Recently Paul Collier, author of “The Bottom Billion”, gave a talk on Ted.com where he outlined a high level plan to improve the lives of what he calls the “Bottom Billion” of people who live in developing countries and are unable to affect change to improve their situation given the current political and economic systems.

What Mr. Collier discusses is fascinating not only from a real world stand point, but his ideas also have some interesting implications in the online social networking world as well.

If you are unclear how to best use social networking sites or unsure of the direction of these sites, then watch this short video about the great need for social interaction among real world groups and you will begin to get a sense of how these systems might effect change on society and business online.

“Paul Collier studies the political and economic problems of the very poorest countries: 50 societies, many in sub-Saharan Africa, that are stagnating or in decline, and taking a billion people down with them. His book The Bottom Billion identifies the four traps that keep such countries mired in poverty, and outlines ways to help them escape, with a mix of direct aid and external support for internal change.

From 1998 to 2003, Collier was the director of the World Bank’s Development Research Group; he now directs the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford, where he continues to advise policymakers.”

Source: Paul Collier’s Profile on Ted.com

Leave me a comment after you watch this video and tell me how you think his ideas apply to social media and online social networking in general.

Speak soon,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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Twitter spam is officially a thing. Today I was followed on Twitter by “signupnow” which links to bux.to, a site that promotes getting paid to look at ads. This is the second bogus follower I received in a week.

According to the follower’s website, “At Bux.to, you get paid to click on ads and visit websites. The process is easy! You simply click a link and view a website for 30 seconds to earn money.”

I don’t know anything about the site, but it smell funny to me and I’d stay away from it unless you can confirm if they are legit. My guess is NO.

This is the start of Twitter spam and it’s a sign that Twitter is coming of age. Age more people use it and people learn to exploit it, Twitter will see more and more spam followings.

Signupnow already is following over 2,000 people and if all of them click through to see what it’s about then that’s a good bit of traffic generated. The conversion rate is another story, but for now my guess is it’s an effective way to get attention.

One blog I read said this about the problem.

“I haven’t seen an issue with this yet, but as we shift from primarily early adopters to more and more mainstreaming, I expect it will happen. Especially since Google is ranking tweets and twitterers quite well- the black hat SEO people will soon notice and try to exploit” - Brian Carter

For now the best way to combat Twitter spam is to remove the bogus Twitter followers to minimize their reach. But a long term defense will have to come from the developers at Twitter. They will have to implement a solution that requires you to approve followers before they can show up in your list, or they will have to implement a timed follow limit that will prevent people from following more than five people in a twenty minute period. That way it would be a pain for would be Twitter spammers to follow people by the thousands.

How would you fight Twitter spam?

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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Here are a few notes from John Pozadzides at OneMansBlog.com. He’s giving the presentation on 45 Ways to Power Up Your Blog at WordCamp Dallas 2008.

I’m not going to list all 45 tips in this update, but here are a few interesting ones for you.

1. Use English Names for Images
2. Descriptive and accurate titles are essential
3. Use title elements on every hypertext link
4. Pick the right theme (SEO over Eye Candy)
5. Web hosting affects your traffic - google traffic is affected by site performance (google could flood a slow server). StumbeUpon stops sending traffic to slow sites
6. Serve images from your own server and not Flickr or risk sending traffic to Flickr and not your own site. Images searches will go to where the site is stored.
7. Use a sitemap to tell Google where everything is on your site. Get the WordPress Site Map Plugin.
8. Post regularly, no less than 2-3 days. Post in advance. Keep 2-3 post buffer at all times, a week or two is even better if you can.
9. Always show related posts.
10. Use Print style sheets to make it easy for people to print your content.
11. Use deep linking by using keywords in the link text.
12. Have your own domain name. Don’t use typepad, blogger, or other sub-domain.
13. Create a podcast and/or publish a video to connect with your audience and make yourself real.
14. Pick a theme that loads quickly
15. Use wp super cache plugin to survive a digg front page appearance.
16. Use the link attraction factors plugin to find out if your post title is digg worthy.
17. Always include at least one image per post, period.

These are all great tips, but the grand finale was the best tickler and that was the Layered Technologies real-time analytics reporting tool from Woopra.com. I’m getting a beta account today as part of being an attendee of WordCamp Dallas 2008, so I’ll update you on all the yummy coolness once I have a chance to get in and use the tool.

Updating from WordCamp Dallas 2008

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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Here are some of the new announcements from the WordCamp Dallas 2008 event here in Frisco Texas.

Not only is WordPress.org getting a refresh, but WordPress 2.5 was also released today.

Media Management:

Media upload is totally redesigned with the ability to upload multiple items at one time.

Image Handling:

You can tag your images on your desktop and then upload them to WordPress and it will pull out the image information automatically so you don’t have to re-enter the information.

Plugins:

Plugins can be automatically updated without the need to manually download the files and upload them to your server. Whether this works or not will depend on your server settings.

Pluggable Features:

WordPress 2.5 has several interesting new pluggable features. Everything from color schemes to post creation tool bar buttons is pluggable in WP 2.5.

Hacking Prevention:

All WordPress 2.5 passwords are now salted and stretched to prevent hacking. Before the security was a straight MD5 Hash. What hackers used to do was to hack an old WordPress blog and then download the user database so that even if the blogger updated their WordPress instance, the hackers could still get back in. So, update to WP 2.5, keep your blog updated, and just for good measure, always always change your username and password if you get hacked. Hopefully the new WP security will help prevent hacking.

WordPress 2.6 Future Vision:

The growth of WordPress since 2006 has been virtually exponential. Both the user community and the develop community continues to grow and as it does we can only expect for it to become more entrenched in the lexicon of publishing online. WorPress is being used as The blogging platform of choice and it’s being used as the foundation for CMS systems.

Updating from WordCamp Dallas 2008,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

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Would anyone visit your website if they could see it first? There are widgets today that will let you see a site before you visit them. But, they don’t easily let you compare sites side by side in full view.

Well, there is a new visual search engine on the horizon that lets you pick through thousands of websites without actually visiting any of them and it does it in an iTunes album over sort of way. I came across the search engine a few days ago and I signed up for their beta program.

They just opened up the beta program tonight to the public and accounts are going fast. As I type this 100 accounts have already been claimed. If you’re interested in trying it out you should go there now before all the accounts are gone.

I have mine and I plan to do a series of videos on the service in the coming days. It’s totally awesome and I already have a few ideas of how you can use it in beta. I’m off to WordCamp for the weekend so it will be next week before I can create them.

In the meantime you can play with the tool.

Have fun,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

P.S. I’m going to WordCamp in Frisco Texas this weekend and I’ll be posting updates
to the Open Source Marketer Community, so be sure to look for those.

- C

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