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So, my question is how do people get the word out that their website or blog exists? Do blogger invest in ads? Is is just through word of mouth? Or searching Google? I'm just curious how does a website build it's popularity. Do you just put your website up on the web and hope people find it? I know you can make your site SEO friendly, create sitemaps and such but what other techniques are used?
Thanks,
John
The big thing is, build a good site! have good quality relevant content. SEO and page linking will help. Most search traffic comes from Google imho. I would suggest
http://www.google.com/webmasters/start
Submite a sitemap would be high on my todo list.
Also Use relevant and unique - page titles, Friendly urls and relevant H1 tags
Hope that helps
My blog has been running for about a year and a half. I tried some tricks or tips on promotion that I read from around the Internet. Sure, you can get some activity bursts from promotion on other places, but I've found that the number one factor for a blog is simply to have good quality content. You can trick people into visiting with clever reddit or digg titles, but they'll never turn into repeat visitors. With quality posts, the search engine and referrer inflow will be steady.
If you only blog for popularity or money, and don't really care about putting out worthwhile content, it will show, and the people will not visit your site. I changed pretty early on from quantity over quality to quality over quantity. After all, ask yourself: wouldn't you rather subscribe to a blog that gave you a great read once a month rather than a blog that flooded your reader inbox with shallow, forced posts?
Among hobbyists, the usual approach is to make a polite announcement on related forums, and when a subject comes up on a forum or blog that you have addressed on your blog or web site, include a link as a part of your response.
Among professionals, advertising, advertising, advertising.
This thread at Hacker News is a good starting point.
Well, this site was started by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky (if I'm correct), so they both mentioned it on their blogs. Then they asked for people on those blogs to join the beta version. By the time the live version came out, people were already here. Then... wait for word of mouth to spread. If your site is great, they will come.
Join the ASP, read and participate in their forums... I learned a lot from them and highly recommend them. Ignore the politics.
I used Myspace as my own free advertising engine, perhaps a bit a-moral but it did the trick till I caught my server on fire.
Having a community of users is very important in having a popular site. Typically your site would have a message board of some sort where users could interact with each other. Also having a large source of reference information is also important. Once you have your site up, you need to go out and promote it. It takes time, be patient but never give up promoting it.
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During a meeting with a client the topic came up about the internet and where its going in the next 5 years. The client wanted to know stats such as "How many businesses are on the web", "How will my client base increase using the web" and "How can a website benefit my business".
But does anyone have any good articles for this? It would be nice to have some FYI facts, from reliable sources, to reassure them that having a website is a smart business decision.
During a meeting with a client the
topic came up about the internet and
where its going in the next 5 years.
You could make some money if you had a good answer for that. I'll bet you can't tell where it's going in the next five months.
Have some fun - find predictions from five years ago and see how true they are.
reassure them that having a website is a smart business decision.
Ask them how not having a web site is a smart business decision. Are you saying they have no presence on the web at all? How have their sales trended over the last five years?
Don't worry about the web site. Ask them what their top three business problems are and see how a web site might help it.
For the third question maybe an article about "long tail" could be of interrest. I understand it as making profit with niche market and large user base, but there is many other angles. As usual Wikipedia is a good start and give many other links to reference materiel.
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Social networking is great, but there is something fundamentally wrong with the way social networking is implemented today in most popular services. I'll put it in this example: Imagine that there is no SMTP, and consequently, it is globally assumed and accepted that you can only send email to addresses on the same domain. The result would be the emergence of a single email service, let's call it emailbook.com, which we all have to subscribe to, if we really want to communicate with the world.
This is what's happening with social networking today. You HAVE to use the same service your fiends/colleagues are using to talk to them.
I would like to be able to put up my own social site, invite my friends who trust me, share amongst us, but still be able to share with the world at large.
What are the chances of this scenario happening in the future? What does it take?
There sure is, and not just one! The future you wanted is now here.
By the time of the question, back in the end of 2010, OStatus had already existed for half a year, and the year before that there was OpenMicroBlogging (OMB), and at about the same time as OMB, the XMPP XEP 0277.
Since then several other protocols have popped up, such as diaspora* just half a year later, and later some smaller players like Friendica's DFRN and HubZilla's Zot.
OStatus never left draft status, but the big buzz[0] these days is about ActivityPub, which is a W3C recommendation since January 2018 and came out of the Social WG mentioned by #keithjgrant in his answer. There is a multitude of implementations[1], finding their niches with different use cases like microblogging, blogging, link sharing, picture sharing, video sharing and audio sharing.
There is also the collection of blog-oriented protocols described on https://indieweb.org/.
[0] pun intended
[1] Diaspora and GNU Social, although shown at fediverse.party, do not implement ActivityPub. The other applications shown do. There are several other applications not shown there, such as FunkWhale, Plume, WriteFreely, Prismo ... There is no terse and complete overview of all of them, but several are listed at https://switching.social/ and https://wedistribute.org/ publishes news and interviews related to all of them.
