Aggregating Feeds with Pipes

Once again, I feel as if I've jumped into the deep end of the pool, but with my eyes open. Somehow I ended up on a page talking about Pipes. From there I eventually landed on a quite interesting video showing how to aggregate feeds - using Yahoo Pipes. Don't worry, I have very little idea of what I'm talking about or where I'm headed with this, so I won't go too far down this road. However, it does appear to be a very cool idea! What I'm thinking is this: The website I'm working on gets updated once a month, and up to a half dozen pages get new content. It would be nice to have a feed that directly shows our members what content is new. This technique may fit the bill. I'll have to mull it over and explore further, but for now, I'm intrigued...


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Blogging Platforms

Week 8 of Foothill College's COIN 72 (Web Marketing) reaches the topic of my favorite pastime: blogging. And, just to show I'm not too old to learn new tricks, even as I approach another birthday - I spent several hours this morning exploring other blogging platforms. This blog, and all my other blogs, is hosted by blogger.com, which is now owned by Google. Our textbook mentions several other platforms such as TypePad, MoveableType, WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal. Oddly enough, it seems as if Drupal is the one that has caught my eye. Why? It's one of the two platforms hosted by my server (IX Web Hosting), and it allows for multiple blogs (compared with Joomla!). Jumping off into the deep end this morning, I spent 30 minutes watching this quite fascinating video created by Robert J. Safuto of Awakened Voice. I must admit, it's a bit over my head for now, but what it shows me is that this is a blogging platform that gives the author a LOT of advantages! You can slice and dice your content in many different ways, and there seems to be a large community of practitioners who are waiting to help. So, check out this hardly-for-beginners explanation of Drupal's Content Construction Kit and Views. Again, over my head, but like the carrot on the stick, it points me/us? in the right direction. So, here goes:



To learn more about installing Drupal 7.1, read Safuto's guide, Builing Your Blog with Drupal 7 Version 1.
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Mobile Marketing

Oh no - I've seen the future! Mobile marketing is going to be BIG. What can a poor consumer do? Well, for starts, we can learn what's coming at us down the pike. Here's a short video about Millennial Media company. It's first S.M.A.R.T. report (Scorecard for Mobile Advertising Reach and Targeting)was produced in March of 2009, and by August 2011 they had produced 49 more intelligence reports.



Millenial Media doesn't just study the trends of the industry - they are one of the prime movers. The February report from MobiThinking.com lists Millenial Media as second only to Google in the mobile media market. Here's a video ad by Patagonia, created with Millenial Media, just to give you an idea of what the new age has in store for us.


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Foursquare

Here's a company I know nothing about: Foursquare. It claims to have over 15 million members worldwide, and advertises thus: "We build tools that help you keep up with friends, discover what’s nearby, save money and unlock deals." They cater to businesses, and have over 750,000 signed up as paying customers. The price? It's a mystery. This business tool goes on the list for consideration when creating a business Web site. To read more, see about Foresquare.



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Ad Preferences

It's come to my attention recently the extent to which Google has modified what is available to us in a fundamentally game-changing way. This video tells the "nice" side of the story - you can control which Internet companies market to you by choosing your "Ad Preferences" in each search engine. Of course, this is not the whole story, but at least this video does explain a little bit about the disturbing discovery many Web surfers are making - advertisers know where you've been, what you like, and what you do online.


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Do I Diigo?

Here's a new tool: Diigo. It seems to have lots of options to underline, highlight, annotate, and clip online articles of interest. I'll check it out!
Diigo V5: Collect and Highlight, Then Remember! from diigobuzz on Vimeo.

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Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of "improving the visibility of a website or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results." (see Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization).

To quote a little more from the Wikipedia article: 

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work, what people search for, the actual search terms or keywords typed into search engines and which search engines are preferred by their targeted audience. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.

One of my first endeavors in the remodeling of narfe65.org will be the analysis of how well we have positioned our web site so that it appears on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) when people look for it. For instance, if someone searches for "narfe meetings in the bay area", will they come up with our Meetings page, which will tell them when we meet and where? What do our members actually search for when they try to find their chapter's web site? Who IS looking for us? All of these are questions for a process of SEO, and the answers are what I will pursue for the next 10 weeks.
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