When we started the #socialmedia Tuesday discussions there really wasn’t a whole lot of use of the #socialmedia hashtag on twitter. As we and others used it more and more, spammers have jumped in and now the #socialmedia hashtag is flooded with #socialmedia tweets

Since March 23rd 2009 we have been capturing every #socialmedia tweet to  that has been tweeted. You can see in the graph below that the general use of #socialmedia has grown substantially.  No longer just a little spike on Tuesdays, all week long there is #socialmedia activity.

So far we have captured 271, 500 #socialmedia tweets. However the pace of tweets is increasing quickly and we have capture over 50,000 #socialmedia tweets in just the last 30 days.

All of these tweets have been made by a total of 46,781 twitterers

As a result  the hashtagsocialmedia.com website has gained more attention and you can see the increase in unique IPs in the graph below.

To be fair, our system has capture tweets on days when twitter users have been hacked/hijacked as well as days when the Twitter API failed to produce results. So considering these anomalies we have a pretty accurate picture of the use of #socialmedia.com.

I wonder if there are any other hashtags on twitter used as much and for so many months consistently as #socialmedia.

Over the past few months we have made a lot of changes to the hashtagsocialmedia.com website: A New Design, tweet directly on the live page directly, exposed some of the traffic and tweet counts and of course we have had some incredible moderators.  As a result we have seen more and more traffic and participation.  I’ll be revealing more of the stats on the use of the #socialmedia hashtag shortly.

Over the weekend we added a few more updates. We updated the home page with  a little bit of interactivity that will allow you to  browse the head-shots of our moderators, review the topics they discussed and quickly access to archive of that event.  We also added a little more detail to the event pages: properly calling out the topic and the main questions asked. We have more to do on these event pages but it is a start.

There are more features coming soon.

I have spent the last week working with the twitter search API. I have to say that I think it is a very accessible API. I was able to pick it up and start developing within the hour.  In fact I will be announcing a new twitter app/site  in partnership with @marc_meyer and @jasonbreed. So look for that announcement later today.

All in all I have to say I am amazed by how much demand twitter supports. The API allows us to query twitter aggressively.  Many people complain when twitter goes down but considering how much they are delivery through their site and API I am surprised it does not go down more often.

This year, one of my projects was named a finalist for the SxSW interactive web awards.
The project was www.lynnMarieSmith.net

I Iwas fortunate enough to get the chance to attend a few days of SxSW as well as the Award Ceremony.
The award Ceremony perfect. An excellent emcee, Baratunde Thurston, kept the event light, intelligent, entertaining and and fast paced. No one likes a 5 hour drawn out award ceremony. If you do not know Baratunde Thurston, get to know him here: http://baratunde.com/blog/ . It is worth the effort.

Unfortunately www.LynnMarieSmith.net was not a winner this year. www.Alifelski.com took home the award for the personal portfolio category. I was pretty sure that if we did not win, she would. And vice versa. Her design is original, well thought out and overall pleasing.
So Congrats Ali!

This site is worth a few minutes of your time to day. www.thefwa.com has named it the site of the day.

The video interface and music comes together ro create a fairly seemless and immersive experience.

The People’s Choice award voting has opened for SxSW. Please head over to https://secure.sxsw.com/peoples_choice/ and vote for www.lynnmariesmith.net You can vote daily. So please vote early and vote often!

Google Yahoo and MSN are coming together again to enforce a new standard in search engine optimization.  People have been talking about canonical links and the importance of addressing them through cleaning up site architecture, navigation and permanent redirects.

Definition:

Canonical is quite simply the the duplication of URLs that link top the same page. Here is an example. All of the links below link to the same page of content. The Search engines could index each one of these links. So the question for the search engines have to “guess” which one is important and which one isn’t.

http://www.mckyton.com
http://mckyyon.com
http://www.mckyton.com/index.php
http://mckyton.com/index.php
http://mckyton.com/index.php?content=home

Up until it has been the responsibility of the search marketers to be aware of this issue and address it through careful crafting of website architecture and 301 redirects. Well it still is the responsibility of the Search engine marketer but now there is real unified guidance on how to address this issue through a new tag attribute  rel=”canonical”

 Here are the announcements from the search engines:

http://ysearchblog.com/2009/02/12/fighting-duplication-adding-more-arrows-to-your-quiver/
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
 http://blogs.msdn.com/webmaster/archive/2009/02/12/partnering-to-help-solve-duplicate-content-issues.aspx

So What?

Well the simple answer is that this will better organize your website information in the search engines. Whether this will actually improve your SEO/SEM efforts is the real question.

It has been my experience in the past that you are not always rewarded when playing by new rules right away. For example implementing clean URLs on an established site and seeing traffic decrease in the short term. When clean URLs and xml sitemaps were in their infancy you could actually damage money making search engine positions. This would occur because, quite frankly, no one really knows exactly how the search engines will  react to drastic/newly supported changes on your site. When your are very indexed in the search engines and playing the long-tail key-term game you don’t even know everywhere you show up in the search engines. In other words if you make important changes to the structure or architecture to your site you can inadvertently negatively affect your site positions. No matter how knowledgeable or experienced you are until the search engines publish the exact method of ranking, indexing, algorithm changes, etc… All of this is a crap-shoot. Their are general rules you stand by but the rest of SEO/SEM is a constant game of Plan Do Check Act  .  In other words lots of  elbow grease.

Ignorance is Bliss

It has been my experience that sloppy url architecture can actually be a blessing in disguise for small static websites. Essentially, accidental traffic from search engines. If you start following this new recommendation right now you may be negatively effected.

What you should do?

Wait. Organized links are good for search engines but not necessarily you…yet.Don’t make any drastic changes to your site or linking methods yet.  Just sit tight and wait until the benefits are proven. Wait until it is proven that organized, canonical URLs offer more benefit than your acciental traffic. Eventually it will happen. That sweet spot will open up where you can move to this method with out inadvertantly breaking anyhting and you won’t be too far behind the curve that you lose out from inaction

www.lynnmariesmith.net

I recently found out that a project I worked on last year, www.lynnmariesmith.net has been named a SxSW finalist in the personal portfolio category. I am really looking forward to this event and honored to be named a finalist. Finalists in other categories include, Yahoo Flickr, NBC Hulu, The Big Picture, CNN Shirt, Mint.com, StumbleUpon,  Delicious 2.0 and many more amazing sites.

Here are some of the standout finalist and the complete list that are new finds for me.

http://www.iamsecond.com/

http://aviary.com/home

http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/

http://tracychapman.com/

Complete List Below

Activism

Clif Bar 2 Mile Challenge
I Am Second
Just In Queso
Sunny Side
Tweet Congress

Amusement

Addictionary
CrappyCat
GirlGamer.com
Pixton
UPS Regifter

Art

Forward Thinking Museum
Remembering Bogle Chandler
The Served
StreetArtLocator
Things I Have Learned in my Life, So Far

Blog

The Big Picture
The Bygone Bureau
Dumb As A Blog
OneRiot
Postcards From Yo Momma

Business

CNN Shirt
Jasmax
Lowe’s “Welcome Back Spring”
Modernista!
Zeus Jones Gift Guide

CSS

Eden Sessions
Trevor Exter
Mint.com
Noisefreak.com
ProjectMiso

Classic

Ars Technica
Flickr
Instructables
Picnik
StumbleUpon

Community

Delicious 2.0
Fluther
Lost Zombies
Protagonize
Trusera

Educational Resource

The Cycle
Discovery Earth Live
From Ellis Island to Orchard Street
HowStuffWorks
One Hen

Experimental

Foul Owl Karaoke
Popego
Sweemo
Ten Thousand Cents
We Tell Stories

Film / TV

Flight of the Conchords Lip Dub
Hulu
In Plain Sight: WITSEC Confidential
Jinni
Secret Location

Games

Adult Swim Games
Globulos
PMOG
PlayCrafter
Why So Serious? The Dark Knight Alternate Reality Game

Mobile

AP Mobile News Network
Brightkite
Gigotron
Pikchur
Please Fix the iPhone

Motion Graphics

ADE Creative Studio
The Corona Beach
NVIDIA Speak Visual
Synergy | ThyssenKrupp Elevator Corporation
What’s Your Lighting Style

Music

Tracy Chapman
The Finetune Family
SoundCloud
Spiritualized Haromonies
James Zabiela

Personal Portfolio

Ali Felski
Pericycle
Eric Piasecki: StockSearch
Revyver
Lynn Marie Smith

Student

Business of Detention
Michael Dick
Modernity Spirit of Experimentation
Think Artificial
Weekend Pictures

Technical Achievement

Absolut Machines
Aviary
jQuery UI ThemeRoller
Skydeck
Tarpipe

Often  a topic of discussion: How do you measure the success of your social marketing efforts? The most common idea I have heard over the last year is to wrap all of your efforts up in to one word, “engagement”.  And in this meaning, engagement includes, visits to your site, how many unique visitors, how often they came back, how log each visit session is on average. All of these are pretty basic web traffic measurements. However, if you add to these the measure of the number of people posting, commenting, and re syndicating your content you gain greater insight. At least that is the goal.

Their is a race out there to not only to establish an engagement measuring platform but also to simply define what engagement measurement is.

PostRank.comhas taken a step in that effort. PostRank.com website clearly states that is aims to “measure audience engagement” Interestingly it has begun to dissect what online engagement is and how measure different areas of engagement.

The 5 C’s of Engagement

• Creating
• Critiquing
• Chatting
• Collecting
• Clicking

Who knows if they have it right., but it is interesting to see the evolution of engagement metrics.

Post Rank integrates and measures via the following:

• RSS Feed Analytics similar to feedburner
• Integration with RSS Readers including Newsgator, Google Reader, Trawlr, Daisy Feed, FetchIt! and more
• Simple integration with major blogging platforms, Blogger, WordPress Typepad
• An API and developers section of it’s website.

What is not clear after my limited browsing of the is does this scale? Can this be easily implemented into a network of blogs or a  large scale community that goes beyond blogs and includes, forums, galleries and so on. Either way it will be interesting to follow and see how it evolves. Postrank has a BETA program for “Feed Analytics”. Go here to sign up.

My RSS Aggregator picked up a few items on Cloud Computing today and each item tells a very different story of Cloud Computing. 

1) Rackspace blows away cloud computing myths

2) Omniture’s Outage Woes

3) IBM Sets Its Sights On Cloud Computing With LotusLive

These items are written and posted all day every day. Contradicting each other in some ways, supporting in others, redefining and ever evolving.

This isn’t the first time we have seen Cloud Computing, it’s just the first time we are calling it cloud computing. Many years ago it was ASP ( Application Service Providers), recently it was SaaS and the emerging term now is Cloud Computing. Lets call all of these “Internet applications”

So why do we keep trying to push Internet applications as opposed to desktop software or internally developed and managed software. One reason, cost. Cloud Computing is the non committal IT purchasing mangers dream.  You can buy in and be up and running in minimal time at limited term requirements. Some service run on an pay as you go or  month to month program. Many of the larger companies in Internet Application  space focus on annual contracts to mitigate risks and cover setup fees.  Just because its in the cloud doesn’t mean there isn’t setup.

But it’s not all rainbows and sunshine otherwise we would all be operating on ASP programs and we would have never needed the reincarnation known as SaaS and  Cloud Computing.
Internet Applications failed to reach mainstream and overtake desktop software in the past due to the limitation of the web. That is limitation of the web servers, database servers,  overall speed and accessibility of the Internet and also very much due to the limitations of older browsers. Well Servers are more powerful than ever, the Internet itself is more accessible than ever and there is true competition in browsers that is driving progress and innovation. There is also an ever growing community of web developers with new ideas, talent and overall understanding of web technologies. 

So is Cloud Computing going to stick this time? Not if history has anything to say about. The problem is that the desktop is more powerful to the individual user than the service providing web server. So what happens is the demands of the user outpace the web technology powering Internet applications.

But does it matter if cloud computing survives this time? NO. This isn’t even the right question to ask yourself.

The right question is this.
 Is cloud computing the right option for my business right now? And to this question, in this recession, the overwhelming answer for almost all companies is yes.

This will not always be the case, technology will evolve, business will need more customization or privacy, users will require advanced services. And when these things come to a head it will be the time to invest in the desktop again with internally managed software. This is OK. This is a cycle and right now we are in the Internet Application segment of the cycle.

But can Cloud Computing sustain this time. Well what would it take for Cloud Computing to keep up with increasing demands.  How about the following.

• Fast and robust Internet connection,
• universal / anywhere access to the Internet
• Powerful Networking
• Powerful Servers
• Powerful Browsers

Each one of these items needs to not only keep up but lead the industry to keep Cloud Computing from losing out the desktop again.

Google knows this. I have to wonder how how long Google has been targeting and working on this strategy or if it just evolved into this. 
For Google Apps to take off and sustain popularity indefinitely it needs to address each of the items above. So lets take a look at what steps they have taken.

• Fast and robust Internet connection,
  • Google Data Centers and purchase Dark Fiber, an Internet within the Internet  http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/Google-and-Its-Continuing-Dark-Fiber-Mystery/     

• Universal / Anywhere Access to the Internet
  • Google Lobbies for Wireless Spectrum usage  http://news.cnet.com/Googles-battle-for-wireless-spectrum/2008-1039_3-6199374.html
  • http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/breaking/google-wireless-spectrum-bid-is-on-328429.php
  • Obama Broadband plans http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_03/b4116027365196.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily
    
• Powerful Networking
  • Google Builds its own routers http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10137682-92.html  
• Powerful Servers
  • Google designs its own servers to for powerful performance easy maintenance http://gigaom.com/2008/12/29/how-google-is-influencing-server-design/  
• Powerful Browsers
  • Google creates its own browser. Google Chrome  
     
• The only other thing Google needs is regular innovation in application features and design. And for them that’s easy
  • http://code.google.com/
  • http://www.google.com/programming-contest/ 

So will Cloud Computing survive the user demands in innovation and the competition of desktop performance?

I’s more likely now than ever and Google has a the infrastructure to make it happen.