Online Video In 2011: Connected TVs, Social Recommendations, And Standards Wars

Jeremy Allaire

Editor’s note: Online video is going through many changes as people begin to connect their TVs to the Internet and social sharing over Facebook and Twitter influence what people watch as much as search. In this guest post, Jeremy Allaire, founder and CEO of online video platform Brightcove, gives his view of where online video is going next year. Allaire’s last guest post for us was on the standards war in mobile video formats.
Web video is just getting started, and 2011 promises to be yet another year of transformation in the online video landscape. The stage is set for mainstream connected TVs, Over-the-top adoption, and even more videos watched directly streamed from website. Here are the five biggest trends in online video that will play out in significant ways for end-users and publishers alike.
1. Connected TV Platform Wars
The past year saw the definitive emergence of platform wars in the handheld computing landscape. This year will see those wars expand into new territory, the Connected TV platform market. Input 1 on the TV is the new homepage or start screen. We should expect that the battles will look incredibly similar to the market that emerged for smartphones over the past several years, but with some other entrenched players. Google vs. Apple vs. the dominant TV brands. In fact, these platforms will largely be based on a similar architecture, offering app and content publishers a common model for creating device-oriented applications and Web experiences.
Apple will ship an iOS-based Apple TV display and will open up Apple TV to third-party apps beyond Netflix. Developers will have a common model for building apps across the phone, tablet and TV, as well as a suite of new APIs for phone and tablet apps to interact with TV apps (think remote control type activities, gestures for games, etc.). Its platform will also support HTML5 with a set of design standards for TV Web 10-foot experiences.
Google, which has already put forward its first rendition of the same, will expand on this and create models that integrate Android apps across all devices.
In addition, the largest of the TV CE manufacturers (e.g. Samsung and LG), will put their best foot forward with TV App SDKs, App Stores and TV Web standards based on HTML5, looking to leverage their massive volumes and strong position in the living room to fend off Apple and Google from owning the consumer experience and app distribution relationships.
Expect by the end of the year a frenzy of publisher and developer interest in creating TV Apps and TV Web experiences as the volumes of products shipping by the end of 2011 will be in the tens of millions and very attractive as a target platform.
2. Over-The-Top TV Subscriptions will emerge, but largely fail
The long coveted idea of Over-The-Top (or OTT) TV distribution (through services such as Google TV, Apple TV, or Boxee), which would lead in turn to tens of millions of consumers “cutting the cord” with their cable provider will further take hold in 2011, but will largely disappoint consumers.
While library video on-demand subscriptions through services like Netflix, Xbox Live Marketplace, and Amazon VoD offer users great and broad libraries of content, they don’t yet offer a compelling substitute to a cable subscription.
In 2011, we’ll see the first wave of attempts to create more rich TV subscription bundles that are available over the Internet. Expect Netflix to start paying for more recent and popular TV shows, and for Apple to potentially offer a low-priced ($25/month) TV subscription product with a collection of recent hit TV shows. But most major broadcasters and studios won’t bite or participate in a meaningful way, leaving consumers still feeling like these products don’t offer enough. The absence of a broad offering of live sports will be a major factor keeping cords from being cut.
At the same time, your existing cable subscription will start to offer a greater range of content over the Web, and likely top-tier cable companies such as Comcast / Xfinity will make their online video products available through open devices and apps, blurring the lines even further.
We’ll have to wait until 2012 when the scale of Connected TV adoption is large enough that online TV subscription providers will be willing to write big enough checks to get the best available programming.
3. Facebook and Twitter will become larger sources of video traffic than Google search
In a recent jointly published study by Brighcove and TubeMogul, we reported that the fastest growing source of traffic to videos on publisher websites were social platforms Facebook and Twitter. This growth is accelerating and the role of these platforms as primary content discovery and viewing environments will reach a point by the end of the year that they will soon be as large and important as Google search.
Increasingly, online video publishers will treat Facebook.com as a Web publishing platform that is as important as their own Web domains. Facebook will welcome and embrace using its site as a media distribution end-point, offering rich tools and a business model that doesn’t require that it share in advertising revenue generated from impressions on its site. This will be highly attractive to publishers and we’ll see more and more VOD type applications launched concurrently on publisher sites and Facebook.com.
4. Video Ubiquity—Every Company is a Media Company
While a bit of a cliché, we’re seeing this happen at an accelerating pace. In 2011, if you are a professional institution, organization or business of any size, you will have an online video strategy. Video is becoming such a central part of how one communicates, markets, educates and informs online that every pro website will be publishing some form of online video.
It will first feel a lot like the brochureware era of the first generation Internet, with a lot of poorly-conceived and poorly-executed content. But a new era of Web video production businesses will emerge much as the Web development industry of the mid-90’s emerged, and organizations will start to iterate and experiment with how to best accomplish their online objectives using video.
5. Battle Over Video Delivery Standards Heats Up
Google’s recent announcement that they are acquiring Widevine adds fuel to what is already an important platform war over how video is consumed, secured and delivered both on PCs and increasingly on non-PC devices.
Several alternative stacks are emerging for encrypting / securing and then, in turn, delivering video in a high-quality and reliable manner to all platforms and devices. Apple offers Apple HTTP Streaming which both secures video and provides for adaptive delivery to both HTML5 and iOS Apps, but is proprietary to Apple’s devices and software.
Adobe offers its own DRM services and HTTP streaming standards, both of which are proprietary but are designed to work across client and device platforms that support the Flash runtime.
And now Google will get in the mix with Widevine’s technology, which also provides a method to encrypt and secure video files and deliver them to nearly any device or operating system using adaptive bitrate HTTP streaming. We should expect that, like with On2’s video codecs which were open-sourced as the WebM video standard, Google will open source and freely distribute the Widevine technology, as well as bundle it as a standard part of the infrastructure in Chrome, Chrome OS and Android browsers and operating systems.
It all adds up to more Web videos on more devices and points to a day when we won’t be able to tell the difference between the Web and TV.

