Social networking tools
Partly because blogging is a form of networking and partly because a lot of blogging is being done by Web innovators, many bloggers are heavily involved with social networks, such as LinkedIn, Audioscrobbler, and Friendster.
What these sites aim to do is better connect you with your current group of friends or colleagues and to build relationships between those with similar interests. Sound a little like the network of relationships inherent to blogs and blogging? It should! Being a member of these communities has intangible benefits but definitely demonstrates an understanding of Internet trends and technologies that only speaks well of you. Additionally, your accessibility through these mediums encourages curious bloggers and readers to get in touch directly. And, of course, getting hooked into the conversations going on within these networks can generate buzz and readership for your blog.
Not all of these networks are useful to you, but think creatively about how you can leverage these networks to add value and functionality to your business blog.
Audioscrobbler
Audioscrobbler (www.audioscrobbler.com) collects information about the music you listen to and then matches your musical tastes with that of other users. The result is a list of recommended music and contacts with whom you can talk in forums and form into groups (see Figure 8-5).
Figure 8-5:
Share your musical tastes on Audioscrobbler and find others with similar interests.
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"For a Hard1 Earned Thirst, Audio jcrobb lei
Welcome to Audioscrobbler.
Audioscrobbler builds a profile of your musical taste using a plugin for your media player (Winamp, ¡Tunes, XMMS etc..)- Plugins send the name of every song you play to the Audioscrobbler server, which updates your musical profile with the new song. Every person with a plugin has their own page on this site which shows their listening statistics. The system automatically matches you to people with a similar music taste, and generates personalised recommendations.
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Morning..
Some maintenance from yesterday went on a little longer than expected, but things are running smoothly again now. Oh, and we have some rules for the forums now, and a more visible way of searching them.
New Artist Similarity
Posted by on Nov 9 2004, 20:31 UTC [ 69 replies 1
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Artist similarity data (see 'Similar' link on artist pages) has been updated. Statusquo83 wrote an algorithm that takes only 9 mins to run on my PC using the most recent data dump.. Nice and fast :) See what you think of the results.
Friendster
Friendster is a purely social networking tool designed to connect groups of friends and allows you to build relationships with your friends' friends. The basic premise is that this is a friend-making tool where the people you come in contact with are already known to your friends or friends' friends. This is a great tool for making contacts with young, single people!
LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) is a purely professional network of 1.4 million people. Register and provide some basic information about yourself and then feed your Rolodex into the system. If you have colleagues that aren't registered, you can invite them. Use the system to search for people and organizations you want to make contact with. For example, if you want to make contact with the CEO of a company to establish a business relationship, do a search for that person's name. If the CEO is in the system, LinkedIn tells you how many contacts you have in common, or trace a route from your contacts, your contacts' contacts, and hence to the CEO.
The entire system is based on referrals, so the chances are high that you can make a connection to a potential business partner. I used LinkedIn, which is shown in Figure 8-6, frequently while writing this book to find and request contact with bloggers and technology companies.
Figure 8-6:
The LinkedIn professional network allows you to leverage the contacts of your contacts to make new business relationships.
Figure 8-6:
The LinkedIn professional network allows you to leverage the contacts of your contacts to make new business relationships.
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