Category: On Social Media

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Essays On Culture On Social Media

We need to talk about the impact of Likes

Have you ever experienced information overload? Maybe I’m alone in this, but I love discovering new things. And for me learning from blogs, forums, or videos is an easy way to do it. With all that input I am influenced by the thoughts and ideas of the content. Which is part of the joy of learning, reshaping one’s frame of mind and gaining fresh insights.

Then I read Martin Cooper’s interview of Jeremy Keith in Net magazine. It was at night, I was sitting outside on my patio under the warmth of the propane heater as rain thundered down beyond the roof. In that moment I was reminded of what made the internet so compelling.Jeremy Keith interviewed by Martin Cooper

Here are the words I was reading. “What fascinates me,” Jeffrey says, “is the very basic idea of the web. This idea that anybody can publish on the web and other people can see it. People anywhere in the world. It’s a very simple idea but all the permutations of that have influenced a lot of what I do.”

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Essays On Social Media

Facebook is broken

Facebook likes brokenFacebook is broken. The site isn’t down, you can still login to your account. The problem is with its business model. Have you noticed how your newsfeed is getting more filtered? When you post something to your Facebook wall, it is only seen by a few of your friends. To prevent people’s walls from being inundated with thousands of posts, Facebook shares your posts with just a few of your friends, then if those friends like your post it is shared with more of your friends.

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Essays On SEO On Social Media

Step by step strategy on how to grow your blog’s traffic

Monthly web traffic growth of Machiine.com

This is a graph of Machiine.com’s web traffic over the last 12 months (April 2012 – April 2013). You will notice that while the number’s aren’t huge, they show steady growth. I’ve posted on 3 blogs over the last 4 years and noticed some similarities between all of them. Here is a summary of what I’ve learned about blog traffic.

If you have a blog you write content on, it’s probably because you’ve learned something and want to share your experience or knowledge with others. It’s encouraging to see that the time you spend on writing the articles is paying off. Conversely seeing little to no growth in traffic is über discouraging. If you are at this point, before you give up, read this article. I hope it will encourage you to continue. Maybe it’s not the way you write, but the types of articles you are writing. This tutorial will walk you through the steps to grow your traffic.

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On Business On Social Media

Thanks Grooveshark

Grooveshark T-shirt and stuff

Apparently writing a blog pays in t-shirts. So a few weeks ago I responded to an article written by Gizmodo (which they posted about a year ago) proclaiming that Grooveshark was done for. Obviously they got that one wrong and I wrote about why I am glad Grooveshark is alive and swimming. I mean I love Grooveshark I use it everyday. Well after writing the post I got this tweet informing me that Grooveshark wanted to thank me for writing that article and would send me a tshirt, as long as I lived in the U.S.

Two things went through my mind. I thought first that it was probably a scam and then that I don’t live in the United States. But I responded anyways. Luckily for me it was real, and the kind folks at Grooveshark were nice enough to mail me this package anyways. Which I found in my mailbox today and am stoked on.

As a founder of a tech startup myself I thought this was really cool. I don’t know if you have experienced this too, but one of the things that I have found neat about the startup culture is the strong sense of community. Most everyone I meet is open to talk about ideas, brainstorm solutions and throw together an event for nearly any reason.

This is what makes startup businesses unique. (At least some of them). When they let that culture of openness and the desire to think different permeate into a company, they create something that stands out from the crowd. They embrace open conversation and in some cases even reward it. It’s also great advertising. I wrote about Grooveshark once and now I am writing about them again. Thanks again Grooveshark.

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On Social Media

Are we missing an opportunity for a great conversation with Social Media?

Coffee shop social

I was reading some writing by blogger Jeff Goin who writes about writing. He was saying that social media is a two way street. It’s an unique opportunity to have a conversation with other people. But on blogs people write these complete thoughts, not offering room for conversation. I’ve been doing this! I love to write complete thoughts. It feels so good wrapping everything up.

This got me thinking about a couple things. First, I really agree with his statement that social media is a two-way street. It’s about much more than consuming. It’s a really cool way to co-create thoughts and articles and conversations. Let’s look at some of the tools we have today. With Twitter we can co-create conversations and current events. With Pinterest we co-create galleries of our interests, effectively co-creating digital magazines.

The second thought I had was that social media offers a way of connecting people across the world in one conversation, as if they were sitting around a table at a coffee shop. It’s really too bad that Google and Facebook are trying to give us location based search results. Because this is really is a unique opportunity to connect the world in a totally new way that could lead to break down of social barriers. It’s just a thought. What do you think? Is social media just a conversation, is it really about co-creating and could it help bring people from around the world into closer community?