Tonight I’m in San Antonio Texas for a few days of fun and sun with the family at Sea World. It’s about a five hour trip from where I live so I had some time on the road to listen to audio books and think. I took in about four chapters of The Four Hour Work Week by Timothy Ferriss and I can tell you it’s worth the read, or download and listen in my case.

Tim often refers to people in his book as the New Rich. These are the people who have learned to maximize their time while minimizing their work hours to get the most benefit from their efforts. The point is to live your life without engaging in “soul crushing activities” for the sake of “being a hard worker”.

This got me to thinking about ways to reduce some of the less value added takes I perform. For example, when I upload videos to sharing sites like YouTube, DailyMotion, Blip.Tv, or Vimeo I usually upload them one at a time. But a better way would be to upload a video once and have it upload to multiple video sharing sites without any extra effort on my part. In fact, I could probably get an assistant to do the task for me.

The site I have my eye on for automating video upload processes is Hey!Spread.com. They offer an inexpensive service for uploading videos to multiple sharing sites and they have an application programming interface (API) that I can use to hook mulitple sites and software to the service. That means I could automate some of my video distribution tasks and possible create tools and services that others would be willing to pay for.

If you haven’t heard of them or haven’t been to their updated site recently, then give them a visit and see what they have to offer. They really have an impressive list of supported video sharing sites and they are adding services regularly.

Now, off to bed for me. Sea World awaits!

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Listen To This Article Podcast

I have a new social media friend and no, I’m not talking about the tons of random friends requests you get on a daily basis. I’m talking about a piece of social networking software that can help you get your arms around the online social scene. I’m talking about Flock, the web browser that’s based off the Mozilla project.

I know what your thinking. Who needs ANOTHER browser when FireFox 3.0 has just been released? I think FireFox has made some great improvements, but they are improvements to an old model of consuming the Internet. Browsers like FireFox and Internet Explorer have come to power as part of the Internet land rush where the primary goal of the online website visitor was to “browse” sites looking for things to consume like text and images. But the online landscape has grown to include audio, video, and social networks. So it makes sense to have a browser that understands how to handle these additional part of the online experience.

According to the Flock website, “When using Flock, people can easily discover, access, create and share videos, photos, blogs, feeds and comments across social communities, media providers, and popular websites.”

As a social browser Flock helps you pull together most of the more popular social networks into one common dashboard.

For example, using Flock I can see all my friends from Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter all in one sidebar. Different networks are listed under their own tabs and all the networks can be crunched down into one tab that create a single activity stream or view.

The icon of each person in my people stream has a network badge to tell me what network they are on.

A great feature of Flock is the media stream. As I select a friend in my people sidebar, I can see all the available media for that person. I instantly see their pictures, videos, and other media options. From there I can leave comments on that piece of content.

The benefit here is speed. I am just a few clicks from the networks I use and I can move between social networks and still maintain one common user experience.

Flock also helps you extract content on a page that might overlook. For example, if you load a page in Flock that has an RSS feed, Flock will ask if you want to add it to your feed sidebar.

Again, the important point here is speed. You are not wasting time looking for feed addresses when subscribing to content. You can even add additional social networks and useful links to your favorites which can show up as a sidebar to give you one click access to your most common online resources. I use mine to get to Picasa, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, and Gmail.

Even though Firefox has a ton of addons that I use, I still find myself using Flock all the time now. It’s obvious to me that this is the next generation browser. Social media is here to stay and Flock offers a real solution managing the social networks.

Months ago I overlooked Flock as just another me-too browser in a noisy browser market, but today I understand that it’s a social networking tool that should be in the social toolbox of every online marketer and social butterfly. It’s the best kept secret that wont stay that way for long.

Enjoy,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Listen To This Article Podcast

Recently I came across yet another spam blog trackback in my moderated blog comments. I’ve tried to ignore these as they’ve continued to increase. But enough is enough and now I’m looking at ways to simplify the abuse reporting process.

There are two simple steps you can take to hit a splogger where it hurts. You can report them to their web hosting provider, and you can report them to Google.

The host will most likely suspend the splogger’s account until they remove the content or they may terminate their account entirely. For the most part, this is simply a short term deterrent because they can always re-establish their site with a new hosting company. But it gets the point across.