There are a few. One Social Web uses XMPP which is open and decentralized like SMTP.
Check it out.
http://onesocialweb.org/
I absolutely agree. The good news is, yes, things are happening. Even better, they are happening in the W3C, which means open standards.
The W3C now has a Social Web working group. They are actively working on a handful of standards. The biggest of these seems to be the Social Web Protocol.
Today, they also posted the W3C Recommended spec for Webmention, which is sort of an improved version of the old pingbacks that used to be used on blogs, this time built on HTTP. It allows a post to notify another page on the web when it references it. There are already a number of libraries and services that implement this today.
I think you should take a look at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/. It is a spec developed by google and other social networking players. It supports interoperability and much more.
OpenSocial is currently being developed by a broad set of members of the web community. The ultimate goal is for any social website to be able to implement the API and host 3rd party social applications. There are many websites that support OpenSocial, including hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, Netlog, Ning, orkut, and Yahoo!
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I posted a source code on codeplex and to my surprise found that it appeared on google within 13 hours. Also when i made some changes to my account on codeplex those changes reflected on google within a matter of minutes. How did that happen ? Is there some extra importance that google pays to sites like Codeplex, Stackoverflow etc to make their results appear in the search results fast ? Are there some special steps i can take to make google crawl my site somewhat faster, if not this fast.
Google prefers some sites over others. There is a lot of magic rules involved, in the case of CodePlex and Stackoverflow we can even assume that they had ben manually put on some whitelist. Then Google subscribes to the RSS feed of these sites and crawls them whenever there is a new RSS post.
Example: Posts on my blog are included in the index within minutes, but if I dont post for weeks, Google just passes by every week or so.
Huh?
Probably (and you have to be an insider to know...) if they find enough changes from crawl to crawl they narrow the window between crawling until - sites like popular blogs / news ect are being crawled every few min.
For popular sites like stackoverflow.com the indexing occurs more often than normal, you could notice this by searching for a question that has been just asked.
It is not well known but Google relies on pigeons to rank its pages. Some pages have particularly tasty corn, which attracts the pigeons' attentions much more frequently than other pages.
Actually ... Popular sites have certain feeds that they share will google. The site updates these feeds and google updates its index when the feed changes. For other sites that rank well, seach engines crawl more often, provided there are changes. True its not public knowledge and even for the popular sites there are no guarantees about when newly published data appears in the index.
Real time search is one of the newest buzzwords and battlegrounds in the search engine wars. Google's announced/Bing's twitter integration are good examples of this new focus on super-fresh content.
Incorporating fresh content is a real technical challenge and priority for companies like Google since one has to crawl the documents, incorporate them into the index (which is spread across hundreds/thousands of machines), and then somehow determine if the new content is relevant for a given query. Remember, since we are indexing brand new documents and tweets that these things aren't going to have many inbound links which is the typical thing that boosts PageRank.
The best way to get Google/Yahoo/Bing to crawl your site more often is to have a site with frequently updated content that gets a decent amount of traffic. (All of these companies know how popular sites are and will devote more resources indexing sites like stackoverflow, nytimes, and amazon)
The other thing you can do is also make sure that your robots.txt isn't preventing spiders from crawling your site as much as you want and to make sure to submit a sitemap to google/bing-hoo so that they will have a list of your urls. But be careful what you wish for: https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/the-perfect-web-spider-storm/
Well even my own blog appears in real time (it's pagerank 3 though) so it's not such a big deal I think :)
For example I just posted this and it appeared in Google at least 37 minutes ago (maybe it was in real-time as I didn't check before)
http://www.google.com/search?q=rebol+cgi+hosting
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I'm looking for publications about the history of the internet browsers. Papers, articles, blog posts whatever. Cannot find anything on ACM IEEE etc. and my blog search also didn't reveal anything remarkable.
Did you take a look at the entries in Wikipedia? It's a useful starting point.
Here are a few to start you off:
Wikipedia - Web browser
Wikipedia - Timeline of web browsers
Wikipedia - Browser Wars
There's Eric Sink's blog post: "Memoirs From the Browser Wars".
Eric Sink was one of the members of the team that implemented Mosaic, the first web browser. He litterally is part of the the history of the internet browser :-)
The keywords I would search for in a decent library index (or Google) are:
Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of first HTTP client and HTTP server)
WorldWideWeb (HTTP client mentioned above. Notice no spaces in name.)
NCSA Mosaic (first graphical web browser, evolved into Netscape and eventually Firefox)
Marc Andreessen (project leader for Mosaic, founder of Netscape. Also one of the first technologists to envision a browser-based operating system, what we might now call "web-apps".)
Browser Wars (should cover most of the major players involved in how we think of modern Web browsers).
Most of this stuff is covered in the articles suggested in the previous posts. Just hope this helps you pick out the terms that will help you with finding scholarly sources.
