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At work we started using a web application called Short Stack that allows you to easily create Facebook applications without dealing with a lot of code and has built-in functinalities that would take a lot of work if you were to code or manipulate manually in the Facebook developers section.  We’ve saved a ton of money by being able to create more dynamic and better looking Facebook applications in half the time we were developing them in the past. I now don’t balk at quoting to do a contest... Read Full Story

There’s always those weird headlines you see in your Twitter or Facebook feed that catch your eye and this was one of them: Stumbleupon Drives More Than 50% of Social Traffic. I didn’t believe it when I saw it on Mashable . I thought Stumbleupon was so 2008 . But apparently, it’s still going strong, and its viral capabilities still pump in droves of traffic to blogs. Stumbleupon only has 12 million users compared to 750 million that Facebook has, but the difference is that all Stumbleupon... Read Full Story

I don’t know about you, but I am always skeptical when I hear about the next great social network being rolled out by Google. If you keep throwing darts at the dartboard, and you keep hitting the wall, don’t you think you’d stop throwing darts? Google has failed miserably with Orkut and Google Buzz. Now, they are rolling out a more robust platform that includes the +1 button and Google+, a social network that tries to take what works best for Facebook and Twitter and make it better for a... Read Full Story

Have you ever taken a look at some of the crappy photos thrown together on a Google local listing that hasn’t been claimed by the owner? Google might have pulled them from Tripadvisor, Yelp, or some other review site where the photos were taken by customers. Google sees the gateway to more profit from the very people that drive our economy, small business owners. And now their testing 6 cities by offering up free photography to businesses that will be posted on their Google local listing... Read Full Story

I find myself constantly saying this to clients and colleagues, and they usually look at me with a blank stare. “What do you mean, don’t write for Search Engines?”, they say. “I mean, stop writing with only SEO in mind. Your goal is to get people to read it and for the content to compel them to take action on whatever you want them to take action on”. SEO has killed good writing on the web. All we care about is inserting our keywords and writing crap that hardly makes sense, but as long... Read Full Story

Here’s a fun social media infographic from the people over at Hubspot. By the way, Hubspot is one the BEST original content creators in the Internet marketing industry, IMHO. I thought it was pretty interesting that 17% of social media marketing spending was done on MySpace. It just goes to show you that MySpace isn’t dead just yet. I also thought it was interesting that so few corporations focus on blogging. Blogging was the first social activity on the Internet, and it still serves as a... Read Full Story

So Facebook and Google are now looking to flex their muscles and take down Groupon and Living Social for the business that’s growing faster than our national deficit, social group buying. Google Deals I don’t know much about the Google Deals, but the logical place for them. O be run is Google Places. It’ll be interesting to see how much they charge for the deal. A lot of companies are deterred by Groupon because they take 50% of the revenue. I think Google could be successful with it... Read Full Story

So Facebook and Google are now looking to flex their muscles and take down Groupon and Living Social for the business that’s growing faster than our national deficit, social group buying. Google Deals I don’t know much about the Google Deals, but the logical place for them. O be run is Google Places. It’ll be interesting to see how much they charge for the deal. A lot of companies are deterred by Groupon because they take 50% of the revenue. I think Google could be successful with it... Read Full Story

Google surprised everyone yesterday by rolling out an entirely new way of searching on Google.com. It’s called Google Instant, and it aims at being one step ahead of you when searching for something online. Instead of statically typing in a search term and hitting enter, the moment you start typing a search term, Google starts pulling up instant search results based on every character you type. Like the typical computer nerd that I am, I first stopped and pointed to the west and bowed down to... Read Full Story

WordPress has recently released its 13th major update since it was first developed, and this is a significant. I’ve been using WordPress for 5 years now, and It’s definitely the best open-source blogging platform in the world. You cannot find a better blogging platform with more plugins, free themes, and premium themes than WordPress. It’s now evolved into more of a comprehensive content management system. Here’s a video put together by WordPress to highlight some of the highlights of the 3.0... Read Full Story