“Liking” the changes in people’s relationship status is also a tricky proposition. When Dave finds out that his good friend Steve “likes” that his recent ex-girlfriend Suzy is single, watch out.

But have you ever seen a situation where someone became enraged when another person failed to like their status?

According to MSN, A Texas man has plead not guilty to charges of battery after he allegedly assaulted his wife because she failed to like one of his statuses.

36-year-old Benito Apolinar was arrested in New Mexico after reportedly punching his wife in the cheek and pulling her hair. Police say that Apolinar confronted his wife of 15 years at her home while dropping off his children. The two are apparently separated.

He was upset that his estranged wife failed to like a status he had posted in remembrance of his mother’s passing on her death anniversary. According to police, Apolinar said that is was “amazing everyone ‘likes’ my status but you, you’re my wife. You should be the first one to ‘like’ my status.”

Then he punched her in the face. Classy. He will appear in court in December.

In news that I’m sure will come as a giant surprise to everyone – it appears alcohol was involved. This just puts a new spin on the classic argument that boozing and social networking do not mix.

In honor of Benny and his epically infantile, ridiculous and criminal overreaction, I’ve decided to put together some tips on how to get your status liked. These are sure fire ways to garner maximum likes for your posts. Maybe he should have gone this route:

1. Polarizing political posts:  If you have a few hundred friends or more on Facebook, chances are good that folks from all over the political spectrum are represented in the population.  So say something polarizing – Obama this or LOL Republicans that.  There is most likely going to be a contingent that agrees with you.  And the good thing about political posts is that they snowball in terms of likes.  As soon as the disparaging comments start rolling in from the half that disagrees with you, the side that does agree with you becomes emboldened.  They will be more apt to like your status as a way to take it to the crazy libs or silly cons railing away in the comments.
2. Semi-obscure song lyrics or movie quotes:  The trick here is the “semi-obscure” part.  Posting lyrics or quotes is a great way to garner likes.  People will want to like your status to prove to everyone else that they are cool enough to recognize the origin of the quote.  But it’s a delicate balance – deciding how obscure to make the quote.  If the lyric or movie quote is too easily recognized, people will think it’s too dumb to like it and just move on.  If the lyric or quote is too obscure, they might not recognize it at all.  Note: It’s better to err on the side of overly obscure.  People might like it in order to rep some sort of super indie-cred, even if they have no idea where it came from.
3. Get engaged or married:  Given this is a long way to go in order to have a status with dozens of “likes,” when it happens organically, you’ll see the power of the nuptials on Facebook.  If you post a status that you just got engaged or married, you will be inundated with likes.  A photo of the ring on the finger will also garner many likes, but that’s a whole other article on photos.  Women traditionally grab the most likes for their engagement and marriage posts, but guys have an opportunity to score major likes with this kind of post.  Since the long-running cultural joke says that guys don’t want to get married, a man posting excitement about marriage is sure to get tons of likes from female Facebookers.
4. Bitch about Facebook on Facebook:  “F**k FACEBOOK!!!”  Enough said.  Post that status and the likes will come flooding in.  That’s because the only thing Facebookers love more than Facebook is hating on Facebook.  Bonus likes if you mention anything about privacy settings.
5. Tony Romo Jokes:  Less specifically, NFL Quarterback jokes.  NFL is the most popular sport in America and the QB is the most high profile position.  Ribbing about their activities, on or off the field, is always a sure fire way to have a hit status.  Play the Ben Roethlisberger/sexual assault angle, the Tom Brady/pretty boy angle or even the Jay Cutler/sucking at football angle – all of these are tried and true response- getters.
6. Finally, this might work:

Depending on your physical stature, this post could snag quite a number of likes.

Joining Mr. Apolinar in the Facebook-using hall of shame are some of these bright citizens. Domestic violence over a Facebook status – more or less ridiculous than they guy who taunted cops with his location on Facebook? How about the guy who posted a play by play of his hostage standoff on the site? Maybe dumber than the people who posted about looting during the Vancouver Stanley Cup riots? Let us know in the comments.

