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Is the Rise of Word Press Killing off Jobs?

November 1, 2011 By 18 Comments

Is Word Press killing of jobs? That’s what a new connection of mine on Twitter suggested to me just last week:

Wordpress Kills JobsThe minute I read Monica’s Tweet, the wheels in my head started spinning. One of them was wondering if it was true, and the second was what can (or should) be done about it. Before we go there, I learned that Monica’s opinion is an informed one, she started writing about WordPress in 2009, about the same time I started working with it (we share that too, she’s done WordPress web development too).

Is it True the WordPress is Killing Jobs?

This would be hard to prove, because during the rise of WordPress there was a corresponding fall in the economy that appears to be unrelated. WordPress does make web development and website maintenance easier and more available to more people to both develop and maintain with less technical skills however. Almost anyone can setup and maintain a WordPress based website. One thing is certain it’s still progress and it must be creating opportunities elsewhere. WordPress actually got me excited about web development after a very long hiatus.

What should we do about it?

It’s never fun to end up on the disrupted end of disruptive technology but the fact remains that innovation and value are important qualities in any business. If people are losing jobs from the rise of Word Press, they probably have some marketable skills that can be re-purposed. Web development takes a mix of creativity, technical and business skills, and there is always room for people with these skills. The challenge might have more to do with the discomfort of the disruption and the change that might be involved.

Do you think WordPress is really putting web firms out of business?

Filed Under: Business, Twitter, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , ,

Expand your content sharing with Print Friendly and PDF

October 21, 2011 By 8 Comments

As bloggers we’re always looking for ways to make our content more friendly, encourage conversation and encouraging distribution of the content to amplify our voice. I recall seeing the Print Friendly plugin for the first time over at Waxing Unlyrical. I thought it was interesting but didn’t connect the dots until yesterday that is.

Why some of your readers will love this plugin

Think for a moment about your less tech savvy readers, the ones who may not even have a Twitter account or won’t bother to click the LinkedIn share because they rarely log in. Or think about the friends and connections of your tech savvy readers that won’t want content delivered anywhere but the old tried and true – Email. This is where the true power of Print Friendly lies. In this video I demonstrate how the plugin works and describe in more detail why I think it is great for the web 1.0/Email crowd.

Video not showing up? Try this direct link.

Filed Under: Productivity, Technology, Video, Wordpress, YouTube Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Bye Headup it was nice knowing you

February 15, 2011 By 11 Comments

Good ByeHeadup makers of a Wikipedia info popup information utility are calling it quits on 2/28/2011. Citing lack of success in an Email sent to users of Headup (including moi) early this morning:

Hi there,

Following our previous email, we wanted to let you know that by the end of February we’re going to discontinue the Headup Widget for websites service.
We appreciate the time and effort that you took to use it. It’s been a great experience for us, and we hope you enjoyed the product as well.
There are many reasons for this, but the bottom line is that it just wasn’t successful enough to warrant future development.
The Headup widget will stop functioning on February 28th, 2011.

If you are a WordPress or Joomla user, we highly recommend that you uninstall it from the plugins page before the end of the month.
Other users should simply remove the script from their HTML files.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

Thanks for the feedback and support along the way, you’ve all been great.

All the best,
The Headup team.

I use the Headup widget here on my blog to allow people to get popup information on keywords such as Email, Facebook, Notifications, Life, NBC, Community (picked randomly from recent posts). According to the WordPress Codex site Headup has as of this publishing 10,754 downloads. So there are at least that many people like me seeking alternatives. I am going to start looking at alternatives but Wikipop is looking the most promising right now.

“Lack of success” = Lack of Profit

With the pressures to provide everything for free these days, many people are raising the question about free content and free applications. In fact if you follow @GiniDietrich’s blog she did a piece recently about charging for content. In that article she cited a recent Harvard Business Review podcast “Finding Profit in a World of Free” which is a very interesting piece that discusses the topic in depth.

Good bye Headup, it was indeed nice knowing you. Thanks for the free software and good luck to everyone. I only wish that your monetization strategy had worked because I thought you had a pretty awesome tool.

Photo Credit Peter Kaminski

Filed Under: New Media, News, Tools, Wordpress Tagged With: , , ,

Episode summary Blogger Ethics with Guest Danny Brown (Podcast)

January 20, 2011 By 4 Comments

Danny BrownRecently Danny Brown to joined me for a discussion about blogging ethics and transparency. Danny Brown is co-founder and partner at Bonsai Interactive Marketing, offering integrated marketing, social media, digital and mobile marketing solutions and applications. His blog is featured in the AdAge Power 150 list as well as Canada’s Top 50 Marketing Blogs, and won the Hive Award for Best Social Media Blog at the 2010 South by South West festival. After reading Danny’s blog for a while I learned two things that compelled me to invite him to join me for this episode:

  1. That he calls things the way he sees them
  2. That he is passionate about blogger ethics

Who better to dive into a topic that some might view as controversial? I knew that Danny would give me his honest answers and would not pull any punches. I really looked forward to chatting with him again, Danny was a part of the PRapalooza panel in early November 2010. Danny definitely lived up to my expectations and if you’re interested in learning more about transparency and ethics in the blogosphere have a listen:

Listen to Blogger Ethics and Transparency with Danny Brown:

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Find Danny Brown online:

On Twitter @dannybrown
Also might want to read his recent post about Blog Disclaimers at Dannybrown.me.

