Posts Tagged ‘blog post’

Posted on May 28, 2010 - by Wayne Sutton

Google Wave turns one, then tweets and how to embed a Google Wave blip into any website

In case you missed it, Google Wave turned one year old today. I’m not sure what Google or the Google Wave team did to celebrate but the @Google Twitter account tweeted Happy Birthday about the news and soon the @googlewave team retweeted the message as you can see above and below.

Back in January I wrote a blog post called 9 practical ways to use Google Wave for business and fast forward six months later I’m still using Google Wave for business. Little did I know it was “Wave’s birthday and earlier today I tweeted the following message:

At the time I tweeted the message it was after reviewing some of the Google Wave “blips” / conversations that the TriOut team were having and some of the milestones we were reaching. Fast forward a few hours later Google Wave Product Manager Steph Hannon @twephanie tweeted the following:

No, Steph Hannon @twephanie thank you and the Google Wave team for continuing making a useful FREE collaborative tool for entrepreneurs like myself to use for team projects.

Since Google Wave launched from closed beta to public access one of the most requested features was to make it easy for people to embed Google Wave blip messages into a blog post or any website. I’m not sure when it was released but you can embed a google wave into any website with a Google Web Element called “Wave Element”. To do so go to: http://www.google.com/webelements/wave/ and just past the wave url you want to embed in the box and the Wave Element will provide you with the code to embed. Here’s an example and closing question below.

How are you using Google Wave?

Posted on May 28, 2010 - by Wayne Sutton

Location Based Post Round-up: Geo / Location based news from the past week.

Location, Location, Location, that what was said at the end of 2009 of being the next big thing in “social media’ or marketing or just the next big thing. Has it lived up to all the hype? I would say so but I’m a little bias because of TriOut. Regardless as more brands launch location based promotions and location-based startups just “launch” the location-based services/marketing industry is truly one to watch. Starting today I’m going to post a weekly round of location based blog post from around the social web. You know I wanted to call the post “This week in Location” but I’ll let @Jason and @leolaporte hold on to the “This week in” name for now. Here are the location based post round-up for the week.

Brand Security Issues With Geo-Listings
by: @smartfinds

The importance of protecting your brand stems from local consumers performing a significant volume of searches for businesses, products and services in their local area. They look up local information through web searches and through mobile searches. As they look up this information, they get to see pictures, videos, consumer reviews about your business, products or services. If this information is not appealing to the local consumer they will avoid your business.

Location History, “Footstreams” & Aggregated Check-in Data Will Transform LBS
by: @gsterling

And while the individual location history is interesting to review, it’s the aggregated information — such as being collected by Skyhook — that will provide fascinating and valuable “real world analytics” to retailers, restaurants and numerous other types of businesses and marketers.

Where Have I Been? Get Your Answer with the Google Location History Dashboard
by: @GoogleMobile

We’re really excited to make Latitude and your location more useful to you, but we definitely understand that your privacy is important. Just as before, Google Location History is entirely opt-in only and your location history is available privately to you and nobody else. Additionally, you may be asked to periodically re-enter your password when opening any Location History page, even if you’re signed in to your Google Account already (just to make sure you’re really you). Of course, you may always delete any or all of your location history in the Manage History tab or disable Location History at any time.

DeHood: A Location-Based Social Network for Your Neighborhood
by: @fredericl

While DeHood definitely has great potential, the app currently suffers from the simple fact that it doesn’t have a lot of users yet. Given that other networks like Gowalla and FourSquare already have a lot of momentum (though not the feature set of DeHood), it will be hard for DeHood (and other companies that want to enter this space) to persuade users to switch networks and build up their social networks from scratch again.

Check-Ins, Geo-Fences, And The Future Of Privacy
by: @erickschonfeld

When it comes to geo-privacy there are two extremes. Foursquare makes you explicitly check into each place where you want to share your location. That is good for privacy—you only have yourself to blame if you broadcast your location from the strip club—but it makes using the application a bit of a chore. You have to remember to pull out your phone every time you enter a new place and look like a dork while you are checking in. It is also rude when you are at a bar or restaurant with friends and everyone (all the guys, usually) are looking down at their cell phones, but I digress.

Foursquare Nearing 1 Million Checkins Per Day
by: @Jbruin

Foursquare Co-Founder Dennis Crowley says that the 10 plus checkins per second figure was on a Wednesday night, and that the company is averaging 700,000 checkins per day. He projects to hit the 1 million mark by mid to late June.

Millions of Incorrect Listings Plague Location-Based Services
by: @fredericl

Currently, there is no single location database with perfectly accurate information that all of the different vendors can access – and that’s probably a good thing, as it allows developers to use the databases that suit their needs best. If Placecast’s data is correct, however, an error rate that ranges from 8% to 40% is simply too high for consumer products that want to guide people to the right location in the real world.

Market for Location-Based Services is Heating Up for Startups
by: @chcameron

As more tools like SimpleGeo make the incorporation of sophisticated technologies and infrastructures faster and more cost-effective for startups, the opportunities to create truly innovative location-based services will continue to grow.

From SocialWayne.com this week:
Podcast #11 – All about Location with @LouisGray on Foursquare, Google, East vs West check-ins & Facebook privacy
The value of the check in using location based services for businesses and customers. Time to measure those check-ins

Are there other posts you have read about the location-based industry the past week? Let me know in the comments.

