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What Is Ubiquitous Computing?
Wikipedia defines “ubiquitous computing” as “... a model of human-computer interaction in which information processing has been thoroughly integrated into everyday objects and activities.”
Taken literally, ubiquitous computing means “computing everywhere”. It is that, but it's much more than that.
Ubiquitous computing is also known by its shorter form of “ubicomp” and additionally, there are other terms used to describe this concept such as “pervasive computing”, “ambient intelligence”, “proximity systems”, and “location aware” computing. It would be easy to assume this is simply the work of academics or market folk trying to push their individual brands.
But, in fact, it is more that just a matter of personal naming preference. The variety of different terms reflects the multi-faceted nature of what can be done, and what it means, to have computing everywhere. Consider this list of some of the facets or aspects of ubicomp:
- Computing is ubiquitous, so it's available everywhere.
- Computing is pervasive so it essentially becomes impossible to avoid.
- In ubicomp, the computer is not something in the environment that interacts with a human—it is the environment interacting with a human.
- The computing infrastructure is aware of your location or proximity, and makes use of that information.
- Since the computing is integrated in the environment, the human may not even be aware that it is doing something.
- As a result of all of the above, the environment embodies an emergent sense of awareness, in other words: “ambient intelligence”.
Ubiquitous computing has the potential to:
- employ computation in ways we haven't thought of before,
- change our perspective on how we interact with our environment as well as computers,
- use information to impact our lives in new ways, possibly far beyond what the Internet does today,
- and forever change our notions of security, privacy, and community.
That's the party line anyway, and while I think most parties involved in the field believe the above to ultimately be true, it is still very speculative and the actual evolutionary path of ubicomp is less than obvious.
One of my new goals in life, then--if you'll pardon a little drama--is to help make ubicomp more real by exploring the technical aspects of ubicomp and practical applications. There has been a lot of academic research in the field, but, at least to my mind, the "killer" applications, or at least implementations, remain to be realized.
Until next time,
rk
Back With A Mission
I am back after taking a sabbatical from this blog for a while. Looking at the date on my last post, I can't believe it has only been about three months, although it seems like much longer (and in blog time that may as well be forever).
The reason I took some time off (only from the blog that is) was that I didn't particularly like the direction the blog was going in nor was I happy with the projects I was working on. The two major problems as I saw it were:
- While I enjoy writing and blogging, I have always been more of an architect by nature as well as career (systems and software), and after some introspection realized I really wanted to be building something, and that should be where my entrepreneurial energy goes vs. primarily being an analyst/blogger.
- Although I had a good idea of the technical space that was a match for my background and interests, my focus was in the wrong place.
In my time away from this blog I have been working on my picobuzz web app at picobuzz.com. I've also been exploring Twitter and other social media and networking sites and apps. I've never been much for things like chat, IM and texting in the past, but I am particularly fond of Twitter and the people active on there.
There was a method to this jumping around: while I was off doing some soul-searching on what new direction I wanted to take with my entrepreneurship, I have been gaining some valuable experience on buliding a Web 2.0 app (picobuzz.com). Also, I have been getting a meaningful (not superficial) pulse on social networking, or at least those aspects I might be interested in.
All of this has helped me figure out my new focus. I will still be actively maintaining picobuzz (because it is a rush seeing what the Twitterverse is buzzing about). However, I am also going to be starting work on my new focus: Ubiquitous Computing, also known as "UbiComp". In retrospect, this is more of an evolution for me rather than a revolution. I already have a background in many of the related technical aspects like wireless communication, bluetooth and distributed computing. I was in the ballpark with my prior blogging focus on proximity marketing. Yet, I was close but still so far. The reasons:
- Proximity marketing is too often like a solution in search of a problem. There are some interesting applications and businesses doing work in this area but they are for the most part niche applications.
- There are issues related to privacy and intrusion that bothered me about proximity marketing.
- Even though I was aware of the work in Ubiquitous Computing, Pervasive Computing and similar domains, I had trouble seeing the mass appeal and value proposition for the average person. I am not far off the mark in thinking this--there have academic efforts and conferences on this for several years now but most people, even technical, are unaware of this field. And this is a field which could have mind-blowing ramifications.
In closing (for now), I am happy to say that I have come up with some new ideas for exploring and (hopefully) advancing the field of Ubicomp. I will be starting work on these ideas immediately and sharing my thoughts on this blog in the upcoming weeks.
rk
12 Days Of Traffic -- Day 12: Giving
I am going to close the 12 Days of Traffic series on the subject of giving. Everyone has heard an expression like "Give and it will come back to you ten-fold". So what am I saying: if you give, you will be rewarded with an abundance of Web traffic? Pretty much.
I have already discussed how participation on social networking sites and other blogs will motivate other people to visit your website. But it goes beyond that. I have heard and read repeatedly from some of the most successful entrepreneurs that giving to others results in great rewards. You don't have to believe in divine intervention or karma (but that's ok, too). I think it is a simple truth is that when you give to others, you become the kind of person who others want to know, trust, and give back to. From what I've seen, these entrepreneurs didn't consciously give with the expectation of anything in return. They gave for giving's sake and discovered that they prosperred when they helped others prosper.
So first, I would like to say that part of my motivation for writing the 12 Days series was to give something back to bloggers and other Web entrepreneurs. If anyone ends up benefiting from my thoughts and research, then I will continue it a success, no matter what my traffic statistics.
Second, I would like to give some link love to some other writers and bloggers who's work I enjoyred and some of whom are also working on Web entrepreneurial endeavors:
Chris Bloczynski: Chris is another blogger (and another Chris, btw) who writes about entrepreneurship and Internet marketing.
Breaking Free: This is the site of Brian Armstrong who wrote a book of the same title (Breaking Free) about getting out of the corporate cubicle world run your own business. Brian did a 30 day series with some tips similar to what I've discussed.
ProBlogger: I've mentioned Darren Rowse's blog before but will mention it again because it is a great source of information.
Edith Yeung: Edith's blog is about personal development as well as entrepreneurship.
DoshDosh: The mission of DoshDosh is "helping you make money online". I thoroughly enjoy reading Maki's articles.