The HTTP client (now better known as the Web browser) is one of the key components of the World Wide Web (or just "the web"), which is distinguishable from the more generic "Internet" in that it uses a combination of technologies (most notably: HTML, HTTP (client and server) and Domain Names). The reason why you may be having trouble finding good sources in your search is that you are searching of "history of the web browser" which is kind of like searching for "history of guitar solos" in that the info is out there but combined with the larger topic. While you may get some results, most of the information you want will probably be integrated into sources on the history of the web. That's why I suggested searching for Tim Berners-Lee first, as he invented all of the major components essential to the web.
I would start with Wikipedia as Eward mentioned.
But after you read wikipedia, check the bottom of the articles for the sources used. Then read those sources. If this is for a school paper I doubt you'll get full points for using wikipedia.
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What's the best way to close the loop and have a desktop app "call home" with customer feedback? Right now our code will login to our SMTP server and send me some email.
The site GetSatisfaction has been an increasingly popular way to get customer feedback.
http://getsatisfaction.com/
GetSatisfaction is a community based site that builds a community around your application. Users can post questions, comments, and feedback about and application and get answers to their questions either from other members or from members of the development team themselves.
They also have an API so you can incorporate GetSatifaction into your app, and/or your site.
I've been playing with it for a couple of weeks and it is pretty cool. Kind of like stackoverflow, but for customer feedback.
Feedback from users and programmers simply is one of the most important points of development in my opinion. The whole web2.0 - beta - concept more or less is build around this concept and therefore there should be absolutely no pain involved whatsoever for the user. What does it have to do with your question? I think quite a bit. If you provide a feedback option, make it visible in your application, but don't annoy the user (like MS sometimes does with there feedback thingy on there website above all elements!!). Place it somewhere directly! visible, but discreet. What about a separate menu entry? Some leftover space in the statusbar? Put it there so it is accessible all the time. Why? People really liking your product or who are REALLY annoyed about something will probably find your feedback option in any case, but you will miss the small things. Imagine a user unsure about the value of his input "should I really write him?". This one will probably will not make the afford in searching and in the end these small things make a really outstanding product, don't they? OK, the user found your feedback form, but how should it look and what's next? Keep it simple and don't ask him dozens questions and provoke him with check- and radioboxes. Give him two input fields, one for a title and one for a long description. Not more and not less. Maybe a small text shortly giving him some info what might be useful (OS, program version etc., maybe his email), but leave all this up to him. How to get the message to you and how to show the user that his input counts? In most cases this is simple. Like levand suggested use http and post the comment on a private area on your site and provide a link to his input. After revisiting his input, make it public and accessible for all (if possible). There he can see your response and that you really care etc.. Why not use the mail approach? What about a firewall preventing him to access your site? Duo to spam in quite some modern routers these ports are by default closed and you certainly will not get any response from workers in bigger companies, however port 80 or 443 is often open... (maybe you should check, if the current browser have a proxy installed and use this one..). Although I haven't used GetSatisfaction yet, I somewhat disagree with Nick Hadded, because you don't want third parties to have access to possible private and confidential data. Additionally you want "one face to the customer" and don't want to open up your customers base to someone else. There is SOO much more to tell, but I don't want to get banned for tattling .. haha! THX for caring about the user! :)
You might be interested in UseResponse, open-source (yet not free) hosted customer feedback / idea gathering solution that will be released in December, 2001.
It should run on majority of PHP hosting environments (including shared ones) and according to it's authors it's absorbed only the best features of it's competitors (mentioned in other answers) while will have little-to-none flaws of these.
You could also have the application send a POST http request directly to a URL on your server.
What my friend we are forgetting here is that, does having a mere form on your website enough to convince the users how much effort a Company puts in to act on that precious feedback.
A users' note to a company is a true image about the product or service that they offer. In Web 2.0 culture, people feel proud of being part of continuous development strategy always preached by almost all companies nowadays.
A community engagement platform is the need of the hour & an entry point on ur website that gains enuf traction from visitors to start talking what they feel will leave no stone unturned in getting those precious feedback. Thats where products like GetSatisfaction, UserRules or Zendesk comes in.
A company's active community that involves unimagined ideas, unresolved issues and ofcourse testimonials conveys the better development strategy of the product or service they offer.
Personally, I would also POST the information. However, I would send it to a PHP script that would then insert it into a mySQL database. This way, your data can be pre-sorted and pre-categorized for analysis later. It also gives you the potential to track multiple entries by single users.
There's quite a few options. This site makes the following suggestions
http://www.suggestionbox.com/
http://www.kampyle.com/
http://getsatisfaction.com/
http://www.feedbackify.com/
http://uservoice.com/
http://userecho.com/
http://www.opinionlab.com/content/
http://ideascale.com/
http://sparkbin.net/
http://www.gri.pe/
http://www.dialogcentral.com/
http://websitechat.net/en/
http://www.anymeeting.com/
http://www.facebook.com/
I would recommend just using pre built systems. Saves you the hassle.
Get an Insight is good: http://getaninsight.com/