One interesting tool they created in response to the disaster is an image gallery which shows how status updates spread in the hours and days following the earthquake and tsunami. The black dots show the high influx of updates.

These are three images from the set of ten. It’s interesting to see how the flow of Facebook took place in a span of 24 hours. Highly concentrated updates occurred earlier on the west coast, and within 12 hours the east coast became enveloped with Japan related updates.

Facebook has released this tool as a part of their effort to heighten awareness, and increase donations towards the disaster effort. They’ve partnered with Zynga, famed Facebook game developer, to take donations for ‘Save the Children’s Japan Earthquake/Tsunami Emergency Fund‘. If you’re an avid CityVille, Frontierville, or Farmville player, funds from virtual goods purchased in the series of games will go towards the joint Zynga/Facebook effort.

The system was created using open authentication technology OAuth which allows limited data to be shared between sites while protecting account credentials.

Syncing functionality includes:

• Status updates synced from MySpace to Twitter and vice versa
• Updates originating from MySpace will be noted as such on Twitter and vice versa
• Status syndication can be enabled for one-way or two-way
• When updates post to Twitter, readers have a link back to MySpace to make commenting easy
• Enables on-the-go status syncing (for Twitter and MySpace Mobile – WAP and apps)
• Open authentication technology (OAuth) protects account credentials and data shared between sites

Comments

I logged onto Facebook to grab an example of the bad grammar that has resulted from the mandatory inclusion of “is,” and as it turns out, most of my friends have done a good job of adapting to the word’s presence.  So, just to make up an example, a person might get stuck saying “Joe is didn’t like the movie.”

Heck, the BBC and CNN might even want to take note; at the moment, a group called “Petition to Get Rid of ‘is’ from Facebook Status Update!” has exactly 164,069 members, and I’ve seen groups protesting genocide and such things with much smaller tallies.

Although Facebook may still do very odd and possibly illegal things with users’ data, at least the social network is paying some attention to proper grammar.

Google sometimes keeps its mouth closed in these situations, but yesterday, the search giant fessed up.  “Blogger and Blog*Spot had an unexpected outage for an hour this morning, starting around 7AM PDT.  As of 8AM, all but a few blogs are working properly again,” wrote “Pete” on the official Blogger Status, um, blog.  “We apologize profusely for this interruption in service.”

Quite all right, Pete.  These things are bound to happen, really; it’s just more noticeable (and newsworthy) when they happen to a company of Google’s size and prominence.  And everything had been going so well.  There were new videos for Google News, fresh ads on YouTube, and the launch of Sky.  Also, according to Hitwise, Google’s search market share is up.

Now the Blogger story’s been picked up by such notables as Google Blogoscoped’s Philipp Lenssen and Juan Carlos Perez of the IDG News Service.  Perez notes, “Blogger publishers have posted a rising volume of complaints on the official Blogger discussion forum since Monday, reporting problems editing, publishing and accessing blogs.”

Ah, well.  Blogger’s back in business, now, and not many of its fans seem to be holding a grudge.

Google has attempted to gently request and chastise writers who use their brand name as a verb. The company fears the time when Google becomes google, a generic term meaning ‘to search’. The Washington Post has been dinged by Google for doing this, as has our Jason Lee Miller.

Google, meet the real world. They’re googling all the time out here, and it’s happening in all kinds of media.

During the afternoon airing of ESPN Radio’s Dan Patrick show yesterday, the conversation turned away from sports to one of Dan’s favorite topics: Jessica Alba and the possibility of her appearing on the show.

During his banter with producer Phil ‘The Showkiller,’ Dan said he’s heard that an Alba appearance would also entail bringing along her Fantastic Four co-star, Chris Evans.

Dan wanted to know more about Evans, so he casually asked Phil to google the actor. Phil managed to pull that off without wrecking the show, and no one thought anything of the request. If Google cared we haven’t heard about it.

