Explaining Twitter And The Tweets

Many of my friends often wonder the use and importance of Twitter. They say - "What is this Twitter all about?"That is the reply I get most often when I talk about Twitter to friends and family.  And when I explain them the way how Twitter operates, they ask, "Why would anyone use Twitter for blogging and other purpose when you dont have a separate inbox etc and everything here is public?"
Twitter is a Mini Blog
Twitter is a mini update usually containing 140 characters. It is a popular features of social networks where you can update your status.
It is a kind of mini blogging, for people who want to blog but don't want to blog on platforms like blogger etc. A personal blog can keep people informed on what is going on in your life and in and around you, but not everyone has the time to spend an hour crafting a beautiful post about them or what they think. Sometimes, you just want to say "I am not feeling well today" or "I want to see Sachin Tendulkar winning for Mumbai Indians In IPL3."
So what is Twitter? It's a great place for keeping people informed on what you are up to without the need to spend a lot of time creating an entire post on any topic you want to speak your mind on.
Twitter is Social Messaging: - While Twitter was started as a mini-blogging service, it is grown into much more than simply a tool to type in quick personal status updates. So when asked "What is Twitter?", I often describe it as a "cross product of blogging and instant messaging" to describe it roughly in plain and simple language.
At Twitter - social messaging you can follow people and have followers, and even you can have Twitter on your cell phone and interact with people whenever you like. Twitter has become the perfect social messaging tool. Whether you are out on the town and want to connect with a group of people , or keeping people informed of developments at the event or task you are out for, Twitter is a great tool for quickly communicating a message to a group of people.
Twitter is also emerging as a media to comment on world activities i.e. you can speak your mind on persons, politics, event etc.
Twitter is News Reporting : - Turn on CNN, BBC or any other news-reporting service and you'll be able to see whats going on in the world around and you can also see your favourite media person's comments and opinion on that particular event.
With utilities like Twitterfeed, it is easy to get an RSS feed converted into Twitter updates. This makes it easy to use Twitter as a form of social media marketing. This is also a strong SEO Tool nowadays. There are tools which can post any webcontent on Twitter in the form of short hybrid URLs. A example of this URL is - http://bit.ly/abEqWJ. You cannont predict from this URL what is inside this URL.
After discussing so many things we are now in a situation to say exactly what Twitter is. It is many different things to many different people. It can be used by a family or group or friends to keep in touch, or a company to coordinate business, or the media to keep people informed or a writer to build up a fan base. Twitter is micro/mini-blogging. It is social messaging medium, a business tool, a news reporting service and a marketing utility in SEO.
I hope my friends will read this post to whom Twitter was not clear as to what it is actually. So start twittering about your own status to your friends and group you are associated with and you want them to be in touch with you.

Twitter Widgets

Twitter is the new Buzz for Tech Savvy personel involved in Web2.0 and Blogging. A Twitter widget with latest updates is a integrated part of Blogs these days. Most of the Twitter widgets on Blog are either Flash based or Javascript based. There are many other tools that can be used in creating a Twitter Widget. You can even use Google Spreadsheets for the purpose of creating Twitter Widgets. The most exciting and interesting thing is that twitter updates can be shown on blogs and images. And these images can be used anywhere be it forums, blogs, websites, or any other Social Media Profile.

1. Tweetsnap (Tweetsnap.com): - When you open up tweetsnap, you will see a simple page with a field to enter your twitter username. After you enter your name and hit the Find button, you'll see your most recent tweet on a nice bluish Twitter widget that is in image format (png). Below it, you'll find snippets of code to copy and paste on your site. Just copy what's desirable for you and use it on your blog, forum etc.
2. Retweet Button : - Move over Digg, there's a new article badge in town. Retweet buttons are becoming increasingly popular for blogs and news articles, and they are relatively simple to install. You can put these buttons on your website, blog, embed them in email or even put them in your RSS feed.
3. Twoxit Widget : - This simple Twitter widget from Widgetbox is easily customizable, so you can match the background to your blog. You can also easily transport the widget to Facebook, MySpace  or any number of social networking profiles or blogging networks like WordPress or Blogger.
4. SayTweet (Saytweet.com): - It first asks you to upload one of your images. You can also add a group photo of you and your friends. This amazing tool lets you add your Twitter update on this image in speech bubbles. The unique feature of this is that you can add multiple Twitter usernames and show tweets from everyone. I think it's the coolest way to display tweets.