Finally, I will leave you with link to an organization specifically geared toward entrepreneurs in poorer countries:
Kiva: In their own words: "Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can "sponsor a business" and help the world's working poor make great strides towards economic independence." You can loan as little as $25 at a time and loans are made easily and securely via PayPal.
Or, if you would like to give time or expertise instead, check out these organizations:
GIVE (Global Initiative to Advance Entrepreneurship. GIVE is a nonprofit founded by Steven Van Yoder of Get Slightly Famous™ that is dedicated to addressing the growing problem of global poverty in developing countries by supporting entrepreneurship.
ThinkCycle: A nonprofit organization that has created a culture of open source design to engineer solutions--such as alternate energy, water filtering, etc.--for underdeveloped areas.
That concludes the 12 Days series. I hope you got something out of it. In about a month I hope to come back and report on results. In the meantime, I have work to do putting all these methods into practice.
Happy Holidays,
rk
12 Days Of Traffic -- Day 11: Roundup
I am going to use this post to comment on a few useful sites and services. Having recently moved back to Texas, I am obliged to use at least one Western term--hence the "Roundup".
Technorati
If you are a blogger, know any blogger or can spell the word "blogger", you will run across the name "Technorati" and hear about get a top Technorati ranking. Ironically, despite it's importance to bloggers, it is not easy to find a good definition of what it is. If you think of it as a blog search engine crossed with a social bookmarking site, that is probably as good a definition as any. For their own perspective, check the
Here is a good post on Guy Kawasaki's blog: Ten Questions with David Sifry (founder of Technorati) which helps explain what it is about.
There are a few things you can do with Technorati as a blogger:
1. First sign up for an account and "claim" your blog at Technorati:
Sign up for Technorati account
Then set up your blog to ping Technorati when you update your blog.
However,
2. Make use of Technorati tags with your posts. Technorati tags are like those keywords you put in or on your web pages (to assist readers and SEO); however these tags are like keywords on steroids which get your posts linked and categorized in the Technoratisphere.
Here is the Technorati page on tags.
To add Technorati tags to your posts, you can use a tag generator such as this.
For alternative or more automated ways of tagging your posts, google it for your particular blog software.
3. Add a social bookmark link with your post to allow people to mark your content as noteworthy. To do that, add a link with the following format:
http://technorati.com/faves?add=http://www.yourwebsite.com
Of course, substitute "www.yourwebsite.com" with the url name for your blog.
Social Bookmarks
That last bit on Technorati will allow me to segue into Social Bookmarks in general. Social Bookmarks are a way to allow readers to easily mark or tag their favorite content for social networking sites. Or more to the point: they are a way for website owners to increase their traffic by allowing readers to easily mark or tag their favorite content for social networking sites.
Social bookmarks are typically implemented as a collection of little icons that appear at the bottom of a page or blog post. For example on my blogs, they look like this:
Here is a nice, readable-by-normal-humans article on Using Social Bookmarks To Promote Your Blog.
To get URLs for various bookmarklets, here is a page on how to add 30 way-more-than-30 social bookmarkets to footer for you blog posts. On behalf of myself and readers everywhere, I strongly urge you not to add anywhere near this many bookmarkets, but this page will have a link to any social site you may be interested in.
MyBlogLog
I mentioned MyBlogLog briefly before, but I will elaborate a bit more here. In addition to being another place to register your blog(s) MyBlogLog organizes blogs and blog readers into "communities".
You can find a good introduction to MyBlogLog by Danny Sullivan here. To quote Danny:
"Probably the coolest thing about MyBlogLog is that when you go to a blog running the code -- and if you're a member -- then you'll see yourself show up in the "widget" or member box that people typically run."
As that article also mentions, MyBlogLog is now affiliated with Yahoo!, so you will signup or get a Yahoo! id.
The way to get a widget for your site is to first add a site/blog you author. Then you click on "Get Widgets" to go through the process of generating the appropriate widget to insert into your web pages.
Other Social Networking Sites
I'll finish the roundup with a few other social networking sites. You have no doubt heard of some these already, but I'm throwing them in to round out your social networking traffic strategy:
Facebook: A general social "identity" site, oriented toward people who might be a little old or otherwise have an aversion to MySpace.
LinkedIn: Is a business-oriented social networking site.
Spoke: A lesser-knonw but still interesting business social networking site.
de.icio.us:The premier social bookmarking site. It never really resonated with me--perhaps the spelling of the name is too tedious. Regardless, it is popular service.
Flickr: Speaking of spelling, I get this one wrong frequently. It seems like if it's cool to drop the "e", the "c" should be omitted too. Flickr is, of course, the photo sharing site and is hooked into many blogs. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words and, if it is appropriate for your site (and the images are not inappropriate :) ), it is a powerful way to attract readers and stay in their memories.
That's it for this post. I'll spare you any corny puns on "socializing".
rk
12 Days Of Traffic -- Day 10: Blog Carnivals
A blog carnival is like an online magazine where a collection of blog posts are published on a common theme, but from different authors. Each edition of a blog carnival is a single blog article that contains permalinks links to other blog articles on the chosen topic. Blog carnivals are an excellent way to get one-way inbound links and traffic. And like all the techniques I've discussed so far, they are free.
Other sources of web traffic such as search engines and high-traffic social networking sites like Digg are dominated by larger players (who can invest $ for adwords and other advertising) and power users who command the lion's share of attention. It will take you some time to work your way up into visibility on these sites. Blog carnivals, on the other hand, are very newbie-friendly. As long as you produce some quality content and put in some effort, you can get in the game quite quickly. At first your readers will tend to be other people involved in carnivals, but that is ok because you will establish visibility and relationships with potential peers and build a solid foundation for traffic.
Blog carnivals involve the organizer (who is like the publisher), the host (who is like the editor) and the bloggers who submit posts. The organizer starts the carnival and defines what it will be about, what the submission criteria are, and how often it will appear. They also coordinate who will host each edition of the carnival and publish details on upcoming carnivals. The host is a blogger who volunteers for an uncoming edition of the carnival. The host then collects links from all the submitters (other bloggers), organizes them into a single article, and finally publishes the collection on his or her blog. Each edition may be hosted by a different blogger so that the carnival travels around in that's carnival's community.
