LwEEs.com

Pushing my luck and looking for an online change, I switched my blog to a social networking site. The blog functionality still on, the main difference now is that I’m focusing more in the users, my visitors, in other words “you.” I spend a great deal of time helping others, much of it commenting on other people blogs, forums, and social sites like Facebook. With that in mind I’m hoping to bring all these interface ideas, help, and tips and tricks to one place to bring you “in” and have you spend some time with us.

While all of this may sound like a great idea, social networking has its limits, you have to spend a lot of time monitoring your users, moderating their content, and is very hard to get new quality users. Automating most of the parts of your social experience within your site is part of the trick to not go crazy while trying to maintain your site. Thankfully, WordPress makes moderating easy and developers have made great plug-ins that help your manage your online experience even more.

The tools are just part of the problem and the solution at the same time, the people contributing are also hard to manage. Sometimes you get so frustrated trying to explain others to keep your vocabulary clean, I have kids and I would like them to be able to read my blog posts without having to worry about explicit content. Monetization of a social site is also very difficult, if you don’t believe me try asking the guys at twitter, they are still studying different ways to earn money from a simple social networking site.

To start, I added a simple Amazon add that changes depending where the user is at any point. Integration with twitter is done as well, so go ahead, create a profile on this site and link it to your twitter. My next project is to add Facebook to my site so that you can link to your Facebook profile as well. Do you have any ideas? Contact me at webmaster@lwees.com and let me know what you think, thanks for stopping by.

This tip comes to you thanks to Eric Olson, I notice that on my chat section of my web Gmail interface was a twitter account shortcut. I immediately liked the idea and started to implement it, this is rather easy to do, but for the less tech savvy, I’m including images to guide you thru the changes.

• Start by login into your Gmail account on your favorite web browser.

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I getting deeply involved in social media or social networking and its integration with business blogging, so much that I have a great number of friends on places like Twitter and Facebook compared to what I had a couple of months ago. The other day I had a Twitter update from a Japanese friend in Japanese language, he’s Twits are often in English but this one was not, I immediately asked myself is this a problem or not to my followers.

My native language is Spanish and I have a large number of Spanish-speaking friends along with my English-speaking friends. I started wondering how much of an annoyance is for my Spanish-speaking friends to see posts in English and vice-versa. Is it time to split these two groups?

I’ve been blogging for a while now, and all this time I’ve been blogging in English, when my Spanish-speaking friends visit my blog they know what to expect, but when dealing with social media, with social networking tools like Facebook I’m not sure how to react to this line of thinking. Read the rest of this entry →

Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that allows you to update people on what you are doing as well as see what others are doing instantly, all in 140 characters or less. The main use of twitter has been described as the office water cooler, which is where you stop to take a break and talk to others.

Much like Facebook, twitter is causing sensation, everyone in social media understand the importance of using twitter regularly. If you own a brand or you simply want to stay updated about what’s happening around you, then being on twitter is the way to go.

Ever since I got on twitter I’ve tested a number of applications on the Mac that allows you to update twitter and read your feed instantly without the need to visit their website. Some of these applications are Twitterrfic, TweetDeck, Twhirl, etc., I’m not telling you what I didn’t like about those applications, but I will tell you what I like about Tweetie.

Tweetie lets you be up to date on what’s happening on your twitter feed, much like other applications, it lets you post, reply, and re-post any tweet from your friends. This is very convenient because you don’t have to stop what you are doing and launch a web browser to check what your friends are up to, the application is sitting right there on you desktop.

A large number of twitter applications for the iPhone were released the minute the iPhone SDK was available, but one of them became an instant hit. Tweetie for the iPhone was a hit despite being one of the applications for the iPhone that had no free version, everyone who tried it loved it, I never got my hands on it but people like Cali Lewis from GeekBrief.tv has talked about the applications numerous times on their show.

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In the news today we have Twitter.com as the most recently website to be hacked, the hacked affected those famous twitterers in the service. The latest update from blog.twitter.com claims this was not caused by a phishing scam but by exploiting a faulty tool used to get your password back when you forget your login information.

You can find information about the details all around the web, hundreds of theories about what really happened can be found too. In the middle of this holy mess, I was witness of how diligent is the Twitter team when spammers try to spoil the great service they provide.

The other day I received an email from my Twitter account notifying me about a new follower, these are pretty normal since we all receive one every time somebody starts following you. I like to follow everyone that follows me so I proceeded to click on the link provided in the email to get to the followers account and follow him back. When my browser landed in the Twitter page there was a message from the Twitter crew saying that the account was suspended due to strange activity.

If you follow the Twitter crew reaction to the problem of the hacked accounts and this example I just talked about you kind get a good feeling, a security feeling. If only other sites like MySpace followed this example, but their approach to security is quite strange.

I haven’t had any problems with Twitter, the service works, is cool and delivers. If you have a Twitter account go ahead and follow me, I always welcome new followers.

[amazonify]0470246677[/amazonify]I’ve notice that most of the bloggers that talk about SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are getting too busy promoting their books, blogs, and point of views, that they are forgetting something, “Us”. Most bloggers don’t understand anything about SEO, we need to read about it and understand it one piece at a time.

I totally understand that SEO bloggers need communicate the reality of how page rank, bounce rate, and advertising works, but without asking anyone to give out what they sell, please help us a little better why all of these subjects are important and we may buy from you. Very few SEO experts actually talk about tips and tricks about SEO at a low level, some bloggers are not that savvy, including myself, and this is causing a big deal of confusion in me.

I read blogs about SEO topic day and night, the reason I read this blogs is because I don’t fully understand how to implement SEO on my website. Maybe the tools I’m using are not the correct ones, and the ideas behind my strategy are not correct.

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My sister is hilarious, yesterday she posted a comment on her own MySpace account the almost kill me. She wrote, “Warning, friends with no hands will be deleted.” Immediately her friends started writing to her saying hi or whatever, I found the idea very cute but after doing some thinking around her motivations to do what she did, I asked myself how social my networking is.

Every time I hear about a new social networking platform, I head to the website and create an account. I just create a presence and sometimes I don’t even get to updated it as often as anyone would think. One example is my iMeem account, I created it and never even wrote my bio, it may very well be close by now. The idea is that if anyone that knows me creates an account on any of these new social site and looks for me, at least they find something.

When it comes to update these accounts, I just don’t do a good job. I try to simplify my life by adding picture to Flickr and getting links wherever possible so that I don’t have to upload them twice to different sites. I use different social sites for different purposes, for small rants I use Twitter, for links I use Pownce, for day-to-day stuff I use either MySpace or Facebook. I have a Jaiku account that feeds whatever I do on Twitter, and a Virb.com account that feeds from my blog.

I created a Bebo account that I never pay attention to, I have an account with Digg with one friend that I only use, well for Diggs. This is why I think my social networking skills suck, at least on the web. I update my profiles like once every two weeks, I barely say hi to my friends unless I know is their birthday. I consider myself very unobtrusive, which is not bad, I think.

I would hate to have friends that write to me every single day, except for my mom, which she actually does write to me every day. Even when at the same time, I don’t mind anyone writing to me constantly, as I check my accounts maybe, once a week. What is your experience?

I have a Find Me At tab on my Wordpress blog that holds my accounts for every single social site that I’m in, go ahead and add me. I promise I won’t be intrusive and I only leave comments that are of good taste. A final word, go out there and get as many friends as you can to subscribe to your social sites and keep them growing.

Ever since I heard of globally recognized avatars I created my account, I thought the idea was great and ever since adapted it to all my social media sites. I will upload the same picture from my Gravatar on all social media sites that requires a picture, which gives some uniformity to your presence on the web. This helps people identify you easily, it does not matter if you are in MySpace, Pownce, Twitter, or anyone else’s blog, and they all know who you are by associating the Gravatar.

Gravatar just got better, an article posted on blog.gravatar.com on October 18, 2007 gave everybody the great news that Gravatar has been transferred to Automattic. Automattic are the owners of Wordpress the best blogging platform on the web in a files exchange without providing any information of the economics behind this transition. Everybody in Automattic is very excited with this acquisition, but users are more than excited with this announcement.

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Is not a secret that I’m a big advocate of social media and almost every new media idea that rolls out on the web, I try to get as many people as I can get in my profiles without looking like a spammer. Each one of the social media/microbloggin/myspace-type sites that are available right now have very different attributes that can work for you or annoy you if you don’t control them. I got into Jaiku a couple weeks ego, I like the way you can add feeds to the mix. Jaiku was bought by Google last week, hopefully they won’t change its functionality as they are ok now.

The questions that now I ask myself is what to do with all these sites to benefit my blog, how can I attract people to my blog my making an interesting social site space. The first step is to define the audience on each one of them, we know that most people use MySpace. Younger people use Facebook while micro blogging is used by a selected group of people. The experiment I’m going to try is to talk more about iPods, iPhone, and PSP on my MySpace and Facebook accounts, news will be left to update Twitter and Jaiku.

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