The world of print has no problem googling either. In Esquire‘s May 2007 print issue, a comment from Brian Frazer, author of Hyper-Chondriac, included the G word. The comment was part of a broader health feature on weight loss:

I never linked my inability to relax with my diet. Then I visited an Ayurveda specialist (the ancient science of wellness through "balanced" living; Google it – I have only 200 words here.)

Those are just a couple of examples, observed about an hour apart in the most unscientific setting possible – the afternoon commute. Add them up over the course of a day, overhearing other people subject Google the brand to google the transitive verb in various places, and it’s pretty clear. Google is going the way of Kleenex and Xerox as a brand name.

If you want to share the love from your blog, I compiled an extensive list of "dofollow" and "nofollow" resources covering major platforms such as WordPress (on your own domain), blogger and Drupal. It is also possible on Typepad, and Dawud Miracle and Karen have been discussing ways to present the complicated procedure to remove nofollow on Typepad. Hopefully I will be able to link to a solution soon.

In my review of Blogcatalog recently, I mentioned that one of the key things I would like to see is for the Nofollow link to be removed from the site profiles.

This is how the site profiles used to look when viewed using the Search Status Firefox Plugin which highlights nofollow links on the pages you visit with a pink box.

That link wasn’t just nofollowed. It was also passing through a redirect script to count the number of clicks the link had received, important for their rating system and to help advertisers to evaluate the value of the listings they purchase. Some redirect scripts can pass on link juice, but a clean link is much better.

Blogcatalog Sharing the Link Love (No Nofollow)

The page now looks like this:-

As can be clearly seen, the link no longer has the nofollow extension, and thus passes on juice.

What about the redirect?

<h2>Andy Beard – Niche Marketing</h2>
   <h3><a href="http://andybeard.eu" onclick="return o(‘andy-beard-niche-marketing’);">http://andybeard.eu</a></h3>

You will see here that this is a clean link which uses the onclick parameter to count the number of outbound clicks from the page. From what I can tell from limited testing, pages also load a lot faster with the new linking method.

Not All Links Are The Same

Some would argue that MyBlogLog has provided followable links from the start, and they are certainly to be congratulated for this. They also have a number of useful linking structures that help bring their profiles into prominence.

It is interesting studying the value of links from various services just by doing a quick vanity search on Google for Andy Beard.

The MyblogLog linking structure with the number of links using that term internally really makes them highly relevant.

That doesn’t however help much on relevance for other terms not associated with the name of the blog, or blog owner.

Here is another vanity search, but this time on "Andy Beard – Niche Marketing"

Ok so that link text is being used through to my page profile on Blogcatalog, so it is not really very fair and also is very prominent on Bumpzee for the same reason.

Lets use a term that I use in my description on multiple syndication sites to see which is giving me currently the best relevant link.

"Blog Search Engine Performance"

Blogcatalog is an older domain, but that page with description is much younger than my profule on MyBlogLog.

There are references on Bumpzee for that phrase before MyBlogLog appears.

This isn’t conclusive research, but as of this writing the page that is ranking for Blogcatalog is often based on my old rating within the service – as my registration was quite late, it was fairly well buried on each of the listing pages, often 4 or 5 pages deep.

It takes Google a number of days to recalculate ranking based on links. Thus it is only going to improve.

Blogcatalog Introduces Real Tagging

Please first of all understand that this seems to be the first stage of implementation, but it demonstrates clearly the direction Blogcatalog can take and the speed they are implementing changes.
The removal of nofollow was quite a simple matter, but implementing tagging certainly took a little more work, in just a few short days, on a holiday weekend!

Lets take a little look at Meg’s Blogcatalog profile

Now my geeky readers will no doubt notice that not every site is currently working, and that the tags currently being picked up are Megs categories defined within a feed such as:-

    <category><![CDATA[blogcatalog]]></category>
  <category><![CDATA[mybloglog]]></category>
  <category><![CDATA[Australian Blogs]]></category>
  <category><![CDATA[blogsearch]]></category>
   <category><![CDATA[blogging]]></category>

hat was taken from Meg’s feed (she has actually got 2, one at WP.com, and one on Feedburner – they really should support redirects)

Blogger blogs do things slightly differently. Here is an example of the code in Johns feed at Finding The Money.