The place to start with blog carnivals is, naturally enough:
You should browse around to find carnivals that are a good fit for your topic area. There is also a pretty decent FAQ to walk you through the process. Here is another introductory article on blog carnivals which seems to be popular: Five Questions (And Answers) About Blog Carnivals.
How do I plan to employ this technique towards picobuzz.com? Well, as it turns out, I will soon have accumulated 12 new articles to draw material from. Sure, I wouldn't just throw all of them out there and I will have to do some editing, but it gives me a great running start. You would almost think I planned it that way.
rk
12 Days Of Traffic -- Day 9: Twitter
Twitter is an online social networking service that enables you to broadcast short messages to your friends or "followers". Twitter's slogan is that it answers the question: “What are you doing now?” Twitter messages--also known as "tweets"-- are limited to 140 characters, so each message can be sent as a single SMS alert.
Twitter and similar services (Dodgeball, Pownce) are known as microblogging services. The blog part of the name is appropriate because when a person does an update(tweet), they are broadcasting it to their followers as opposed to IM where there is more of a live, one-to-one conversation going. The "micro" part of course refers to the small size of the "post", which is part of Twitter's utility as well as part of its charm.
I held off talking about Twitter up to this point due to my personal bias, given that my own website picobuzz.com is based on Twitter. Nevertheless, Twitter can add to your traffic strategy and help you gain visibility.
How is Twitter good for generating Web traffic? Well, I'm sure you figured out from my 12 Days of Traffic series so far that a common theme in building traffic on the Web is to get out there and participate and contribute. So why bother to use Twitter in addition to the other social networking services discussed so far?
Well, for one thing Twitter is dead simple to set up and use. The limitation on the post(tweet) size is actually liberating. With only 140 characters to work with, it takes little time to write such a micropost and leaves little reason to fuss over it and spend time editing your thoughts. As such it offers a way to stay active on the Web during those down times when you don't feel motivated to sit down and write a regular blog post. You can even tweet from your mobile phone using SMS or one of several mobile twitter apps out there.
Another great thing about Twitter is that it is pretty much a positive anarchy, where you can follow and interact, or at least attempt to interact, with anyone. You can find politicians (BarackObama, John Edwards), Web celebrities (Jason Calacanis, Robert Scoble, Guy Kawasaki), and I believe Hollywood celebrities (which I have little interest in looking up). Not that I'm recommending you stalk these people or anyone else. My point is that it is easy to follow someone on Twitter, and chance the occasional reply, without looking or feeling like a stalker.
You can sign up for a Twitter account here.
Twitter is easy to figure out, but if you want, here is a Newbie's Guide to Twitter. There is also TwitDir which is a Twitter directory that can help find if someone you know has a Twitter account.
Finally, there is a Twitter helper app I am using: twitterfeed. What this does is monitor my regular blog's feed and automatically do a tweet for me with a link to my new post.
Ok, really finally: If you haven't yet checked out my Twitter buzz app picobuzz.com, please do so (thanks).
So--“What are you doing now?”
rk
12 Days Of Traffic -- Day 8: Comment With Abandon
One of the most consistent bits of advice that accomplished bloggers give to new bloggers and webmasters hungering for traffic is:
Actively leave comments on other people's blogs.
I don't delude myself that I am revealing earth-shattering new web traffic secrets here in the 12 Days. For one thing, if it was so secret you might not know or believe it works. Plus it is hard to keep a secret from everyone on the Internet. The real problem is separating fact from hype and identifying what is likely to work consistently. I am including this one because I have seen it work and, just as importantly, believe it is still one of the best techniques for building quality traffic.
For a similar opinion on the subject, check out this article by Yaro Starak at Entrepreneur's Journey: Proof That Blog Commenting Still Works To Build Traffic.
Commenting on other people's blogs is effective for building traffic, not only because it creates awareness in your blog, but also because it inspires genuine reciprocity in the other bloggers. When you show support for someone else's work, at some point they tend to feel compelled to return the favor or at the very least curious on what you are about. Plus, since bloggers are constantly looking for new things to blog about so they may start to think of your site as a good source of content. They will feel more comfortable referencing your content knowing it is a mutually beneficial situation. In summary, it's a win-win situation, which means that it's a sustainable process.
Before I forget, I want to point out that you don't need to have a blog site to use this technique. My picobuzz site is not primarily a blog, yet I fully intend to build relationships with bloggers. In fact, non-blog content provides new material for bloggers as an alternative to spending too much time commenting on each others blog posts.
The other aspect of commenting on other people's blogs is illustrated in this picture which shows a typical comment for an individual's blog:
In addition to leaving your name and comment, you are often allowed to provide your website's URL. Why? Because bloggers know you want to spread your URL love around, and also that you will be more motivated to contribute comments for that very reason. Getting your URL on several quality blogs will have a positive impact on your search engine placement.
Here's where things get challenging: although smaller blogs and sites will allow this sort of thing, larger blogs and sites do not because of the risk of abuse by spammers. As mentioned in my post 12 Days Of Traffic -- Day 7: The Digg Effect, Digg does not support this when commenting. The same is true for Reddit and about any other social networking site known for high traffic. So we are left with a bit of a dilemma: we want to comment on a site with good traffic but we also want to leave our URL.
To this, I offer a two-part solution:
1. Pick a couple or few blogs with the following characteristics:
- They cover topics in the same topic, interest or industry as your site.
- You respect and enjoy reading their content.
- They have respectable but not huge traffic. You are more likely to develop a good relationship if the bloggers are still small enough to be reachable.
- Oh yes, and they allow adding your URL in comments.
2. It is possible to find a site that has good readership but is not so "big" that URLS are banned. I recommend Mashable as a worthy site for supporting and commenting. I enjoy reading it, they have a cool site, and it allows URLs in comments. It also has a respectable Alexa ranking of about 1300 at this point.
You can sign up for Mashable here.
Happy commenting!