Posted on May 5, 2010 - by Wayne Sutton

Google News: 7 recent updates made by Google to make the web a better place for you & me…

Over the past few months a lot of news about how the social web is growing up / changing right before our computer screens has been about social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and the  online video war between HTML 5 vs Flash vs Apple vs Adobe as a video experience for users. Not to be left out in the cold earlier this year Google launched Google Buzz with somewhat of a warm yet controversial welcome due to email privacy and public contacts concerns.  Since then the little search engine giant that could, Google has announced a few updates for their line of products. In case you missed any of the Google news, here’s a list of recent announcements made by Google not in any particular order.

1. Google launches Google Analytics Application Gallery, “Google Analytics releases 38 features…”

It’s only been a year since we launched the Google Analytics Data Export API and developer programs. To celebrate we are highlighting some of the exciting solutions that extend Google Analytics in our new Google Analytics Application Gallery!

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2010/05/google-analytics-releases-38-features.html

2. Google launches “New Place Pages for mobile phones”

Last fall, we launched Place Pages which organize relevant and useful information about places on Google Maps. Since then we’ve been developing a version, available now, which gives you access to the same useful information optimized for your mobile phone.

3. Google updates search page and results for mobile phones “Google’s new look for mobile”

When it comes to mobile search, we strive to not only give you the same comprehensiveness and relevance as when searching with Google on your computer, but also a consistent look, feel, and overall user experience. So today, as we roll out a new look for Google Search results on your computer, we are happy to announce similar changes to Google Search results for mobile.

http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2010/05/googles-new-look-for-mobile.html

4. Google launches, Google Reader Play: “And now for something completely different”

In Google Reader Play, items are presented one at a time, and each item is big and full-screen. After you’ve read an item, just click the next arrow to move to the next one, or click any item on the filmstrip below to fast-forward. Of course, you can click the title or image of any item to go to the original version. And since so much of the good stuff online is visual, we automatically enlarge images and auto-play videos full-screen.

http://google.com/reader/play

5. Google Wave updates: “Embed sites in waves with the Iframe Gadget”

Right now, there are a handful of Google Wave gadgets designed to help you bring information from other sites into a wave and interact with that content collaboratively. It will be a wonderful day when every website can be wave-ified inside a Google Wave gadget, but until then, I want to share a simple method for embedding arbitrary webpages inside a wave- a new third party extension called the Iframe Gadget. When you insert this gadget, you (and anyone else in the wave) can specify the URL of a webpage, and the gadget will render that site right inside the wave. It works best with webpages that provide an embed code, like Google Maps, and fill all the available screen space.

6. Google launches Google Dashboard, “Happy half-birthday Dashboard! Six months in and 100,000 users a day”

Since we’re celebrating our very first half-birthday, we thought it was the ideal time to update you on how things are going. On average, around 100,000 unique visitors a day check out their Dashboard, 85 percent for the first time. Since launch, we’ve worked to grow Dashboard, adding a number of other Google products including Sites, Maps, Books, Webmaster Tools, Buzz, Goggles, Sidewiki and Analytics. We’re still working on adding other products to the tool and are talking with users about new ways to improve the functionality moving forward.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/happy-half-birthday-dashboard-six.html

7. Google search updates: “A spring metamorphosis — Google’s new look”

We’ve added contextually relevant, left-hand navigation to the page. This new side panel highlights the most relevant search tools and refinements for your query. Over the past three years, we’ve launched Universal Search, the Search Options panel and Google Squared, and it’s those three technologies that power the left-hand panel.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/spring-metamorphosis-googles-new-look.html

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Any other news recent news from Google I miss?

Posted on October 3, 2009 - by Wayne Sutton

IZEAFest announcement: Sponzai launches as sponsored post platform for bloggers and brands

Whether you agree with it or not, sponsored blog post or tweets which some call sponsored conversations are here and more are on the way. Today at IZEAFest conference organizer Ted Murphy who’s behind sponsored tweets announced Sponzia which works to match bloggers with sponsored content.

The Sponzai pitch
Sponsors write their own guest post including multimedia and links. Sponsors then select the blogs on which they want to distribute their pre-written post. Bloggers earn cash for posting the content.

Monetize Your Blog
Sponzai.com is an online marketplace that allows you to connect directly with sponsors to find sponsored guest posts for you blog. Sponsors compensate you with cash in exchange for you publishing a post they have written. You simply copy and paste a guest post to your blog and submit the URL back to us. Think of it like eBay for sponsored guest posts.

Web: http://Sponzai.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/sponzai

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As Sponzia launches and sponsors content continues to evolve, we’ll see more platforms like Sponzai launch. I personally believe in 100% disclosure which something that Sponzia says it will only support. It will be interesting to see which bloggers and sponsors start to use Sponzia.

This is not a sponsored post, I’m attending IZEAFest as a moderator of a panel but I do wish Ted and IZEA much success with Sponzai. Also congrats to IZEA to continue to push the envelope to create products to help the blogging community and companies to monetize their products and services. Only time will tell how sponsored conversations will evolve and how it will shape the blogosphere as readers trust will be tested with blog authors.

What are your thoughts on sponsored blog post / conversations?

Opt-in: Sidebar: The best thing about blogs, they just keep going

Posted on July 24, 2009 - by Wayne Sutton

Friday Fix: Podcast: TheSocialGeeks: Stop Being Lazy, and Filter

In the latest edition of The Social Geeks, Chris Miller, Louis Gray, Jeff(isageek) and I talk about new introductions on Lazyfeed, Google Reader, and how to interact with multiple communities on differing social networks. We also talked about various tools we use to filter the noise. Reference the How I Filter The Noise, guest blog post on Jason Keath’s site. You can also find the original copy on Mevio.com.