Weren’t we just talking about trademarks, standards and linkbait? …. Naaww.… this week there's a new buzz -
The latest kid in the corral –Plurk. As one person alluded to, half jokingly, its twitter on meth essentially. Granted many new services that come out experience some initial geek surge, but even this Gypsy was on about FriendFeed (and it’s Rooms) recently – this one is different.
For starters it has a strange snow ball effect going on as you seem to spiral out of control. It is like having an interactive, multimedia enabled forum that Plurked and instant messenger client. You’ll be lucky to not be talking in the third person in no time.
Beyond that I met some folks that gave help and others that made tools for the community to benefit from. Once rolling it is interesting to not only interact but add flavour with images and graphics… You can also start private groups called *cliques* that help one segment their messages once your friend lists get longer.
WTF? The ol Switcherooo – I do think folks hardly read things sometimes. Case and point is this post about KPI’s of SEO which really is nothing really about KPI’s for SEO… and people actually ‘Sphunn’ it..... then it get's interesting...
Then Mochito got jiggy and changed not only the title, but avatar. Goes to show a slightly different angle can always be the prudent trail to follow.
“...very true, a KPI is something you can measure, but i honestly could not find a better word to describe what i meant, so i 'broadened' the definition. Call it 'writer's freedom' or just plain bad english”
…fair enough, gave a Sphinn just for the flexibility… welcome aboard mate!
How NOT to make friends on Sphinn – Loved the comment, “next post on this blog: How to Become an SEO Pariah in 5 posts or less” … note to peeps far and wide… don’t try and create controversy about a respected industry blog with well known and addressed issues… duh…
Mega Round up – considering my love of link round ups and link fests in my posts, one simply MUST highlight Steven’s monthly post. Truly the best round up in the biz!! (here’s the blog post)
Some links of interest for the last week from my FriendFeed Rooms and the land of patents. If you know of some other great posts I have missed, be sure to join our rooms and post to yer heart's content and it might just show up here next week!
Well here I was strolling through my day and to my surprise, it all may be meaningless in a few years. I Stumbled across a fairly frightening view of where the future of the internet is headed. The video below describes the internet of the future as a subscription model much like cable/satellite television where you pay to access different sites in packages and further fees apply when you want to go outside of those access points.
When the web was young, back in the dark ages of dial-up and Mosaic, the big stat was "hits". Everyone had a counter on their home page, and everyone sold, or tried to sell, advertising based on the number of hits on their site. It was soon discovered that hits are a worthless metric. A hit is simply a request made of the server, so a page with 100 images on it generated at least 101 hits every time it was loaded. And the counters on most home pages could easily be padded by hitting the page refresh over and over.
Fortunately advertisers and webmasters learned quickly that when counting traffic there are only two numbers that matter, visitors and unique visitors. Both types are valuable for different reasons, and a website that can grow to a place where people want to return over and over again is less tied to the whims of the search engines.
To that list, we can add RSS news feed subscribers, newsletter subscribers, even the number of comments a simple blog post may get.
The problem with these benchmarks/metrics though is that none of them mean much when it comes time to pay the bills. You can have all the traffic, all the subscribers, even all the hard core fans you want, but if they don't convert in to sales, what's the point?
Over the last year we have been fortunate to have some great people drop by the FireHorse Trail and I thought to start a page dedicated to them and show my appreciation.
If you haven't met these folks or read their great insights, their posts and personal blogs are listed below;
When the web was young, back in the dark ages of dial-up and 
