Googles Death ‘knol’
Posted by reviews on Mar 27, 2008
Googles Sounds the Death ‘knol’?
First, what is Knol?
Knol is a Squidoo/Wikipedia-like social media site brought to you by Google. Currently in beta, it is supposed to be a haven for authors to show off their writing skills and portfolios. Google introduced it to a select group of people in December of 2007. Here what Google had to say about it:
It is a “free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.
The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors’ names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authors — but somehow the web evolved without a strong standard to keep authors names highlighted. We believe that knowing who wrote what will significantly help users make better use of web content. At the heart, a knol is just a web page; we use the word “knol” as the name of the project and as an instance of an article interchangeably. It is well-organized, nicely presented, and has a distinct look and feel, but it is still just a web page. Google will provide easy-to-use tools for writing, editing, and so on, and it will provide free hosting of the content. Writers only need to write; we’ll do the rest.”
What effect will it have on the likes of Squidoo, Hubpages, and Wikipedia?
Since this is a Google project, you can expect a ton of money, advertising, and support once it is finally released. There are already sites out there trying to capitalize on Knol, such as knolstuff. There are also sites that appear to be trying to convince people to join their site instead, and knol isn’t even out yet. Hubpages asks visitors to not wait for Google Knol message; “Why wait for Google Knol? Write your own Wiki pages on HubPages and Earn.” I could see Knol cutting into the Hubpages and Squidoo potential users, as they do not have the name recognition, however Wikipedia is very well entrenched. I think there will be a lot of buzz on the internet, especially within the writer and blogger communities, but I do not believe it will kill most sites (that have an established community), unless they are not already fairly well known.
24 DoFollow Social Bookmarking Sites
Posted by reviews on Mar 13, 2008
DoFollow Social Bookmarking Sites
The following are Social Bookmarking Sites that provide dofollow backlinks to your site. As always, it is important to provide good content to these sites, as well as being relevant content to yours. Most importantly, we should not abuse or misuse these Social Bookmarking sites.
Are these really “DoFollow”? Read this to see other ways of blocking the spiders.
Ok, as I add new ones (or take away bad ones), then the number changes.
- Slashdot PR9
- Mister-Wong PR7
- Furl PR7
- Bibsonomy PR7
- Spurl PR6
- Unalog PR6 - Registration not currently available (thanks dauclair)
- Jumptags PR6
- Searchles PR6
- Plime PR5
- BlogHop PR5
- MyLinkVault PR5
- A1 Webmarks PR5
- ClipClip PR5
- Diigo PR5
- Listible PR5
- MyVmarks PR5
- Complore PR4
- OnMyList PR4
- Kapely PR3
- info4it PR3
- MyPIP PR3
- SyncOne PR3
- Yattle PR2
- Faves PR0
- UPCHUCKr PR0
NoFollow - How the attribute is being interpreted differs between the search engines. While some take it literally and do not follow the link to the page being linked to, others still “follow” the link to find new web pages for indexing. In the latter case rel=”nofollow” actually tells a search engine “Don’t score this link” rather than “Don’t follow this link.” This differs from the meaning of nofollow as used within a robots meta tag, which does tell a search engine: “Do not follow any of the hyperlinks in the body of this document”.
What is a good way to check if a link is Nofollow? Download Firefox
Install the Firefox SEOQuake Plugin from the tools page.
You may also like the DoFollow Forums List
*If you notice any changes or possible additions, please post a comment.
StumbleUpon: Improving Your Fan Network and Increasing Traffic
Posted by reviews on Nov 15, 2007
StumbleUpon is a wonderful thing. You can find all sorts of sites, pages, photos, videos, and games that would otherwise go unnoticed or not found when using your typical search engines. Use the Search in StumbleUpon and you can find gems of sites that you would very likely not find, as they could be buried deep into the pages of Google or Yahoo!.
Another benefit of StumbleUpon is the amount of traffic that can find your pages and sites. If you have something that you would like shared, you can add it to StumbleUpon when you or another stumbler discovers it and reviews it. From that point on that page, image, or video is on the StumbleUpon network.
This leads us to the next point.
Ways to improve your network of Fans:
- Create a StumbleUpon blog and have thoughtful, entertaining, funny, or simply fun content.
- Use the StumbleUpon PhotoBlog It! option to blog about a great photo that you have found. Do this by Right-clicking on the photo and choose StumbleUpon PhotoBlog It! Then comment on the photo you have found.
- Join various groups, such as Stumblers, StumbleUpon, or StumbleUpon Tweaks and Tricks (to improve your StumbleUpon layout and add features!)
- Read the StumbleUpon tweaks on The Prawn website.
- Also, you can improve you chances of meeting other like minded people by adding various interests to your profile. There are tons of interests to choose!
Interesting Blogs to read about StumbleUpon: