blogging

Some good resources on new media

eirikso6 Comments

I was recently interviewed for Telenor’s business magasine “Trigger” and was asked to give some good resources and blogs on new media and this whole Web 2.0 thing. Here is what I came up with. It’s not compele and I am sure I have forgotten some very important sites. Feel free to add your faves in the comments:

First of all, you should follow this blog. I will continue to publish thoughts on new media and the things I find interesting here on eirikso.com.

Then you should start following my shared items from google reader. It’s the articles that I find interesting enough to share with my audience. Hours of blog reading filtered and shared!

Then, more or less from the top of my current list of blogs in my feed reader:

TechCrunch
For startups and Web 2.0. Essential!

Buzzmachine.com
Jeff Jarvis comments on citizen journalism and new media. High quality!

Micro Persuasion
Steve Rubel on how the internet change marketing and PR.

NewTeeVee
New media and the whole new media scene. From Om Malik’s blog empire.

BoingBoing.net
Subculture, technology and everything trendy. “A directory of wonderful things.”

Seth Godin
Essential about marketing and change.

Brilliantdays
Oyvind Solstad on new media, Macs and getting things done.

Tversover (Norwegian)
Applied Abstractions (English)
Dr. Espen Andersen on technology, business and new media.

Thomas Hawk’s digital connection
Photo, new media, media centers and the works.

Now you should learn how to use Technorati.

Here is an example. Do a search for the big Norwegian oil company called “Statoil”. Instantly you have all the recent blog posts mentioning this company. Then learn how to use an RSS feed reader like Google Reader or Bloglines. Or, start using Netvibes or Google IG as your start page. Now put that search in with you feeds and get instant notifications when a blog mention your company.

You find the feed for the search up to the right on the Technorati search result page marked “Subscribe”.

As mentioned, feel free to add your own favourites in the comments.

Some good resources on new media

Track all your conversations

eirikso17 Comments

This is something that I have wanted for a long time. A tool to easily track all the conversations I am participating in around the net.

Usually, I leave a comment and keep that page in a tab in my browser, or mark the page with a “followup” tag in del.icio.us. None of these methods are perfect. Here on eirikso.com I have installed a plugin that lets you choose if you want to be notified by email when people posts a new comment on an article that you have commented on.

You won’t need any of this if you start to use coComment. From their page:

Join the conversation
Track your comments across different platforms (blogs, forums, online communities…), and follow conversations you’re interested in, no need for your own blog!

Track
coComment keeps track of all the online conversations you’re following in one convenient place, and informs you whenever something is added to a conversation.

Share
Publish your conversations to your blog in a click, or send them to your friends via email.

Explore
Check out the top commenters, what articles and posts are generating the most comments, who’s commenting on the same conversations as you.

My experience so far is very positive. Try it out!

Track all your conversations

Stealing an image of a kid

eirikso26 Comments

Apparently I nearly killed a reader through pure boredom with my last post, so I hope this stuff is slightly more interesting.

A couple of weeks ago my father-in-law calls me wondering if I have started selling pictures of his grandchildren to commercials. He is talking about a picture of his grandson listening to an iPod. Used in an advertisement in a magazine he just received.

I haven’t sold any pictures of my son to commercials, so I was quite interested in this. As you can see from the picture that I have inserted above, my father-in-law had reason to believe that I was selling images to commercials.

The image is available through this article. And available for sale for editorial use over at shutterpoint. I am selling images both for editorial use and for use in commercials. Any images that include family members are only available for editorial use. The people responsible for this ad have not bought any pictures from me. And this particular picture isn’t even available with a license that would allow use in an advertisement.

Here at eirikso.com it is protected by the simple fact that this image is my intellectual property. Eirikso.com is also marked with a Creative Commons license. Giving people freedom to use my work for non-commercial purposes as long as they give me credit and issue the same Creative Commons license on the work that includes mine.

So what do we have here?
Commercial use of my image in an advertisement. And by the way, no image credit. These people have to follow Norwegian law. This use of my image is a violation to paragraph 1 in the norwegian copyright act. It is a screaming obvious theft of intellectual property.

In addition to this, it is a violation to paragraph 45 c. Use of an image where a person is clearly visible. They need permission from the person in the picture.

At this point I have sent a letter to the shop that is responsible for the advertisement. Asking for a full report on where this image have been used. They have simply forwarded this to their lawyer.

I have made it clear in my letter that this is something that is of interest for my readers and that I will publish articles on this matter. I am awaiting an answer and will of course keep you updated on this!

Stealing an image of a kid

The latest video news on your site

eiriksoLeave a comment

 

Do you want a nice video player with the latest news on your web site? Then Reuters is your friend. If you register and let them approve your site you will be allowed to paste their complete and always updated video player right into your blog. Just like you would paste any video from YouTube on your page.

I guess they want a bit of control of the sites that use their player. That’s why you will have to register and have your site approved before you are allowed to insert their player.

Interesting approach. I guess they understand that they have to publish their news the way people want it. If people have blogs and people want the news on their blogs, then let them have it.

Now I have to find a way to add this player to my current Netvibes start page. That’s where I really want it. Who knows, maybe there’s a Reuters News Player Widget out there already?

Update:
I forgot to mention that the player is available for US and UK sites only. Hmmm. What is eirikso.com? It is hosted in the US, the language is English, but the author is Norwegian…

The latest video news on your site

Lefdal and the iPod Nano revisited

eiriksoLeave a comment

I promised a quick update on this when I had done my presentation for the Consumer Electronics Trade Foundation in Norway.

Back in August I posted an article on the fact that the Norwegian electronics retailer Lefdal sold iPod Nanos with a hard drive. I wrote the article mainly to show an example of the fact that more and more often there will be discussions about you, your product or your company out there on the net.

This was a short discussion about a typo in an ad. And people linked to it. Right now it’s the number one hit on a search for “kjøpe ipod nano” (buy an ipod nano). Number one of about 270 000 hits.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to join the dinner and the party together with the trade foundation after my presentation. Usually the most sincere and direct feedback is the one given during the evening. However, I got quite a bit of requests for other presentations from people in the audience, so I guess the presentation worked pretty well.

I used the example, and of course I needed to give the people from Lefdal a suggestion of how to react.

I don’t think they have missed a single sale of iPods because of my article. In fact I don’t think they have missed anything at all because of this little rant about a typo. But, they could have gained some cred by simply leaving a quick comment. Something like:

“LOL. Yes, this typo is slightly embarrasing. We make huge amounts of marketing material and do our best to make it accurate. It’s very nice that you appreciate accuracy and correct information. Of course we’ll fix this error for our next release.”

…or something like that. More than 500 people subscribe to this blog. Between 1000 and 2000 unique users stroll around in here every day. About 25% of them Norwegians. Not exactly millions of people, but a pretty valuable target group. I haven’t done any serious research, but I don’t have to be a rocket scientist to understand that my readers are above average interested in media, equipment and gadgets…

Lefdal and the iPod Nano revisited

Some essential blogs to read

eirikso1 Comment
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I have done a lot of presentations lately and people keep asking me about recommended reading. If you want to start looking around in this strange world of blogs and long tail content, here is my list of 10 essential blogs and one with 10 essential media blogs. These lists are a bit old. I would add techcrunch.com, buzzmachine.com, micropersuasion.com, presentationzen.com and gapingvoid to the essential stuff.

My complete list of subscriptions in Bloglines is here, but right now I am experimenting with the updated Google Reader as my RSS-aggregator of choice. I’ll try to find a way to share the subscrition list here as well.

And, Technorati is your friend. Interested in marketing? Well these are the best blogs about marketing according to technorati. Play around with the search if you have other interests.

Some essential blogs to read

Five ways to check a web site

eirikso3 Comments

Okay, so this strange web site called eirikso.com has just written something about your company and you have no idea how big this site is. How many people will read this guys rants…?

First, I have to tell you that if someone write something about you on the internet you should never underestimate the potential amount of readers. One example is Vincent Ferrari’s “Insignificant Thoughts“. After posting a taped conversation with an AOL customer representative his thoughts where not so insignificant anymore. The big traffic drivers kicked in and Mr. Ferrari eventually ended up on NBC.

But, you want to do some quick research just to find out if thousands of people will read this stuff immediately or not…

1. Check the website itself

Is the site publishing how many subscribers it has? For this site the circulation is currently between 500 and 600 people.

Then, check the amount of comments. Many comments usually mean a bit of readers, and always mean pretty passionate readers.

Next is to check for any logos from statcounter, sitemeter, shinystat etc… Some sites publish their traffic.

2. Look up traffic data with alexa.com

Not very reliable on small sites, and tend to favour american sites, but will give you an indication of the traffic. In the illustration here the chart shows eirikso.com compared to the biggest financial newspaper in Norway, Dagens Næringsliv. And here’s the link to alexa.com. You simply enter the url in the search form and click “site info” when the results have come up.

3. Always google. Always.

If you search for eirikso in google you get about 50 600 hits. “eirikso” is not a very common english word, so this could be an indication of the fact that people mention this site out there. Also, the Google Page Rank of a site is an indication of how serious google finds it. The page rank is a scale from 0 to 10 where the most important sites have a page rank of 10 and the pretty insignificant ones have 0. Eirikso.com are currently on 5. You can check the page rank of any site here. (Please note that you should always check the site with www in the site-name. Ie. www.eirikso.com and not simply eirikso.com).

 

4. Use technorati blog tracking

Technorati have had their share of bugs and problems but they are slowly turning into a pretty good tool to find stuff in the blogsphere and to do quick checks on blogs. Technorati’s rank is based on how many blogs that links to the site you are checking. They currently track 57 million blogs. Eirikso.com have a rank of 15 071 right now. Far from the really big blogs, but above average in the crowd of 57 million…

5. Subscribe to the RSS-feed

Not all blogs publish their circulation. If you want a hint then sign up for the RSS feed of the site you want to check in Bloglines or Newsgator Online. They will tell you how many other users that subscribe to this feed in this reader. A very very very inaccurate estimate for the total circulation would be to multiply this number by  something between five and ten…

Feel free to add additional ways to check up on a web site in the comments!

Five ways to check a web site

Kjøpe en iPod Nano

eirikso28 Comments

…and what kind of horrible typo is this headline then? It’s Norwegian and translates into “Buying an iPod Nano”.

This article is a short rant and an important experiment. The Norwegian headline is part of the experient. More on that later.

First a rant about something that I guess most of my readers have experienced. Horrible errors in marketing material from retailers of consumer electronics. This example is only what I found after two minutes with an ad that came with our newspaper today. There are so many examples that I have played around with an idea of a dedicated blog on these issues.

Have a look at this one.

 

An iPod Nano with a hard drive. That’s truly exceptional. When I go to Apple’s spec page for the Nano the very first line of facts tells me that the Nano has flash based memory:

Hard drive or flash memory is a pretty significant detail about an MP3 player. Apparently not for Lefdal, the Norwegian retailer that keeps telling me that the Nano has a hard drive…

I actually read the marketing material from these shops. Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA etc… In Norway they’re called Elkjøp, Lefdal, Bonus etc…

It’s one of my strange hobbies and it’s part of my job to be fairly updated on what’s available for the average media consumer. The products and the prices.

But unfortunately I know too much about these products and end up thinking that these guys have to be inaccurate morons. The amount of errors and plain lies are simply sad.

Then, actually entering one of the shops asking questions to the staff is even worse.

Or am I the only one with this experience?

The important experiment

I am going to do a presentation for the Consumer Electronics Trade Foundation in Norway later this autumn. I am going to talk about big changes in the media industry. And about how blogging is changing the way they should communicate with their customers.

If this article on eirikso.com ends up with a high ranking in Google it will be a good example. I can stay on that stage and search for where to buy an iPod Nano, or “kjøpe en iPod Nano” in Google. And show them that an article that says that they’re all morons hits better than their own shops.

So, if you have a blog and a story about bad service or inaccurate marketing material from these kinds of shops then please write about it and link to this story as well. If possible let “kjøpe en iPod Nano” be the link itself…

Comment here as well, and I’ll update this post with a link back to you.

Update2
So far so good. I learn a lot from this experiment.
1. People in general agree on the fact that consumer electronics advertising is inaccurate and frustrating
2. Links really do boost google ranking: Kjøpe en iPod Nano
3. I look forward to my presentation for the Consumer Electronics Trade Foundation
4. I need to talk to Espen Andersen about Google optimization. His article that is linking to mine hits above mine! 🙂

Right now there’s quite a bit of traffic from ITpro. In addition to this loRdx, Mr. Sandvik, Tove, Sonitus and Anarkistix have been kind enough to link.

Update:
Links are ticking in. Espen Andersen is mentioning the iPod Nano Redux on his english blog Applied Abstractions. Because this post is mostly about lousy marketing you should have a look at his example regarding excellent customer support.

Espen links from his norwegian blog as well. If you are fortunate enough to manage the strange language of Norwegian you can have fun with this little story about Innovisjon AS.

Technorati tells me that links are ticking in from Henrik and Ole Bruseth as well. Both blogs in Norwegian. In my opinion Mr. Bruseths blog has the best name of a Norwegian blog ever. “Overstadig Bruseth”. And here I have to give a sincere apology to the 85% of my readers that don’t understand Norwegian.

Kjøpe en iPod Nano

Keeping an eye on your website

eirikso11 Comments

 

My hosting company have had some stability issues lately, so eirikso.com and all my other sites have been down a couple of times.

To get an exact idea of how big the problem is I started checking out a couple of services that can monitor your web site and alert you by mail if it is down.

I found several solutions. Here are the two that I am currently testing:

Montastic. Completely free. Lets you add up to 100 web sites to monitor. You get an email if one of them goes down. You can also subscribe to an RSS feed with status information.

SiteUptime. Free for keeping an eye on one site every 30 minutes. Gives you an email if it is down. Stores some data and details so you can keep an eye on the total uptime. Commercial version available with more functions.

Do you have any other suggestions? I have a couple of servers running 24/7 at home as well. Is there a simple application that I can install on my computer that will check on a web site at regular intervals?

Keeping an eye on your website