Experiments in Cyberspace

German government is trying to push a law that will prevent employers to check their prospective employees' Facebook data. The draft presented by Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere is a lame -still positive, though, attempt to address surmounting problems created by social networks: It will be illegal to become a Facebook friend with an applicant in order to check out private details as some people seem to be indiscriminate about whom they accept as a friend. If an employer turns down an application based on the Facebook postings, a rejected job applicant could take the company to court and claim damages. The new law also aims to limit video surveillance in the workplace like lavatories and locker rooms after a public outrage when it was discovered that some corporations have been checking on employee e-mails and filming sales clerks during coffee breaks. However, de Maiziere continues, Employers will still be allowed to run a search on the web on their applicants. Anything ...

Yesterday, I finally took the plunge and registered an account with Twitter. Since you had to follow at least one person, or so I assumed, I picked Onion, only to regret it approximately ten minutes later. True to its fame, Onion was at the top of its form and more than 100 tweets filled my home page in no time. You can waste/spend your entire life by following Onion only. Despite the fact that I follow the magazine for years, I will delete it. Another side effect is my account seems to have been all screwed up, today. Apparently I am somebody else now, a Frank Grangetto to be exact, a Matt Schwartzwalder and Rachel Leggett are both me, and whatever... Leave it to another day to sort it out.   This experiment provided me some insight, though. Search engines make a very good job of what they are supposed to make: searching what is already written. But how do you search what is thought but not written? For that I believe, Twitter can be a very good alternative. I had t...

Life is a good teacher. Up to now, it has never occurred to me a short domain name could be an advantage. I have always assumed, because I do it that way, people could bookmark a site when they like it regardless of the length of its name. Though I do not use it, social networking sites like Twitter changed my mind. I suddenly realized how difficult it must be to write a tweet about an article on this site without the aid of URL shortener services. Just writing the part "experimentsincyberspace/2009/04/" with the protocol prefix consumes 52 characters. I am not saying you will not be found. I am talking about the extra step, often tedious, of the necessity of shortening the URL. A very good idea could be having a short URL handy beneath or above your articles so that people can easily use it. Rather than having your visitors do it, you can take the extra step and place a short link yourself. In addition, keeping your URL intact can be a marketing and branding advantage. ...

After reading and reading again what I wrote about Google's proposal to acquire Twitter , I started thinking, and thinking again. What makes Twitter valuable commercially? If you had told me people would frantically post and follow short messages 5 years ago, I would have laughed at your face. Yet, here they are, swamped in a frenzy of 140-character texts. But does that make it worth spending millions? Said post, probably under the influence of bright analysts, claimed an information value for businesses to realign and improve their products and services existed. True but an incomplete judgment, because it misses an important element: Mobile connectivity . Teens of my generation had one electronic tool: computers or PC's. It was new, it was cool and it let us go to places not seen or heard before (I stopped short of writing where no man had gone before). The promise or prophecy, -correction- dream of Gibson's cyberspace locked us in basements and dark rooms for many a...

Rumors have surfaced up that the number one search engine Google is in late (early according to some) stages to acquire Twitter for an undisclosed price above $250 million. Twitter has recently rejected an offer by Facebook for $500 million worth of Facebook shares. Why would Google want Twitter? Michael Arrington argues Twitter's real value is in search. It holds the keys to the best real time database and search engine on the Internet, and Google doesn't even have a horse in the game: More and more people are starting to use Twitter to talk about brands in real time as they interact with them. And those brands want to know all about it, whether to respond individually, or simply gather the information to see what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong. And all of it is discoverable at search.twitter.com, the search engine that Twitter acquired last summer. People searching for news. Brands searching for feedback. That's valuable stuff. Twitter know...