<category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="networking" /><category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="promotion" />

Those are generated by using labels on the new blogger, thus it would be worthwhile using lots of them, or creating additional links to a tag space that shares link love back with you.

I don’t think it will take long to have this picking up all forms of tagging such as rel="tag" anywhere within a feed item.

That is what they would have to cope with on my blog, where a post might only be in 3 defined categories, but be tagged with 10 or 20 tags.

Blogcatalog Tagspace?

The microformat "rel-tag" definition dictates that the end of the URL you use to link through to the pages that form a "tagspace" should end with the word in question.

The destination of a rel="tag" hyperlink is required to be a tag space (a place that collates or defines tags), where the last segment of the path of the URL is the tag

Blogcatalog now has links such as

http://www.blogcatalog.com/post-tag/blogsearch

As a demonstration they have built a global tag cloud, though this doesn’t yet have a comprehensive data set.

They also have the links to tags as previously highlighted, and the ability to search tags.

Tag Search

This is becoming a little confusing, and I am sure things will become refined over time allowing even more powerful features.

Currently we have a number of search options:-

• In the Blog Directory – this searches the blog directory descriptions only – as an example a search for "SEO" currently doesn’t find my blog listing, even though it is highly rated in the SEO category, and I use SEO for a blog defined tag – SEO is even a term found in one of my reader reviews, but that isn’t picked up. Tag and Category are probably terms that shouldn’t be picked up, but review content probably should.
• In Tags – these allows a search in predefined tags when blog accounts are created. As an example a search for "BlogCatalog" doesn’t come up with any results, because no blog has currently defined that term as one of their core topics. A search for Wordperss in the tags comes up with my blog at the top, because my blog is currently the highest rated blog using that defined tag.
• In Blog Posts – this searches the content of archived blog posts. It should be noted that there is a lot of stored content with some listings going back over 1 year on a search for the term "Wordpress" – I wonder if data such as categories or tags is also stored (the raw RSS data) – if they have all of it, that is a lot of content that can now be recategorised with tags and who linked to who within the content.

Popularity is currently based upon blog rating, I am not sure how relevance is counted, but it would also be possible to introduce other metrics such as linkage and add additional authority based searches or options.

• In Blog Post Tags – this is the new form of search previously discussed, that will allow bloggers to define what their post is about using the rel-tag microformat already used by Technorati, and their blogging platforms existing category system.

BlogCatalog vs Technorati

As I have already likened Blogcatalog to MyBlogLog, it is now time to take on an even bigger player, Technorati.

Technorati could roll out a networking feature, but their current size means it isn’t something that can be rolled out fast without also introducing a massive support and spam problem. Technorati autodiscovers sites and feeds, often polluting its index, and is a primary target for junk.

Blogcatalog could easily encroach on Technorati’s space, whilst remaining devoid of spam, and already having a social feature built in.

Blogcatalog is only indexing feeds which it is told about and isn’t scraping the blog itself looking for additional blogroll links which aren’t necessarily a good indication of quality, because it can be easily gamed. Authority with Technorati can easily be established by releasing a few themes or widgets, or having a blog as part of a network, as I have discussed in the past.

Blogcatalog is probably lacking in historical data, but that isn’t honestly hard to get. They could always write a simple "Pick Me Up" plugin that can be installed and provides an RSS feed of all previous posts, and I am sure something similar could be possible for all platforms, maybe something like a dynamic, blog content only sitemap.

Fancy charts and tables are fairly easy to add

Technorati Is Ugly in Pink

Blogs added to Technorati are not added manually – Technorati find them by itself, and only at a later date are they removed from the index if they are found to be "splogs".
Lots of the feeds Technorati is encouraged to collect aren’t unique blog feeds.