How to Speed up Search Engine Indexing

Image via Wikipedia

It’s a common knowledge that nowadays users don’t only search for trusted sources of information but also for fresh content. That’s why the last couple of years, the Search engines have been working on how to speed up their indexing process. Few months ago, Google has announced the completion of their new indexing system called Caffeine which promises fresher results and faster indexation.

The truth is that comparing to the past, the indexing process has became much faster. Nevertheless lots of webmasters still face indexing problems either when they launch a new website or when they add new pages. In this article we will discuss 5 simple SEO techniques that can help you speed up the indexation of your website.

1. Add links on high traffic websites

The best thing you can do in such situations is to increase the number of links that point to your homepage or to the page that you want to index. The number of incoming links and the PageRank of the domain, affect directly both the total number of indexed pages of the website and the speed of indexation.

As a result by adding links from high traffic websites you can reduce the indexing time. This is because the more links a page receives, the greater the probabilities are to be indexed. So if you face indexing problems make sure you add your link in your blog, post a thread in a relevant forum, write press releases or articles that contain the link and submit them to several websites. Additionally social media can be handy tools in such situation, despite the fact that in most of the cases their links are nofollowed. Have in mind that even if the major search engines claim that they do not follow the nofollowed links, experiments have shown that not only they do follow them but also that they index the pages faster (Note that the fact that they follow them does not mean that they pass any link juice to them).

2. Use XML and HTML sitemaps

Theoretically Search Engines are able to extract the links of a page and follow them without needing your help. Nevertheless it is highly recommended to use XML or HTML sitemaps since it is proven that they can help the indexation process. After creating the XML sitemaps make sure you submit them to the Webmaster Consoles of the various search engines and include them in robots.txt. So make sure you keep your sitemaps up-to-date and resubmit them when you have major changes in your website.

3. Work on your Link Structure

As we saw in previous articles, link structure is extremely important for SEO because it can affect your rankings, the PageRank distribution and the indexation. Thus if you face indexing problems check your link structure and ensure that the not-indexed pages are linked properly from webpages that are as close as possible to the root (homepage). Also make sure that your site does not have duplicate content problems that could affect both the number of pages that get indexed and the average crawl period.

A good method to achieve the faster indexation of a new page is to add a link directly from your homepage. Finally if you want to increase the number of indexed pages, make sure you have a tree-like link structure in your website and that your important pages are no more than 3 clicks away from the home page (Three-click rule).

4. Change the crawl rate

Another way to decrease the indexing time in Google is to change the crawl rate from the Google Webmaster Tools Console. Setting the crawl rate to “faster” will allow Googlebot to crawl more pages but unfortunately it will also increase the generated traffic on your server. Of course since the maximum allowed crawl rate that you can set is roughly 1 request every 3-4 seconds (actually 0.5 requests per second + 2 seconds pause between requests), this should not cause serious problems for your server.

 

 

 

 

5. Use the available tools

The major search engines provide various tools that can help you manage your website. Bing provides you with the Bing Toolbox, Google supports the Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo offers the Yahoo Site Explorer. In all the above consoles you can manage the indexation settings of your website and your submitted sitemaps. Make sure that you use all of them and that you regularly monitor your websites for warnings and errors. Also resubmit or ping search engine sitemap services when you make a significant amount of changes on your website. A good tool that can help you speed up this pinging process is the Site Submitter, nevertheless it is highly recommended that you use also the official tools of every search engine.

If you follow all the above tips and you still face indexing problems then you should check whether your website is banned from the search engines, if it is developed with search engine friendly techniques, whether you have enough domain authority to index the particular amount of pages or if you have made a serious SEO mistake (for example block the search engines by using robots.txt or meta-robots etc). A good way to detect such mistakes is to use the Web SEO Analysis tool which provides detailed diagnostics.  Finally most of the major search engines have special groups and forums where you can seek for help, so make sure you visit them and post your questions.

If you like this article, use the bookmark buttons on the top of the page and share it with other users.

Posted by bbriniotis on 30th of August, 2010 at 11:17

More accurate and faster than the speed of Google's new look!

Image by lukedbaker via Flickr

Google will not search pages, polished look, but the speed and the engine is found to build up again - in time to the development phase is expected to review the changes. Caffeine baptized in the name of the new Search Google for the usual Puritan, built on a Spartan look, which is clearly a good move for the mogul on the Internet - no need to continue to design, the important thing is the service speed and quality. The web is already found in the writings of the most important issues in conformity with a summary of the first detailed results of tests and interviews detailing the changes are real consequences.

They can be smarter already after reading the brilliant innovations in relation to Google, of course, what the average user is not necessarily required, since the outcome is usually the same as you are wont: a quick and easy searches, reliable hit rate. These experts, however, the company that there is still room for improvement, the two-year project (which is the Google File System, which covers the development of the GFS), the first slow to show results. These are clearly visible on the basis of the first tests of the new search engine in a number of kills, and provides more accurate, faster and it makes an average of about 0.2 seconds lefaragva most of the time required.

Particular attention is paid to the new sites on the Internet to index changes, which are also accelerated to seek more accurate, more effective. Although this almost every day to change, modify, the recent development in a comprehensive enough to give a specific name. The makers of the new engine is much more flexible and more power, opportunity predecessor, which was also recorded by the companies and then exploited when the search results will be sorted out. What users are happy to be that Google does not stand watching the competitors attempt, whether the presentation of a brand new search engine, or against a specific alliance.

The comScore survey, while interesting results have been published in which Google continues to be confident in leading the search market (the United States, 65 per cent share), but also show that the solutions are used to make a better turn to rival search engine company in service. Google is much more user loyalty, they are much less likely to use fanyalodnak the competition platform, and a month, almost twice as many searches are settled.

