I just completed the PRoactive Report on Monitoring the Online Conversation so it’s very timely.

Other sessions I plan to attend and blog baout

• Actionable Social Media:

• Podcast & Audio Search:
• Images & Search Engines:

With Google Universal pulling in images, news, audio and video these are the must attend sessions.  I will cover them this week, so keep reading.

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Downtime can be scarier than any Halloween spookiness for a site publisher. While search engines like Google will send their indexing spiders around multiple times to a site, too many inaccessible results due to downtime could be interpreted as a site that no longer exists.

Getting dropped from Google could make that non-existence very real. A recent post at Royal Pingdom cited the danger of downtime, with the corresponding effect of vanishing from Google’s index, ruining whatever SEO work has been done until the spiders come back for a return visit.

They cited Matt Cutts on a previous comment about downtime, where he noted that Google does try to go back and recrawl pages it has dropped previously, in case the site has returned. Rather than relying on Google’s return after dropping pages, webmasters need to keep an eye on their sites for downtime issues.

Pingdom modestly suggests its service as one of any number of options for monitoring a service. Site publishers will also want to check out Google’s Webmaster Central and the site tools they make available.

What you may not want to hear: The kids are cool with this; they consider it a "cost of doing business."

In general, girls are more likely than boys to be approached by a stranger, and are more likely to feel uncomfortable or scared about it. Thirty-nine percent of girls have been approached, compared to 24 percent of boys; while 11 percent of girls reported feeling scared or uncomfortable, only four percent of boys reported the same

The likelihood of contact goes up significantly among those with social networking profiles and photos of themselves posted. Overall, 44 percent of those with profiles and 49 percent of those with posted photos have been contacted by people they don’t know, with nine and ten percent, respectively, saying they were uncomfortable or scared by the contact.

Comparatively, only 16 percent of those with no profile or no photos posted reported such contact from those other than their friends, and five percent or less reported being uncomfortable or scared.

Interestingly, of those that have been contacted by strangers online, those with profiles are less likely to be uncomfortable with the experience.

"This result is not necessarily surprising since nearly half (49%) of social networking teens use these sites to make new friends—in other words, connect with people they do not currently know," says Pew research specialist Aaron Smith, author of the study.

"It may also be the case that profile-owning teens see some level of unwanted contact as a known downside of maintaining a social networking profile and view it as a relatively minor ‘cost of doing business’ in this environment.

Interestingly, Internet monitoring software that allows parental supervision appears to be more effective than online filtering for preventing unwanted contact from strangers.
 
 

The new media are rewarding more participatory, more sincere, and less directive marketing styles than the old broadcast media rewarded.

The transformation is unfolding on a model of consumer collaboration, in which consumers use digital media that lie beyond the control of marketers to communicate among one another, responding to marketing’s intrusions by disseminating counterargument, information sharing, rebuttal, parody, reproach and, though more rarely, fandom

Key concepts in the report include:

• Successful interactive marketing may be less a matter of domination and control, and more a matter of fitting in.
• There is a human need to assert and present to the world a self-serving identity and to manage one’s personal reputation.
• The form of interactivity most attractive to marketing is one that facilitates people’s ability to construct their identity and contribute to the making of meaning.

.We are certainly seeing an increased interest in social  media strategies.  The first action to take is to listen to the conversations online.  And you have to keep monitoring these conversations all the time.

So an online reputation monitoring tool like the new Brandseye from the UK, which can not only monitor what is being said about you and your competitors but can also evaluate the remarks and calculate a brand ‘score,’ is vital to the success of any social media marketing or PR strategy.

If you are interested in what it can do, drop me an email. sallyf at expansionplus dot com

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It’ll still be quite a while before that free electricity offsets the initial cost of the system, but at least the panels have earned Google a little positive PR.  The Earth Times Online, for example, states, “The Google system is also now the largest solar installation on any corporate campus in the United States.”

To help people grasp the size of this development, Google has even created a new performance monitoring site; I’m told that, over the past day, those solar panels have generated enough electricity to run almost 6,000 loads of laundry.  There are interesting charts, as well – as it is solar power Google’s using, you’ll note that output drops to zero overnight.

That’s not a problem, though.  “The system will offset peak electricity consumption at the solar powered offices and the newly constructed solar carports have charging stations for the plug-in hybrids,” writes Dan Reicher, Google.org’s Director of Climate and Energy Initiatives, on the Official Google Blog.

Google’s got deep pockets; its attitude towards solar power could change the way a lot of important people think.  And even if the search engine company didn’t just affect the whole oil industry, well . . . the power of positive PR could wipe out some bad feelings.

She looks at one firm that claims to “DESTROY” negative content, for just $29.95. A closer look at the fine print reveals a nightmare waiting to happen.

You authorize us to take such action on your behalf, and to identify ourselves as acting on your behalfThe Customer also acknowledges and accepts the risk that Reputationxxxxxx, Inc., may not succeed in effecting the removal and/or alteration of any Internet content about the CustomerYou recognize that such contact may have unpredictable side-effects, including but not limited to negative responses from others.

Cool, so for thirty bucks, you’ll create a bigger mess than I’m already in? Where do I join?

