uber.la

Jun 30 2011

The 8th Discipline of Social Media; Tagging with Delicious, ReFinding Your Links

Category: community building,executive learnings,social media,social media marketing,tech opinion,tech reviews,tools — jmacofearth @ 7:17 am

If you don't use delicious.com perhaps now is the time to get started. Owned by Yahoo, delicious is the best way I know of to leave a bread crumb of your research for others to follow. It's also a killer crowd-sourced index of the web on any topic you can type it. Individuals have tagged and commented on these links on a subject that you are interested in. Hand-curated links. Good stuff comes to the top quickly on Delicious.

Here's why Delicious is so critical to your social media success.

Refinding that crucial information is as important as discovering it the first time.
Sharing your links with others is better than a single Tweet or LIKE of the information.
Social bookmarking builds a crowd-sourced index on any topic you are interested in, it's like a curated index of the web
Organizing your mind on the web will change your experience
Sure you can always Google it again, but how much time did it take you to find that specific comment last time, tag it and forget it and it's always there when you need it, or when you need to share it.

I have screen-grabbed a few searches I did this morning on delicious. The first one is for "healthcare" and you can see the most popular terms on the left upper corner and the overall "bookmarked" volume on the right. You can see things have been spiking in 09 on this topic. Easy to imagine why.

: delicious tag search: healthcare

The second term I delicious-ed. (As opposed to Googled.) Was "pharma."

: delicious search: pharma

In this example I have excluded my own delicious bookmarks. Notice the Google-placed adds on the right hand side. So Google is getting some love on this process too.

http://delicious.com (do a search on anything you are looking for)

A couple other interesting ways to explore content on delicious is to use their trending tabs. Here is the "Fresh Bookmarks" tab:

: delicious tabs: fresh bookmarks

And the "popular bookmarks" tab:

: delicious tabs: popular bookmarks

And the "explore tags" tabs:

: delicious tabs: explore tags

Start tagging your web experience with Delicious. Or perhaps you want to look at SPARKS on the new Google+. Either way you need to find and refind information on the web. Do it in a way that provides more social connections for all of us.

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://uber.la/2011/06/delicious/

The Disciplines of Social Media:

Tags: crowd-sourced index, delicious, hand-curated links, indexing your web, organizing your mind on the web, organizing your tags, refinding critical information, sharing links, social bookmarking, tagging, tagging the web, the 8th discipline, using delicious

Comments (6)

Jun 28 2011

First Look at Google+, the Alternative to Facebook from Google

Category: community building,google+,social media,tech opinion,tools — jmacofearth @ 2:47 pm

GOOGLE+ (GooglePLUS) or google.com/+/

We can't see the system yet, but we've all heard about Google's entry into the social network space for years. This most recent SXSWi the talk was about Google's new social sharing product called Circles. Well, it's here in the new Google+ And WAVE looks like it might still have signs of live under a new name Huddle and Hangouts.

One thing for sure, Google has the money, the market share and the braintrust to figure this out.

One other thing for sure, the market doesn't care if your Google or StartupNumberX, if your concept sucks, or your application isn't ready for primetime, you will know, because no one will use it. And people like me, hungry for Facebook alternatives, will use it hard and call out all the flaws, IMHO, of course. So here's all we got so far from Google's LearnMore page.

The intro video is nice, but don't get to gung ho just yet. The videos for WAVE were amazing. And where's WAVE today? But on thing that seems pretty clear, your Google Profile is going to be at the heart of Google+, so you might start getting that in order right now. Your links, associations, perhaps even your left over BUZZ. We can all be excited about an alternative to Zuckerberg's misguided advertising platform, but it's gotta work seamlessly and offer something better, MUCH better, than facebook. That's a tall order.

Let's take a look at the pieces we know about so far.

Circles
A way of connecting your networks of people together by interest. Here's their description.

Sparks
Might be a bit like a LIKE and a bit like a Social Bookmark (see Delicious). What if all your "likes" were tagged and stored for you to come back to? Would that be a good thing?

Hangouts
Google+ takes on Skype and Facetime with an open virtual chat room.

And for "mobile"

Instant upload.
Facebook does this pretty well, so this is merely the Google+ alternative. I wonder if it uses Picasa?

And Huddle
A nice form of group IMing.

So let's see how they tie all of Google+ together in the coming weeks. I'll be looking for my invite so I can show you under the covers. For now, go visit the LearnMore page and take the tours. But don't get too attached to the system just yet. A lot of people invested a lot of time and effort to see Google's WAVE make it into the mainstream, it failed. And BUZZ, well, it was pretty much a same-as-Twitter-no-benefit project that also failed.

I couldn't be more hopeful about Google+. The Facebook lock on social needs to be challenged. And Google certainly has the platform and motivation to do it. Let's see if the social (people) get behind Google's efforts. Stay tuned, we'll have front row seats.

Here is my delicious Google+ tag page, where you can find all my Google+ discoveries the second I find them

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://uber.la/2011/06/google-plus/

The LearnMore page about Google+

A few other posts that might be of interest:

Lifehacks; What's Your Best Hack?

Category: about me,community building,social media — jmacofearth @ 8:00 am

What does the term lifehack mean to you? And have you heard of mindhacks?

There's a very popular site called Lifehacker, that you might want to get a gander of if you don't already "hack." While it's mainly tech hacks, there are occasional hacks of other sorts.

So a lifehack is some kind of shortcut that you can use to get ahead in life. It may involve tasks that can be done in an easier or quicker fashion, it might be a software package that helps you monitor a part of your work that allows you to get closer to Tim Ferris's 4-hour work week. (4-hour work day, maybe…) And a mind hack is simply a way to supercharge or hack your mind into doing things better, quicker, or sometimes in parallel with a 2nd task.

Okay, so after all that preamble, there is really only one life hack that comes to mind that I practice daily, and it wasn't from Lifehacker.com.

Get up an hour earlier.

That's it, that's my main lifehack. I get up at 5:45 most mornings, every day of the week. And as I've gotten into the habit (oh, habits can also be a form of a lifehack, creating new habits that positively affect your life and progress) of getting up, literally, before the crack of dawn, I typically use this time to write. So if you notice many of my posts coming in around 7am (why would you notice that?) it's because I've been reading and writing since 6-ish.

A lifehack I'd like to add, is yoga. How about adding 15 minutes of yoga, EVERYSINGLEDAY, as I'm waiting for my coffee to brew and my mind to begin firing on all cylinders? That would be a perfect lifehack. No added time requirements. Great benefit. Action required, commitment and motivation to "just do yoga."

Also of note, delicious.com might be the best tech/mindhack there is. Imagine a repository for every link you ever want to refind. And then imagine it's tagged and stored in the cloud so you can get it from anywhere. Oh and Yahoo bought them, so they ain't going anywhere. All good. Here's a sampling of my delicious tag cloud, where I send the links I want to find again.

And in many ways, this link john32mac, is my extended mindmap of the web. I've been tagging and indexing topics since 2008. That's a lot of information.

What are your favorite lifehacks?
(it's not social if you don't share, lookin for some hacks in the comments please. And HERE not on facebook, if you don't mind. And no, I won't beg. Yet.)

@jmacofearth
permalink: http://uber.la/2011/06/lifehacks/

My "lifehacks" page: Lifehack Links (delicious is a great lifehack)

Coming tomorrow: The 8th Discipline of Social Media: Tagging with Delicious, How Do You ReFind Your Links?

Resources: