web-2.0

Feed Your Blog To Twits

http://www.twitterfeed.com

 

 

If you are familiar with Jaiku, Twitters competing micro blogging service, then you’ll know that you can add content into your Jaiku account from RSS feeds across the web. For now, you can’t accomplish this with Twitter but Twitterfeed at least allows you to feed your blog and other RSS feeds to Twitter.

Twitterfeeds site design leaves a lot to be desired, but the concept behind the service is clear. Before you begin using Twitterfeed, make sure you have a registered Twitter account. This Twitter account, or one of your choosing, will be the one that posts your feed entries onto Twitter. Once you create your account, make sure you click on the CREATE NEW TWITTER FEED link. One of the cool things about Twitterfeed is that it has support for OpenID logins. There are too many sites and services on the net that require users to create a username and password. We need more of these sites to support OpenID so that we can use one unified login for multiple sites.

Type in your Twitter username and password, your blogs RSS feed, choose your update frequency which is usually 30 minutes, maximum amount of updates to post each time and if you desire you can type in a description which will be attached as the prefix to each Twitter post. If this option is disabled, only the posts title and link will be posted. The last option you have available to use is whether or not the feed is active.

Once configured, Twitterfeed will check your feeds based on the update frequency you choose during the setup process. If Twitterfeed detects new content, it will automatically post the new content to Twitter via your account.

This service is fairly straightforward to use but I have to question it’s meaningfulness. For instance, if you maintain a blog and you publish a piece of content, you can immediately come up with your own prefix with the associated post link and post it to Twitter and it will show up instantly as compared to waiting 30 minutes from the time it was published. The manual method described above actually offers more flexibility but it is also a little more time consuming. Twitterfeed does allow you to have more than one feed attached to an account, so if you don’t want to be bothered with creating Tweets featuring your new content, then this service should do the trick.

Who Needs Privacy?

As illustrated by Nick Douglas writer for Valleywag and a recent article on Mashable.com written by James Mowery titled Stalking 2.0 have users switched from wanting to remain anonymous to practically being stalked and not giving a hoot about privacy anymore? As most of us know, anonymity on the Internet is a tough thing to come by. Some say it doesn’t even exist. Why is it then, that so many people are using Web 2.0 services that practically broadcast everything they do with their computer system to the web?

It is unnerving to see so many users literally broadcasting much of their personal information to the web. I feel that if this trend of broadcasting ones life to the Internet continues, there will be a sharp increase in the amount of cases that deal with identity theft. Each one of these broadcasting services is a piece of a puzzle, collect enough pieces and you can put together a comprehensive profile on a specific person. One thing is for sure, browsing the web and going through a user’s online presence to compile personal information is a whole lot easier than hacking into a user’s system.

The next time I hear someone complain about Google and how much information they store on their users to accommodate targeted advertising, I am going to remind them that there are folks like Nick Douglas who can likely find the information they need about a particular person within 60 minutes of browsing each social networking site that a user may be apart of. Not every guy is as nice as Nick, and I whole heartedly believe that the social engineering types are gleaming with joy as the information they needed to work so hard to obtain is now given to them on a silver platter.

Who else is concerned about what is going on? Do I and others have nothing to worry about?

Use 15 Bookmarking Services With 1

OnlyWire.com Use One Bookmarklet Instead Of 15Consolidation of web services is the next big thing on the web and OnlyWire is on the bandwagon providing a service that allows one bookmarklet to take the place of 19 others.

Online bookmarking really took off once del.icio.us hit the web. del.icio.us offers a way for users to store all of their bookmarks in one place on line, sharing of bookmarks with friends, and also allowed a way for users to check out what their friends were bookmarking. Since the launch of del.icio.us there have been a countless number of other bookmarking sites to hit the scene such as Blue Dot, Furl, Diigo, Spurl ect. You may have developed a favorite amongst all of these different offerings, but what if you could use nineteen different bookmarking services through only one? That is precisely what OnlyWire allows you to do.

Synopses:

OnlyWire provides users with a bookmarklet which is tied into nineteen different bookmarking services. Once you add something to OnlyWire, that bookmark is then added to each one of the other nineteen bookmarking services you actively have an account on. Note what I just said. You must have an active account on one or more of the nineteen bookmarking services that OnlyWire is tied into if you want your bookmarks to be published on those sites.

Why Bother:

You may be wondering why anyone would ever have nineteen separate accounts on nineteen separate bookmarking sites? Having an account on each of those services and then using OnlyWire to publish to all of them at once allows podcasters, bloggers and content producers to easily expose their content to a wider audience. I’m not saying that you should be exclusively using this service to only bookmark your content because that is a form of abuse, but there is nothing wrong with occasionally tagging your own content every once and awhile. This will generate an increase in traffic on your end and having your content on those nineteen services provides at least nineteen more back links to whatever site it is your promoting.

Creating An Account:

Creating an account is pretty simple. Provide a username, password, type in the associated CAPTCHA image text and off you go. One thing worth noting is that OnlyWire will automatically bookmark OnlyWire.com and the OnlyWire Sponsor site on each of the bookmarking services you are participating with. The good news is that OnlyWire will only bookmark the Sponsor link once.

The Boring Part:

Once your account is created, it will automatically be logged into OnlyWire.com. Near the top of the SERVICES page, you will see an area designated for BOOKMARK TOOLS: These tools are the actual OnlyWire bookmarklets you will need to use to publish items to your account. Unlike Blue Dot, OnlyWire allows you to bookmark pages that contain Frames and ones that don’t. Most sites however, are generally void of frames so you’ll most likely only use the Save Page (NO FRAMES) bookmarklet. On a funny note, OnlyWire uses the acronym (STD) to describe the bookmarklet that saves pages with no frames. The bookmarklet is safe to use, so don’t worry about catching anything!

Also on the SERVICES page their will be two columns of text boxes, one for usernames and the other for passwords. Each set of boxes is for a particular bookmarking site. Be sure to fill out the appropriate details for each service your apart of or the OnlyWire bookmarklet will be unable to post to those sites. This would be a good opportunity for you to create accounts on each site you don’t already have one with by clicking on the link to the left of the text boxes. I managed to create accounts on all but five of the services listed. Those sites I couldn’t register with were apparently having some account registration issues that prevented me from getting an account. If this happens to you, just skip them.

Using The BookMarklet:

Using the bookmarklet couldn’t be any easier. Once you come across a piece of content on the web you would like to bookmark, simply click the Bookmarklet button in your browser. Usually the title and the website link will appear automatically. Always add tags to your items. These tags play an important role as they allow members of each bookmarking site to find your content. Think of tags as keywords and keyword phrases that users would type into a search box to find your content. You can choose whether to keep your tags private or not, but if you want to shoot yourself in the foot be sure to mark them as private. You don’t have to, but it is generally a good idea to put in a snippet about the particular item you are bookmarking. Those who find your content will be grateful for the short description.

Final Thoughts:

OnlyWire is a great service as it allows users to consolidate at least 19 bookmarklets into one. Not only does this save time and energy but it could potentially help you clean up your browser window by allowing you to get rid of the individual bookmarklets you may have from different bookmarking services. As I registered an account to all of those services I didn’t have an account on, I noticed that each one came with it’s own browser plugin/bookmarklet which would of made my FireFox browser a mess.

Using OnlyWire in the proper way should really benefit web masters as it allows them to really push their content to a wider audience. As noted previously, if you use OnlyWire to only bookmark content on your own site, you are generally abusing the service which puts your account at risk of being suspended or banned. Bookmark your own content sparingly. Also try to play an active role in these social bookmarking communities by adding users as friends, sharing bookmarks, bookmarking the same things your friends are bookmarking ect. After all, it wouldn’t be Web 2.0 without having a good bit of social interaction within a community.

Learn More:

If you would like to learn more about OnlyWire, I suggest downloading and taking a listen to Pete Balasch’s episode 15 of the Internet Marketing And SEO Tips Podcast. This episode covers OnlyWire and why web masters should seriously consider jumping on board and using the service.

If you prefer one bookmarking service over another, please tell us why in the commenting section.