Accidental Link Building Through Blogging »
Posted on May 29th, 2008 by Paul Woodhouse in Business Blogging, SEO | Leave A Comment

At last week’s Next Generation Marketing Conference (which was a second cousin twice removed from exceptional - get yourself to Martinsburg June 12th) I heard something spouted from one of the attendees early on that I haven’t read or heard for a good three or four years. Somebody actually said in reference to blogging:

“I don’t have time to read blogs.”

I’d forgotten my reaction to this statement, but I soon remembered it was akin to taking a punch to the bread basket whilst simultaneously slapping yourself on the forehead ‘doh-ing’ on each slap. A sort of violent anathema to the belly rub head pat trick.

So simple even a bambino can do it.

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TAGS: authority sites, blogging, blogs, keywords, linkbuilding, linking, roi, tinbasher, wikis

Wikis for the Common Good »
Posted on November 5th, 2006 by Justin Seibert in Internet | Leave A Comment

The more tech-savvy among us have known about wikis for some time now. These sites, the most publicized of which is Wikipedia, take advantage of the collective knowledge of the masses and are also known as User Generated Content (UGC).

When you visit Wikipedia, you can do a search just like you would in a search engine. Click on the article you want to learn more about - the number of entries on this one site will amaze you - and start reading what your fellow net citizens have written.

There exists, of course, some danger that the information, whether of malicious intent or not, could be incorrect. If you’re an expert on the subject and you read something that doesn’t seem right, you can make a change to the content yourself. Some wiki sites use master editors, some don’t, but either way, if the traffic to the site is high enough, usually discrepancies will take care of themselves over time.

Not all of these wiki sites are as broad as Wikipedia. Many exist solely to inform about one very small subject. Now the United States is getting in on the action, trying to prevent some of the information sharing problems that led to 9-11.

The CIA and other US intelligence agencies now post to and read from a site called Intellipedia, which is not accesible by the public at large. Although the government is trying to figure out how much information can be shared by how many as it goes along, it already has procedures in place to protect some particularly sensitive information from being leaked to the press.

Although this intelligence wiki is meant to be kept from the public, creating wikis can be a very useful tool in drawing attention to your products and even Web site.

Be careful not to try to manipulate the information, though. While corporations typically try to control messages at a very high level, the whole purpose of a wiki is to let the public in on creating information.

If you’re not careful, you could end up receiving a lot of bad press for not presenting a “true” picture like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s found out in the past month for posting non-transparently controlled blogs as a source of online advertising.

TAGS: wikis