your site. JobCoin pulls jobs in from its database and posts jobs on your job board that your visitors will find interesting, based on your site\'s niche as well as JobCoin\'s own ranking algorithm. With JobCoin you get paid in two ways: First off if an employer creates a job post through your board, then JobCoin will pay you on average about $20 per post. Additionally if someone applies for a job through your job board, regardless of whether or not that job post was actually created through your job board, you will be paid between on average $2 and $10 per application. The last payment option is what makes JobCoin unique. The other solutions (minus Job-a-matic) only pay you when the job is posted. So even through JobCoin pays you substantially less per post than the other solutions, the additional income from people applying for jobs may be more than adequate to offset that loss of revenue. http://www.jobcoin.com/ Do you see any mistakes? Would you like to share your own experiences with any of these job board solutions? Please leave a comment below. Originally written by Andre Deutmeyer for MasterNewMedia and first published on December 11th 2008 as Website Monetization: Job Board Solutions Compared - Personforce, SimplyHired, JobThread, And JobCoin. ...

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Online Video SEO is all about making your online video content more visible and easier to find on Google and other major search engines. In this article you can learn what are the critical components, techniques and tools you should adopt to significantly increase your online video content visibility. Photo credit: Luis Francisco Cordero But to get good traffic on your blog site, and appearing among the top results is not as easy as it may sound. Findability is the key. The more easily people can find your videos when do they do a search online, the greater the amount of traffic you will get. Sounds simple enough, no? What\'s the secret formula then to get high search engine results rankings for your video content? A well crafted title, good tags, metadata, RSS, are just some of the components that play a critical role in making your video content more readily accessible on major search engines. David Reilly, managing director of search engine marketing and optimization company Barracuda Digital, shares with you today all of the main strategies you need to adopt to get your videos seen by as large an audience as possible. Here all the details: Intro by Robin Good Optimising Your Online Video Content Intro Online video\'s now one of the best avenues to engage and market to an online audience. Video enables publishers to communicate a message on multiple levels - via visual images, the spoken word, music and visual text. Online video enables website owners to reach a huge growing audience for minimal investment and with video now being incorporated into universal search results on Google this presents a major commercial opportunity to boost traffic and SEO performance. Below is summary of tips to maximise your video optimisation. Video Sitemaps / MRSS / RSS Click above to enlarge image If you host videos on your site, you need to direct the search engines to your video content via a separate video sitemap, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), or media RSS (MRSS) file. Creating a video sitemap could improve Google listings by allowing the search engine to access content and metadata that will enable it to add the footage to Google\'s video index. The video sitemap is an extension of the Google sitemap protocol that ties together your video content and the metadata required to get it noticed. For each video you can add a duration, title and keyword rich description to help drive traffic to your video and also help Google properly index it. The included video URLs will then be searchable via Google\'s video index and may even appear in other search products offered by Google. Surrounding HTML / Optimising Meta Tags If you want your video to rank well, you must give the search engines something to index and rank. Surround videos with relevant on-page HTML that is easily indexed by the search engines. Optimise for key phrases that reflect the content and the terms users search on. You could even tag each scene. Descriptions / Title Tags / URLs / Video File Names Descriptions and titles should be optimised with relevant key phrases. Video titles should be catchy to encourage users to view the video. They should include key phrases that are relevant to the video, and where possible, to your product / brand. Max Out The Tags, Title And Description For Every Site The more metadata describing your video, the more likely someone is to find your video. Many uploaders waste opportunities by adding few or non-descriptive tags. Tags and the category you choose should be relevant to the video. Video creators can go from little viewership to regularly featured producers simply through a better choice of category. Remember to place keywords in the keyword tag portion of the website the video is on and anywhere else that requests ?tags\'. <title>BBC NEWS | Business | US unveils $250bn banking rescue</title> <meta name="keywords" content="BBC, News, BBC News, news online, world, uk, international, foreign, british, online, service" /> Add The Keyword "Video" Lots of people add the word "video" to their search query. Make sure you add the word "video" to your title, h1 tag, description, metadata etc. Transcripts A great way to give the crawlers something to index is to provide (or publish) a transcript. Add a transcript to each video file via the video status page. Create a keyword-rich title for the transcript and a brief synopsis of its subject matter. Google prefers it if the format of the transcript is time-coded and saved as a .txt file. A time-coded transcript breaks the script of the video into segments. Each segment includes the time the words in the script are being said in the video followed by the actual words of the script. The time of each segment should be listed in the following format: HH:MM:SS.mmm. Each timestamp is relative to the start of the associated video file: Be Careful About Flash Video Search engines have a hard time crawling video content inside Flash players. If you have to have Flash videos, place them on HTML pages containing text for the search engines to index and a navigation scheme they can follow. The next-most compatible format is an .mpeg format, since if a user has either Windows Media Player or QuickTime they\'ll be able to view it. Note: compatibility comes with a price: .mpg files are much larger than modern formats for the same amount of quality - sometimes up to twice as large. Conclusion Online video in 2008 provides fantastic ROI and relatively uncompetitive marketing opportunities to boost natural search performance and traffic. Originally written by David Reilly for Webcredible and first published on November 1st 2008 as "Optimising your online video content". About the author David Reilly is Managing Director of Barracuda Digital. Based in London, Barracuda Digital is a dynamic, performance based Search Engine Marketing consultancy specialising in areas including natural search optimisation, search consultancy, SEO training, paid search management, and video optimisation. Photo credits: Be Careful About Flash Video - King Pin\'s Forums All other images by Webcredible ...

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Virtual worlds offer exciting opportunities in online learning. A virtual world is a fully customizable 3D environment on the Internet where people can meet, talk, and interact with each other as if they were in the real world. The big deal is that you\'re not just a screen name or a still picture, but a three-dimensional individual that you can personalize as you want. Photo credit: h-l-n If you have ever attended an online seminar or a virtual university lesson you may already know how this works. You join a virtual room, the presenter / teacher shares his screen and his voice with attendees, and you can enjoy a presentation, a course, or a panel without leaving the comfort of your own place. What is less fascinating about the whole learning-at-a-distance process, is that you usually end up being just a screen name or a still picture, and you can\'t really interact with other people in the room like in the real world. The opportunities for any interaction among participants are very limited because there\'s not your whole "persona" sharing its experience with other people. That\'s exactly why virtual worlds, and their most popular platform Second Life, can be venues to effective virtual learning approaches. Since in a virtual world the opportunity to interact with other people becomes fully immersive, and it is not just limited to screen-sharing or videoconferencing, a virtual environment constitutes a potentially much better alternative for educators and learners. In Second Life you have a fully-customizable projection of your "alive self", not just a screen name or a picture. You can perform many actions in a fashion that is very similar to what you normally do in your everyday life. Walking, talking to other people, visiting places, attending events, and more. And it\'s very easy to understand how the whole thing works. George Siemens is an educational technologies and media expert who strongly supports the use of virtual worlds for educational purposes. In this weekly media literacy digest, he strongly disagrees with those academic environments who find the use of Second Life too complex to be considered as a valid resource for online learning. But, as every week here on MasterNewMedia, Dr. Siemens also provides you with other pointers, facts and resources that can help you and me to make greater sense of new emerging technologies and their impact on the way we learn, understand, and deal with the world in these fast-changing times. Here all the details: Intro by Daniele Bazzano eLearning Resources and News learning, networks, knowledge, technology, trends by George Siemens MIT Students Build Mobile Applications in 13 Weeks I personally don't see this project - MIT students build mobile applications in 13 weeks - as being extraordinary (as the post suggests). Learning with mentorship and oversight from industry is hardly new. The speaker / researcher is right in suggesting that integrated learning of this type will become more common. Too often, we still teach as if we don't have tools for distributed collaboration. Old habits die hard. But, if an educator takes time to reflect on how she / he could teach differently by using freely available technology, numerous opportunities are quickly realized. How about bringing external presenters, industry researchers, and peer learners from around the world? How about using the numerous high quality learning resources available through Ted Talks, iTunes U, conference proceedings, etc? The challenge many educators face today in trying to improve learning is not one of technology or information access. The most significant need is to begin envisioning a future reflective of the affordances of technology now broadly available. Networked Learning In a post expressing ideas similar to Wendy Drexler's Networked Student video, ed4wb contrasts education as traditionally conceived and as it might develop in the future. Several useful diagrams emphasize the type of control shift occurring in how learners access content and participate in conversations. I've been a bit bothered lately by how networked learning is increasingly being conceived - i.e. a function of external and social networks. This is the most obvious way to explain learning. For example, I grow my knowledge as I connect to other people and information sources. This is, however, not a complete view of learning. If learning is only about external connections, then how can gradients of understanding be considered? Or how can expertise (yes, it still exists?) be described in relation to novices? If our focus is only on the external act of networking with others, have we moved much beyond behaviourism? We can still use a network metaphor to address this concern, however. As suggested during CCK08 (slide 8-18), learning can be seen as networked in at least three distinct ways: neural, conceptual, and external / social. The underlying structure in each instance is a network, but what is being connected is obviously different in each instance. (via weblogg-ed) If PLEs Are Incompatible With The System Then How Do We Change The System? Education plays a diverse role in society, ranging from formal research universities to practically focused community colleges. The method of education is generally structured - based on the assumption that if we have clear goals (i.e. learn this content), then we also need clear / structured approaches (objectives, instruction, evaluation. Some pockets of innovation exist. For example, during my current trip to Singapore, I heard about Republic Polytechnic, an institution completely based on problem based learning. I don't know how well the approach is working, but at least they're experimenting. But change in education is hard because change disrupts existing power relationships. In some cases that's necessary, especially when the system is not meeting the needs of the intended audience. As Graham Atwell notes: It is not just a question that curricula cannot keep pace with the speed of technological and social innovation. It is an issue that the skills and knowledge required by today's technology cannot be delivered through a rigidly sytematised, market led educational system. Furthermore, globalisation, the rapid turnover in employment and occupations and the implementation of new technologies have led to pressures for continuing learning - what is being called lifelong learning. Present education systems cannot deliver this. What Shall We Do With Higher Education? In addition to a delightful array of vehicles, General Motors has given us a great metaphor: a company that once ruled supreme, lost touch with the changing world around it, and, in spite of warnings over a period of three decades, still failed to align itself to the new reality. From royalty to peasantry in less than 30 years. Can higher education learn lessons from GM? Do colleges and universities share a similar fate? According to a few articles I've recently encountered, yes: Transformation 101: "This is a classic unsustainable trend. Higher education prices cannot grow faster than inflation and family income forever. If colleges use productivity gains from technology to restrain prices, they'll continue to thrive in a world that values their product more than ever. If they don't, they'll be hammered simultaneously by a frustrated public and new competitors eager to steal their customers." The Next Bubble?: "Obviously higher education will (and should) survive. But there is no reason to think that higher ed will be immune to the shakeouts and reorganizations that have affected so many other institutions in this age of globalization, which has wrought a heightened level of what economist Joseph Schumpeter called "creative destruction."" For Innovators, There Is Brainpower in Numbers When I first read Wisdom of the Crowds, I came away with an appreciation of collaboration that starts with individuality. Let me explain. The examples of crowds used throughout the book emphasis personal contribution that adds to the whole, but is not subsumed by the whole. Collaboration involves individuals contributing their unique perspectives, not a type of faceless mob with an identity all its own. The individual view of collaboration has always been an issue for me in using wikis. Wikis overwrite individual contributions (sure, you can look at the history and find who contributed what, but that's not very useful). In For Innovators, There Is Brainpower in Numbers, NYTimes - one of those newspapers not yet filing for bankruptcy - looks at the difficulty in "thinking together": "Traditionally, brainstorming revolves around the false premise that to get good ideas, a group must generate a large list from which to cherry-pick. But researchers have shown repeatedly that individuals working alone generate more ideas than groups acting in concert? The best innovations occur when you have networks of people with diverse backgrounds gathering around a problem." Second Life University Affairs looks at Second Life in higher education (within Canada). Results are mixed. Overall, the article presents a negative view of virtual worlds. I'm a bit baffled by the comment that Second Life takes too long to figure out: "The learning curve that comes with Second Life is a drawback mentioned by all professors, online communications personnel and students, and this is one factor that makes some universities reluctant to use the program". The technical skills required to communicate, fly around, and generally exist in Second Life are low. Learning how to navigate and communicate takes very little time. More advanced tasks such as customizing your avatar take more time. But it's like saying "using MS Word is too complicated". Sure, using the full range of features, tagging, merging documents, etc. takes time to learn. But to type and save an article / paper takes almost no time. The article confuses "requirement to participate" with "becoming proficient". Originally written by George Siemens for elearnspace and first published on December 13th 2008 in his newsletter eLearning Resources and News. About the author To learn more about George Siemens and to access extensive information and resources on elearning check out www.elearnspace.org. Explore also George Siemens connectivism site for resources on the changing nature of learning and check out his new book "Knowing Knowledge". Photo credits: MIT Students Build Mobile Applications in 13 Weeks - Personal Branding Blog Networked Learning - ungorf If PLEs Are Incompatible With The System Then How Do We Change The System? - Stephen Aaron Rees What Shall We Do With Higher Education? - Cathy Yeulet For Innovators, There Is Brainpower in Numbers - ktsdesign Second Life - TechDigest ...