With all the poor quality content being added to the index, there is no wonder Technorati choose to add nofollow on every page, but that is also their undoing.
Many smart bloggers, because Technorati isn’t sharing any link love don’t link to Technorati directly, and use internal tagging. WordPress will have tagging built in with the release of WordPress 2.2.
Wordpress.com has for a long time used its own internal tagging system, and I questioned a while ago that this was potentially an extremely smart SEO move.

Technorati is heavily cross linked, but all the cross linking is nofollow ugly pink links.

Blogcatalog can justify having followable links, because there is a human review process for every blog, and they have also added a voting processs and other quality controls to highlight the highest quality content that readers find valuable.

Conclusion

I have had direct contact at various times with people from MyBlogLog, Blogcatalog and Bumpzee, and at this time I have no direct financial incentive to promote one particular service over another, and am purely writing about what I observe to be great features, and encouraging more.
I don’t know whether I am the only person directly encouraging Blogcatalog to add what I feel are cool features, and some of these features are also a feature of Bumpzee, who I have also actively encouraged to include them both publicly and in normal user feedback discussions by email.

So far I am only scratching the surface of what is possible…

Comments

*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu

“Typically, the editorial board of a newspaper will conduct lengthy interviews with contenders and choose those whose positions on crucial issues are aligned with the newspaper,” she said.

Further discussion on that topic should be directed to the political blog or website of your choice. I’m sure not going to touch it. Stephanie’s continued prose merits more attention for Yahoo’s search marketers.

Once an ad has been composed and submitted to Yahoo, it undergoes a review for compliance with Yahoo’s editorial guidelines. That may be a little intimidating to the newer search marketers; staying within the boundaries should not prove a problem, though.

“Advertisers have the opportunity to direct searchers to their goods and services, and, in turn, Yahoo! is perceived as a trusted source for information that searchers are seeking,” she wrote. “Without editorial guidelines, these shared benefits would have difficulty coexisting.”

Yahoo keeps its clients up to date on the status of the editorial review. Stephanie noted how advertisers can check their management consoles to see this information. Any keywords or ads that may have been removed or declined will have a reason listed on the Editorial Details page.

Being familiar with the guidelines should help advertisers avoid running afoul of them. Using trademarks can be challenging; that particular issue has a page dedicated to it.

Though they have been proactive in labeling hazardous sites, Google hadn’t been informing site owners about their badware status outside of posting alerts in that site’s Webmaster Tools.

Not every site publisher uses Google’s Webmaster Central, so a badware designation could creep up on a site and be unnoticed unless someone happens to inform the webmaster or he discovers the problem in the search results.

Google announced better badware notifications, and they extend beyond Webmaster Central.

Phil Harton wrote on the Webmaster Central blog that they are providing more information in Webmaster Tools about badware detections. “We’re also showing example URLs that we’ve determined to be dangerous,” Harton wrote. “This can be helpful when the malicious content is hard to find.”

Some sites will also receive email notifications from Google. They will attempt to reach webmasters at typical email addresses for websites, like webmaster@ or admin@.

—

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews:

So whats new with version 3?

• Site targeting: AdWords Editor now provides full support for site-targeted campaigns.
• Negative sites: Add or edit negative sites for keyword- and site-targeted campaigns.
• Edit while you wait: If you manage multiple accounts with AdWords Editor, edit another account while your changes post.
• Count your selection: The status bar now displays the number of rows you’ve selected in the data view.
• Pause or resume ads, keywords, and sites: Use the Status menu in the edit panel to change the status of selected items.

The new editor also has a number of updated features which include -

• Export to HTML: Your HTML export will show or hide deleted campaigns, depending on how you’ve configured your preferences. The HTML export is ideal for showing your account to someone who doesn’t use AdWords Editor.
• Export to CSV: In addition to account, campaign, and ad group snapshots, you can now export custom views. The CSV export is ideal for spreadsheets or other applications that can read structured data files.
• Paste to multiple ad groups: Select multiple destination ad groups via the Edit menu > Paste Special.

You can download Editor version 3 here.

Is the new version still missing features you want to see? You can send your thoughts over to Google using this form.

Comments

Tag:

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

Bookmark WebProNews: