Category: Featured

The Internet Wins.

The Internet Wins.

With the recent election of Barack Obama, there is going to a new Presidential precedence in using the Interwebz to communicate with the US citizens.

There was no question Obama’s Internet marketing was top notch. He and his team had the most effective marketing of anyone who ever ran for office.

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr – Barack Obama’s team has and is participating in all of these new mediums.

Even though he will likely have to give up his Blackberry when he gets to the Oval Office, Obama will still be the first president to use a laptop at his desk.

Add to that, Obama will now be giving a weekly address via YouTube. This is obviously a HUGE step in the right direction – not since JFK using TV has a president involved himself in new channels of communication.

With regards to his technology policy, perhaps what is best about the election of Obama is that he is a strong proponent of Net Neutrality, the purposed laws and measures which will keep the Internet open and free for a long time to come.

Obama will even be appointing the first Chief Technology Officer of the US. Hello, change.

Check out this video of Arianna Huffington (Editor in Chief of Huffington Post) interviewing Google CEO, Dr. Eric Schmidt about the underlying potential of the new Internet Presidency.

Hopefully, the US government will be able to be as increasingly transparent as businesses/corporations have become through the use of social media.

Whether you agree with the rest of his policies or not, with Barack Obama in the White House, the Internet wins.

What do you think?

T-Shirt Friday: Fat Man Unleashed

Fat Man Unleashed

Thanks to Israel Lagares, aka Fat Man Unleashed, for sending me this awesome t-shirt.

Israel started Fat Man Unleashed in May of 2007 – a few months after I started my blog (January of 2007). UBD redesigned Fat Man Unleashed in October of 2007. Back then, FMU had only around 400 RSS subscribers. Today, Fat Man Unleashed has nearly 4000 readers! Talk about an online success story!

Israel recently started a social voting site specifically tailored to the health community called HealthRanker. HealthRanker has received mentions on many top blogs and is quickly becoming an authority in the social media circle.

Congratulations goes to Israel for creating two very popular and highly-trafficked websites! Make sure to check out Fat Man Unleashed and HealthRanker.

P.S. – The UBD Block Ad Plugin is here!

New UBD Website + Our First Plugin

New UBD + Our First Plugin I wanted to make a few quick announcements. First of all, my team and I have been hard at work redesigning the UBD site and fully integrating it into WordPress. I am happy to announce that this is now complete – our new company website runs off a single installation of WordPress.

WordPress serves as a great platform for not just blog content, but showcasing a portfolio, an e-commerce store, or even a forum. In the next few months, UBD will be releasing premium WordPress plugins, tools and themes that will help YOU use your blog more effectively.

Our First WordPress Plugin

This Friday (June 13th), UBD will be releasing its first WordPress plugin co-developed with the renowned WordPress developer, Alex King. Alex is one of the original contributing developers to WordPress and has authored many popular WordPress plugins, including ShareThis, Twitter Tools, and Popularity Contest.

We will also be releasing a free theme within the next week from the UBD design contest winner, Phillip van Coller.

PageRank Update Underway?

PageRank Update Underway?

Some of you may have remember that when I first started my blog back in January of 2007, I was awarded with a PR5 during my first PR update. Unfortunately, when the Google PageRank slap hit everyone six months ago, I was bumped back down to a PR4.

Today on I read on Courtney Tuttle’s blog (nice blog, Courtney 😉 that Google is undergoing its quarterly PageRank update. I decided to verify this for myself by checking a few blogs in my Google toolbar. I am happy to report that my blog jumped back up to a PR5. This is a another nice surprise from Google because less than two months ago, I was awarded with a Google authority listing for my name.

Every blogger can do things to increase the chances of them receiving a higher PageRank update. Almost a year ago, I wrote on article on how to prepare for a PageRank update.

How about you guys? Have you noticed a change in your PageRank? Usually, the update takes a few days to be accurate across all Google data centers.

For more information on this mysterious force of Google, check out this Wikipedia article on PageRank, which interestingly, outranks Google’s page about PageRank.

Twittering Up a Storm

It seems like everyone these days is now Twittering – the micro blogging platform in which people “follow” each others’ updates via a live, instant message-like chat stream. You will see my recent Twitter updates on the top of the sidebar on the right-hand side of my blog.

I first started Twittering in November of 2007 when UBD attended the Blog World Expo. I used Twitter to keep my readers up to date of what I was doing while we were in Vegas at the expo.

At that time, not many other people were using Twitter and I had less than 10 followers. Now, in the past week, the number of people following me on Twitter has more than tripled!

What accounts for such a rapid increase in the number of Twitter users and followers?

I have no idea! Twitter is simply becoming more viral by the day. Way too many of my homeboys and homegirls are now using Twitter.

About a week ago I told John Chow to get on Twitter, and within a few minutes he was signed up and following me. In the past week, John now has almost 500 people following him on Twitter.

Many people seem to think Twitter is just useless bantering, but I have started to see its benefits. For example, Twitters allows you to:

  • Keep up to date with what your friends and colleague are doing
  • Be on the cutting edge of breaking news – for example, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington posts tidbits of upcoming news which have not yet appeared on his site
  • Keep you readers updated of your new blog posts using the Twitter Updater WordPress plugin
  • Share interesting stories or websites you have found with your followers
  • Start conversations with people whom otherwise you may never talk to
  • Network and become more well-known within online communities
  • Ask questions and receive answers from the people who follow you

I asked John, “Is Twitter just useless chat or do you think it allows you to better keep in touch with your readers?” This was his response:

Twitter is like having one big mega chat room. It can be a huge time waster or a good marketing channel depending on how you go about it. I got on twitter as a marketing move and I’m trying very to keep it from being a time waster. It’s VERY HARD!

I have noticed that as more of the people I know have started twittering, I have become more a more active Twitterer myself. In the past week, for example, I have updated Twitter (a.k.a “Tweeted”) over 70x… Compare that to less than 10x in the previous 5 months.

Writing a quality blog post takes significant time and effort, but with Twitter, you only have 140 characters to post, so no one is expecting a novel. A good “Tweet,” as they are called, may simply be a link to a cool blog post, or a question/answer to a problem a fellow Twitterer is having.

I highly recommend Twitter to anyone who is looking to network within a community and potentially increase new readers for their websites or blogs. I know that I will be using Twitter more over the next few months to stay in contact with my readers and also to network with people. I have even started to receive quite a few “follow” requests from many people local to me in Scottsdale, Arizona.

So, what are you waiting for? Follow me on Twitter!