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Web widgets are the new frontier of content distribution when it comes to social media marketing. Web widgets are tiny interactive micro-applications made up by small portions of code which can be easily embedded in your blog site, or run in a widget platform installed on your own computer. Photo credit: Webwag Social media is all about reaching out to and interacting with people through the Web. Web widgets enhance and build upon that interactivity further, providing rich, always up-to-date information to users / customers. And worth mentioning is web widgets are completely free and re-distributable. Web widgets belong to two categories: a) Embeddable: you just grab the code of the widget and paste it into the HTML of your blog site. You can even add them to social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, Hi5, and many others. b) Not-embeddable: you need to run a widget platform on your computer. Windows Vista and Mac Os X Tiger and above already have this feature built-in. Linux users can install Screenlets. For Windows XP and Mac users Yahoo! has developed its own widget platform as well. Web widgets can integrate newsradars, photo galleries, games, video clips and compilations, Flash applications, and almost any type of media content you can think of. Lots of brands are even creating rich content, which you cannot find anywhere else on the Web, specifically for their web widgets! Media analyst and social media marketing expertPeter Kim has put up on his own site a fantastic collection of social media marketing examples, listing all the companies that use social media to market their products and services on the Web. To show you the potential that web widgets have in social media marketing, I have here selected, from Peter Kim\'s list, the very best widget applications created by companies, while adding a brief description. I have actually selected only those widget examples that allowed me to fully embed right into this article the widget application, making it easy for you to look at these examples and to evaluate their marketing strategy and effectiveness. Here all the details: Intro by Daniele Bazzano Social Media Marketing: Best Widgets Applications (Hand-picked and extracted from Peter Kim\'s Social Media Marketing Examples) Dove-MTV Fresh Takes Beauty company Dove has partnered with popular music channel MTV to promote its new line of products. In this web widget they offer small "webisodes" of Fresh Takes, a show airing on MTV channels starring singer and actress Alicia Keys. You can also chat with a meebo-powered chat room, or listen to music tracks by R&B singer Duffy. By answering to a short survey, Dove and MTV also give you the opportunity to win a $200 gift card from Amazon. The Hotel Indigo With this widget Indigo Hotels perpetuate their philosophy of making customers stay in touch with nature. You can read natural-food recipes, have a look at the upcoming local events in your city, or listen to chill-out music podcasts, as well as reading all the latest news from the company. And if you want to book your stay, just click on a button. Samsung Omnia Do you like the new Samsung Omina? From this widget you can preview some of the features of this new smart phone. Just drag and drop the little icons from the left to the right side of the screen. Watch a small video, listen to music tracks, or check how GPS info are displayed on the phone. You can even use this widget as a permanent clock: simply adjust the time zone and you\'re set. Stephen King\'s N. This web widget entails a graphic, downloadable version of "N.", the new graphic novel from Stephen King. From the widget brought by CBS and Marvel, you can watch small webisodes of "N.", and a small interview of Stephen King himself describing how this project was conceived and what makes it valuable to promote his new book. You can also order the book straight from the widget. WWE This web widget from WWE promotes the SmackDown Vs. Raw 2008 video game. You can watch videos taken from Nintendo WII and DS platforms, or have a look at screenshots of the game. After you\'ve enjoyed the content, you\'re just one-click away from the official site or to purchase the game. Disney Music Block Party This web widget allows you to access all the podcasts from the popular Disney Music Block Party Tour. Check product details, tour information, or go straight to the iTunes Music Store to download the podcasts you like. And if you run-out of time, you can even grab the content and sync it to your mobile to enjoy it on-the-go. Walmart The popular low-price store company Walmart has partnered with Taste of home magazine, invitation service Evite and The Weather Channel to bring you everything you need from your garden parties with neighbors. Read