Do yourself a favor, don’t touch any reputation management service that costs less than a good steak. In fact, take a look at the do-it-yourself online reputation monitoring guide, I put together last year, and treat your loved-one to a good steak instead. ; )

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

The software, entitled Zephyr, will store the name, age, and location data that their children input into their MySpace profiles. The software will also alert parents anytime that information changes, and will be stored in a password protected file on the hard disk which can also be accessed remotely.

The software, however, does nothing to actually prevent the children from entering fraudulent information into their profiles.

Pete Cashmore gives his breakdown of Zephyr:

Wow. Parents communicating with their children; it seems like such a bourgeois concept, doesn’t it?

Of course, parent/child communication is ultimately the best defense against online predators. Right now, the minimum age requirement to sign up for a MySpace account is 14 years of age. Profiles of MySpace members under the age of 16 are supposed to be hidden from anyone 18 and over, but a hack was posted in mid-2006 that seemingly bypassed that restriction.

Try as it might, Zephyr will only serve to document the problem. The burden of addressing MySpace misuse ultimately falls on the shoulders of the parents.

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There are a lot of different ones on the Internet, some are free and some are very expensive. All the ones I found share the same complexity and that doesn’t work for me. So after browsing the web for a while to find a suitable tool I gave up empty handed. I had to write the tool my self.

This is what I wanted

• Automatic start-up
• Multi website support
• Check both HTTP status and title tag
• Balloon tip notifications
• Systray application
• Install and forget
• Low impact and high performance

This is what I didn’t need

• E-mail notifications
• History feature
• Server installation

The end result is this very simple but very powerful application that does nothing more than it is supposed to do.

It checks websites quietly in the background and pops a balloon tip if a site doesn’t return HTTP status “200 – OK”.

The reason why I chose not to include a history and email/SMS notification feature is because those features are not useful if you sit in front of your computer all day. Then a simple balloon notification would be much less obstrusive. If I’m not in front of my computer I can’t fix any issues on the websites anyway and I don’t want messages on my phone in the weekend.

Download

Site Monitor installer (398 KB)

C# source code (57 KB)

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Mads Kristensen currently works as a Senior Developer at Traceworks located
in Copenhagen, Denmark. Mads graduated from Copenhagen Technical Academy with a multimedia degree in
2003, but has been a professional developer since 2000. His main focus is on ASP.NET but is responsible for Winforms, Windows- and
web services in his daily work as well. A true .NET developer with great passion for the simple solution.

http://www.madskristensen.dk/

It lets you write to the EventLog, Sql Server and WMI as standard and lets you write your own provider that monitors the different events that occurs in a web application or ones you raise yourself.

Read more on MSDN about using health monitoring in ASP.NET 2.0.

It also lets you send an email when an error occurs with writing anything but some lines in the web.config. This is amazing.

I don’t know how many times I’ve written some code that would send me a mail when a critical or unexpected error happens. For smaller web applications, this is absolutely amazing, because you probably don’t want a big event logging framework when building a simple presentational website.

It is built so clever, that you don’t get an email every time an error occurs. You can set the interval or get with the one minute default. If five errors occur within that one minute, only one mail is sent with the information of all the errors so you mailbox won’t get flooded.

I couldn’t find an example of how to use health monitoring to send an e-mail, but a lot of articles on the web led me in the right direction. After doing some research and trial-and-error I finally made it work.

Here is a very simple web.config file that sends an e-mail whenever an unhandled error occurs. Pay attention to the <healthMonitoring> and <system.net> section. These are the important ones that makes it work.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<configuration>
   <appSettings/>
   <connectionStrings/>

   </system.web>
   <system.net>
     <mailSettings>
       <smtp from="you@domain.com">
         <network host="smtp.domain.com" />
       </smtp>
     </mailSettings>
   </system.net>
</configuration>

How easy can it get? Truly amazing.

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Mads Kristensen currently works as a Senior Developer at Traceworks located
in Copenhagen, Denmark. Mads graduated from Copenhagen Technical Academy with a multimedia degree in
2003, but has been a professional developer since 2000. His main focus is on ASP.NET but is responsible for Winforms, Windows- and
web services in his daily work as well. A true .NET developer with great passion for the simple solution.

http://www.madskristensen.dk/

Pingdom dropped us a note to remind us their year of free website monitoring offer will run through 6 am ET Saturday, December 23rd. The signup process will not ask for a credit card, nor will it require server-side configuration.

“This is our Christmas present to all the webmasters and server administrators out there,” says Sam Nurmi, CEO of Pingdom. “There is a lot of time for something to go wrong during a long weekend. You really don’t want your visitors and customers to be the first to notice that your company website is down.”

Many of our readers probably have something in place to handle automated monitoring chores. But if there isn’t one in place, Pingdom’s offer is worth a look.

Their service can monitor websites available to the public, or ones that are password-protected like customer login areas. Pingdom can also keep an eye on email or any other web service that may be running on a site.

The service connects to a site from multiple locations globally. A single point of failure could be a problem with a given route, like the type usually inflicted by the time-honored backhoe blade dropped through a cable method. Other routes could still be available when that happens, so a webmaster can verify that the problem in one place isn’t a showstopper for other visitors.

From press time, there are about nineteen hours left until Pingdom’s free offer expires. That would leave the service available for the normal $9.95 per month fee for interested customers.

—

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.