website.net.nz

Got an email from someone today alerting me to another brand new NZ digg style social news aggregator Linka.co.nz

A user driven social content site for New Zealanders by New Zealanders

Not sure if there’s room in NZ for two sites like this but who knows. I’ve added a link.

I personally don’t think linka is presented as well as scoopit, it’s missing the all important SOE URL rewrite mod, the linka / link language is a little clumsy and of course it doesn’t have the backing of scoop.co.nz so it’s a little hard to see how it will get the traction needed to be a real contender. But Who knows!…Good luck to them.

The Google Zeitgeist page is always an interesting, although sometimes depressing, snapshot of what people are interested in / searching for.

This week the top ten search terms are

1. masters
2. pet food recall
3. good friday
4. wrestlemania 23
5. mlb extra innings
6. easter bunny
7. rose mcgowan
8. lauren conrad
9. keith richards
10. blades of glory

It also struck me that if you then use these words in your blog post at the beginning of the week, by the end of the week you will be attracting some of those people searching for information on the ‘pet food recall’ or ‘wrestlemania 23′. Of course I would never advocate pure cheating and the junk content that entails but nevertheless, if some of those words can be worked into the post you where going to write anyway … Keith Richards, the pet food recall and wrestlemania.

Continue reading ‘The Keith Richards wrestlemania pet food recall’

There was an interesting post on the Celcias blog about a huge surge in awareness of climate change a while back. I’ve been wondering whether this is a trend that will continue.

I’ve always been interested in how ideas spread, especially important ideas. And I’ve always been interested in ways of tracking how widely an idea is spreading over time.

It’s only a certain type of person who blogs so using the blogsphere as a measure of general consciousness is flawed. Nevertheless, there are a lot of bloggers out there, and when you look at what they are saying over a given period of time you can get a useful measure of how an idea is spreading.

So I thought I’d pop over to Technorati to see how often the term ‘climate change’ is being mentioned in the blogsphere. This handy little graph shows that massive surge talked about on Celcias. It doesn’t look like the increased interest was a permanent change but there is a definite trend.

It would be interesting to look at what was happening at the time of that big spike.

Here’s some related real time graphs.

Posts that contain "climate Change" per day for the last 30 days.

Posts that contain "global Warming" per day for the last 30 days.

Posts that contain "global Warming" And Greenpeace per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Scoop have launched a very nifty and very web2.0 zeitgeist of their own. It’s a little bit digg and a little bit del.icio.us and I like it! Check it out at www.scoopit.co.nz

It’s great to have a NZ version of the social networking / tagging / bookmarking phenomenon and it’s a smart move by Scoop. Scoopit will no doubt drive traffic to scoop.co.nz and Google will eat it up. Indeed it seems there are a few people who have already identified this potential which begs the question - will quality or quantity prevail? On what basis are people voting for each item? It’ll be interesting to see how it pans out over time.

The little ScoopIT widget is an excellent touch. I’ve added mine already (-:

Greenpeace’s ‘Defending Our Oceans’ has earned a place in the 59 Smartest Orgs nominations online as chosen by GetActive, NetSquared and Squidoo (founded by everyone’s favourite marketing guru, Seth Godin). They say:

“These are organizations that give their volunteers and members a voice and get out of the way. They’re pros at mobilizing awareness online. They’re experimentors. Innovators. On a mission. They’re fearless….These aren’t just orgs that throw up a video or a forum or a MySpace page and stop.”

Check it out and put in your vote!

I wrote a post recently about using the google ajax search api in wordpress. Turned out it is a simple matter of putting the javascript in the header of the template, adding the onload function to the body tag and popping the div into a page or a post or even into the template.

I’ve set up a page here where you can see it in action.