P.S. this blog allow urls in comments
12 Days Of Traffic -- Day 7: The Digg Effect
For those of you who aren't familiar with Digg (there may be a couple out there) it is a social networking site where news items are submitted, shared, and ranked by users as opposed to being controlled by editors. Bloggers have discovered that getting their blog on Digg, especially the home page, will potential result in a flood of traffic to the blog, sometimes within minutes. In fact, due to the popularity of Digg, the traffic can be so overwhelming as to cause what is known as the Digg effect, where a small website's unprepared web server is brought to its knees (goes offline) due to the overwhelming traffic.
This has not escaped the notice of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) consultants who tout the importance of getting on the Digg front page. Unfortunately, theyoften don't offer any clues about how to do that, and it's easier said than done. For one thing, Digg users are easily turned off by self-promotion. Although you are allowed to submit your own articles, you run the risk of falling in that category. Also, Digg's popularity makes it a target for spamming and shameless self-promotion for the same reason it is desirable for legitimate bloggers and content provider. Further, Digg doesn't allow signatures and urls in the post body may be viewed negatively.
So what's a blogger or web publisher to do? Well, there is a right way to build Digg traffic, but it will take some time and effort. Here are some tips:
- In general, you will need to take some time to develop a trusted relationship with other Digg users.
- Try not to submit your own articles. In the beginning, you can use a few good friends to help submit your items and vote on them.
- Try to focus on your area of expertise. Identify other users who have blogs and articles similar to yours and whom you respect, and develop trusted relationships with them.
- Submit posts and articles from those trusted users blogs. If you scratch their back, they will scratch yours.
- Don't just publish, be an active reader and vote on other submissions. Comment on other submissions.
- When you commen, put a link to your own content, only if it is very relevant and helpful for readers of the original submission.
- Do not submit, or have submitted, everything you write. If you can get your most interesting articles some visibility, readers will see your other work when they get to your site.
For additional advice, check out this article with a very appropriate title:
How to Become a Digg Top User (without doing anything shady) .
To actively use Digg you will need to create an account here. After that, just go to the Digg homepage and start browsing around. Using it is fairly self-explanatory.
I will leave you with one additional gem you can use with Digg called the Social Media for Firefox Extension. What this tool does in essence is help you be the first to submit hot items to Digg by finding items on other social networking sites such as StumbledUpon and Reddit which are already popular but haven't made it yet to Digg. Being the first user to submit popular items will develop your reputation as a power user.
12 Days Of Traffic -- Day 6: RSS Feed
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, which doesn't immediately tell you any more than the acronym.
Basically, RSS is like a streamlined channel--called a feed--for website updates. RSS produces a stream of the latest content of your website, which is often posts from a blog, but could be news or other updating content. With zillions of websites and blogs out there for people to read, an RSS feed evolved as an excellent way to make it easier to quickly and easily consume this deluge of information. With RSS, a person can use an RSS fead reader or "aggregator" tool to consolidate a bunch of RSS feeds. This way, that person can quickly scan the titles from your recent blog entries or articles along with other feeds of interest.
RSS has a variety of other potential application which I won't go into. For website traffic purposes, RSS is a valuable technology for several reasons. This was part of my motivation for introducing a blog into the mix on Day 5, because a blog provides an easy, standard way to introduce a feed to a website. The advantages of RSS include:
1. RSS works like a subscription. If someone is interested in what they see on your site, they can "subscribe" to your RSS feeds. A subscription is a good thing. Just like a magazine subscription, if someones subscribes to your feed, that means they will potentially be coming back and reading your stuff regularly. Even if they don't always bring readers to your page, RSS creates regular readership which translates into traffic. Even though your feed might appear in a feed reader/aggregator (away from your site), the reader must often click through to your site to read more than the summary provided in the aggregator.
2. A reader is more likely to come back to a feed than a bookmark. It is quite common to come across a website you like and bookmark it, only to forget to go back to it later. If your feed is sitting in a reader's aggregator list, even if they are browsing other feeds, your feed will also be right there in front of them thereby increasing the odds that they will browse your content at some point.
3. RSS provides an easy way to get links to your site, and more links to your site means better chances for traffic. There are various feed directories to which you can submit your site--without the hassle of exchanging or begging for a link on someone else's website. Here are links to some directories:
feedburner
syndic8
feedboy
If you have a blog, here are some specific directories for that:
mybloglog
bloglines
blogcatalog
bloghub
Rather than typing any more out for you, here is a nice page at BloggingTips which lists 75 blog directories.
4. RSS feeds are very standard, and surfers are "trained" to look for the RSS button on your page. By making it as easy as possible to sign up for your content, you are more likely to get busy, impulse-driven readers to subscribe. If they have to fill out a form or give their email address, they might think twice and just move on. With Bloglines--the feed aggregator I use--I can easily capture an RSS feed I might like with little effort. Then I can figure out later if I want to keep reading that feed. Ultimately, good, interesting and relevant content is what keeps a reader's attention (and traffic). RSS helps get them in the door (or rather "window" :) ).
5. A feed forces you to have regular content. Regular, or at least semiregular content is needed to keep traffic to your site. If you have a blog it is a must, but it's just as important to websites with other kinds of content. If you use a blogging platform like Blogger or Wordpress, they will have an easy way of automatically creating a feed from your blog posts. If your blog platform doesn't provide an RSS mechanism, switch to another blog platform. Seriously. If you have a website with different content, you can still have a feed, but it might take a bit of programming or scripting. If you are using a Content Management platform such as Nuke, Joomla, Drupal, Django, Ruby on Rails or one of the many others, there is probably a plugin to help you do this or help in a forum on how to do it.
I happen to use the python-based platform Django for my blog and picobuzz.com site. I found a lot of excellent blog posts on how to set up things like an RSS feed for a blog. If you are not a programmer, I would recommend trying Wordpress. It will help keep the programming or scripting to a minimum, and PHP is probably easier to get started with.
For picobuzz, which is not a blog, I have decided that I will create a feed which periodically reports on the latest buzz. It wasn't too hard to come up with that idea for a non-blog feed, and you can probably easily do the same. There are other possibilities for feed content:
- the latest news (applicable to almost any website)
- deals or specials (e-commerce sites)
- photo feed
Once you actually have a feed, you should place a link on your pages using a nice RSS icon, for example from this RSS button page. It is becoming fairly standard to use the orange button with the little signal arcs:
That's all for this post. I am going to go "feed" myself lunch (ooh--lame joke).
12 Days Of Traffic -- Day 5: Just Add Blog
My Web traffic tip for the day is:
If you want to increase traffic to your portal website, add a blog.
That's pretty much it. A blog is one of the best ways to publish content and attract readers and therefore attention to your website. I realize that may be pretty obvious, especially if you already have a blog and that's why you are reading this series of articles in the first place (thanks by the way). So, I will speak to those of you who have a blog first (before you leave in utter disappointment) and then speak to those who don't have a blog.
If You Already Have A Blog
If you fall in this category, you probably already know why it is a good thing and what you can do with it. And you really just want to get more traffic. Here, then, is my second tip of the day:
If you want to increase traffic to your blog website, add a portal.
So what does that mean? Basically, what I'm saying is that you want to include content that doesn't look like daily blog posts--in other words, you should have some articles. You can think of Articles as major posts, which are also know as pillar articles or posts. Characteristics of pillar articles are:
- They are longer than a typical post, at least 500 words.
- They are usually written in a tutorial style and offer practical advice.
- It is obvious that you did some research on the topic.
- The topic is somewhat timeless relevant for a good period of time.
The last point is what makes them important to your blog for web traffic. Think about it this way: if you write a post announcing that Apple released the iPhone yesterday, even such an earth-shatteringly important announcement is going to become old news at some point. If you blog about what you had for breakfast, it will become old news much sooner. I you instead write a useful tutorial on a topic--such as how to do work with CSS stylesheets, how to understand your phone bill, why not to feed your dog chocolate--then someone new to that subject will likely benefit from your expertise or research. And such a tutorial may be relevant for a long period of time because there are always new people browsing on a topic. In fact, the longer it hangs around, the more popular a pillar article can become (it may become a classic), which is the opposite of what happens with news-like blog posts.
So the extra work going into a longer, well-researched and written article pays off in the long run. Most of the bloggers I tend to read take this approach, and there seems to be a high correlation between this approach and bloggers that make good income.
If You Have A Portal Site But Don't Yet Have a Blog
By a portal site, in this case I essentially mean a website that is not a blog. A blog can pull in traffic to all types of websites. Some of the advantages of a blog are:
- You get to say pretty much anything you want--there is no publisher to approve, reject or censor you. Hopefully you will not blog about anything too heinous, but the point is you have a lot of freedom to express yourself.
- A blog adds a human element to a business. There are a number of officers of major corporate entities who chose to blog for this reason, for example Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems.
- If your blog cotent compliments you other website content, you will pull in readers who turn into buyers or subscribers of your other content.
- You can strategicially market blogs in places you might not otherwise be able, such as Technorati (a topic for a future article).
Getting a blog started can be very easy. If you are already using a Content Management System or platform, then it may already have a blog module or plugin. If not, you can get started quickly and easily with one of these free services:
If that's not enough here are 40+ free blog hosts.
I already have this blog to work with, but I am planning on adding a blog to picobuzz so I can blog about content and news specifically relevant to that website. I thought about doing the 12 Days series of post with that site thinking that these articles might pull traffic to there. However, I decided that it was important to not dilute the focus of picobuzz with offtopic content so I decided to keep these posts separate.
That's it for today advice. It's sort of basic, but it serves as an important foundation which we can build on.
NOTE: I am already seeing a bit of traffic from StumbleUpon after only one day. It's only a trickle, but it's a start.
12 Days Of Traffic -- Day 4: Search Engines
Part of getting traffic to your site has traditionally involved recognition and good ranking with major search engines and directories. Having said that, most legitimate experts on Web traffic agree:
The most important factor in achieving sustained, high-level traffic is having abundant, good-quality content.
The art of improving search engine ranking is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. There are many companies and websites that offer services for SEO--some are legitimate, but many are scams. Search engine companies like Google are not too kean on "link farms" or sites which have no content other than linking to other sites--and this is the kind of thing some SEO services offer. Here is a cautionary page from Google on the subject.
SEO Tags
The following are a few HTML settings which will make your pages SEO friendly. All of these are located in the <head> section of your html pages.
1. Title tag
This is still said to be one of the most import SEO settings.
<title>keyphrase1 | keyphrase2 | etc</title>
For picobuzz.com, it might look something like:
<title>twitter buzz | popular microblogging terms | picobuzz</title>
I could probably do better than that, but it's a start. In general, you want set yourself apart from the many other websites out there, so specific titles and keywords will work better. Even if you are in a popular niche, you should try and distinguish yourself somehow.
2. Robots meta tag
Add this to tell search engine spiders and it is ok to crawl and index your site:
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow" />
3. Content-type tag
This helps search engines understand the type of content:
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
4. Description tag
<meta name="description" content="Microblogging buzz -- Today's top twitter terms." />
5. Keywords
This is the one that used to be the main focus. It's usefulness is debated now (due to past abuse) but it should still be configured and look something like this:
<meta name="keywords" content="your keywords,go here,separated by a comma,but not a space">
For example:
<meta name="keywords" content="microblogging buzz,microblogging buzz terms,twitter buzz,twitter buzz terms,top twitter terms">
If you want to learn or do more with SEO, just google it and you will find plenty of free information. Here is one link with SEO articles. Everyone has different opinions, but you should see some common themes and good advice.
Links For Submitting Your Website to Search Engines
The following are links to pages where you can submit your website's URL in order to help get it recognized by the most popular search engines (like google) and directories (for example yahoo!):
google: url submit page
yahoo: submit a website
MSN: live search submit
DMOZ: how to suggest a url
Ask: sorry, no submit page
That should get you started with search engines. After that, you can go back to creating awesome content!