Know someone or a group of people that might be interesting to interview? Contact me or @hackmanj.

Filed Under: Blogging, Interviews, New Media, Podcasts, Social Media Strategy, Twitter, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , , , ,

How to use Tagxedo to embed a cool tag cloud on your Blog

January 3, 2011 By 3 Comments

Tagxedo Tag Cloud of Joe's Gone SocialHave you tried Tagxedo? It’s a pretty nifty little app I spotted on @liendi11′s  Amplog recently. While playing around with it I realized that it was more difficult to get the clouds to work in WordPress than one would think so when I found a way to get it to work I also created a video to explain it. The method that I demonstrate shows you how to create a tagxedo cloud that is usable in both pages, posts and even as a widget. The main thing that needs to be modified is the size of the iframe code that is provided in the tagxedo code snippet. Here is the video followed by a live example of the tag cloud.

In the live example of a Tagxedo Tag cloud below you’ll note that all of the links go to the default function in the setup – a Google search page. Ideally a blog specific search should be used. I’d imagine someone will get creative and port it to a WordPress plugin before too long but until now you can see the possibilities. (Note: If you click the tags it will take you off my site and to Google search, apologies I should have adapted it to my site search!)

Filed Under: Blogging, Images, Social Media Strategy, Video, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

How to Solve the Information Overload Problem

November 17, 2010 By 2 Comments

There has been a lot of discussion about the Facebook announcement on Monday November 15th. In fact there was a lot of hype leading up to the announcement. I can’t help but think it was sort of like the run up to the Google Buzz announcement and I could imagine the people at Facebook HQ saying amongst themselves:

“Oh boy, there is an awful lot of hype out there. Are we going to be able to live up to it or will we be the Google Buzz of unified communications announcements?”

I don’t think they can live up to the hype and let me explain why. I can really summarize it to a single sentence:

“Facebook is (mostly) a closed system.”

So how does a website that controls everything become a power player in something as open and free as communications? To be the key player in this space I believe there will be several important criteria:

  1. Be a fairly open system with open standards and APIs.
  2. Provide for connections to cutting edge, legacy and strategic systems.
  3. Rich filtering and logic algorithms.

The importance of an open system

The swell of opportunity created through the open source movement has created great opportunity for an evolution of ideas and made many great things possible. Just look at the extreme contribution of some major open source projects from the last 10+ years (my top 10 list):

  1. Wikipedia
  2. Linux
  3. MySQL
  4. PHP
  5. WordPress
  6. Apache
  7. Mozilla
  8. Open Office
  9. Creative Commons
  10. Filezilla

The API issue is really a no brainer, to get a better idea of why read this article “Top 5 Reasons Why Your Startup Needs an API” while written for startups I think it is a great overview of the importance of APIs without getting too technical.

So if you’re going to make the big messaging play, you better be focused on being open and accessible already.

Being cutting edge while walking with the Dinosaurs

There are so many forms of communications that are viable and would be a part of any true unified communications system. Facebook is still a cutting edge platform in 2010 but they lack key strategic and legacy support that would be essential as the player in the next big messaging platform.  Here are a few examples of the different systems:

Cutting Edge (current/bleeding edge tech)

  1. Cloud Technologies (Google Docs, Dropbox)
  2. Social Networking Sites (Facebook, LinkedIn)
  3. Streams (Twitter, Buzz)
  4. Voice over IP (Skype, VOIP carriers)

Strategic (established tech that is likely to be around for a while)

  1. Instant/Text Messaging (AIM, SMS)
  2. Blogs
  3. Email
  4. HTTPS (Encrypted Web Protocol)

Legacy (older technology that will largely fade away in the future)

  1. Internet Relay Chat
  2. FTP
  3. HTTP (Web Protocol – yes, Legacy)*

*HTTP should be on its way out, this is a little bit of writer activism on my part. Many would argue it is a strategic technology.

If you review that list and ask yourself, who understands and communicates effectively with everything on that list (and more importantly all the other important resources not on the list)? I guess at this point the answer is no-one, and that is the “what” in unified communications.

The importance of curation, human or machine.

Information Strainer

The importance of curation, narrow the stream or face information overload.

Photo by verbeeldingskr8.

