BlogDay has finally arrived and here are my five recommendations:

1) Chris Brogan - I was introduced to Chris through Jeff Pulver and have been addicted to his blog ever since. Chris is a social media and networking expert. He works as community developer for Video on the Net and Network2. He is also co-founder of PodCamp, a free unconference that explores the benefits and uses of new media community tools. Chris writes amazing posts on how each of us can use social media tools to effectively market ourselves and create a community around our brand. Chris often writes on how we can improve our usage of networks such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook to socially connect with others. A great blog for anyone who wants to learn how to do social networking right online and offline.

2) Roi Carthy - Roi and I met at Blogference and have become good friends. Roi is a product launch consultant for various startups. He also recently started covering the Israeli startup scene at TechCrunch. He writes about different emerging startups and likes to interview people in the company before writing his post. He covers various topics such as: Business models, product development, and marketing to the blogosphere. Highly recommended for anyone who’s interested in staying on top of what’s going on in the hi-tech industry and finding out more about the people behind the ideas.

3) Stii Pretorius - I met Stii through StumbleUpon and we have kept in touch ever since. Stii is a programmer who lives in South Africa. He writes a lot about programming (surprise surprise :-)), software, and online tools. Even though a lot of Stii’s posts are quite technical, he has a very personal and simple writing style which allures you to read further. Anyone who is mostly interested in the technical aspects of the Web 2.0 world should definitely check his blog out.

4) How could I leave out Kent Newsome? I met Kent when I initially started blogging. He was one of my biggest fans from day one and I will not forget that. Kent the founder and developer of ACCBoards.Com and a few other popular interactive web sites. I love Kent’s blog because Kent writes like no other. He has a very original and unique way of covering what’s going on in the Web 2.0 world and at the same time give you his own personal opinion about it. He doesn’t just tell you about the latest software or social network, but he has something to say about it. Something meaningful and different than any other blogger. His posts will leave you thinking for days. I cannot say enough about Kent’s blog. You should try it out for yourself.

5) And finally…Stowe Boyd - Stowe and I met through the blogosphere. I have been following his blog for a very long time and I believe we can all learn so much from this wise man. In June 2007 he was ranked #2 out of technology industry analysts by Technobabble. Stowe is a strategic consultant to big hi-tech companies as well as small startups. He writes mostly about social tools, and their impact on business, media, and society. Like me, he likes to discuss not only the online tools, but Web 2.0 culture as a whole and what its implications are on our society. His posts are always thought-provoking and often even philosophical and sarcastically humorous.  If you haven’t yet been on Stowe’s blog, do yourself a favor and start today.

So these are my five blog recommendations. I hope you enjoy them. In addition, I would love to hear back from you guys which are your favorite blogs and why.

I recently received an email from Steinar Skipsnes letting me know about OthersOnline . This is is a new social service that matches people by their similar queries, as well as Web surfing habits and preferred interests. OthersOnline stands out from other social sites with its browser toolbar which enables the user to see who else is reading or interested in the topic or site that he’s currently looking at. For example, every time you search Google, you see the people who relate to those same keywords, plus their Web pages, and you can connect with them. A dropdown menu provides contact to their IM or email details, including a link to their profile. Contacts are split into global and local recommendations, based on the zip code in your profile. Friends can be added to a favorites list for easy contact at any time.

The Company positions itself as “Google for People”. Steinar writes me: “We bring you traffic. You know how businesses buy keywords on Google to promote themselves? Well, that’s what we’re doing for people/bloggers, only it’s free.”

OthersOnline will run contextual ads based on its users Web browsing history, and promises partnering companies a chance to build their brand by retaining contact even when users have clicked away from their site. See for more info.

Marshall Kirkpatrick writes:

“Will this work? I don’t know, but it’s interesting. Will strangers seek each other out based on common surfing habits? Will this turn into just another space for a large number of men to harrass a large number of women and and a small number of women with webcams to go nuts? If multiple people could communicate at the same time like a perma-IRC, if users could see who was on a page in real time or if other community discourse was possible then this might strike me as more likely to take off. But that’s just my take on it personally; there may be a simple beauty with enough safeguards to make this mass market viable.”

I agree with Marshall that it would be really cool if multiple people could communicate at the same time and especially if users could see who was on a page in real-time. However, I do know that OthersOnline is currently working on improving its service. Steinar tells me that they’ve got a couple of large deals lined up which will result in significant keyword-based exposure for their users, and a lot more new users.