(Check out the Google Analytics screenshot above. picobuzz.com is big in Alaska! :) )
12 Days Of Traffic -- Day 3: StumbleUpon
From my considerable research on the subject of traffice generation, I have the impression that the StumbleUpon service is a potentially good mechanism for generating traffic fairly quickly as compared to other methods. Other methods--some of which I will cover in future Days posts--build more steady traffic over a longer period of time whereas StumbleUpon appears to generate traffic more quickly, but the traffic is not so sustained. Since we need some traffic (any traffic at all) quickly, StumbledUpon seems like a good early step.
The StumbleUpon application uses a custom browser toolbar which acts like a TV remote control where one is quickly clicking through channels (you should probably imagine the remote is in a guy's hand :) ). To quote their own page:
Channel surf the internet with the StumbleUpon toolbar to find great sites, videos, photos and more based on your interests. StumbleUpon learns what you like and makes better recommendations.
Because of this, StumbleUpon users tend to skim through websites more quickly than usual, making a judgement in seconds on whether they should take a longer peek or click on to the next site. This is why we tok some effort on Day 2 of the 12 Days Of Traffic to make sure our website looks appealing.
To get started, go to the StumbleUpon signup page:
This will walk you through the process of creating an account, then installing a custom toolbar as an addon to your browser. After installation (and probably restarting your browser), you should see a StumbleUpon toolbar as one of the toolbars of your browser:
You can now proceed to get your website recognized by StumbleUpon by going to this link, which will give you a page like the image below, where I have entered the url for my website picobuzz.com.
Click on "View Reviews", and you will probably get a message like:
We don't have a record of
http://picobuzz.com/
That's ok, just click "visit the site" which will take you to the url you entered. From there, just click on the thumbs up ("I like it") button on the StumbleUpon toolbar:
From there you just enter a quick review for your site in the form, and that's it. Hopefully this will start sending some traffic your (and my) way. In the meantime, try out the StumbleUpon service and see what interesting sites you can find!
12 Days Of Traffic -- Day 2: A Website Makeover
Before we start executing a lot of techniques for driving traffic to our website, it is worthwhile to take a moment and make sure we our putting our best face forward and giving potential viewers something compelling to look at. Consider it an instant makeover like you see on TV where they take someone plain or frumpy (I think that's the word) and jump right in to quickly change their hair, clothes, and makeup in order to see how they can give that person their best look--using what they have to work with now.
We don't want to go overboard and spend days or weeks redesigning the site. No, we want something quick like that half hour makeover on TV. If you think your website needs extensive cosmetic surgery, you will have to put that aside and plan for it later. For now, we just want to make sure we are putting our best face forward.
We are living in the instant-gratification era. Among other things, we crave information and want it instantly. Surfers on the Web now include two generations of people who were raised on the flashing, fast-cut, in-your-face media style pioneered by MTV and others. Even older generations of Web users, who might remember a time before MTV and the Web (say what?) have a need to assimilate more information ever more quickly. The rise of technologies such as the Web--but also email, smartphones and Instant Messaging-have resulted in an expectation to employ these systems and devices for instant access to information. I myself have not read a newspaper for years. I do read a lot of books and magazines, but for news I can't see spending half an hour or more reading a newspaper when I can get the same (or fresher) essential news in 2 minutes from a Web page like CNN.com, MSN.com or even FARK. I do think we have gone a bit too far, and I hope that someday we get ourselves off of this crazy pace of living. But there is no getting around the huge need for instant access to information.
What does this have to do with Website traffic you ask? In short, the focus, theme or purpose of your website needs to be apparent as quickly as possible--in seconds to a new viewer who just wandered upon your site.
Of course, this may be easier said than done, and I won't claim to be an expert on web design or marketing. That doesn't make it any less true. Although we are going to take some quick steps to spiff up our website for now, good web design is a bit of an art form and is an ongoing journey ,and you will want to re-evaluate your site from time to time.
Some specific tips I can offer from my experience and others are:
1. Keep your style simple. When you think it is simple enough, it still can be more simple. There is a common theme these days with "Web 2.0" sites toward stark style and simplicity. While sometimes criticized as just another trend, it is a valid recognition that simple web pages connect more effectively with surfers. Google is the poster child for simple web design. Other models include Flickr and 37signals.
For a humorous, but informative, recipe for creating a Web 2.0 page, check out this page by Jacob Skjerning.
2. Create a good "About" page. This is your prime place to say exactly what you want your website to be. So even if your website doesn't exactly tell the story you want at the moment, your About page will.
For a concise example of what to put in an About page, check out this ProBlogger post.
In my case for picobuzz.com, I have a lot of ideas that I think are good but are going to take me a while to implement. I can use my About page to say what my goals are, even if those features don't appear today.
3. Make it easy to find things. If your website is still small, you may not have a big problem here, but even a simple blog home page can screw this up.
Some specific examples:
- Don't provide many ways to navigate to the same item. This goes against the grain of some schools of web design, but I would argue this point ferociously. I challenge that a link--to the same exact page--needs to be in 2 different headers and the sidebar. If you give multiple choices, it not only makes your page more cluttered but worse, causes confusion. One link, in the right place, will work much better.
- Put the RSS feed icon in a obvious spot. If someone is wanting to subscribe to your feed, that is a valuable new reader who wants to get more of your content. You want to do everything in your power to make it easy for them so they don't have to hunt, get discouraged, and give up. If you don't know much, or anything, about RSS feeds, I will cover that on another day.
- Put a link to that nice new About page you are going to make in a prominent spot at the top of your page, typically in your header bar.
- Make links to additional content obvious. Sometimes it is actually really hard to find the content in a blog or media article. I'll sometimes see a title that intrigues me but I have to wade through like 20 links surrounding that title or summary in order to find the meat of the article.
12 Days Of Traffic -- Day 1
This is the first of a series of posts about an experiment to generate traffic to a new website. As I write about these techniques, I am going to be trying them out on my own new website I have developed: picobuzz.com.
I am a firm believer in looking for opportunity anywhere you can find it. I didn't always believe this (maybe I am a slow learner), but I have been amazed time and time again at examples of where people find interesting things and good ideas. So, I am going to take advantage of two opportunities:
Opportunity 1:
It is the holiday season. For those who may not know, the 12 Days of Christmas is a historically famous Christmas song where someone sings about how their "true love" gave them progressively (and numerically) more gifts over a 12 day period, including such bizarre gifts as "10 Lords A-Leapin". So, this inspired me to do a sort of mashup of the 12 Days of Christmas and n-day articles done by other bloggers. For example, some bloggers have done 30 days of articles in a series. I'm pretty sure I would run out of gas before then--12 days seems more workable.