Digital Britain: a revolution for UK internet users?

After months of anticipation, communications minister Lord Carter's Digital Britain report was finally released to the masses yesterday. Although there were few surprises - the interim report released in January had many industry commentators prepared for what was to come - the revelations have created debate concerning the effectiveness of the proposals and whether or not they will really achieve the government's digital inclusions goals.
The report's main points include a minimum 2MB broadband connection for all households by 2012, a speed that Lord Carter has called "a technological minimum wage". While this objective has been public for some time, the report also revealed that the government hopes to levy a 50p per month 'broadband tax' on all households, in order to pay for the rollout of next-generation broadband.
In addition, internet service providers in Britain will be required to cut illegal file sharing on their networks by 70 per cent in the next 12 months. Analogue radio will be phased out and replaced exclusively by digital stations by the end of 2015 and, while there were some fears that Channel 4 and Five would be merged together, the report's conclusions instead will give 4 financial assistance from the government in order to create a joint venture with BBC Worldwide.
But what does the Digital Britain report mean for online advertising and the search industry? The effects will be made clearer when - and if - the proposals start rolling out over the next few years but initially, wider broadband coverage clearly indicates a broader market for advertisers. According to the report 2.75 million homes, around 11 per cent of households, in the UK do not have access to a broadband connection of 2Mbps. What's more, the prospect of superfast broadband speeds could also mean the potential for more advertising exposure - i.e., as internet connections get faster, users can carry out more searches and visit more sites in an hour then they would previously have been able to.
And while Google - a company that's been integral to the development of the digital landscape in the UK - isn't the focus of the document's proposals, it certainly makes its presence felt throughout the report. Lord Carter's introduction starts off by highlighting the huge amount of activity that takes place on Google and YouTube every day and uses the firm's massive growth over the last ten years as an example of how far the digital economy has come in the 21st century.
It also seems that Google has been taking many steps to keep the government on-side. For starters, it has joined the Ofcom-led Consortium of Stakeholders to drive Digital Participation, along with AOL and Yahoo!. This super-group will have £12 million of funding available to them over three years to facilitate this goal. What's more, Mountain View has also signed up to the Broadband Stakeholders' Group's Audiovisual Content Information Good Practice Principles, which aims to provide "clear, consistent information about commercially-provided audiovisual content". Other signatories include AOL, Yahoo!, MySpace, BBC, Channel 4, Five, ITV and Microsoft.
But it's not all good feeling between Google and Westminster. In the report's discussions of digital security and assurance, it cites Google Streetview as a key point of consumer concern over online privacy. How the future of this service will play out as the government seeks to take steps to address these worries is still to be seen, but it seems unlikely that it will move towards a total shutdown as seen in Greece - particularly since the report also states that the Space Innovation and Growth team will start cataloguing satellite data collected by Google Earth.
While the Digital Britain proposals have been welcomed by some and criticised by others, what really stands out is that nothing is yet certain. The objectives lined out in the document have yet to be agreed upon so whether any of them will come into being remains unsure. However, even if its most basic goals - like broadband for all - are approved, the implications for the digital economy, and therefore online advertising and search, are sure to be significant.

by Search Copywriter
Y. Sulaiman

Google Optimization: Using Search Operators

Image by rustybrick via Flickr

The underlying premise of SEO suggests that you understand the task at hand when it comes to outranking the other 999 entrants for any given keyword.
Google stops indexing a particular keyword after 1,000 results when assessing the aggregate relevance score to determine which results are spawned. By truly understanding this, you can discover a great deal from using a few basic Google search operators to determine what type of foothold a competitor has for a given keyword or niche.