If I were to combine all the communications I receive and process into one place it would be a big ugly mess. This is where the curation of the content will become essential to a unified communications platforms success. Curation will be the “how” in unified communications. The key will be to adequately search, filter and customize the data so that only the most important information is the most readily available. Allowing different ways to respond, perhaps knowing that for example a certain user prefers and responds better to Email, while another user responds more readily to Twitter, and so on. This will provide value on a number of levels. This will be a delicate balancing act because it must be easy for the end user to achieve high adoption rates, while technically pushing the envelope under the hood.

I think in 2010 many people are feeling over-whelmed by the data that they have to process. If you can cut through that mess, you will have a very satisfied customer. This is the “why” of unified communications.

This is my opinion, what do you think?

Filed Under: Blogging, Business, Facebook, Idea Farm, Productivity, Social Media Strategy, Technology, Twitter, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Testing the LiveFyre Comment System

October 12, 2010 By 14 Comments

Earlier this year I signed up to be on the beta tester list for Livefyre comment system. Just last week I saw it live on @Dannybrown’s Blog and realized I still had the account so I went back to the site and re-signed up (just in case they’d forgotten about me!). Within 24 hours I received an update notice about the Livefyre comment system being in beta, so I sent a really professional request to be considered for this proving stage of the product:

“I’ve already signed up for the beta, hook me up please :) ”

Within hours I received a message from @jkretch that he had sent me an invite. So I followed the link and started the task of migrating to this comment system. First I disabled Disqus, knowing that I would not want a conflict. I was preparing for the worst, I had no idea how difficult this Beta setup was going to be. When I clicked through the setup it auto-detected that WordPress was on my blog and gave me the option to import existing comments. The next screen was the actual instructions:

Livefyre Comment Installation Instructions

Livefyre Comment Installation Instructions

For anyone who knows WordPress at all will know the task they described pictured above is extremely simple and I think that is the best part about Livefyre so far. It is super easy to setup, after installing and activating the plugin I was DONE.

I am excited to try this comment system out here on my blog, it seems like it will take conversation capability to a new level. You can see who is currently participating as well as do all the other things you would expect.

So what do you think about the comment system? Please take a test drive and let me know your thoughts here.

Filed Under: Blogging, Wordpress Tagged With: , , ,

Uses of the Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin for WordPress (Video)

September 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Whenever we post things on a website the search engines index the page based on the address of that content. What happens if you move it? People will no longer be able to access it using your old link and the search engines will start fresh with the new page once (if?) they find it. This video shows you how you can use the Quick Page/Post Redirect to prevent losing referring traffic when you rename a permalink in WordPress. This plugin also has a number of great other uses, in fact I demonstrate how it was used to redirect old links from my Joomla based website to a WordPress based revision of the site as well. Don’t lose your SEO juice when you make changes, let your content be found.

Filed Under: SEO, Tools, Video, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , ,

Adding the Twitter Tweet Button to WordPress

August 12, 2010 By 4 Comments

Update 8/13/2010 – there is now a plug in called Twitter Tweet Button 1.0 that can be installed and enabled via WordPress Plugins. I am still using this original method described below because for me the formatting is off with the button.

I recorded this screencast for people who don’t want to wait for a decent plugin for the Twitter Tweet Button. There are some ways to add this to the single post template manually but with my template it was a complete nightmare to do. Until a plugin is released I this might help you add the new button to your WordPress blog:

This video does provide information on how to use the append plugin to add code or text to every page/post or both:

Filed Under: Technology, Twitter, Video, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , , ,

Interview Diane Rayfield Harp Social (Podcast)

August 4, 2010 By 4 Comments

Tonight I interviewed Diane Rayfield of Harp Social on Blogtalkradio. I invited Diane because I wanted to integrate more social media related guests into my podcast. Diane is the founder and CEO of Harp Social where she leads a team of social media, SEO and online marketing professionals to strategize, manage and evolve integrated online marketing for businesses. I met Diane at Amplify.com a social networking site that I have blogged about frequently. I always enjoy talking social media with people like Diane because I learn from them and the energy is upbeat and inspiring. Diane and I really covered a lot of ground during the interview, but her area of expertise is Strategy, Metrics and Inbound Marketing – “Getting Found”. Here are some highlight areas you can expect to learn more about if you listen to the entire episode:

  1. Location Based Marketing (Yelp, Foursquare and Gowalla)
  2. Monitoring/Metrics (Radian6, Google Alerts, Social Mention and Hootsuite)
  3. Amplify.com
  4. Facebook Pages
  5. Video Marketing (Including Youtube)
  6. Social Media Policies
  7. LinkedIn (Including Answers, Groups)
  8. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  9. Turning Point Autism Foundation

Listen

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You can follow Diane on Twitter @dianerayfield or visit harpsocial.com to learn more about her company.

Browser or RSS Reader doesn’t support flash? Download/Listen to this episode 

You can also signup to be notified when I have new Podcasts scheduled by clicking the “follow” button for my show on Blog Talk Radio.

Filed Under: Amplify, Blogging, Facebook, Interviews, Podcasts, SEO, Social Media Strategy, Tools, Twitter, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,
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