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While there have been shortages of episodes of The Web Strategies Podcast there certainly have been an abundance of changes lately. This is a time for introspection for me personally as I begin a new life. Statistically a majority of us have gone through a separation or divorce, and I know I need say no more in explaining why this venue has stood in silence for several months now. The focus of my world recently has been to transition to living solo which is going well. I am now living in Chesapeake, close to my office. Thankfully my professional life continues to flourish along with the remarkable success of Web Teks.
I guess the biggest news is the Open Source Music Project. With more time as of late to devote to my music, it brings me great comfort - and surprisingly others seem to enjoy it as well. This project has a corresponding podcast which I will link to as soon as iTunes gets back to me with an ID.
The Open Source Music Project was actually germinated during my association with a group knows at A2 in 2007. Although I am obligated to leave out most of the details, A2 is an effort to launch a new kind of digital entertainment. As far as I know that is still an effort in progress.
So what the heck is open source music?
I made it up. But the concept is to allow the free use of any individual tracks as the ingredients for a new song. When you record and produce your own music it is usually a series of separate audio tracks blended together. My inspiration came from getting such different results when mixing certain tracks together and leaving some out of the mix. Some of them are not so great - but a few really shine. On the Open Source Music Project site I encourage anyone interested to download these tracks and use them any way they like (under the Creative Commons Attribution License). If you take a listen let me know how abysmal that stuff really is. You may comment on any track on that site and if you really are a glutton for punishment subscribe to the RSS feed.
How can it be two months since I made an entry?? I wanted to give a quick shout out to Rick Party and his very hip site voiceover universe. This is web 2.0 at its very best. Even if you have no clue what a voice over is you will see the business savvy Rick possesses by visiting this site. It is in the context of the Internet, a true social network – with some pretty cool bells and whistles.
While knocking around last night I was watching a voice guy out west doing some tracks in real time. I think you will find this site worth a few minutes of your time to see how every niche – including yours – can benefit by understanding a little bit about social networking.
Tom Walker is the return guest and we talk about a dynamic digital catalog project that creates PDF documents and images personalized to the user’s needs. This is a good illustration of how running a business has changed in the digital age.
We also discuss the ups and downs of tying together a line of business software or other third party application to your company website. What happens when some function on your web site is not doing what you think it should? How to cut though finger pointing and just get the darn thing fixed.
In our Extra section I show you the inside numbers for traffic to this companion website. Click here if you don’t see the Tags and Tags Extra.
To return to the podcast click here: WSP 06 Marrying Integrators
I use a program called Urchin, which is the same basic engine as Google Analytics. (Well - actually I admit I use both.) Google Analytics is free and Urchin comes with the server hosting service. They both do essentially the same thing; give you information about how many people are visiting your site and where they came from.
In the screen shot below you can see stats from launch to this posting.
This second snapshot shows traffic recorded in the current calendar month.
Thanks to your interest the number of folks visiting and downloading the program is rising steadily. On average the number of visitors per day continues to rise exponentially. Thank you!
On the Extra section of the Web Strategies Podcast show six I also talk about the difference between tags and tags. Last time we talked about add-ons, tools for your browser that make it easier to see Meta tag information. That would include Keywords, Descriptions, and Page Titles mostly.
You should also be aware that your customers and colleagues may use tags to define bookmarks for various web pages they use. Over time the number of useful pages has increased to the point that Web 2.0 developers saw and filled a need to easily categorize our interests and share them. That’s the “other” kind of tag - and is best demonstrated by the site we mentioned last week - del.icio.us .
You may have noticed it took a little extra time to get the Web Strategies Podcast show six edited and posted. We hope to be weekly, but as a friend put it recently - “sometimes life just gets in the way”! We appreciate your support. Please invite your friends and colleagues to review our podcast on iTunes - just type in “Web Strategies Podcast” and we should come right up. The more reviews - the higher we rank - the more people will subscribe. Thanks again for your interest!
This fifth episode of The Web Strategies Podcast happened to be recorded a few days after four tornados ripped through an area about 15 miles from the studio. That prompted a discussion on Disaster Planning – Data Recovery and Hardware Restoration. This is important stuff for everybody. In the studio with me is Tom Walker, president of Web Teks and an expert on the strategic Internet.
Podcast Extra:
Today’s Podcast Extra is about something called “Add-ons” for the Firefox web browser. Add-ons are mini programs that let you personalize your browsing experience - and if you are not using them, not only are you missing out - you may be drifting behind your competitors. There are all kinds of add-ons, the most popular are tools to help you block ads or download files.
The most useful (at least to me) are add-ons like web developer, which adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools. Perhaps it is a little to geek side, but it has been downloaded over six and a half million times. Not just web developers, but us plain folks are using this tool bar to see how web pages are made.
Another Add-on category you should be aware of is SEO tools. There are probably a dozen good tools out of about a hundred or so available as of this posting. I use KGen (Keyword Generator) which is an add-on that allows you to see what keywords are strong on visited web page. For my own blog pages it lets me see which words will most likely be indexed, and it is useful in figuring out which words to use for social sharing. My hot list if Firefox add-ons can be found here: http://del.icio.us/tomanthonydotcom/addon
We will discuss social sharing and tags in an upcoming episode.
Next week we talk about the Big Catalog Project, and Marrying Integrators…Not that kind of wedding … tying together a line of business software to a website.
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