Dustin Woodard's thoughts on search, social media, filmmaking and the web in general.
I’ve had the pleasure of judging the Webby Awards, the Web 2.0 awards, an international pageant, and now the Mashable Open Awards.
Like many awards, there is the judges choice and the people’s choice (both an honor to win for any website). Below is the form you can use to submit your choice (cast your vote before midnight Sunday, November 30th):
Finally some solid evidence showing how long the long tail of search really is! Having worked for some big high-traffic sites, I was always discouraged with the underestimation of the true length of the long tail in other public reports. Finally I did my own research and it was published on the Hitwise blog:
Sizing Up the Long Tail of Search
Here’s a sneak peak:
“After great dissatisfaction with the existing research, which I felt vastly understated the true size of the long tail, I decided to do my own research…There’s so much traffic in the tail it is hard to even comprehend. To illustrate, if search were represented by a tiny lizard with a one-inch head, the tail of that lizard would stretch for 221 miles.”
Understanding the long tail and how to target it from an SEO standpoint is no simple task. I hope this article sheds some light on how important long tail traffic is.
In my experience, I’ve ranked for head terms and I’ve ranked for millions of tail terms. I’d gladly trade in the head terms for a larger piece of the tail. A few companies have learned this, including the search engines, but they’d prefer you don’t know how much of a gold mine it really is.
Just received an email from LinkedIn announcing LinkedIn Apps. Here’s a quick look at the apps they’ve launched with and my thoughts on how they might help you with your career reputation management.
LinkedIn Applications available at launch (in decreasing order of first-glance importance) with my quick thoughts:
Obviously many of these applications are available on other sites or in other ways, but having them associated with your LinkedIn business network may bring about some interesting opportunities. It will be interested to see how popular these become and what other applications are added.
So far, I’ve installed Blog link (so far first person in my web savvy ~400 person network), WordPress (more control and better profile display than blog link), TripIt (two connections on it thus far), and company buzz (didn’t add to my profile, however). Of the three, I noticed blog link may suffer from speed issues (plus I removed it from my profile as I didn’t like the way it displayed) and company buzz doesn’t work very well compared to other twitter search tools.
Love to hear your experiences and thoughts about LinkedIn Apps.
Haven’t seen anyone do this yet on Facebook, so I thought I’d stir the pot and see if this Facebook prank spreads.
Facebook Assault Tagging
Facebook is nice enough to automatically publish any photo of you to all your friends if someone simply tags a photo of you. This has caused embarrassing moments for many people, but there’s a way to guarantee embarrassment:
1) Upload a funny or nasty photo
2) Tag it as your friend
3) All their friends will see the new photo feed of your victim.
4) Watch their friends start commenting on the hilarious photo
5) Prepare to be tagged yourself (you can untag a photo of you, but you have to be on it).
Here’s my first:
The NY Times reports that the largest spam gang on the Internet is being shut down, starting with their assets being frozen. Some key numbers shared in the article:
If these numbers are true, then:
I wish it were true, but I’m skeptical that we won’t see such drops. Unless the penalties are extremely harsh, other spammers will step in to get a piece of the newly available spam pie.