From the category archives:

Easy Stuff

US military hijacks social media for propaganda

The United States military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter by using fake online personas to influence Internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda. A Californian corporation has been awarded a contract with US Central Command (CENTCOM), which oversees US armed operations in the Middle [...]

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How to organise social reporting from conferences and other events

Social media is not a goal in itself, but is a tool. An increasingly popular use of social media is to report live from conferences, workshops or any other events, a technique often labeled as “social reporting”. Traditionally, events published their information through press releases, and traditional web publication methods. Thanks to the wide spread [...]

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Tumblr and WordPress: a crawler’s difference

Mid January, I moved Aid News, one of my news aggregator sites from Tumblr to WordPress. After the move I activated the Google XML sitemap plugin which submits the blog’s sitemap automatically to different search engines.

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The difference between shared hosting and dedicated hosting

After a year running on Godaddy’s shared hosting, I moved BlogTips to its new HostGator VPS hosting end of October. Look at the Google crawler statistics showing the average download speed for a page. See the difference? While on shared hosting, it took up to 25 seconds to load a page, the performance on the [...]

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Google did a PageRank update.
Well… kinda.

Well, whatdoyaknow… Google hardly waited after I gave them bad rating for postponing their pagerank updates , and here we go: On January 20 Google started a new pagerank update. It is hard to find exact information on the pagerank update, but there is a lot of buzz in the SEO world going on at [...]

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How to enable a mobile theme on your WordPress blog in one minute

Accessing a standard website from a mobile phone is a pain. If the site does not support a mobile theme, it will cramp the pages, which normally barely fit on a laptop screen, onto a teeny-weeny mobile phone screen. Microscopic fonts, impossible to navigate, or to click links, etc. Bummer! Nevertheless, the amount of visitors [...]

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A blogger’s 2010 wrapup of cool and failing services

During 2010 my blogging activity increased, up to the point where I went on a sabbatical to concentrate full-time on my social media exploits. In the past year, I used many services available to the blogging community, both paid and free, much more extensively than ever before. I thought of wrapping up my findings of [...]

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Tumblr problems

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Tumblr, one of the blogplatforms filling a niche between the big ones like Blogger or WordPress, and microblogs a la Twitter, suffers from serious hiccups.

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How to evaluate a blog – Part 8:
Graphical Presentation

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While most of the previous blog evaluation criteria were pretty objective, we now move into a much more “touchy & feely” area: the aesthetical presentation of a blog. Website graphics are a means, and not a goal by themselves. Graphics support the purpose of the site. They can emphasize areas, group different topics together, give [...]

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Social media in rural Africa

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We are never too old to learn. This morning, I was participating in a session at the AgKnowledge Africa share fair in Addis, on “How to report on agriculture issues”. One presenter introduced his experiences as a radio reporter, where he travels around interviewing farmers on the diverse aspects of their daily life, their problems [...]

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How to explain “social media” in 60 minutes

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Remember the shout-out post I wrote a couple of months ago, asking for social media volunteers at the AgKnowledge Africa Share Fair in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia? Well, over forty volunteers raised their hand, and invested a fair share of their time and expertise in putting the social media strategy together to cover the four days [...]

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