all that is digital

Monday's news that Facebook had acquired FriendFeed for an undisclosed sum took many people by surprise, not the least of whom were the site's most-active users, many of whom have made the social sharing and aggregation platform their central nervous system for online activity and community. Initial reactions to the announcement had many people asking questions, extremely concerned that the site - as we know it - was doomed to close, and a lack of immediate denials from the company's leadership was seen by many as an implicit acceptance that yes, the end was near. But in the days following, from what I've seen and heard, it is clear to me that FriendFeed is not going away, that the company's being part of Facebook isn't the end of the world, and that after nearly two years of going it alone, the time had come to make a change.

I found this article published in  March excellent relative content-No Gotchas's Ed Batista: Social Network Tools From AlertThingy to Zemanta. "One year after my last review of some social media tools and networks, here's the 2009 version.  Included are: - UPDATES on the services I reviewed last year and how I've integrated them into my work (or not) as an executive coach and consultant: Tumblr, Twitter, Utterli and (on the lighter side) Don't Break the Chain.  (In this section I also reference a number of Twitter clients, but I don't discuss them in depth–more on that front later.)!"  Ed Batista Related articles by Zemanta

Search Engines Evaluating Snippets in SERPS By Bill Slawski, on July 24th, 2009 Meta descriptions for web pages likely don’t influence the rankings of your web pages in search results. But if your meta descriptions include keywords that your pages might be found for, they may be displayed in search results with links to those pages. If those meta descriptions are interesting and engaging, and provide the right information, they may influence people who view them and are interested in what you offer to visit your pages. When someone searches at a search engine, they are usually presented with a list of search results, often referred to as SERPS - search engine result pages, that can include page titles, abstracts or snippets from those pages, and URLs from the pages. The abstracts or snippets may sometimes be part or all of the meta descriptions for the pages, if the meta descriptions contain the keyword or keywords used by searchers in their queries. But, a seach engine might just as easily take that snippet from somewhere else on the page returned in search results. If you spend a fair amount of time trying to find the right words to use in those meta descriptions, you may want to think about what might snippets appear when your pages show up in search results and the search engines don’t use those painfully and carefully crafted meta descriptions.