What is Twitter?

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send “updates” (or “tweets”; text-based posts, up to 140 characters long) to the Twitter website, via short message service, instant messaging, or a third-party application such as Twitterrific.

Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and instantly delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them. The sender can restrict delivery to those in his or her circle of friends (delivery to everyone is the default). Users can receive updates via the Twitter website, instant messaging, SMS, RSS, email or through an application. For SMS, four gateway numbers are currently available: short codes for the USA, Canada, and India, as well as a UK number for international use. Several third parties offer posting and receiving updates via email.

I also took the time to validate @ XHTML Strict, but WordPress insists on inserting target_blank tags. I wouldn’t mind a feature that defaulted to onclick=”target=’_blank’”.

• Maintain a good content to code ratio
• Improving your structural organization will ensure that spiders know what you’re trying to show them
• Declare your main heading as H1
• Using H1 through H6 accordingly
• H1 tag placed directly after the body tag will be weighted heavily by many search engines
• CSS for rollover effects instead of separate images will give you an advantage in search engine positioning

Also - Why tables for layout is stupid !!

• Grammar, spelling, punctuation, rythm, focus, syntax and structure play an important role in getting your message across to the reader. If your blog is not easily read, it is unlikely it will be frequently visited. Studying horrendous language can help prevent similar mistakes in your own writing.

• Avoid first person point of view. It is not against the rules, but should not be seen as the only choice. In many situations the second- or third-person may be more effective.

• Amusing your readers is also a way to gain momentum. Not taking yourself too seriously is important, and you should expect rational/irrational criticism.

• Find fresh content. Many bloggers link to the same sites over and over. Wired probably has a link leading to it from 90% of all blogs. Finding fresh resources will not only help your blog be more interesting, but it will expose more of the web in the process.

Spiders are often spotted by their names, for instance, HotBot’s spider is named slurp and Alta Vista’s spider is named scooter. Reviewing all requests of the robots.txt file is usually your best clue, as spiders request this file to check which pages are to be indexed (although some do not follow this convention).

Investors will not be hard to win over when imagining the dollar value of the non-profit site Wikipedia, the most often visited as a result of a Google search. The traffic to Wikipedia has grown by 680% in the past two years. Amazon has already made an investment in the idea (other investors have also sent $4 million his way). A unique approach will be critical if Wiki is going to try and make a dent in the market this late in the game.

Some of the shortcomings of user-tagged content include:

• polysemy - words which have multiple related meanings.
• synonyms- multiple words with the same or similar meanings.
• word inflections - words with plural forms, ie “dog” versus “dogs”.

wiki - “The lack of a hierarchical or systematic structure for the tagging system makes the terms relevant to what they are describing, but they often fail to show their relevancy or relationship to other objects of the same or similar type.”

Summary:

• The biggest difference between the major players is the ranking system and how you pay per click.
• With Yahoo!, you know exactly what you are paying for. Google does not reveal the exact amount you are paying per click.
• Google yields more page views - increasing your chance of a click though.
• Yahoo! displays results incrementally according to bid. Google rewards advertisers with rank for better Click Though Rates(CTR).
• Ultimately, You will pay less per click with Yahoo, but have better results using Google.

Drupal and Worpress both produce search engine friendly content. These two open-source management systems are widely used and are both known for their standards compliance. The similarities pretty much end there.

Drupal is not a blogging tool. It can be used for blogging, but has much more to it. In the case that you will simply need a blogging tool, Wordpress may be a better option seeing as it is much easier to install and get up and running. If you are looking for something with much more depth and focus on taxonomy, Drupal far exceeds the limitations of Wordpress.

Take a tour of Drupal

From Ethan Zukerman’s blog:
“WordPress is an open source weblogging platform. It’s the platform I use to manage this blog and the platform - with some modifications - that Global Voices runs on. It has a reputation for being very user friendly, but for having some underlying architectural problems that make it hard to scale. Drupal is an open source multi-purpose content management system designed for the support of complex websites with multiple authors. It has a reputation for being ludicriously flexible, ungodly powerful and far too complex for mere mortals to use.”

Clean URLs:

Drupal passes path arguments to itself via its internally generated URLs. This results in URLs that look like the following: “http://www.example.com/?q=node/64.” This makes URLs difficult to read and also stops many search engines from indexing the pages. To avoid this, Drupal uses “clean URLs”, eliminating the “?q=” in internal URLs. Following is an example with Clean URLs enabled: “http://www.example.com/my-nice-url”.

Note* It is better to enable URL rewrites though the httpd.conf file as opposed to .htaccess when possible, as it provides better performance and security.