Check If Your Name Is Available on All Social Media Sites

Yesterday I received an email from one of our readers, asking on what social media sites he should try to secure his name (which can be either his personal name, or his website/business name, depending on what brand he is trying to promote).

In my opinion there are two that are absolutely a must: Twitter and Facebook. All the others are optional. Depending on the type of business you have some niche social sites might be compulsory too. For instance, if you are a photographer you should try to secure your name/brand on Flickr too.

That being said, if you have time available it could be a good idea to secure your name on as many social sites as possible. This will solidify your brand and enable you to interact with your audience/customers on many different platforms.

There is a web tool that helps with this task. It is called namechk.com.

You just need to put the desired name on the search box and the tool will check whether it’s available on not on around 150 social media sites. You can also use it as a list of the sites where you can go and create a profile, as some of them will also let you place a backlink to your website.

source: dailyblogtips

Digg 4 Is Here: What Has Changed

Digg launched its much expected version 4 yesterday. There are some big changes implemented, so I think they deserved a small review.

The biggest change is the introduction of social elements into Digg’s platform. Think about mashing Twitter into the old Digg system. Right after logging into your account, in fact, you’ll be offered a list of suggested users you can follow. If you had fans in the past, they will be your followers, and vice versa. You can follow me ondigg.com/envec if you want (I’ll reciprocate).

Once you visit the homepage you’ll find another change. Now you’ll see a list of popular stories that have been dugg by at least one of your friends (e.g., people you follow). In other words, each user sees a personalized version of the front page now. You still can get the old style front page though, where the overall most popular stories get displayed. Simply click on “Top News” on the top left corner.

One thing I liked is that when you click on the front page stories you are now sent directly to the original website. Before the change you would be redirected to the Digg page of that story, and then you would need to click a second time to open the original website….

Another positive change is how submitting stuff to Digg works. The process became a lot easier. On every page of the site you’ll notice a box saying “Digg it”. If you want to submit a story you just need to paste the URL there and click the button. If no one submitted it in the past, you’ll just need to write the description and bang, the story is in the system (it is also sent to all your followers).

Finally, managing your profile became simpler. Just click on “Settings” and you’ll see a clear menu with the options you have. Bloggers and web publishers should pay attention to the “Import Feeds” feature, which allows you to connect your RSS feed with your Digg account, auto-submitting all your latests posts. It’s necessary to verify your feed by placing a snipped of code in one of your posts.

Overall I think the Digg team did a great job with version 4. They understood that Twitter is basically becoming a link sharing platform, and they modeled Digg to do a better job at that.

Will it be useful again to drive traffic to small publishers like you and me? I am not sure yet, but I’ll certainly give it another shot, and I’ll let you guys know how it works out.

source: dailyblogtips

Digg Will Unban All Domains And Drop the Toolbar

Digg used to be the king of social bookmarking sites some years ago. The system was really democratic, and any website, albeit small or new, had a chance of making it to the front page. Sure, there were many people trying to game the system, but the mass of users made a good job filtering what was good content and what was not.

Then the strange things started to happen. First of all some domain names started getting banned. What is worse, the ban was not clearly outlined or official, but it was a “behind the scenes” thing. Almost like a censorship. There were plenty of stories around the web about Digg submissions vanishing, getting magically buried and so on.

After some time people also started suspecting that Digg went on to use editors who would manually decide what stories were allowed to hit the front page, and what stories were not.

The result? The front page started to feature mostly stories from mainstream websites (e.g., NY Times, PC World and so on). As a result many users got upset and stopped using the service.

In a attempt to revamp the numbers (after all they have investors aboard…) Digg launched the infamous “Digg Toolbar” last year. With the toolbar in place, users would never leave Digg to visit the websites featured on the front page. Instead the toolbar would open, displaying the content of the website inside a frame. Needless to say that webmasters had a very negative reaction to this new feature.

Had things kept unchanged, I am pretty sure Digg would start declining soon enough. Luckily for everyone, things did change. Last week Digg announced that Jay Adelson, the CEO for the past four years or so, is stepping down. Kevin Rose, the founder and visionary behind Digg, will get in control again.

I believe this change might get Digg back on the right track.

In fact there are some good news around already. Over at Search Engine Land I discovered that Digg is planning to shut down the toolbar, and to unban all the domains that were censored in the past.

Personally I had already given up on Digg, but these changes will make me try the website/community again to see if its worth my time. What about you guys, are you still an active Digg user? Will you try the site again given these changes?

source: dailyblogtips

Google Buzz: We Might Be On To Something

Everyone and their dogs is talking about Google Buzz huh? So yeah I felt like jumping on the bandwagon too….

Jokes aside, I believe Google Buzz might actually become something. It is tough to say who will end up using it, how they are going to use it and so on, but Google managed to accomplish at least one thing: to make the tool accessible and easy to use, thanks to the integration with Gmail.

To illustrate my point: I received a Google Wave invite early on from a friend, but never actually used it, because the setup process required more than two clicks. I just figured that I would wait and if the thing went mainstream I would start using it. So far it has not.

Google Buzz is different because with one click on my Gmail account I accessed it. After that I just needed to pimp my Google Profile a bit et voilà. If you want to follow me here is the link: http://www.google.com/profiles/danielscocco.

My first impression is that Google wanted to get a piece of the microblogging/real time web action. Hence why they adopted the “following/followers” nomenclature. It reminds me of Twitter inside Gmail at times…

One drawback I see is the interruptions and emails you get while using Gmail from people using Google Buzz. If they become to much of a hassle I might need to turn the thing off.

Have you tried it? What are you thoughts so far?

source: dailyblogtips