“我思故我在” “I think, therefore I am”
Phising Attack on My Twitter Account
Jun 25th
This morning I received an email from Twitter stated …” Yor Twitter account may have been compromised in a phishing attack that took place off-Twitter…” and ask me to reset my password.
I quickly log on to Twitter and true enough, I can’t enter with my existing password, so I have no choice but to click at the link on the email. Initially I’m a bit skeptical on all these ask to reset password emails, but in this case, it could be genuine as I really can’t log in.
So I click to reset and get a new password, luckily it is ok now. Otherwise I’ll be crying for losing all my almost touching 2500 followers…
Now I remember that 2 days back I accidentally clicked on a link from a friend’s feed in Facebook that said “I just become a member of this AWESOME site that gets you TONS of followers: http://1kfollowers.net” , I registered on the site and get all this problem. In fact, after I registered at the site, I was really regretted as the site didn’t really look good, so I quickly changed my Twitter Password, still, is too late.
But I just wonder how Twitter realize this phising activities, they must be quite efficient.
Awesome Arts!
May 30th
I’m not really a art lover but still couldn’t resist to say a wow when seeing all these wonderful art pieces. The artists who created all these are really talented!
These batch of pavement drawings are done by Julian Beever, he is an English, Belgium-based chalk artist who has been creating trompe-l’œil chalk drawings on pavement surfaces since the mid-1990s.
You can view more Julian Beever’s artwork at his website here : http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/pave.htm
Another artist is Edgar Müller , world known european street painting artist from German.
Take a look at this video for last year’s Festival of World Cultures, this renowned German street painting artist Edgar Müller transformed a huge slice of the East Pier into a dramatic ice age scene.
Take a look at Edgar’s other art works at http://www.metanamorph.com.
How I Use Twitter
May 29th
From my last blog post, I didn’t really mentioned what I use Twitter for. In fact, many people have wrong perception about Twitter, they think they need to update their friends (followers) on what they are doing every now and then, though this can be one of the purpose, I don’t think many people are so interested in learning what you are doing every hour… or about your personal life, unless you are a celebrity.
I use Twitter mainly for sharing and bookmarking at the same time. For example, sharing some interesting videos or articles. It is also very much depends on my interest. I believed my followers are mainly people who are interested in Internet Marketing, so whenever I have read articles or news about SEO, SEM, etc, I would then shared them on Twitter. After sometimes, I can refer the links that I’ve shared in my updates box, so it become a bookmarking site for me as well.
Another purpose I use Twitter is to pull some traffics to my websites. But using Twitter for “link juice” is a lost battle in Google’s ranking methodology. Twitter adds a “nofollow” attribute to links submitted by its users. The “nofollow” attribute advises Google, and a few other search engines (Yahoo, MSN, except Ask.com), to ignore the link.
So Twitter is not a good place for creating backlinks to achieve higher Page Rank. However, it do have offsite SEO value where your followers will see your tweets and click on the links, thus it brings some traffics back to the site hence improve the Alexa ranking. The more followers you have, the better traffics you will get.
Do You Tweet?
May 28th
I have been too engross in this twitter thing lately until I forgot about my blog site! Sooner or later if I don’t update my blog here, it is going to be like annual report, that’s really bad, can’t let this happen…
Ok, back to this Twitter frenzy. I think it has been in the market for quite a while, I remember registering twitter in 2007 with a fake identity and use that to bookmark affiliate sites then don’t see any improvement on the traffic thus stop doing it. Until last year, I read through John Reese’s Traffic Secret 2.0 and he actually highly recommended this site, so I think it is time to go back to Twitter to take a serious look at it.
Twitter is microblogging on a whole new level and in real time. This is what Wikipedia define Twitter : “Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read other users’ updates known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length which are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have subscribed to them (known as followers). Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow anybody to access them. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or external applications”
Ok, if you think is too wordy, just take a look a this video, I found that on Youtube and it can explain what Twitter initially intend to be I guess…
So, that is what many people thought about Twitter, something only for you to update about what are you doing to your friends. Then, many get confuse with the Facebook status, and wonder why they need Twitter.
Let me share with you my own personal feeling towards these two social media platforms. For Facebook, I would prefer to confine it with the people that I know or my cycle of friends. Normal people like me won’t have thousands of friends on Facebook. However, for Twitter, I don’t mind people that I don’t know following me and I don’t mind following unknown people, what matter me is the quality of the Tweets. Of course, that also seems to be a culture of You Follow Me and I will Follow You Back. So I’m now having more than 1500 followers in quite a short time.
To make life more exciting, I’m linking my Twitter to Facebook. So whenever I tweet, my tweets will appear on my Facebook status.
