This post at Search Engine Journal references a social media project at Carnegie Mellon called Socialstream which, among other things, was created to “rethink and reinvent social networking”. Of even more interest is this capstone project is Google-sponsored which means many of these features are likely to be utilized in a future Google property.

Socialstream is based on a unified social networking concept in that it interfaces with a wide array of social media accounts to make networking simpler and more interactive. The Quicktime Demo of Socialstream’s functionality revealed some incredibly useful tools that simplify networking a large number of people. The Socialstream features page does show highlights of the program but actually seeing the product at work in the demo was far more revealing. Read more…

Well I have no idea how this algorithm based on Technorati’s API is but according to this nifty widget created by Dane Carlson, StepForth’s SEO Blog is currently worth $83,551 buckaroos. Hmm, now if we could just get that kind of money from our blog

A new social media website called Thoof has recently come out of beta. Thoof is similar to Digg but features a couple of interesting differences:

1. Titles and Descriptions for content added to Thoof can be updated by users to make them more useful. This is particularly handy since some titles and descriptions are horridly written despite the excellent source content.
2. Thoof uses an algorithm to ‘learn’ what you like and don’t like which ultimately drives the type of content that appears on your personalized Thoof home page. Read more…

FeedBurner’s previously for-fee services are now free after its relatively recent acquisition by Google. This is great news for the blogging community which is probably why it is getting some serious publicity (#1 story on TechMeme).

So what is all this bruhaha all about? Two features, Total Stats PRO and MyBrand PRO have been opened up to the masses:

Total Stats PRO: this service used to cost about $5 per blog per month and provided stats on the posts that got the most interest along with information on uncommon uses, which feed readers are being used and live user reporting. The information is fairly valuable for people with heavily used blogs because, among other things it can provide insight into which blog postings appear to be getting the most interest; which might just spark you to write a follow up.

MyBrand PRO: FeedBurner feeds are normally located on feedburner.com. For example, our feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/search-engine-optimization-blog. With MyBrand Pro, however, you can configure the FeedBurner to use your own domain. Why is this useful? Some companies do not like the idea that their feed address is located on a domain they do not own. FeedBurner aptly calls it “the ultimate in feed-serving transparency.”

FeedBurner Rocks
If you haven’t made the move to use FeedBurner for your blog then maybe these new features will be enough to entice you. Even before these features were free I felt FeedBurner was a fantastic service because it made subscribing to StepForth’s SEO Blog simple for any online news reader. In addition, I like that FeedBurner automatically pings the major news websites for us whenever we post something new – one great way to promote our blog without much effort.

SEO Meet SMM (Social Media Marketing) was the most information-dense seminar that I attended at SMX Advanced, a multi-day conference geared for advanced web marketing professionals. As a result, it has taken a while to view my footage and pick out all of the best tips to share with you. The SEO Meet SMM seminar was paneled with an all-star cast of Rand Fishkin, Neil Patel and Cindy Krum. Between these three incredibly bright people, and my own experience and research I have put together this whitepaper on how to use social media marketing (SMM) to your advantage. I believe this is the most current (timely), accurate and cutting edge information available for those who want to start marketing in this field. Read more…

I have been hard at work writing a white paper that we will be releasing today on do it yourself social media marketing. As a result, my blogs have been rather infrequent – my apologies. Here, however, is a quick list of some of the articles that have piqued my interest over this past week and I expect you will find worthy of a read as well:

• Rand Fishkin posted a hair-raising live example of the repercussions of a Google penalty on a real estate agent that had been using manipulative linking practices.
• What to do when your company Wikipedia page goes bad: reputation management is a hot topic
• Social media and user generated content in the Spanish space: coverage from AdTech Miami
• Andy Beal’s blog shares an interesting fact on how un-linked images appear to be counting as links in Yahoo!’s algorithm according to Yahoo Site Explorer.
• Compete.com now offers keyword analysis by Jeremiah Owyang
• Facebook is acquiring widget startups in a manner that is very Google-esque and Josh Catone of Read/Write Web wrote a great article discussing the virtual ‘Facebook Economy‘.

Lastly her is an interesting interview with Eric Peterson, web analytics guru. Note the background noise is a little annoying.

A company by the name of CambrianHouse got some free press by getting 1000 pizzas to Google employees on the Google campus – bypassing security. So it looks like CambrianHouse has set the bar on outrageous press stunts in the social media industry. Now… I wonder who will try to one-up them? I look forward to finding out. Check out this video, it is a bit long but a lot of fun.

In the first week of June Google launched a program called “Google Gears” that expands the already impressive capabilities of Google Reader (Google’s free news reader) to allow offline viewing. Here is a quote from Google’s related blog posting:

“Now, you can read these updates whether you’re on or offline. It’s easy to read today’s financial news from the New York Times on the train, or catch up on your favorite blog while on a plane 35,000 ft. above the Atlantic. Read more…

I have long been a fan of Google Earth because I find it so thrilling to see the world from my desktop. It is especially cool that with a flick of my mouse I can zoom right in to my neighborhood. Unfortunately Google Earth’s resolution has been getting a bit too clear for comfort for some users.

The picture on the right is that of a cat called Monty, sitting on a perch in his window. This image was found by Monty’s owner by using a new zoom function on Google Earth called StreetView which allows a 360 degree, street-level view of an area. Needless to say this has Monty’s owner a little creeped out.

Here are some related articles that are likely to make your hair stand on end:

• Google StreetView: Your Face and License Plate Could Be Online
  
• Calls for Google to censor images on Google Earth
• Wired News writes about StreetView