The looming Christmas holidays will also force me to crank out the posts quickly before Christmas Day. This brings me (sort of) to the second opportunity:
Opportunity #2:
My blog has been dormant for a while now as I worked on my latest Web app (the previously mentioned picobuzz.com). My readership is virtually zero at this point. This is actually a good thing for the experiment. Why? Well, if a famous blogger were doing this experiment, for example the prolific web-celeb and accomplished blogger Darren Rowse (ProBlogger), it would not be a very fair experiment. Darren could post about his breakfast and generate some traffic. I want to see if I can generate at least a modest amount of traffic from scratch. I have no doubt that Darren and other accomplished bloggers worked hard to get to where they are, but there are also many so-called experts out there touting the Web version of get-rich-quick schemes.
Simply put, a system for generating wealth, when you already have it, is not a valid system.
Likewise, a system for generating traffic when you already have traffic is not a system.
With my current meager traffic, I can rest assured that if I get traffic from the techniques I will be using then the techniques are legitimate.
There, see how I turned a negative thing (my depressing lack of readership) into an opportunity? I think it is also important that I am going to write my posts while I am in the process of doing the experiment, without the benefit of hindsight.
With this series of posts, I am going to make 2 basic assumptions:
1. I am going to assume you have a website--either a blog, a site with non-blog content, or an e-commerce site. It doesn't matter--most or all of the traffic-generating techniques I will be discussing will apply.
2. You want to generate more (or some) traffic to your website. This is an easy assumption, as almost all website owners, no matter what are their focus or goals, crave someone to to read and consume their work. If for some reason that is not immediately obvious and you don't care about traffic, then you don't have a problem, but you can still read on in an amusement.
I won't belabor the point and go off on a discussion of how important traffic is to a website. That has been covered exhaustively elsewhere and besides, if you have now or have ever had a website you know all about this sometimes harsh reality (if not, you will soon find out). The basic truth is:
Even though the Web has billions of readers, when you first create a web page or website, you have exactly one reader: you.
Usually, Web traffic does not happen automatically. Your website can sit there for months with only you reading it (you do read your own website, yes?). You are going to have to do some work to make other people aware of your website and content. Even a very viral (another way of saying "catchy") website or content needs an initial push to get it out there where people and search engines are looking. Most websites need significant, continued work to make them "stick" and enjoy healthy, sustained traffic.
So, this series of posts is about ways to get that ball rolling and start generating traffic for your website. You can get other readers for you website by convincing your mother, your cat (cats are known for their Internet tendencies--see lolcat.com), and anyone else you know, to browse your pages. That is not really a bad idea, as all Web traffic techniques amount to getting someone new to look at your pages. However, this is the brute force method, and unless you know a lot of people you usually won't generate significant traffic with this technique (unless your content is very catchy), and anyway you will start to annoy those people and they will quickly stop reading.
Measuring Traffic
This post for Day 1 in the series is mostly about giving you an Introduction, but I also wanted to cover a specific topic, and that is how to measure website traffic. In order to determine the impact of the 12 Days Of Traffic, I am going to have to have a way to actually measure the traffic. There are two standard tools I am going to use (maybe more later on) for doing this: Alexa and Google Analytics. Alexa is a website which computes traffic levels for other websites. The Alexa rank is measured according to the amount of users who’ve visited a website with the Alexa toolbar installed. Google Analytics is a web tool that gives you more detailed information on how your website is being accessed. Google Analytics is more of a hands-on tool that you will use as webmaster for your site. Alexa is like a Billboard ranking for your site. I
To start getting your site recognized by Alexa, you simple need to get the Alexa Toolbar and visit your site with the toolbar open. Alexa will learn of your site and add it to their list of sites to visit, thus ensuring your inclusion in the Alexa service and in the Alexa archive. You can get the toolbar by going to the Alexa download page. This will automatically detect what browser you are using (Internet Explorer or Firefox) and give you a button to click to start the installation. In addition, you can go to this page to get their crawler to notice you. Use the form at the bottom of the page.
To start using Google Analytics, go to this page. First you sign up for an account. Then you need to add a website profile for your specific website (you can manage multiple websites from your account). Finally, you will need to add some Javascript tracking code to your web pages. The Google Analytics pages will generate this script for you when you create the profile, so you don't have to know much about Javascript--you just need to paste the script they give you into the HTML code for your pages. Ideally, you will have a website template you can put this into so it works for all pages.
That's it for Day 1. This was kind of a long post, but I wanted to give you some background on my motivations and purpose.
Back Working On picobuzz
After an extended leave, I am back working on my picobuzz web app. Toward making the app more Web 2.0 Ajaxified, I have rearranged the buzz page and added tooltips to the icons. Since I will be adding more Javascript, I figured it was time to go back and compare JS libraries. Well, that was an adventure. I assumed that users would be converging on one or two contenders, but it looks like things have not changed much since I last researched libraries. Even something as simple as (fancy) tooltips did not appear stabilized.
Since I had to make a choice, I decided to take a shot at jQuery since it seemed to have a good mix of features, footprint and ease-of-use. Time will tell.
New Venture: picobuzz
picobuzz
The blog's been silent for some time to say the least, but there is a reason--I have been working on my latest distraction venture: picobuzz. picobuzz is a web app intended to capture buzz from the microblogging community. It would have been named "microbuzz" but of course that domain name was already taken.
Currently, picobuzz is centered around Twitter and pulls popular (buzz) terms from the public timeline. My goal is to use this as a platform to try out interesting data mining and AI algorithms. The site is in alpha form at the moment, i.e. not even worthy of beta. But I wanted to get it out there so I'll be motivated to get cracking on improvements.
