Transcendigital blog

Social media is not really new anymore, but there are many people who still struggle with the subtle things that might help or hurt success within the top social communities. Here are the various tips you can follow to help you succeed in most social media communities.

This article, discusses in detail how to best create a profile and persona within the social communities that may help you achieve better success

1. To be or not to be… Yourself?
There are a couple of ways you can represent yourself through your profile. You can either be yourself or take on a persona. When you choose to be yourself, you limit the freedom and anonymity you can have within any given social community. You have to monitor what you say and what you submit, as it will have a bearing on your intentions and reputation. As a result, you open the door for people to research you and possibly link you to any content or product you might be trying to promote.

However, when you choose to use a persona, you are free of those concerns, for the most part. You are not directly tied to any content, product, or service you may represent and you are free to participate in any way you see fit.

2. Choose a memorable name
Choose a name that is easy and memorable. You want people to be able to say your name aloud and recognize it at a glance. Names like “msaleem, “burento,” and “MrBabyMan” are all names you can easily recognize and speak aloud to a friend in conversation.

3. Choose an avatar that works in all sizes
Choose an avatar that is easy to recognize and memorable at all sizes and try to make your image represent your chosen name whenever possible.

4.Be careful what you link to
Avoid linking to sites that could identify you or products and services you provide. You do not want to portray yourself as someone that is on Digg for profit or gain.

5. Stay active
Make sure that you log in to your account as much as possible and perform various actions to keep your account looking fresh and active.

6. Be a good user, statistically
Make sure that you log in to your account as much as possible and perform various actions to keep your account looking fresh and active.
Be sure that you are voting on other people’s submissions and not just your own. You do not want your stats to show that you have submitted 100 articles and only voted on those same 100 submissions.

Also make sure you vote multiple stories in various categories to have a diverse and high level of votes per month. I normally like to see double digits in 3 or more categories in a potential friend.
Try to make comments on posts from time to time. Don’t leave silly “good post” comments–take a minute or two and actually give a real comment. It is always better to avoid having a 0 statistic field in a profile.

7. Don’t be overly friendly
Digg displays all the friends you add under your recent activity section on your profile page. It never looks good to have 300 newly added friends at one time. All the people you added will visit your profile and see that they were not individually added but rather as a part of a mass friend adding campaign.

8. Be natural
You want to grow out your profile slowly, like a natural account would. You should not have 400 friends after just joining Digg 2 days earlier.
Users have been banned from Digg for having unnatural account activities and growth. Profiles are something you should really put the time and thought into doing correctly. Many social community users will review profiles before choosing to friend you or avoid you like the plague.

Link Reference: http://searchengineland.com/080129-083225.php

EveryBlock is a new local “news” site that seeks to answer the question, “What’s happening in my neighborhood?” EveryBlock aggregates data and content from a variety of sources and currently covers three cities in the US: Chicago, New York and San Francisco. EveryBlock competes with Outside.in, YourStreet and Topix to some degree.

The site features three types of “news,” according to the EveryBlock blog:

Civic information — building permits, crimes, restaurant inspections and more. In many cases, this information is already on the Web but is buried in hard-to-find government databases. In other cases, this information has never been posted online, and we’ve forged relationships with governments to make it available.

News articles and blog entries – major newspapers, community weeklies, TV and radio news stations, local specialty publications and local blogs.

Fun from across the Web — local photos posted to the Flickr photo-sharing site, user reviews of local businesses on Yelp, missed connections from Craigslist and more.
There’s a decent amount of “news you can use” in this mix, in a variety of graphical formats, including images, charts and maps.

Article Link:http://searchengineland.com/080124-082320.php

Microsoft has recently alerted corporate administrators that it will push out a new version of Internet Explorer 7 their way next month, and it has posted guidelines on how to ward off the automatic update if admins want to keep the older IE6 browser on their companies’ machines.

The upgrade for IE7 scheduled to roll out via WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) on Feb. 12 was announced last October, when Microsoft said it would no longer require users to prove they owned a legitimate copy of Windows XP before they were allowed to download the newer browser. Microsoft explained that the move was prompted by security concerns.

“Because Microsoft takes its commitment to help protect the entire Windows ecosystem seriously, They’re updating the IE7 installation experience to make it available as broadly as possible to all Windows users,” said Steve Reynolds, an IE program manager, on a Microsoft company blog in early October. “Internet Explorer 7 installation will no longer require Windows Genuine Advantage validation and will be available to all Windows XP users.”

The IE7 Installation and Availability Update was immediately made available for manual downloading and was offered to consumers and small-business users via the Windows Update service in the weeks that followed. Beginning Feb. 12, the new IE7 package will be put into the WSUS pipeline as an Update Rollup package.

Link:http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/08/01/17/Microsoft-warns-businesses-of-autoupdate-to-IE7_1.html

On Thursday Microsoft is expected to release a new set of developer tools for products that improve the Internet’s accessibility for people with disabilities. The tools, currently called UI Automation, can be used royalty-free, according to Microsoft’s Windows Accessibility lead Norm Hodne, as long as the resulting applications are built to perform within all platforms, e.g. Windows or Linux.

Microsoft formally donated the UI (user interface) Automation developer tools to the Accessibility Interoperability Alliance (AIA), an engineering working group that the software giant create last November in partnership with tech companies like Oracle, Novell, Hewlett-Packard and Adobe Systems, as well as assistive-technology developers like GW Micro. The working group’s mission is to pave the way for standards in the industry for text-to-speech software, screen readers and other assistive products.

Microsoft’s UI Automation comes nearly 12 years after the company’s last developer tools for accessibility user design, which were released with Windows 95. Hodne said that UI Automation updates its predecessor by offering developer shortcuts and improved user performance–and the two formats work together. Despite the fact that UI Automation encourages interoperability among platforms, they’re not the only developer tools in the marketplace. Linux and the Linux Foundation provide APIs for the industry, too.

“First we have to work on interoperability of current (developer tools) across multiple platforms and then we’ll work on coming to a single set of (developer tools in the industry),” Hodne said.

Article Link here:www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9852281-7.html?tag=cd.blog

On Google’s Checkout blog it was announced that they have launched Google Checkout Trends. Google Checkout Trends is a version of Google Trends, but limits the data to that collected from Google Checkout merchants.

It basically shows you what people are buying and selling online via Google Checkout. You can plug in one keyword or several keywords separated by comma, and it will show you a chart plotting revenue over time.
Google has trends for several of their applications, such as Google Trends for the main search index. They also came out with Google Hot Trends in May and Google Reader Personalized Trends about a year ago. Google Finance charts are basically a form of Google Trends, but with stock data. Google News has a form of trends for archive news, as well.

Link:googlecheckout.blogspot.com/2008/01/new-on-hot-list-google-checkout-trends.html

Researcher Aviv Raff revealed a flaw that ID thieves could possibly exploit.
There is a serious flaw in how Firefox handles log-ons
and could be used by identity thieves
to dupe users into disclosing passwords, the noted security researcher
said yesterday.

Aviv Raff, best known for ferreting out browser flaws,
revealed the Firefox spoofing vulnerability on his personal blog, and posted a
demonstration. He did not go public with any proof-of-concept code
or working exploit, however.

According to Raff, Firefox 2.0.0.11 — Mozilla Corp.’s most current version –
fails to sanitize single quotation marks and spaces in what’s called the
“Realm” value of an authentication header. “This makes it possible for an
attacker to create a specially crafted Realm value which will look as if the
authentication dialog came from a trusted site,” said Raff.

Article link here: www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9055222