Chad Egeland

What Is Micro-Blogging?

Micro-Blogging is a term created to describe the use of publishing brief (usually under 140 character) text updates to inform others of what you are currently doing. Some of the more popular micro-blogging platforms currently include Twitter, Pownce, and Plurk.

What Is The use Of Micro-Blogging?

Micro-Blogging is a great way to keep your friends and family informed of what is going on in your life. It’s a great way to make new friends, it’s a fantastic way of discovering new and interesting information and requesting information to questions you have as well.

For instance I follow aaronwall of SEOBook.com on Twitter because of his reputation in the SEO commmunity and although he doesn’t post many tweets the ones he does are of high quality and relate to search engine optimization which I am involved in.  Leo Laporte once asked the people who follow him on Plurk and Twitter what is a good FTP program to use because the one he was using just didn’t work for him. He was bombarded with answers and I’m assuming made a decision on his next FTP application based on the amount of feed back he received. I myself have used Twitter and Plurk to ask different questions.

As a business you can also use a micro-blogging platform for public relations, quality control, client interactions and even in the marketing of products and product releases. Direct spamming of your business is frowned upon and will generally result in users to either unfollow or to block receiving updates from you.

Which Micro-Blogging Platform Should I Use?

That choice is totally up to you. I currently use Plurk and Twitter but will probably sign up to any new platforms that pop up. The ways I use each platform does differ. On Twitter I tend to say whatever pops into my head funny, offensive, stupid and sometimes informational I’ll just give a quick tweet and poof it’s gone. Plurk on the other hand shows all of your updates on a timeline so you can visually see what you have been up to in relation to time and as such I use Plurk more of a status update that my friends and family can see.

Micro-Blogging Platform Differences?

Twitter - Went public in October 2006 making it one of the older and more popular micro-blogging platforms on the market. Twitter is free to use and allows you to send updates called tweets of 140 characters or less to simply answer the question of What Are You Doing? You can see a great video by dot sub explaining Twitter in full detail here
After creating an account on Twitter you will be able to tweet by either going to Twitter.com and posting or by using one of the many third party Twitter applications available for PC, Mac and mobile phones. My favorite Twitter app is Twhirl uses Adobe Air framework making it cross platform and is free.
After joining Twitter you can start following other Twitter users. Some of the more popular and interesting Twitter users to follow include: leolaporte, kevinrose, patricknorton, hotdogsladies, ambermacarthur, therealdvorak and of course myself cegeland

Pownce - Pownce was started by Kevin Rose of TechTv and Digg fame and was launched to the public on January 22, 2008. Pownce revolves around the idea of not just updating friends with what you are doing but with sharing files, inviting friends to events and sharing links with your already established friends. Pownce offers both a free and a Pro account version where the Pro account allows you to send larger files, create custom themes and eliminate all ads on the Pownce site. You can update your Pownce account through their website or through the full featured Adobe Air powered desktop client. I have a Pownce account but it is seldom used.

Plurk - A relative new comer to the micro-blogging scene and was launched to the public in May of 2008. To begin your Plurk you first select a qualifier verb such as “has, loves, is, shares, wants, wishes” etc… you then can type your 140 character update which is then shown on a timeline. You are then able to scroll left and right to visually determine what you, your friend and family were doing at a certain point in time. Plruk also allows you to add comments to other Plurkers comments in a threaded style fashion to allow for an ongoing discussion within each Plurk. Plurk was limited to using its website but today I was pointed to an Adobe Air client for Plurk called Plurkair that I have just downloaded and installed. If you want to follow me on Plurk my user name is cegeland

Now What Do I Do?

Go and signup for accounts at one, two or even all three of the above mentioned micro-blogging platforms and then start using them to see which one suits you best. Start posting interesting, informative, funny and/or controversial updates to attract followers and start following others you find interesting. Invite your friends and family members to the service you are using and start interacting with them. In general just become connnected to the social community and if you find yourself becoming addicted to these types of services don’t worry you’re not alone and a service such as ping.fm may be another service you need in the future so that you can update all of your social networks at onece.

After downloading and installing Firefox 3 I was quite disappointed to learn that my favorite theme Noia 2 eXtreme and my favorite extension Tabbrowser Preferences were both unavailable for Firefox 3. I can live with out Noia 2 (kind of) but not without Tabbrower Preferences and so with some searching and a lot of luck I found a new extension Tab Mix Plus that takes the place of Tabbrowser Preferences and is FireFox 3 compatible.

Tab Mix Plus has a multitude of options vs Tabbrowser Preferences but the one I am most interested in is the ability for a URL I enter in the address bar to be opened in a new tab. I also like the ability to change it so that when I click on a link it opens that link in a new tab beside the tab the link came from instead of putting it at the end.

Are there any must have Firefox 3 extensions out there? Are you suffering from extension incompatability blues as well?

I have downloaded, installed and have been playing with Firefox 3 for about a half hour now and so far results are very good. The biggest thing I have noticed so far is that Gmail now loads significanlty faster than it had before, you can also now add tags to all of your bookmarks giving your local bookmarks a del.icio.us feel to them. Here is a list of the top new Firefox 3 features and what you can expect from those features.

Currently my only complaints are:

1. My personal favorite theme Noia 2 eXtreme is currently not compatible with Firefox 3 meaning I’m currently stuck using the ugly ass default Firefox theme. I am stuck using this theme because so many people are downloading Firefox 3 currently you can not get in to the addons section to download new themes.
2. One of the best Firefox extensions Tabbrowser Preferences is also currently not compatible with Firefox 3.

Hopefully the developers of these great themes and extensions will be releasing Firefox 3 compatible stuff soon.

Are you now using Firefox 3? Know of any great themes or extensions? Let me and everyone know your opinons in the comments below.

Matt Cutts of Google, Sphinn and SEO Roundtable are all reporting on what can only be described as an algorithmic slap that could and probably will have your pages deindexed from the Google serps if they ever had made it in to the serps to begin with. Pages that end in extensions such as .exe, .zip, .0 etc…are explained the following way by Matt Cutts

“But there are some file extensions that are mostly binary data, such as .exe, where the vast majority of the time the data would be meaningless blobs, so there are a few extensions to avoid. If your files are named example.dll or example.bin and you don’t see Google crawling pages with that file extension, I’d recommend changing your file extension to something else.”

This makes sense as Google would not want to index pages that do not add any value to the user. There is a simple way to check to see if a file type would be indexed by Google. Using the following command when searching from Google filetype:dll will return any page that ends in the .dll extension. If nothing returned ends exactly with the .dll extension it means Google is not indexing those file extension types.

So the best thing to do is to end your urls with a backslash or a common file type such as .html, .htm, .php. .cfm etc… as this will ensure your pages will be indexed and eventually ranked by Google.

This week at the company I work for we recently switched hosting providers. We went from a shared hosting account to a VPS account and as usual anything that could go wrong did. Internally we had DNS issues with our router that caused email not to be received/sent from within the building and we had issues with some of our server configurations causing high loads and some downtime of our mail and website. I should mention this is a Windows 2003 server running Coldfusion and it appears that Coldfusion may be the resource hog that is giving us the grief.

The bright side in all of this was our new host Canadian Webhosting who throughout the entire nightmare that was this week were extremely helpful and always kept us in the loop of what was happening. They were able to quickly diagnose any problems that we had and always have answered our questions quickly and with as much information as possible.

So if you are in the market for a new hosting provider and are looking for a Windows or Linux VPS Solution why not give Canadian Webhosting a try.