I also spoke to Jordan Mitchell from the Company who told me another scoop: Soon OthersOnline will have reports that show you exactly how much exposure you’re getting from them. Think of it as your own personal ad campaign.

Here’s a screenshot of how it will look:

They are also currently working on improving their registration process to make it simpler and more intuitive. The reporting system and new registration process should be up in the next two weeks and they plan to officially launch their service in mid-September.

Finally! You don’t need to Google someone’s name with the word Twitter in order to find them on the site anymore. Twitter has added a people search functionality so now you can easily find your friends.

Twitter has also added GMail address book import, something they should have done a long time ago. Contacts who already have a Twitter account will be not be receiving the invite, so don’t worry about that.

Spock which publicly launched August 8th, is a new people search engine, helping users find and discover other people on the Web. It was founded by Jaideep Singh (CEO) and Jay Bhatti (VP Product) and received $7 million in financing from Clearstone Venture Partners and Opus Capital Ventures, months before the beta service was even planned to launch.

As Catherine Holahan from BusinessWeek writes:

“A Google search for an individual may return tens of thousands of links in milliseconds. But it won’t display a concise summary of all the information available on the Web about that person, such as her occupation, her interests and hobbies, her age, marital status, where she’s from, and what she looks like. That’s where Bhatti’s company, Spock, comes in. His people search engine, scheduled for launch in July, is one of the dozens of niche endeavors trying to capture some of the more than $60 billion projected to be spent on search marketing over the next four years.”

Spock’s focus is on people. The only kind of search results you get is a list of people. So for example, if you search for republicans or sushi or bloggers, the results will be lists of people associated with your search. The algorithm is probably based on the page rank or frequency analysis algorithm used by Google - but tailored to people.

Spock also uses tags in a very unique way. The spock robot automatically creates tags for any person it finds. It gathers information on people from Wikipedia, and social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook. However Spock also lets users add tags of their own, and vote existing tags up or down to strengthen the associations between people and topics. Spock leverages a combination of automated tags and people power for tagging. Individuals can claim their own page, and clearly each one of us has an interest in doing that.

A unique kind of tag in Spock is called ‘relationships’, and it’s what connects people together. For example, Chelsea is related to Clinton because she is his daughter, but Bush is related to Clinton because he is the successor to the title of President. These relationships are shown on Spock and taken together, they weave an intricate web of connections between people.

Spock also lets people vote on the existing “facts” (tags/relationships) and it re-arranges information to reflect the votes. However, you should know that the system is not yet tuned to do this correctly all the time.

It will be interesting to see how Spock balances people’s desire to manage their own image with the public data the search engine finds. It will also be very interesting to see how Spock manages spamming of tags, websites associated with people, and other user-contributed data.

As Michael Arrington writes:

“People search is a space that went from nowhere to crowded, fast. Wink changed direction and launched a people search product last November. Also in this space is Streakr, ProfileLinker, LinkedIn, ZoomInfo and Upscoop. Unlike the others (for the most part), Spock goes way beyond searching just social networks for people information. They are positioning themselves specifically against Google for web search and Amazon for product search, saying the third important type of search is information about people, and that 30% of Internet searches are people-related. Wink is Spock’s closest competitor among all of the ones listed above.”

While testing the site myself,  I found its results to be quite accurate and I enjoyed the user-friendly interface. With an estimated 20 billion search queries about people done per month, Spock is positioning itself to dominate the people search space. This is definitely a product and a company to watch.

Aniboom is a premier animation network that partners with animators around the world for multiplatform distribution of original content.  Driven by the passion of the art form, professional animators, animation students, and animation fans come to this community to create, watch and share a wide range of animated shorts and series.

Yesterday Aniboom added some interesting new features to its site:

1) The Creator’s Studio - Think you got an original idea for an animated web series? Aniboom wants to hear it. You can pitch your idea to them and if they like it, they will help you produce it, ditribute it through different channels,  and monetize it.

2) Aniboom has come out with new, original Creators Series that they collaborated on with independent writers, animators and directors. New series include: The Mad Scientist Show - a 50’s style TV show, which centers on Dr Pilkenstein, an insane inventor obsessed with improving the existence of mankind, Mister Coo - the surreal adventures of a little man in a very unpredictable universe, Neurosa - the misfortunes of Neu Rosa, a young woman living in the big city who tortures herself in ways you wouldn’t want to imagine. And lastly, The Race for the White House - a comical animation series about Hilary, Barack, and the rest of the gang…coming soon.

3) A new webcam animation widget and tool called MicroSmotion which allows you to animate yourself or anything else you wish with your webcam. You can then embed it on your site or blog, export it to your mobile, or create your own original video greeting cards & send it to your friends and family. Very cool. You can see an example of it here:

If you like animation, you should definitely check Aniboom out. The site has some amazing animation and cartoon videos created by animators from all over the world. You can also find there a unique and easy-to-use animation tool called Shapeshifter which allows you to create your own animation masterpieces. You can then share your animations with the entire Aniboom community and post them on your BoomZone (personal profile), plus you can show your creativity to the world and embed your animations on your site or blog.

Aniboom also holds on-going competitions. The site is currently celebrating its one year anniversary and you can now participate in their Shapeshifter birthday competition and win a Wacom tablet.

Aniboom believes that animators should get paid for their hard work, and therefore it provides each creator with simple revenue share models– all creators who upload or create movies on aniboom.com will receive a fair share of advertising and licensing revenue.

Lastly, I wanted to share with you some of my favorite animation videos:

 Ram by Caroline Ting

Angst by Emiel Penders

Fetch by Michael Gallay

Here’s a demo by Rodney Rumford from Face Reviews, showing how Facebook works on iPhone. As you can see, the design and performance of the application are simply amazing.

With the iPhone Facebook application you can access: News feed, events, friend requests, profile, info, walls, photos, friends, email (sent, delete, send), friend status, friends online, friends photos, search for friends, etc. You can quickly drill down into almost every area effortlessly. There is also a red box in the upper right side that displays the number of unopened emails.

The 2 main drawbacks of this application currently: You cannot access groups or applications. Hopefully this will change very soon.

 Enjoy!

My friend Niv Calderon wrote a great post a few days ago about the correct usage of tags and the optimization of text for search engines. Unfortunately, many of you won’t be able to read it because it’s in Hebrew, so we both agreed that it would definitely be worthwhile to translate it for all of you since these tips are so extremely useful. Please note that I’ve edited the post a bit and added a few more pointers.

Think you’ve been tagging correctly up till now? Perhaps you’ll think differently after reading this post.

What Do You Want To Search As Opposed To What Do You Want To Find

Let’s start from the beginning.

Tags are actually smart keywords that are associated with a piece of information on the internet, such as text, pic, or video. Tags describe this information, classify & sort it, and enable search engines to give us the results that we seek even by the word’s context. For example, a search engine already knows from experience that “Nasrallah” is related to “Hezbollah“, and so forth.

Why are tags so important?

In today’s era of RSS and Web pages that are personally suited for each user, we can receive our information through its classification in a completely different manner than we used to in the past (and the past is not so long ago). If in the past (and still today) we subscribed to a blog or newsletter, the subscription still doesn’t promise us that the actual content will interest us. Even if it’s a blogger that we really like, who knows what he’ll write about next. Yet today, due to tags (and RSS) we can get exactly the kind of information we are seeking without being dependent on those blogs that we know and to explore diverse writings of new people who use tags to classify their content.

Here’s an example: Let’s say you like a specific Star Trek show. There are tons of people in the universe who have written about Star Trek but of course you don’t have the time to search through all of these sites. Now there’s a way to get exactly what you want. Technorati (or any other such service) will find for you all the relevant posts that are tagged with the specific term you’re looking for, and if you wish, you can even register to a service that will stream all the relevant posts on the topic to your computer. In other words, if once we used to write in Google the term that we are searching, and scroll down through all the search results, today’s tags have flattened our search world and made it into one where we write in the search box exactly what we want to find.

SEO Or Optimization Of Internet Sites For Search Engines

Search engines know how to read the tags that you add to your posts. They scan all the text word for word and then scan the tags. Your tags are supposed to exactly fit the text that you wrote. Many people think that flooding their posts with tags will only encourage search engines to get to these posts. For instance, if you write a post about Jerry Seinfeld and you put the tag “web 2.0″, it is logical that whoever is looking for web 2.0 will get to your blog at some point. Right? Wrong. Exactly the opposite.

Bloggers who abuse tags on a regular basis are detected by search engines. Google’s system is smart. If we take Google’s Page Rank for example, it gives ranking to internet pages based on the number of links that point to it, and amongst other things, is also based on the connection between the metadata and the text. Yes, you heard right - Metadata. In the site’s metadata, the site owner tells search engines (and also the surfers) what exists on his site and what they can expect. When there is no “fit” between this information and the actual content on the site, the search engine gives you “negative points”, views you as less credible, and ranks you lower in the search results. This of course affects the traffic coming into your site. For example, if you wrote one post about Brad Pitt’s latest movie, one post about shopping, and one post about your car, you could see why the search engine would view you as less credible if you added “Web 2.0″ as one of your tags, right? (Another point I will add here: The search engine doesn’t just scan your post. It scans the entire page and also your archive, so if you you usually write about Web 2.0 and you put Web 2.0 as one of the tags in a post that didn’t necessarily contain the term but still was related to it, don’t be worried).

Remember to be exact and consistent. If you used the sentence “Brad Pitt’s latest movie” in your post, use the exact same words in your tags. “Brad Pitt’s latest movie” is not the same as “Brad Pitt’s recent movie”. The best tip I can give you is to simply copy paste the words as they are without rewriting them. (Another point I will add here: Think about your tags as you write your post. If you want to use a certain tag, make sure to place it in your text. It’s a different way of looking at writing, I know, but if traffic is important to you, you should definitely consider this).

Recently a trend has emerged on the Web where people use tags as an addition to their post. There are those who use locations, figures, etc., as a way to explain more about the post (I admit, I’ve done this as well). There are those who will use the subtext of their post as a long sentence tag. While we can’t fight this trend, just like we can’t fight the emergence of slang words, we can still explain to these people that writing complete sentences will not help promote or classify their posts. It will only have the opposite effect and create a minor sub-category in which these posts will be classified.

Be precise and exact with your tags. This will help surfers get to your blog and make search engines love you. More exact tags, more traffic. Think about it.

Now I will add some tags to this post based on all that I’ve learned and hopefully, I’ll do it right.

Thanks to Eszter for the pic.

Technorati tags: tags, tagging, niv calderon, blog, text optimization, search engine, tips, search, keywords, rss, web 2.0, blogger, post, technorati, google, seo, Optimization Of Internet Sites, page rank, metadata, traffic

I found this amazing video made by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod, and XPLANE, on Chris Brogan’s blog, and wanted to share it with you. This presentation will definitely leave you with some food for thought:

As a follow-up to my Survey on Social Networks Worldwide post, I am curious to hear from you guys, which is your favorite social network and why. I myself must stick with Facebook for the time being. I like the fact that not everyone can see my profile; that I can add and learn about lots of interesting applications and support causes; that I can see all my friends’ activity on my homepage. This last feature is genius - by showing me the different groups my friends are joining, the different links they’re posting, the various causes they support, I am driven to action by curiosity. Facebook has an amazing ability for user “stickiness” to say the least. I must say that the latest MySpace-like advertising on Facebook has caused me some distress (those blinking ads are the worst). I am really hoping that Facebook doesn’t deteriorate to MySpace design standards. At least for now, I feel its advantages outweigh my need to distract my eyes from the blinking promotions.

Which is your favorite?

Thanks to Terinea for the pic.

On September 9th, my friend Jeff Pulver along with a few other interesting people are organizing an international music event in support of peace and unity. The event will be held in Jerusalem and will feature the Black Eyed Peas, along with Arrested Development, and The Commitments (yes, the band from the movie).

The mission of Jerusalem Rocks:

“Jerusalem Rocks! will bring together musicians from all over the world in support of peace and unity. Jerusalem has hundreds of thousands of students and youth, numerous universities and a total population of 725,000. The city, its population and industry strive to show the world that Jerusalem is dedicated to peace and, more, is a growing center of today’s culture and business. However, Jerusalem has not hosted a mega international musical event in many years. Jerusalem Rocks! speaks to all these issues. It is not only a gift to Jerusalem; it is a statement to the world.”

I think what would make this event a true symbol of peace is the addition of Israeli and Palestinian musicians performing together. Perhaps through the international language of music, we could start making the progress that our politicians haven’t been able to make.

For more information on the event and to purchase tickets, visit the event website.