food recipes, buy all you need to prepare your dishes with the shopping list feature, create personalized invitations cards, and check the weather forecast for your zone. Honda Readysodes Motor company Honda created this web widget to advertise its new SUV Pilot. This widget showcases a series of webisodes with funny videos that focus on the key strengths of the new vehicle. As many widgets of this kind, this works like an anchor to the official site, where you can go and create your own webisode or customize your Honda Pilot. Viva Hollywood Music channel Vh1 released this web widget to promote one of its most successful Spanish reality shows: Viva Hollywood, where players compete to become a telenovela star. From the widget you can watch a trailer which explains what the show is about, have a look at participants\' bios, or go to Vh1 site for additional videos and images of the show. National Geographic News This minimalistic web widget allows you to put National Geographic latest news on your site. Just place your mouse cursor on the headlines to enlarge the news. You can also access National Geographic photo and video content very easily by using the buttons at the bottom. Additional Resources Apple Dashborad Widgets Windows Vista SideBar Gadgets Yahoo! Widgets Screenlets (Linux) If you want to have a comprehensive idea of what web widgets are, how they work and how you can you take advantage of their distribution and marketing potential, I suggest you give also a look to this other article on MasterNewMedia: "Digital Content Distribution Made Easy: Web Widgets - What They Are How They Can Bring New Life To Your Blog - Video Guide" This resource list has been put together by Daniele Bazzano of MasterNewMedia - Original resource list of social media marketing examples prepared by Peter Kim for Being Peter Kim and published on November 23rd 2008 as "A List of Social Media Marketing Examples". About the author Peter Kim is a former analyst at Forrester Research and international marketing manager at Puma AG. A well-known personality in the fields of social media and marketing, Peter Kim currently working to build a start-up to help clients formulate social computing strategies. ...

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This is my own video on the future of education, that completes and extends what I was able to deliver this past Wednesday at LeWeb in Paris. Photo credit: Giorgio Montersino Here below you can see two videos. One is the original recording from my LeWeb presentation and the other one extends and completes what I did not say on stage. I contend that we are about to see a deep change in how we look at education and learning in the coming years. The deep changes we have been witnessing in the worlds of mass media, advertising, marketing and communication in general, and much of what we have been labeling under the 2.0 title needs to be harmonized with our educational approach to schooling inside society. If we have come to appreciate the value of collaboration, sharing, co-creation, mashing up, bottom-up contributions and grassroots media creation, as well as those of listening to customers, of starting true conversations, of opening to critical feedback, and to suggestions from all your clients, we must also be able to see that these same principles and approaches can be transposed and utilized effectively in delivering a more valuable educational experience to our kids. a) Teaching is not learning, b) What are the things we really need to learn, c) What is the context and resources in which a new educational paradigm can emerge, are the key issues that I bring forward in this video presentation. I must thank once more LeWeb organizers Loic and Geraldine LeMeur for having provided me with this great opportunity. Here the video: Love of Education - A Shifting Paradigm and here is the continuation of the first part I presented at LeWeb: In the coming days I will publish an article that further explains and corroborates, via the use of several other video interviews I had recorded for this event, my full view on the future of education and what it is going to take to get to it. I must acknowledge also, which I had no time to do on stage, that my ideas were strongly influenced and inspired by the extensive work done by Ivan Illich in the 70\'s, and by Seymour Papert in the \'80s. I also utilized ideas developed by Stephen Downes to whom I owe great respect for the extensive research work on the future of education he has already done. Further thanks go to Howard Rheingold, Nancy White, Gerd Leonhard, Jay Cross, Teemu Arina and George Siemens who have provided me with invaluable feedback and video material on this very topic and which I will shortly publish here on MasterNewMedia. ...

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