Basic Competitive Analysis Metrics

1. Start with the keyword you are interested in researching. Place the keyword "in quotes" in a Google search box.
For example "SEO" returns 262,000,000 competing pages with the chronological order of the strongest sites first.
Then look to the right and determine the number of competing pages you are up against "for that keyword". It will say results 1 of 10 of (the number of competing pages).
This allows you to assess the competitive landscape with one brief metric. The extent of what you consider a competitive keyword depends on the website. For example, most websites can acquire a keyword under 50,000 competing pages with ease and competitive keywords start above 100,000 results and ascend into the millions (pages in index / divided by the top 1,000 results).

The next few metrics will allow you to understand where your SEO ceiling is (what threshold your website has for keyword benchmarks). Our blog for example can devour a keyword with up to 1,000,000 competing pages just from one post of mentioning those keywords (without backlinks).
So, all the talk about building website authority does have a place when you understand the implications to rank with less effort. Authority sites have the ability to zero in on a keyword and skip over hundreds of other websites and reach the top 10 results by the merit of trust and internal link weight and dynamism they possess. In keeping with the topic at hand, let's move to the next metric.

2. Evaluate your competitors domain and determine the amount of pages they have by using this search command in Google. You can use the #1 site and the #10 site to gauge an average of pages required to capture the keyword or, if you want you can use the #1st, 2nd and 3rd site that rank for the selected keyword to see which formulas they are entrenched in.
site:competitorsite.com (this shows you how many pages they have indexed in Google)

3. Next, determine how saturated their website is with the keyword in question.
site:competitorsite.com keyword
This shows you how many pages are indexed that include the keyword within their website. If the site in the top 10 is an authority domain, it can rank from one keyword alone in the title tag, description tag or having the keyword in the body text (or any combination of these three metrics).
While most websites do not have that luxury, often dozens or hundreds of pages are required to cross the tipping point of co-occurrence for that keyword within the website and acquire a top ranking. However each keyword has a threshold which is going to vary depending on the unique metrics of each website (which is why you need to look at more than one site for evaluation).

4. Now that you know that your competitor's site contains Y amount of pages and X amount of those pages are dedicated to a specific keyword, you can go the the most relevant listing returned from their site and look at the off page factors (which means finding out how many backlinks are linking to that page). To do so, use Yahoo Site Explorer and type the specific URL in and look at the inlinks tab to see how many pages are linking to that page.

For example, if the homepage is returned as the top ranking result for the keyword using the competitorsite.com keyword search command, ignore it and look for an actual page that has a title, or relevant shingle with the keyword (in the title, URL or description).
If they targeted a keyword using a broad match method (which means it was not necessarily the objective, but their site acquired the ranking based on ambient factors, then you will only see a sparse mention of the keyword). The point being, the homepage is a catch all and will not provide you with the same amount of depth when attempting to data mine deep links from your competitors.

The idea is, you want to know (a) how many pages they have indexed (b) how many pages contain the keyword (c) how many deep links (how many links just to that page) the top ranking page has (from outside the site) as well as (d) how well the site in internally linked (for that keyword).
We can determine criteria a-c with simple search commands, and you can also determine if the site is treated as an authority based on the keywords that appear in bold when using the site: command, websites start transforming into authority sites through topical relevance after 200-300 pages are developed around a topic (if they are linked and optimized properly).

5. Crunch the numbers and assess the competitive landscape of the keyword in question.
For example, if you know that the top 3 sites all have an average of 1000 pages and out of those 1000 pages 50% or more of them contain the keyword in question and your site has 20 pages, then you are not being realistic with your ranking objectives.
I am not suggesting to go add 1000 pages overnight (as that would not be natural) but rather, start chipping away at the keyword using a variety of SEO tactics.

6. Check the allintitle, allintext and allinanchor thresholds for the selected competitors' sites. This means finding where they rank in Google (in the top 1,000 results before the results get obscured / redundant) using the following search operators.
allintitle:keyword (who has the highest occurrence of keyword in title)
allintext:keyword (who has the highest occurrence of keyword in their body text)
allinanchor:keyword (who has the highest occurrence of anchor text / links with this keyword)
Using Google again, you can look at the competitor's on page and off page metrics, instead of breaking them out individually, you can just use NicheWatch instead, or our Ultimate SEO Toolkit, to perform this function.

The Conclusion
SEO is only limited by your imagination when it comes to determining the extent of how you use tactics for discovery and analysis. We covered a few simple metrics using Google search operators above that allow you to isolate co-occurrence and determine the global keyword density for a site.
This does provide a preliminary analysis to at least let you know what your up against (qualifying a competitor or your domain to a keyword). If you reverse engineer the averages, you can find the tipping point for essentially any keyword and craft a plan of action to acquire it.
For example 1,000 pages indexed, 900 have the keyword in exact match and the main landing page has 50 inbound links from Page Rank 4 pages. Now you have a threshold to exceed. Although this is a preliminary method, sometimes looking at basic metrics such as these can provide an immense amount of insight and determine the next competitive threshold you target for analysis.

About The Author:
Jeffrey Smith is an active internet marketing optimization strategist, consultant and the founder of Seo Design Solutions Seo Company. He has actively been involved in internet marketing since 1995 and brings a wealth of collective experiences and fresh marketing strategies to individuals involved in online business.

Google Friend Connect Now Open To All Websites

by Erick Schonfeld on December 4, 2008

Update: Facebook just opened up FB Connect as well in a self-serve fashion. It’s mano-a-mano.

The battle over who will control access to your online identity is heating up. In the wake of more and more partners finally starting to take a shine to Facebook’s competing FB Connect (which we just implemented on Techcrunch), Google’s Friend Connect is now in an open beta. Before it was in a limited preview release, but now any website can add Google Friend Connect as a login option.

Google Friend Connect is OpenSocial’s answer to Facebook Connect. It lets other websites accept a member’s OpenSocial username and password to log into their sites. More importantly, it also lets websites access users’ social data, which includes friend lists, profile information, feed messages, reviews, ratings and the like.

Since it is based on OpenID, visitors to a Website that adds Friend Connect code will be able to sign in using their Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID usernames and passwords. The Websites will also be able to add any OpenSocial apps developed by third parties. And it supports the OAuth data portability standard.

When you drill down into the technical details, there are some differences between Friend Connect and FB Connect. But ultimately, what is at stake here is what will become the identity and data portability standard on the Web, and who will control it. While Friend Connect is taking a more open-standards approach, Facebook has the users and the momentum. Who are you betting on?

Thinking of Launching a Negative Keyword Campaign?

Before launching a negative keyword campaign, let’s make sure everyone understands what it is. First of all, here’s a little background information on keywords. Keywords are words that search engines use to search for relevant Web pages.
Negative keywords are used in keyword advertising to hinder ads from being shown when a search term contains the negative keywords.
As Google clarifies, negative keywords aren’t for everyone. People are accustomed to using keywords to drive traffic to their site, but as everyone knows, not all traffic is good traffic. This is where negative keywords come into the game.
If you are a retail company and want specific, targeted traffic, a negative keyword ad campaign is something you might want to consider. For instance, if you’re a company that only sells women’s clothing, you could put “men’s clothing” as a negative keyword.
Each of the search engines are different when it comes to their allotment of negative keywords. Google allows a maximum of 10,000 terms or phrases. Yahoo! allows 250 maximum terms or phrases. The total character count for all negative keywords for Microsoft cannot surpass 1,022 and no single keyword can go beyond 100 characters.
Being very specific and targeted is key to a successful negative keyword ad campaign. There are several tools available to help you in this effort. Google offers several tools such as Google Keyword Tool, Google Suggest, and Google Product Search. WordTracker is another tool that helps you to filter that unwanted traffic. Ken Jurina (as seen in the above WPN video from PubCon 2008) and the Epiar crew recently announced a new negative keyword service that uses their proprietary keyword research application to generate a prioritized negative keyword list.

Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn | Guy Kawasaki

Image via CrunchBase

by:Mario Sundar
When Guy Kawasaki blogged about the Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn, LinkedIn had 8.5 million users in 130 industries. Since then we’ve grown to over 12 million users covering 147 industries, but many of Guy’s suggestions on using LinkedIn (see below), still remain a great way for professionals to strengthen their online brand reputation and leverage their professional network. Happy Reading!

1. Increase your visibility.
   By adding connections, you increase the likelihood that people will see your profile first when they’re searching for someone to hire or do business with. In addition to appearing at the top of search results  (which is a major plus if you’re one of the 52,000 product managers on LinkedIn), people would much rather work with people who their friends know and trust.
   
2. Improve your connectability.
   Most new users put only their current company in their profile. By doing so, they severely limit their ability to connect with people. You should fill out your profile like it’s an executive bio, so include
   past companies, education, affiliations, and activities.
   You can also include a link to your profile as part of an email signature. The added benefit is that the link enables people to see all your credentials, which would be awkward if not downright strange, as
   an attachment.
   
3. Improve your Google PageRank.
   LinkedIn allows you to make your profile information available for search engines to index. Since LinkedIn profiles receive a fairly high PageRank in Google, this is a good way to influence what people see when they search for you.
   To do this, create a public profile and select “Full View.” Also, instead of using the default URL, customize your public profile’s URL to be your actual name. To strengthen the visibility of this page in
   search engines, use this link in various places on the web> For example, when you comment in a blog, include a link to your profile in your signature.
   
4. Enhance your search engine results.
   In addition to your name, you can also promote your blog or website to search engines like Google and Yahoo! Your LinkedIn profile allows you to publicize websites. There are a few pre-selected categories like “My Website,” “My Company,” etc.
   If you select “Other” you can modify the name of the link. If you’re linking to your personal blog, include your name or descriptive terms in the link, and voila! instant search-engine optimization for your site. To make this work, be sure your public profile setting is set to “Full View.”
   
5. Perform blind, “reverse,” and company reference checks.
   LinkedIn’s reference check tool to input a company name and the years the person worked at the company to search for references. Your search will find the people who worked at the company during the same time period. Since references provided by a candidate will generally be glowing, this is a good way to get more balanced data.
   Companies will typically check your references before hiring you, but have you ever thought of checking your prospective manager’s references? Most interviewees don’t have the audacity to ask a
   potential boss for references, but with LinkedIn you have a way to scope her out.
   You can also check up on the company itself by finding the person who used to have the job that you’re interviewing for. Do this by searching for job title and company, but be sure to uncheck “Current titles only.” By contacting people who used to hold the position, you can get the inside scoop on the job, manager and growth potential.
   By the way, if using LinkedIn in these ways becomes a common practice, we’re apt to see more truthful resumes. There’s nothing more amusing than to find out that the candidate who claims to have caused some huge success was a total bozo who was just along for the ride.
   
6. Increase the relevancy of your job search.
   Use LinkedIn’s advanced search to find people with educational and work experience like yours to see where they work. For example, a programmer would use search keywords such as “Ruby on Rails,” “C++,” “Python,” “Java,” and “evangelist” to find out where other programmers with these skills work.
   
7. Make your interview go smoother.
   You can use LinkedIn to find the people that you’re meeting. Knowing that you went to the same school, plays hockey, or shares acquaintances is a lot better than an awkward silence after, “I’m doing fine, thank you.”
   
8. Gauge the health of a company.
   Perform an advanced search for company name and uncheck the “Current Companies Only” box. This will enable you to scrutinize the rate of turnover and whether key people are abandoning ship. Former employees usually give more candid opinions about a company’s prospects than someone who’s still on board.
   
9. Gauge the health of an industry.
   If you’re thinking of investing or working in a sector, use LinkedIn to find people who worked for competitors—or even better, companies who failed. For example, suppose you wanted to build a next generation online pet store, you’d probably learn a lot from speaking with former Pets.com or WebVan employees.
   
10. Track startups.
    You can see people in your network who are initiating new startups by doing an advanced search for a range of keywords such as “stealth” or “new startup.” Apply the “Sort By” filter to “Degrees away from you” in order to see the people closest to you first. [Republished from: Ten Ways to Use LinkedIn via "How to Change the World" -- Guy Kawasaki's blog]
    

Guy is known for bringing the concept of technology evangelism to the masses through his pioneering work at Apple’s Macintosh group. In addition to blogging the above post earlier this year, he has also blogged on topics ranging from LinkedIn Profile Extreme Makeover to LinkedIn and the Art of avoiding an Asshole Boss. [Source: Guy Kawasaki's weblog -- How to Change the World]

What is it: Sphinn?

Image by egoodman via Flickr

Sphinn is a social site for search and interactive marketers. It's designed to allow you to share and discover news stories, read and take part in discussions, discover events of interest and network with others. Here's a summary of how to get started:

• Read News & Discussions: The Hot Topics area of Sphinn is what you'll see by default when you come into the site. That's why the little Hot Topics "tab" will be colored green. This area shows you news stories submitted to Sphinn and discussions within the site that have been voted the most active recently by the Sphinn community. If you're busy and want to know what's hot, Hot Topics delivers this to you at a glance. You can even get information sent to you via email or news feed.
• Share News: Read a news story you want to share with others? Use the Submit Topics tab to enter the story's URL, and then your submission will appear within the New Topics area of Sphinn. If enough people "Sphinn" it, the story might move into the Hot Topics area. Submit stories that got "hot" on a regular basis, and you could appear as one of the top Sphinners. To submit, you have to be come a member. It's free and easy -- takes only a few seconds and an email address. Sign-up here.
• Start Discussions: Want to talk about something relating to internet or search engine marketing? Also use the Submit Topics tag, give your topic a title and start the discussion off with your post. Others can then add their comments to what you've said, and you can respond in turn. Like news stories, new discussions show up within the New Topics area and move to the Hot Topics area if enough members Sphinn them.
• Network: Looking to meet other online marketers? Sphinn makes it easy. Submit interesting stories or make important points in discussions, and people might decide to stalk you. Don't worry -- stalking's a good thing at Sphinn! It means someone's interested in following what you're doing here. You can view all your stalkers at any time (and choose to share this with the public, if you want). Find some of them interesting? Stalk them back, and that turns them into friends at Sphinn. The Network page is where you can search for people in addition to finding them through news stories and discussions.
• Find Events: Made some friends online that you'd like to meet in person? There's always plenty of in-person events going on related to search and interactive marketing. Use the Events Calendar to see what's coming up. You can also associate yourself with an event, so that others know you'll be going. Or check out those already saying they'll be there!

That's the fast overview of Sphinn. There's more you can do, such as drill-down to find news and discussions in particular categories of interest (such as Google AdWords or SEO), and the help area will explain more details about Sphinn to you. There are also tools you can use to bookmark stories to Sphinn or place a Sphinn button your marketing site, so that your readers can share your content with the Sphinn community.
Aside from the community itself, Sphinn has a staff of administrators and moderators to watch over things. You'll find them listed here on our staff page. Need to contact someone about an issue? Use the contact page.
By the way, Sphinn is part of the Third Door Media network. Be sure to check out our other sites for search marketers:

• Search Engine Land: A hub for news and information about search engine marketing, optimization and how search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft Live.com and Ask.com work for searchers.
• Search Marketing Now: SMN webcasts combine the most authoritative and actionable education about search engine marketing issues with the convenience of attending online
• Search Marketing Expo: SMX is our search marketing conference and expo offering education and networking in locations in the US and Europe throughout the year.

Finally, why Sphinn? We liked the idea of a place where marketers could put their own spin on news by commenting on stories or having discussions. But spin.com was taken, as was spinn.com and sphinnn.com was a N too far, we felt. So we went with sphinn.com, pronouncing it "sp-hinn."