Delicious is simply delicious

Let's talk about something other than Twitter this week - let's talk about Delicious (formally del.icio.us*, pronounced "delicious"). Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for sharing, storing and discovering your bookmarks.

I don't know about you, but I don't like how browsers store bookmarks - those great web sites you find that you want to store end up getting lost when you buy a new laptop, or when you use more than one type of browser - so prior to social bookmarking sites, I would store my favorite web sites in a txt document on my hard-drive. Then came along social bookmarking web sites - leading social bookmark is Delicious, where I can not only store bookmarks, I can tag them with my own keywords, discover web sites bookmarked by others and share my bookmarks with the world.

Delicious is also clever enough to track how many times a particular Web site gets tagged or bookmarked and it presents the most popular bookmarks on its homepage, which is a great way to

It's definitely worth giving Delicious a try - visit the site, scroll down the homepage and read the headlines on the most popular bookmarks, click on the "Explore Tags" tab and see what's there, search a keyword from your industry (heck put in your company name), set up an account, add some bookmarks, and add some bookmarks (click on the save a new bookmark tool from the top right of every page).

Social bookmarking is worth exploring and Delicious is a great way to dip your toes into this Web 2.0 feature.

* The "del.icio.us" domain name was a well-known example of a domain hack, an unconventional combination of letters to form a word or phrase. Del.icio.us and delicio.us now redirect to the new domain, delicious.com.

The 411 on RSS

Let's turn back the clock a few years and talk about some technological oldies but goodies from the start of the Web 2.0 world.

I'm sure you've heard about RSS feeds, but can you tell me what RSS stands for and what is does?

RSS stands for "Real Simple Syndication" and does exactly what is says it does, provides the technological means for real simple syndication of a web sites content, including blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video, into a standard format that is called a "feed" or "news feed." Typically RSS feeds contain headlines and short blurbs, but sometimes RSS feeds contain full articles.

The standardize feeds allows for web site owners to distribute their content out to individual news feed readers, and feed aggregator sites, like Google reader and it allows individuals to bring their favorite web site's content to their desktop or homepage.

RSS allows you to keep up to date with multiple Web sites, and gives you control over which headlines you decide to click on. Power to the People!

Get Linked with LinkedIn

Most people I know who work in the consulting, technology or the internet sectors are members – although not all are active members – of LinkedIn.

What is LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a social network for business people – a social network to help business people keep, make and build connections.

At it's basic, LinkedIn can be used as your virtual resume and at it's most complex, LinkedIn can become a major pipeline for business intelligence, client acquisition, business news and/or finding a job (if you are looking for a job)

How to get the most out of LinkedIn

1. Join
2. Fill out 100% of your profile, including your personal picture (corporate logos, although allowed initially, can be removed by LinkedIn). The profile is easy to update don't worry that you have to get every word just right the first time.
3. Make your profile public – this applies to almost everyone, of course there are a few special high-profile individuals who may not want the whole LinkedIn-verse to see their profile but still want a profile that they can share with specific individuals. Since most of us aren't those types of people – just make your profile public.
4. Use LinkedIn's applications to include your blog, twitter and slideshare accounts to your public profile
5. Add contacts by searching for current and past co-workers, employees, employers, associates, and alumni
6. Recommend some of people. If you know of a superstar, tell the world about it.
7. Join a group or two.
8. Spend a few minutes each day participating in your groups – lurking, reading, and answering questions.

Cautionary Note

Don't write anything you don't want your employers or clients knowing about. Changes made to your profile can be delivered to members of your contact list every week. So if you are currently employed yet you are looking for a job, you may not change your profile to "desperately seeking new employment". Remember almost 8 million people visited LinkedIN in January 2009 – you can bet someone you know is among those millions.

Should you and your have a LinkedIn Profile:

Absolutely yes.

Ten Twit Preventing Tips for Twitter

Twitter has hit the internet, and the media by storm, so much so I think we have safely call Twitter the Internet's newest wunderkind.

So I've come up with these ten steps to getting started with Twitter, since it seems that everyone has, will be or should be starting on Twitter.

1. Understand your playing field. If you work a company other than your own, check to see if your company has a policy on employees using Twitter while at work and/or Twitting about work. If they don't have a policy then ask specific questions about what you are allowed to do on Twitter and get the answers in writing. You don't want to be facing the unemployment line because you twittered-inappropriately about work.

2. Join and participate. Sign up in your real name with a bio and picture so the rest of us know who we are talking to.

3. Select your Twitter voice. Is the main focus of your Twitter account business or pleasure or both? (check item # 1, to confirm that you can twitter about your business)

4. Follow people who find it useful and watch how they behave. Follow some top people to start with and invest some time in reading their tweets and clicking on the links they include in their tweets. You will start to understand the power of Twitter.