There are many kinds of application out there that you need when you tweet. For example, Twitter Karma, it is a real good application to help to manage the followers and followings. You can do bulk follow to the people following you and also can bulk unfollow people that not following you.
Another application that I like is TweetLater, with this application, I can put in 10 – 20 tweets and schedule them to distribute the tweets a long the day, very useful, it can let me have my tweets up even when I’m sleeping.
There are many more applications and I will update you as and when I have time. At the mean time, feel free to follow me on my twitter – http://twitter.com/vandachan. Start tweeting now!
见到阿贤真开心！
May 18th
Understanding Google Adwords Auction
May 9th
I found this quite interesting video by Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist, explaining the AdWords Ad Auction and shows you how your maximum Cost Per Click bid and Quality Score determine how much you pay for your clicks on Google.com. A good beginner’s introduction to the system.
George Bernard Shaw once sent two tickets to the opening night of one of
his plays to Winston Churchill with the following note:
"Bring a friend, if you have one."
Churchill wrote back, returning the two tickets and excused himself as he
had a previous engagement. He also attached the following:
"Please send me two tickets for the next night, if there is one."
his plays to Winston Churchill with the following note:
"Bring a friend, if you have one."
Churchill wrote back, returning the two tickets and excused himself as he
had a previous engagement. He also attached the following:
"Please send me two tickets for the next night, if there is one."
FREE Listening Tools to Monitor Your Online Buzz
Jul 21st
Posted by vanda in Resources
3 comments
Nowadays, managing online reputation has become part and parcel of online marketing, thus you will need to have some good online listening and monitoring tools. There are many tools out there and some are costly tools (such as Radian6 and Scoutlabs), not forgetting some of those greedy agencies and consultants that will charge you a bomb by doing the service for you.
I have compiled here some good tools that you can use to monitor online buzz for your brands and the best thing is these are all FREE tools.
1. Google Alerts
This is the most important and basic automated tool that can help people and businesses monitor the Internet for developments and activities that could concern them. Google currently offers six types of alert searches: “News”, “Web”, “Blogs”, “Comprehensive”, “Video” and “Groups” and results are sent to subscribers daily by e-mail or via RSS feeds.
2. Addictomatic
Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It’s the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what’s up, what’s now or what other people are feeding on. Addictomatic shows you results from Twitter, Friendfeed, Bing News, Google blog search, Digg, Delicious, Technorati, Twingly, etc. You do not even need to register on the site!
3. BlogPulse
BlogPulse is an automated trend discovery system for blogs, a free service by Nielsen Buzzmetric. It is actually a blog search engine that also analyzes and reports on daily activity in the blogosphere.
4. Boardtracker
This tool specializes in monitoring forums. Boardtracker is currently following more than 66 million topics on more than 37,000 forums.
5. Bloglines
Bloglines is a free online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content. Bloglines can be used to start monitoring the sources you are interested in.
6. Commentful
Commentful is a service that watches comments/follow-ups on Blog posts, Digg submissions, Flickr galleries, and many other types of content. When ever there is an update, i.e a new follow-up, Commentful notifies you instantly.
7. Ice Rocket
IceRocket is an Internet search engine specialized in searching blogs. It also offers a search module for Myspace, and this makes it the only tool of these that does so.
8. HowSociable
HowSociable provides a simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web. You can have your Google Blog Posts score, Twitter score, Flickr score, Youtube, Myspace, etc, on the same page. This tool can be very useful to measure the impact of your actions across the social networks.
9. Facebook Lexicon
Lexicon is a tool to understand what Facebook’s users are talking about on Walls. Use the tabs at the top to explore different trends in the topics listed in the drop-down menu. Lexicon never looks at messages, Chat, searches, or other private data.
10. Keotag
Keotag allows you to search content tags. Once you have picked a tag, Keotag lets you choose the sites you want to it search for you. Of course, the classics among the choices are: Google, Twitter, Technorati, Reddit, Digg and others.
11. Social Mention
Social Mention is a social media search platform that allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. It monitors 80+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.
12. BackType
BackType is a conversational search engine that index and connect millions of conversations from blogs, social networks and other social media so people can find, follow and share comments.
Of course there are a lots more listening tools available, especially for social media e.g. twitter which I will need to talk about twitter monitoring tools in my next blog. But I think the above tools would be a good start.
Last but not least, you can also use Yahoo! Pipes to create your own online buzz monitoring tool. Yahoo! Pipes is a web application from Yahoo! that provides a graphical user interface for building data mashups that aggregate web feeds,web pages, and other services, creating Web-based apps from various sources, and publishing those apps.
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