It is no secret that I am not a big fan of social bookmarking . Don't get me wrong, I love sharing stuff with friends. I simply missed the train of stumbling, twitting and whatnot; or to put it more correctly, I had gotten used to a system of my own long before social media services were scattered all around the web. Yet, they have been a fact of our lives. I have just added a few bookmarking buttons here in the hope that they will be useful to those who are accustomed to the phenomenon and can't live without it. I hope I did the coding right. I included a few bookmarking sites which I thought to be popular and beneficial. The real purpose of this post, however, is to thank the developer Joost de Valk of Sociable , a popular Wordpress plug-in. I sort of shared his styling and ported here. I really do not like others where, after an accidental mouse over a pop up springs up, an event I find highly distracting. Others make a call home and if there is a problem there, your...

As readers of this blog are aware, my view of using social media is not mainstream, or should I say it is unorthodox. I strongly believe that achieving higher ranks in search engine results will yield more positive returns in the long run, as opposed to getting to the front pages of social media sites. Although this opinion is based more on intuition rather than raw data, I do have some statistics albeit limited in depth and scope. I paid a visit to an internet cafe whose owner is a friend of mine. After a full day's observation, here are my preliminary findings: From a total of 54 customers, none visited a social media site. 60% of those said "yes" when asked if they had made a query using a search engine that day. The most popular application was MSN's instant message service. I will go on and speculate that, a considerable percentage of social media users is made up of bloggers themselves and commercial site owners. For any blogger who wants to target casu...

As the number of social networks increase, so does their importance for bloggers in particular and businesses in general to promote their content through them. It is critical to understand the metrics used to use social media effectively . One particular industry that has high stakes in this is the search engines as social media sources provide an effective alternative to traditional web search by directly connecting users with the information needs to users willing to share the information. For example, users can post questions or new items, and rely on other users to comment or rank the content (e.g., sites such as Slashdot or Digg) or rank the popularity of users (like Twitter). While the responses could be excellent, the quality could vary greatly. Hence, user feedback, such as voting, or rating the content, has become a crucial aspect of the effectiveness of the community as demonstrated by the paper, A Few Bad Votes Too Many? Towards Robust Ranking in Social Media [pdf] by Jiang...

Less and less things in life surprise me any more. But this new craze of "let's all follow each other on [insert your favorite network here]" has amazed me. Apparently there is still room for surprises and I have gladly taken it as "I am not that old after all." Fine! Let us dissect and analyze this 'following phenomenon'. What makes the number of followers valuable as a metric? For instance, Matt Bacak of Twitter fame claims he has so many followers that he is the third tweeted??? man in the Tweetland. He thinks it is valuable so he markets it: First Facebook, now Twitter. The Powerful Promoter, Matt Bacak, has taken himself to the top of the social media networks yet again, this time beating out 99.9% of the fastest growing site's members. [...] Turn your income-generating ideas into handfuls of cold hard cash. [...] By Matt Bacak, the Powerful Promoter and author of Powerful Promoting Tips newsletter. "If I could show you a proven, b...

I have partially covered some of the social networks you can use . Now, let us focus on making the most of them. I will recommend a slightly different strategy for you to follow. After you have made your own experiment and decided on which networks you will concentrate your efforts, here are some tips for you: Do not rush submitting your own posts Do not try to game the system in vain. Instead, give your readers the opportunity to bookmark and/or submit them. This will be a new experiment with which you will measure what percentage of your subscribers take the time to bookmark and share your posts. Think how you can improve the submission rates Most probably, the initial results will be discouraging, that's good! Now, reread your posts and note how you could have written them better, especially the titles. Check if your bookmark links function properly and if they are clearly visible. Do you encourage your readers to share? Use comments to your advantage When answering a rea...

A common concern for all bloggers new and old is reaching a wider audience. They start with their family members and a few friends, and they write their feelings, thoughts, experiences etc, hoping to gain more subscribers in the wild wild web. Sooner or later, they direct their attention to the so-called social networks as getting traffic from search engines is difficult, at least initially. I will briefly touch upon my experiences with some of them and sincerely hope you will find this review useful. Before we go on, however, I want you to ask yourself a simple question: Do you enjoy using them? Your answer to this is the KEY CONCEPT here. If you think a particular network will bring you readers just because you manage to throw in a post or two, or any number of them, you will soon discover you are wrong. The buzz word is, and has always been the user experience , and you are one of those users. If the network(s) of your choice helps you find interesting blogs, good articles an...