In most cases Google AdSense is used on spam blogs. If you report AdSense policy violations to Google they will suspend the splogger’s AdSense account.

Which approach you take is entirely up to you. In my opinion, having someone’s hosting account suspended is a lot less aggressive than having their AdSense account suspended. You might want to assess the degree of the offense before you decide which approach is best.

If the spam blog was their first attempt at experimenting with the idea of generating revenue then at least they can take the hosting suspension as a lesson and decide to move on to something more productive.

However, if you hit them at the AdSense level then they’ll be affected on a broader scale because it could get their whole AdSense account banned. To me this is much more aggressive and it depends on the situation to determine which route you may want to go.

If you want to take both routes then I recommend reporting the site to Google first, wait for their ads to come down and then report them to their host and get the entire site taken down.

To me this is the full meal deal of fighting sploggers, but just keep in mind that it’s going to take your own valuable time to step through the process and depending on the number of spam trackbacks you get, it might take more time than it’s worth.

That said, I recommend you use a combination of form letters and software to cut down on the time spent in the communication process.

Here is a simple email template that I used recently to request that a host remove my original content from a splogger site:

- - -
A website on your server is stealing my blog content. This site is scrapping my original content for their spam blog.

[Insert Offending Spam Blog URL Here]

Please have them remove the content from their site. The original content can be found here if you need to verify ownership.

[Insert Your Original Content URL Here]

Thank you for your attention in this matter.

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com
- - -

This simple email received an immediate response and the host took the website down immediately. The communication does not have to be complicated or lengthy. Hosts and Google know what’s going on and all you have to do is provide them with the basic details and they will follow their own processes to handle the problem quickly.

I’m currently using this form letter along with macro software that lets me assign short cuts to just about anything. I assigned a short cut to this form letter and when I type in a key phrase the letter appears and I complete the url sections and send it off to be handled. Overall the process takes under thirty seconds and I’m done.

If you’re using a PC, I recommend using a text macro tool like PhraseExpress. It’s inexpensive and you can use it to create macros for starting applications, pasting blocks or text, form letters, website addresses, you name it. If you use a Mac, then I recommend TextExpander. It’s basically the same type of application, but it’s made for the Mac OS. I use TextExpander for email signatures, social networking greetings, support responses, blogging code snippets, and now splogger form letters.

Combine the form letter with either one of these macro tools and you’ll be able to gain an edge on spam bloggers and protect yourself from content theft.

What tools do you use?

Splog smashing,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Listen To This Article Podcast

Please do not beat me! You were promised an article about how to use Del.icio.us to get more visitor traffic for your blog and it is really almost finished. The problem is there is so much to say that I keep re-writing parts of it.

So, please don’t beat me. You will get your article and I will get to write the next article in the series. But, until then, here is something you need to read about. My good Italian friend who is a master of video tutorials recently put out seven fantastic videos about Firefox extensions that will make your life easier.

Here are the 7 Firefox extensions covered in the videos:

1. Get Pagerank And Alexa Rank Of Any Web Site - This is great for selecting sites to target for link building.
2. The Ultimate SEO Plug-in - I use this plugin and it will absolutely change the way you get information about websites.
3. Find Out Your Competition In Google In Different Countries - This is great for knowing who you can potentially target for joint venture partnerships.
4. Monitor Any Website For Changes - Stay on top of specific websites.
5. Exclude Your Own Visits In Google Analytics - Keep your numbers real so you get an honest look at your traffic.
6. Automatically Backup And Synchronize Your Bookmarks - Keep everything up to date without a hassle.
7. No More Waiting When You Click On A Pdf Link - Not waiting is always a good thing, especially when it comes to PDFs.

These extensions are a great addition to your productivity and Internet marketing toolbox. Vittorio walks you through each one. Vittorio really is a master at video, so read his blog post, Top 7 Firefox Extensions For Web Site Owners and give the videos a squint. While you’re there check out the rest of his video library. He does not sleep much so he has an impressive collection of video tutorials.

Now back to that Del.icio.us article,

Charles McKeever
OpenSourceMarketer.com

Listen To This Article Podcast