You Have A Brand New Site What To Do Now For Its Optimization

There are many people who make or are planning to make a great sites or blogs etc with very good information in it. But many of us don't know how to get the site indexed in Google, Yahoo, Bing Etc. This blog is intended for those people and many of us to help them with their sites. This will teach you how to popularize your site from very beginning starting from getting a domain to using SEO Tecniques(Basic). These are the steps you can care about for your site:-
1. The first thing is that look for a good URL name for your site so that it contains one of your many keywords about your site's content. And choose that name also for your Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress, Gmail or any other account. Because we want our site to get indexed as soon as possible on the web. And if possible we can make create these accounts even before the launch of our site/blog. 
2. Select a Good Domain provider like Godaddy. they are very genuine domain providers with a more than million customers. They have a lots of tools built into their service and the best thing is is that they have good customer support. 
3. Avoid using dashes, commas or hyphens etc in your URL name. You think of a good name for your website try getting that nam,e registered as soon as possible. As good names do not wait for you for long, someone else will take that name and you will loose a good domain name which could have boosted your business or product. Good things never wait longer you have to grasp them ASAP if available. 
4. Create good content for your website. Organise your website. Use good HTML codes to make your website. Avoid duplicate contents in your content. Use appropriate tags where ever necessary. Make your webpages light in weight so that it loads up ASAP when the visitor lands on your page else the visitor will skip to some other link for meet their need. Will you like this to happen, I think no body will like this. 
5. Get a Twitter account in the name of your registered domain. Set a link of your website in the Twitter account. Start Twittering. This will help you make ground for you to populate your links. This will help you in getting a place in the organic search result for your website. 
6. Get a Facebook account for your site. Start talking about your site, products and services with your friends. This will make your product public much before you will launch the site. 
7. A Gmail account is most important aswell. A gmail account will help you in doing your sites SEO if you are doing it yourself. As Gmail has great SEO Tools Like Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools and it gives you access to many other accounts like You Tube. Also setup a LinkedIn account and put your site's link there. The aim is to set as many links as you can pointing towards your website and remember these links are quality links. 
8. You can opt for a blog of your site on your website domain itself. Keep updating that blog on a regular basis. This will drive huge traffic to your website. If this is not possible then you can also opt for the services of Blogger for your blog. Make the blog URL on Blogger with the same URL that you are owning for your site. This will eventually bring traffic to your primary website. But Dont forget to talk about your product and services and other essential things related to your business in your blog on a regular basis. Search Engines like Fresh content and quality content about or on any subject. Search Engine will give prefrence to that. 
9. Make as many quality link for your site as you can. I will suggest One Way Link building for this through directory submission. Submit your site to as many online directories to your relevant category. Never spam your link, otherwise Google will penalize you for this. 
10. Write a few good article about your site, services and products and submit them to article directories. Submit them to directories with good PR. 
These are the basic things that all of us can do with a little bit Googling and asking from friends and collegues who have some knowledge on this. Follow these steps and your site will certainly get good visibility and quality audience. 
CHEERSSSSSSSSSSSSS

Web Video Optimization Techniques

Optimizing web videos has become very important as the use and size of videos has increased on the Web. Here are some practices used prominently by many people.

While streaming-media files make up only a small portion of the total web objects on the average web page. YouTube is responsible for about 10% of all traffic on the Internet (Nowak 2007) and is growing at over 162% a year (see Table 1). Consequently the optimization of streaming media, movies in particular, is important to minimize load times, reduce bandwidth bills, and maximize web page speed.

Site	Unique Visitors (1000s) (Jan 2010)	Year-over-year growth
1. YouTube	66,378	162%
2. Google Video	23,759	137%
3. AOL Video	18,687	114%
4. Yahoo! Video	17,473	405%
5. vids.myspace.com	14,281	69%
6. MSN Video	19,967	8%

Video Production Tips

To create highly optimizable videos you've got to have high quality originals videos. Video creation is like a war for your promotion of product. Use a high quality digital video camera to make your video, as there will be less noise in your video content. Minimize pans, zooms, and subject motion and make sure your subject is well oriented and visible and loud for the audiences to catch their attention. Use a simple background and a solid tripod for the camera. Avoid hand-held shots, but if a tripod is not an option use a gyroscopic stabilizer or an image stabilized lens. The lower the noise, movement, and fine detail in the background the smaller the video. Smaller the video the less space it will need on the web server and the faster it will be available to the user.

• Minimize camera motion with a tripod
• Minimize subject motion
• Use a lot of light
• Use a simple background
• Avoid camera pans and zooms
• Use professional equipment
• Use a digital format

Video Optimization for the Web

Movies optimized for the web should be short in duration, small in dimension, and optimized with the appropriate codec. I have seen movies that are 12 to 20 minutes long auto-loaded on home pages some 90-150MB in file size! People are more accepting of temporal compression (over time) than spatial compression (frame per frame). You can cut the frame rate from 15fps to 10fps or even 8fps, each frame will have 50 percent more data per frame for the same file size, which will increase the quality of the picture. The minimum dimensions should be 320x240 pixels, anything much smaller has less impact and is hard to view. For users with a high speed connection you can offer a 400x300 pixel video. To maintain quality, up the data rate in proportion to the image size. Remember that doubling image size (320x240 to 640x480) requires a 4X (not 2X) increase in data rate.
Use this data rate formula to help target your movie for the right delivery medium (especially with H.264).
Data Rate = (frames per second) X (movie width) X (movie height) divided by 29000
This translates to DR = FPS * W * H / 29000.
For example: A 320x240 movies with 15 frames per second needs to be compressed to about 39.7K of data per second.
After you've captured your video while minimizing noise edit any unnecessary frames and add titles and effects. The key to optimizing movies on the web is to break them up into smaller segments that are a few minutes long at most. Edit out the parts of the movie that aren't essential to your message, crop fuzzy edges, and reduce the dimensions to keep them to a reasonable file size. Use the minimum frame rate that gives an acceptable playback. Finally after editing out nonessential content, reducing dimensions and frame rate, optimize your videos with different codecs to see which creates the smallest acceptable file.

• Crop the fuzzy edges
• Reduce video noise (with filters)
• Adjust contrast
• Adjust gamma level (for cross-platform viewing)
• Restore black and white
• Deinterlace

Compressing Videos for the Web

Now that you've got your video prepared and adjusted it's time to compress it. This is called "encoding" in the jargon of the industry. You must compress the size of your video so it can be successfully streamed (or downloaded) to your target audience. Encoding is the process where this compression happens, and it is full of hard interdependent decisions:

• Streaming Media Format - QuickTime versus RealMedia versus Windows Media
• Supported playback platforms - Microsoft Windows versus Macintosh, or both
• Delivery method - True real-time streaming versus HTTP streaming
• Overall data rate - Compression versus quality versus bandwidth required
• Audio quality - Mono versus stereo.
• Codec - H.264, Sorenson and WMV are the current champs.
• You'll need to make some decisions here to give the best compromise between quality and size. QuickTime Pro is a fast and convenient way to create optimized videos. For more control you can use Cleaner, a product made by Discreet (http://www.discreet.com). Sorenson Video Pro can sometimes make smaller videos than H.264 at similar quality. Finally Episode Pro offers maximum control over video compression with the ability to compress to H.264, Flash, ipod, and other formats. 

There are many terms which are quite technical here. Need some more Googling on those terms for you to undersatand them clearly as all these things are related to Video Making and many of us are not aware with all these terms. Need not to worry even I understood these things by extensive search on related sited. I have tried to give resources for those things. Hope you will find them usefull as well.
CHEERS!!! ENJOY VIDEO OPTIMIZING

Social Media Optimization

Social Media Optimization




Social Media Optimization (SMO) is a term coined by Rohit BHargava an Indian man. He has related this concept with SEO concepts. He said SMO can bring lots of traffic to your site through new channel or routes as it is not only through Google and Yahho or other search engines that drive traffic to your site. 


SMO is - The online tool and platform that people use to share opinions, thoughts, experiences, and perspectives with each other. Social media can take many different forms, including text, images, audio, and video. Popular social mediums include blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis etc. Example are Facebook, Twitter, Buzz, My Space, etc to count a few.


Social Media Optimization allows to let you populate your links on the web. These links are spread into all your friends and community connections. When sending your links to persons with like interest can give great exposure to your links with your message.   


Rules For SMO Are :- 


1. Increase Your Linkability
2. Make Tagging and Bookmarking easy
3. Reward Inbound Links 
4. Help Your Content Travel
5. Encourage the Mashup
6. Be a User Resource, Even if it Doesn't Help You 
7. Reward Helpful and Valuable Users
8. In way it sounds a whole lot like Marketing 2.0. It is pretty much includes all the new marketing techniques that are becoming popular rolled into one,     techniques such as; Linkbaiting, Usability Design, Buzz Marketing, Community Building, and anything that can be considered "pull marketing".
9. Participate - Join the conversation. Social Media is a two way street, lets not forget that. By conversing with the community you are creating awareness and prolonging your buzz. You are keeping it going and this often results in a snowball effect. Participating helps your message spread further and faster. 
10. Know how to target your audience - If you don't even know your target audience you are in trouble. There is always going to be a certain audience you can appeal to and others that you can't. So know your appeal and who it is appealing to. 
11. Create content - There are certain kinds of content that just naturally spread socially. It does not matter what industry you are in and what boring products you sell, there is always some kind of content that can be created that will be useful for someone. Whether it is creating widgets, making people laugh, or writing a anything, it can be done. Know what type of content can work for you and create it.
12. Be real.


While social media optimization is becoming very important we should not forget about old SEO either. Google and Yahoo still drive mass amounts of traffic and you can not ignore them. It is all about exploring new mediums and riding these waves. But Still these new mediums are a strong way to do good for your site to do better ranking and business in terms of driving traffic to the site.