Stay tuned, as they say, for more details.
rk
Entrepreneuring: Executing To Completion
I recently read this post: How to Make a Successful Business over at One Year Goal .com. In it, he refers to the problem of "never-finish-itis", the act of continually switching to new projects and never finishing previous ones--a problem which resonates very strongly with me. The post concludes with the advice: "Pick a venture, any venture, and finish launching it. Then repeat. Success will find you sooner than you think." It is valuable advice indeed, and co-incidently, I have been thinking on this subject a lot lately, and would like to share my own meditations. I will refer to projects in general, which includes, but is certainly not limited to, starting a new entrepreneurial venture.
Over the past couple of years I made good progress toward productivity and Getting Things Done (GTD) goals; however this particular issue remained unresolved. Therefore, if I accomplish any resolution this year, it will hopefully be mastering the ability to focus and drive (my own) projects to satisfactory completion. I am going to focus specifically on the endgame--finishing a project--as opposed to starting them or finding time to work on entrepreneurial projects. I will relate to my own situation so that you will believe that I feel your pain, and that I am not just preaching something that happens to come easy to me. It doesn't.
The Obstacles
1. Not having a clear goal for completion. Clearly, if you don't establish a concrete definition for when a project is completed, you will never know when you get there or what's left to do to get there.
2. Attention of focus. I have spent much of my career multitasking work items and being successful doing so. There are many productivity gurus now proclaiming the evils of multitasking and I agree with their points, but I would also argue that it works in some domains. I would also have to agree that it can make you fail miserably at other times, such as when, say, entrepreneuring your own startup.
Garret LoPorto has a book entitled The Da Vinci Method - Break Out & Express Your Fire. In this book LoPorto discusses the connections between creativity and ADHD, and offers plausible behaviorial motivations for attentive "disorders" and why they may not be such. Let me say up front that I am very skeptical of diagnoses and justifications for ADD/ADHD behavior. I have read more than one book justifying or even celebrating a lack of focus and/or commitment. Based on my experience, both academic and as a parent, I believe it is usually just an excuse for lack of discipline. To be clear, I am not saying that attention focus is not a problem, and I believe there are real causations for attention problems, genetic, evolutionary or otherwise. And after reflecting on my own personal history, I am also somewhat obligated to agree, from my excruciating boredom in the classroom as a child to my multitasking, completion-challenged track record as an entrepreneur. What I do not buy is that ADD/ADHD is a clear-cut disorder that one can simply medicate, or worse that it is an excuse for antisocial or unproductive behavior. I view it as another dimension of behavior that is more or less of a problem depending on the individual. In my case, I have worked to overcome the problem in some ways, but I have room for improvement.
3. The Bigger, Better Thing. This is what happens when you are midway through a project, and then come up with another wonderful idea which you just know will be insanely greater than the current one, make you more money, and change the world. So you soon lose interest in the current project and spend all your time thinking about the new one. Of course, the excitement wears off a bit after you think about it enough and even if it doesn't, it is destined to become the next project you abort partway through. Sometimes, you don't have a new project but simply become disillusioned with the current project because you peceive it as risky, lacking a value proposition or lacking revenue potential.
4. The Illusion: The next problem with completion is the illusion of anything ever being complete. There is more to this than being a perfectionist. Although I generally strive to do quality work, I am not what you would generally consider a compulsive perfectionist. Anyone who has ever seen my messy desktop can attest to that. Still, I find it hard to let go of something--with my name on it--that is not a well-rounded, complete package of goodness. The irony is that few things are ever really complete, so the effort is misguided at best. This concept seems to be at odds with #1, or even the whole idea of getting something done. I will explain shortly.
The Solutions
1. First of all, define a clear, achievable goal for completion. And it is extremely important to set a date for completion. A whole book can be written (maybe it has) on how setting a concrete date will drive you to completion. In my corporate career, project timelines are usually clearly set and driven by business or customer deadlines, which partially explains why I don't have the same problems in that environment vs. my personal entrepreneurial projects. With my own projects, if I even bother to set a date, I am only disappointing myself if I don't make the date.
2. Defer, or ignore completely, the Bigger, Better Thing. If it really seems like a good idea, then write it down and resolve to not work on it until you successfully complete the current one (there's another motivator for you). Or, you can chose to ignore it because a) it will not turn out to be bigger and better and b) you don't need a bigger and better idea--you need to be successfully at something now. I can't tell you the number of other people's business ideas I've seen that seemed incredibly lame and stupid and yet somehow they managed to make more money with their idea than I did with my brilliant idea that I never finished.
3. Do some research before you start. There are cases where a project is really not worth pursuing because it doesn't have a viable market or niche. This is a topic outside the scope of this article, but it can be easily solved by doing a little research upfront. Check out possible competitors. Use tools like the Google keyword tool to find out if anyone is interested in your subject. But don't spend too much time on it and suffer analysis paralysis--just do some ballpark research, and then dive in and start doing something.
4. Use the 75% completion principle. I recently had an epiphany--or perhaps more accurately, co-opted one--when reading Brian Armstrong's book: Breaking Free. Brian explains the technique more eloquently, and I highly recommend reading the book in general. But basically, the technique is to set a goal and milestone for 75% completion of the project. This amounts to psyching yourself out such that you actually achieve a good-enough version of your project before your innate tendency to drop off has time to fully kick in. For example, if you are building a new website, you should set a milestone that has you going live with 75% of what you wanted to do, because that 75% is more than good enough to put online. And it is probably infinitely better than one you never put online. You can see a different form of this principle in the popular Web 2.0 approach of calling every website a "beta". You can always create a new project targeted at making improvements.
rk
Creativity 101 From Bloggrrl
Bloggrrl offers tips for getting your blogging creative juices flowing in an article entitled Creativity 101: 5 Ways You Can Make Your Blogging Groooovy. In addition to her entertaining writing style--which you could fairly quickly deduce from the article title--she offers some simple, specific methods for coming up with new blogging topic ideas. I would say these tips could be applied toward a variety of other creative tasks, such as coming up with a new product or domain name (Of course, good luck finding one that isn't taken, no matter how strange the name).
As an example, tip #2 describes a method for using index cards and colored markers to mix and match themes. As an avid fan of using index cards for GTD (Getting Things Done), I welcome other applications for these 3x5 inch wonders.
Read the article here: