Social Bookmarking Tools

I have been looking around for tools to help me with social bookmarking. You know the kind of thing, instead of manually adding my link to Delicious, etc one service at a time, these tools will add your link to them all, at once, no muss no fuss.

That’s the idea.

It doesn’t take mad Google skills before you find OnlyWire. Looks like just the ticket.

OnlyWire: The Only BookMarklet You'll Ever Need!

The only bookmarklet you’ll ever need, it says. Sure looks comprehensive too. Doesn’t quite do them all, but it’s a start.

But, and isn’t there always a but? But, those mad Google skills come in handy a bit more.

It seems there is a sneaky little clause in the small print that everyone agrees to when you blithely sign up. Yup, you guessed it, accusations of spam, no less.

Could be people are leaning toward tin-foil-hat brigade, or maybe they have a point. It seems when you add your registration you give the company carte blanche to link up, using your account, anyone they choose to. Without your confirmation or even being aware. Hmmm … is that right? Could that be true?

Enough people are accusing them of it that I am worried, but so far nothing has appeared in my lists that I didn’t put there.

Anyone have any experience of this service, or can recommend a better one?

Woopra Review

You might recall earlier in the year a flurry of reviews of an analytics service called Woopra. They made a splash at WordCamp Dallas, which led to appearances on TechCrunch and the fantastic Geek Brief (got to love that show).

Woopra is a real-time stats service for websites and blogs. Unlike traditional analytics solutions, you can actually see people arriving at your site, and even chat with them in an IM/IRC-like chat window.

Sounds neat, huh?

I originally heard about it from Lorelle at SOBCon (Lorelle interviews the founders of Woopra here). She was handing out invites, but I didn’t get one, but wasn’t upset as I am a Mac user and was “reliably” informed by a fellow attendee that it wouldn’t work for me anyway. Or maybe it only works on 64-bit Macs, or something. Or maybe it did work and I was just misinformed.

Anyway, a couple weeks back Jamie Horrop introduced the northern UK bloggers meet-up to the service and gave me an invite. This time I was informed it would work, so of course I was eager to try it out.

Woopra provide a WordPress plugin so I signed up, used my invite and installed the plugin … then forgot all about it. Little did I realize, it was not for some reason recording visits.

Today I did an email giveaway to my subscribers, a special report in PDF for free download. Seemed like a good day to have some real-time analytics. Ooops, no data!

Luckily as well as the plugin there is your bog standard javascript copy and paste, which worked a treat.

Woopra

As you can see, the interface is lovely. This java based desktop application looks fantastic, and is a credit to them, and an example for anyone else who thinks they can design a UI.

Is there more to it than gloss and glamor?

Yes, and no.

Other than the real time stats, which to be fair you can get at PMetrics, there is little here that you can not get at Google. Let’s face it, real time is not going to be something you need every day.

The chat part? Not convinced. I couldn’t get anyone to chat with me. Perhaps it is a popup blocker problem or a browser issue? Or perhaps nobody wanted to chat.

That all said, it could replace your current favorite stats package, it is pretty much all there.

Woopra

It’s really cool to see your stats grow and change as you watch. Quite hypnotic.

Woopra

For business users though there is one GLARING omission; no support for online BUSINESS. Conversions. Advertising tracking. Custom filters …

Consider your standard, default, business with an online presence. Someone who is using the web for sales, not just for attention. Where are the features that help those guys?

Luckily there is an API, perhaps someone will be adding something for us folks who care about making money and stuff. It must be said too, this is still under development.

So in summary, it looks great, and it blows the little guys like statcounter off the web, but you will want to keep Google for a little while yet.

Save Web Pages for Later with Iterasi

A perfect combination of events today. The first is an unhappy event. I feel ripped off by an online merchant. The second is an online service that will help me in my dispute.

I bought a product with a membership continuation program as a “backend”. You know the kind of thing, you buy the download but to get the download you have to be plugged into a “free trial” of a membership site, but cancel soon enough and in theory you shouldn’t get billed.

Well I tried to cancel. Twice. Using the email information provided in the support knowledge base. Today I got billed.

Of course I tried (again) to contact the publisher, but I was worried he will change the information on the site. I was going to take a screenshot but then I saw on TechCrunch that Iterasi was now available for Macs.

This service allows you to grab pages exactly as they are, store and tag them for later retrieval. Just what I need!

First you sign up and download the toolbar. Then when you come to a page you want to store, you hit the appropriate button.

iterasi Help

Unfortunately the “Quick” option stores pages available to the public. Not good if you want to keep receipts, booking details and login information.

Firefox

To keep something private you have to use the more detailed form. I’m guessing most people will quickly find the longer route more useful when it comes to retrieval time anyway, you will be glad of the folders and tags.

Firefox

Once you have filed your stuff away, you can browse and get your info back out quite easily. No, I am not showing you my account!

Think this might be useful to you? Please share in the comments …

Protect WordPress Logins

Your Minder - Wordpress Single Logins

As WordPress gets more and more used for non-blog type roles there becomes a greater need to protect your security and content privacy.

Unfortunately WordPress out of the box makes it easy for multiple people to share one login.

This isn’t so bad when you share a login between authors, although a better idea would be to give each author their own login and only the permissions they require.

The problem comes when the login is provided to gain access to paid and premium content or when the WordPress install is for private and confidential information, for example a company extranet.

Luckily a plugin has been created to help with these issues, restricting one account to a single login session and booting off anyone found to be sharing accounts.

The product is called Your Minder and is from the same people as the membership plugin previously reviewed.

Your Minder - Wordpress Single Logins - Wordpress Specialists

Features

  • Flexible Logic system allowing you to specify the number of IP address able to access the same user account within a given period
  • Chose between Soft or Hard Lockouts
  • Soft Lockouts - log both parties out and redirect the user to a page of the admin choice
  • Hard Lockouts - Logs both parties out and prevents re access until certain conditions are met
  • Timed Lockouts - If using the hard lockout options a time delay can be placed before the user is allowed to login again.
  • Email Re-activation - Using Hard Lock out the lock can remain in place until the user reactivates the account via a link sent to the email of the account holder.
  • Wordpress MU 2.6 support!

I think well worth the $15 charge. Check out the plugin page for more details.

Google Insights

I don’t follow the search and SEO news like I did a few years ago but even I spotted a lot of the guys talking about a new service from Google called Google Insights.

The service provides information on search volume broken down by time and geography. So if you want to know if your favorite search terms are gaining or losing popularity, and where, then this is the tool for you.

Unlike Barry I can’t get very excited about sports so I first tried a search close to my own heart … “Chris Garrett”

Google Insights for Search - Search Volume: "chris garrett" - Worldwide, 2004 - present

As Aaron says “you can consider boosting early success in the most receptive markets”. Using this I can kind-of see where interest would most likely be.

Aaron also points out this is valuable data to PR and branding folks:

This type of tool can also be used to see how related some generic concepts are to more specific related concepts, and how much news coverage and marketplace changes move the relative importance of different keywords in a marketplace. Public relations experts will be able to use graphs like the following to say “hey our brand is catching up with the market leader.”

Seeing how a term is growing or diminishing in popular usage is an important feature. Compare “weblog” to “blog”:

“Weblog”
Google Insights for Search - Search Volume: weblog - Worldwide, 2004 - present

“Blog”
Google Insights for Search - Search Volume: blog - Worldwide, 2004 - present

As you can see, while the terms were interchangeable at one time, “weblog” almost seems old fashioned now.

Where it falls down though is the data is based on what people enter as search terms, not what they are interested in. This is an important distinction as this chart shows:

“Microsoft v Google v Yahoo!”
Google Insights for Search - Search Volume: google vs. microsoft vs. yahoo - Worldwide, 2004 - present

What do I mean? Well, I know there are many people who enter Yahoo as a search term in their Google homepage to take them to Yahoo! website. They are not interested in Yahoo! as a search, they use it for navigation. Without that nugget of info you might draw the wrong conclusion from the lines on that graph. Take the data as interesting but hardly 100% reliable.

That said, it is still useful and fun. In particular, the geographic info is interesting, who knew where the most interest in SEO was?

“SEO”
Google Insights for Search - Search Volume: seo - Worldwide, 2004 - present

What do you think? A toy or genuinely useful?

Create Your Own Social Network With Ning

Ning. Create your own social network for anything.

Social networks are all the rage right now but the mass-market, generic social networks do not have the focus that you might need. Enter Ning, a service that allows you to create your own social network.

These social networks do not have to be public either, they can be private, invite-only affairs too.

I was looking for a place to create some Mastermind groups, groups of people to discuss business ideas and marketing tactics with. Then I remembered an SEO group I was invited to join had been created using an online service. Yup, it was created with Ning and looked like just what I needed.

Ning allows your members to

Essentially it becomes your own mini-facebook :)

Once you have added your new social network you have a lot of flexibility to customise it.

Mastermind Hub

As well as adding features, moving widgets and tweaking the appearance of your new site, you can also add premium paid features such as using your own domain.

Ning: Add Premium Services

If enough people join my site and get use out of it I will be adding my domain and removing advertising, but until then I am quite happy to be promoting this free service and allowing them to make money off my page views.

You can check out the site I created here at mastermindhub.ning.com, join if you like :)

Selecting Random Names With Excel

Random selections are necessary a surprising amount in day-to-day life. Most people opt for less than ideal solutions to the problem, drawing straws or names in a hat. This is ok when deciding who’s turn it is to buy the drinks but not so great when calling the non-randomness of your selection into question could land you in hot water.

Thankfully most of us have access to Microsoft Excel or an equivalent online service and spreadsheets have all you need to get the job done and shift the responsibility to an objective third party, even if it is one you program yourself.

I recently ran a prize draw where I needed to pull out a selection of names from a list of around 4,000. My original solution was a bit cumbersome, and I complained loud enough that readers came to my help.

With the assistance of Nicole Simon and Tony Rose I investigated better ways. Unfortunately their suggestion of using the RandBetween function threw errors on my Mac version of Office, so here is my new and tested approach.

Random SelectionExcel

The first column is an incremental number. You can easily add this in using the formula =ROW()-1 just type that in the first cell, copy, select how many cells you need, then paste. Excel will do the rest for you.

In the next column you add your names. Look over my selection and you will get an insight into my TV viewing habits ;)

Now comes the part we did all this for, the random selection formula:

=VLOOKUP(INT(RAND() * MAX(A:A))+1,A1:B$21, 2, FALSE)

Vlookup will find the value of a cell based on an index. In our case the index is the number in the first column. We don’t just want any number though, we want Excel to select it randomly, so we use the RAND() function multiplied by the max (in my example 20). We want it to be a whole number so we wrap that in INT(), and it needs to start at 1 so we add 1 to the result.

In the next part of the VLookup we tell Excel where to find all the data, and where to find the value we want to return. We enter false for the final attribute because we need an exact match.

There you have it, just paste that baby in or recalculate as many times as you need and you will get random selections returned.

Only minor irritation, it doesn’t stop it returning duplicates, but it’s not a big deal for my purposes.

Got a better solution? Share in the comments :)

Web 2.0: You Build, They Profit

All the talk about popular applications being pulled on the iPhone application store and possible application developer favoritism over at FaceBook reminds me of what I think of as Web 2.0 dirty secret.

In fact, I think it’s not a secret to anyone who spends much time watching the industry news as well as partaking in these services and sites.

You know when these companies are gaining billion dollar valuations, you know how those figures are arrived at?

They do a head-count of their “user base” livestock. Whatever the going rate for a warm-bodied user is, multiplied by their active registrations.

Perhaps there is a premium for payments, subscriptions, and so on. If I was doing the valuation I would much prefer to see some sort of income! But in most cases recently the price has been set by eyeballs, potential for future eyeballs, and some vague idea that ads might pay for everything. Sound familiar dotcom1.0 folks?

The fuel for all this activity is euphemistically described as “User Generated Content”. From the service owners point of view this means they build infrastructure, promote it, and watch the users create the real value.

Think YouTube, Digg, Squidoo, WordPress.com and any social network you could name.

Without users they have no content, without content no users. Without users, no value.

But you get the impression that they have a different view, that users are bottom of the food chain. A replaceable and value-less commodity. Numbers on a spreadsheet. Unless you are a Scoble or an Arrington they can treat you like so much dirt brushed from their $1000 Italian lofers.

Going back to the Apple and FaceBook application woes, doesn’t this seem like the same attitude?

Without these application developers both companies have less to offer end-users. With fewer options they have lower attraction or consumption, and therefore lower profit potential. You wouldn’t know it from how they act, though.

The lesson for the rest of us? If you play in someone else’s sand pit, expect to get some kicked in your face.