5. Get over that uncomfortable feeling and start to twitter.

6. Download and use a client such as thwirl or tweetdeck, or my personal favorite hootsuite. .

7. Find people who share your interests using tools such as Tweetscan or Tweetgrid and see who the important people in your locality are with Twittergrader.

8. See what everyone else is talking about and emerging topics by using Twitscoop. Need some help on what to tweet (verb: tweet – the action of writing on twitter) about?

Here are some winning practices of top tweeters:
* Don't be pedantic. We don't care what you're eating for lunch, or that you just woke up.
* Don't use Twitter just to pimp your blog posts.
* Don't pimp your clients all day
* Don't over-tweet. If you need half a dozen tweets to make your point, do one that points to a blog post.
* Do link to interesting articles, sites, blog posts.
* Do include links in as many of your posts as possible
* Answer and ask questions
* Be polite and don't be boring.

9. There are serious news issues being covered on Twitter such as the coverage of the Mumbai bombings and Hudson plane crash. Follow your competitors and what others are saying about them by entering their name into search.twitter.com. You might as well search your companies name as well – you might just come up with some interesting research.

10. Relax and give Twitter a chance. If Twitter doesn't work for you, then at least you'll know and you’ll already have a Twitter account and some Twitter experience if you ever need it in the future. If Twitter is keeping you more informed, helping you connect with customers and/or friends, then you can call yourself part of the Twitter Nation!

Tweeting on Twitter

Twitter has been in the news a lot in the past weeks:
* rumors of being courted by Facebook,
* huge traffic numbers,
* tweets from the courtroom, and the surgical suite and congress.

Here's the 411 on Twitter.

Twitter is an open micro-blogging service. It enables its users to send and read other users' updates (known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length.

Do you need a twitter account?

Maybe, maybe not. Although there are a lot of people on Twitter, unless you can establish a specific reason for your company to be on twitter, I would say just wait. Go and secure your name and/or your companies names by signing up for a Twitter account.

The upside of Twitter, it's easy to use, with plenty of 3rd party tools to extend your ability to interact with Twitter and to track usage.

The downside of Twitter, you are only talking to other people who have a Twitter account.

Is Cloud Computing Really Computing in the Sky?

Is Cloud Computing Really Computing in the Sky?

Ah, no. Cloud computing has nothing to do with sky, weather, satellites or clouds for that matter. You may have heard about cloud computing this week in relation to the Google Gmail outage on Feb 24th and TechCrunch's explanation on the cause of the problem.

Cloud computing is considered the next step in the growth of computing and the Internet, where software (like office suites, and development platforms) are found on the Internet (in the cloud) and not on individual hard-drives. Examples include Salesforce.com and Google Apps which provide common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while the software and data are stored on the servers.

That's it for the explanation on cloud computing - the debate on the pros and cons of cloud computing will be saved for another time.

Online Privacy is Still a Concern

After 12 years of the common man using the Internet for everything from online gaming to banking, online privacy still seems to be of great concern for over 80% of internet users.

Concern, prevalent among all age segments, increases with respondent age: rising from 67.3% among respondents 18-24 years to 85.7% with respondents 55 years and older.

* Over 60% of respondents are aware of the tracking, collecting and sharing of information that occurs as a result of online activities.

* Respondents do not see value in ads targeted to them based on their web surfing behavior – even if it improves their web surfing experience.

As someone who not only uses the Internet daily, but who makes their living from this media, I know that I have a different relationship with the Internet than the typical users, but it's still surprising that so many people are concerned about their personal privacy online. In an age of grocery stores tracking our purchases through our loyalty cards to provide us coupons for products that we normally purchase, health care companies and pharmacies data-mining every purchase we make, large stores monitor traffic patterns to determine the best placement of items to Amazon's "Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought" and "What Do Customers Ultimately Buy After Viewing This Item?" - a feature that I have a love/hate relationship with - I am a little surprised to hear that consumers are concerned that web sites track what consumers are doing on those sites.

But, setting my personal opinion aside, the concern exists, it's real and we need to address it, especially on a health or medically related site.

What's the best way to handle this?

1. Establish Privacy and Terms of Use policies, and then follow them all the time, not just when it's convenient.

2. Hire or appoint a chief Privacy Officer and give that person the ultimate authority over all things related to personally identifiable information.

4. Collect only the information you need, and no more. You may wish to have 20 data points on every consumer but if you are only goin to be using 5 data points, then collect 5 for now.

3. Explain (out in the open) why you are collecting data and what you will be doing with that data.

I have found that being open about why you collecting data, and what you will be doing with that data goes a long way to increase a consumer's trust level in your site.