From the OpenID website:

This morning the OpenID Foundation announced that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have joined the board. The OpenID Foundation was formed in early 2006 by seven community members with the goal of helping promote, protect and enabling the OpenID technologies and community. Today’s announcement marks a milestone in the maturity and impact that the OpenID community has had. While the OpenID Foundation serves a stewardship role around the community’s intellectual property, the Foundation’s board itself does not make any decisions about the specifications the community is collaboratively building.

If you’re not quite sure why this matters, consider the future of online usage.  There’s a school of thought that would argue that everything will be connected and social networking will continue to grow, evolve and bring in millions of additional users.  In addition to social networking, blogging and other community and interactive websites will flood the internet like never before.  With this in mind, by soliciting the assistance of the major players in Silicon Valley, OpenID has all but solidified it’s status as the standard for online authentication.  Additionally, by agreeing on a standard for OpenID, there is potential for large companies to work on a reputation and/or profiling system for web users at-large.  To learn more about OpenID and the latest  news related to the maturity of the OpenID community, check out the following: “Evolving the OpenID foundation board“

Digg’s latest changes didn’t put an end to gaming as was intended. Instead, gaming is now required of active diggers who seek to hit the front page.

If you’re an active social network user, then you’re likely familiar with Digg and the latest problems that have arisen with recent algorithm changes. In short, Digg recently made an effort to curb gaming of their website by changing how stories are promoted and if you’ve been following the drama, it looks like Digg succeeded on some levels.

There has been a lot of talk about the casual-digger versus power-digger conundrum that has played out on Digg. Casual Digg users have laughed and even prodded at the Digg community’s top supporters for losing “power”.

Who got squeezed by the new Digg algorithm? It’s not who you think!

New users got what they wanted and top diggers with a huge fan-base are a tad uncomfortable, but they’ll survive. Arguably, the most important users of Digg’s community are the ones hit hardest by new changes, it’s the active diggers that provide the Digg community with diggs, comments and link “new users” to “top users” via social networking.

If you don’t believe me, ask the top digg users if they have hit the front page in the last 48 hours. The response will be similar from our mini-celebrities in the community. MrBabyman / Muhammad Saleem and Zaibatsu (aka “Reg” / Z) aren’t the ones denied access to the front page, nor should they be! It is not those users that have had their Digg experience ruined and chances are they didn’t miss a beat despite participating (in some form) in the backlash against Digg last week.

Did Digg go too far and were active diggers right to react angrily to the new changes?

My initial position was that diggers were being melodramatic and reactionary. But hey, drama is what makes the world go ’round and it sure helps drive communities on social networks, especially if you follow politics.

I’ll give an example of something that the new Digg algorithm did cure and explain how this cure essentially served to squeeze out the large base of users that are active but lack the strong fan-base that Digg’s top users have.

Digg’s Front Page — taking out the trash

Digg did a good job of removing the spammy lame garbage posts from the front page. What I mean is, some blogs essentially quoted long passages from other sites and added a line or two of commentary and would make the front page.

The reason these garbage sites would hit the front page was because of the way the algorithm worked – it focused on friends and lobbying and sites with already large communities would get automatic diggs in addition to the friend’s of diggers who would submit the articles.

The problem that Digg is going to have to deal with is that they seem to have tightened the screw a bit too much making it difficult, if not impossible, for active diggers to have their content hit the front page. In fixing the ‘garbage-blog’ problem, Digg killed the ability of middle-of-the-road diggers and some quality digg content-submitters to hit the front page. One of my active interests on Digg is politics, so a good analogy is when cities actively clean the streets by ‘removing’ homeless people during the Olympics. They may have good reasons for doing it, but hiding the problem and cheating the public out of the truth only temporarily hides the homelessness problem and doesn’t actually fix it!

Where does that leave top diggers that are marginalized by the new system?

Whereas active diggers previously may have accomplished multiple front-page articles with quality content before, they can’t make the front page to save their lives. A number of diggers who actively engage the community on Digg are no longer front-page worthy using prior Digg strategies and friend support.

Where does it leave active users who don’t have two to three thousand fans? People in my boat aren’t interested in switching social networks, we don’t have time to get situated in a new community or learn a new system, so my only option is to do exactly what Digg programmers are trying to prevent.

In order for active users to hit the front page with quality content, gaming is now required! Essentially, users like me are forced to add more friends and shout-spam while commenting and lobbying for support on articles I’d like to share. The entire purpose of Digg is defeated for people like myself who are boxed-in by the new rules.

Based on what I know so far, I can’t defeat the algorithm without ‘gaming’ the system and I’m not exactly a new user in-fact I’m probably one of the more active diggers around! Here, let me explain. Before the Digg algorithm changes, getting to the front page with ‘good stuff’ wasn’t terribly difficult for me because I managed to make friends with a lot of active diggers and frequently contributed to discussions that would help give my profile exposure.

Digg wants to prevent ‘trivial’ front-page submissions, understandable, but the problem is that now a lot of really good stories will not hit the front page. If you’ve been paying attention – like I have — minus the spam-blog fix, the over-all quality of Digg’s front page stories have diminished considerably.

Prior to the Algorithm Changes…

I purposely kept my list small, maybe in the 100-110 range for the most part and I did so for the purpose of following all of my friend’s submissions. If they submitted good stuff, I wanted to be there to digg and/or comment! It made sense, it worked well but it made Digg a strong lobby system that spammers quickly exploited for their own profitable gain. The fact is, however, that I never felt a need to “game” the system when I was submitting quality articles… the system just worked.

Digg fixed the problem with mass-friend adding and spam-shouting but because of the user interface, many stories on “upcoming” aren’t seen. The only way I can imagine getting articles on the front page is by adding a few hundred more friends and hope they aren’t on the digg shit-list.

Active Digger “Shit-List”

I call it a “shit -ist” because if you’re friends with active diggers chances are ‘you are one.’ If this is the case, the threshold for promotion is very high and requires the effort that you’d expect from a full-time job.

Fine, I’ll play along with the “new Digg” and I will go ahead and add a bunch of new friends that allow ’shouts’ to their profiles. If they don’t allow shouts they are useless because others won’t see my shout-spam for articles I’d like on the front page. Is that the effect that Digg programmers were hoping for? I really hope not, because it sounds counter-intuitive and inefficient. Further, the system is so damned slow as it is I can’t imagine why they’d want to see the system taxed further.

Conclusion: I’ll play the game, but it isn’t a very fun game because I feel like I’m working a job now and getting no love in return. My intent is not to come off as a whiny digger and I know that my words may come off that way to some. The idea was to share my latest Digg experience and the logic that goes through the minds of people adversely affected by the algorithm who nevertheless want to be front-page capable again.

I’ll report back with my results and findings to complement my above views on how the middle guy, not just the ‘top diggers’ got squeezed out of the equation by Digg’s brilliant new algorithm.

I have a few stories to share about myself and the story below reminded me that I need to take care when embarking on this new world of ‘professional blogging’. I have a number of sites and the amount of stress can be overwhelming at times, I can’t imagine how much worse it’ll get when all of my blogs have the amount of traffic that my flagship blog does. (a second blog of mine is already threatening to do that)

GigaOM founder suffers from Heart Attack

Om Malik’s blog, GigaOm, regularly breaks news about the technology industry. Last week, the journalist turned blogger broke a big story about himself. Mr. Malik, 41, blogged that he had suffered a heart attack on Dec. 28.

“I was able to walk into the hospital for treatment that night and have been recovering here ever since,” Mr. Malik wrote. “With the support of my family and my team, I am on the road to a full recovery. I am going to be O.K.”

His heart attack — and his blogging about it — raises the issue of what happens when a blogger becomes a name brand.

Instead of a grand introduction, I’m just going to dive into the meat of my post. Ask questions in the comment section if you’re confused.

Niche Market: Understand your Audience

First things first, you need to make some simple calculations regarding your niche, audience, and the competition that exists for the audience.

Determine what is popular and useful in your niche and figure out how you can get that information to your audience. If it is hard for you to conceptualize the user process, think about how you browse the Internet when you have free time and compare that to how you operate while at work. What happens when you need information and what kind of search terms do you use? Additionally, think about how you phrase your search queries. Do you do this in the form of questions or are they simply topics? And What about generic information? What search phrases do you use and why? Write this stuff down, it helps if you’re a student of the search engine optimization game.

Beware the SEO Expert “References”

Many SEO experts will write crash courses on proper website optimization and they’ll also try to sell you “expert” services. Paying the price of a SEO expert is well worth the investment if you can manage to find a SEO pro and don’t have time or know-how to research this subject yourself. Hey, it’s OK if this stuff just isn’t your thing, but maybe you just don’t want to pay for something you could do on your own!

Search Engine Optimization made simple: Learn to communicate using properly tailored titles and phrases.

One of the biggest problems with Search Engine Optimization is poor communication.

It doesn’t help that a lot of “experts” out there throw out phrases and terms that are industry standards but not conducive to SEO learning for beginners. Along the same lines, a number of SEO articles are written for the wrong audiences or for the wrong purpose: profit. Sadly, because of the SEO niche audience, profit is often the sole motivating factor behind helpful guides on blogging and design.

SEO Tip: Optimize your site for your audience and search indexing or your “masterpiece” will not get the exposure it deserves.

Ever wonder why “SEO Experts” use 10,000 word articles and shady tactics, like bolding the title and bolding key words that appear throughout an entire article? If you’re reading this article, you’re probably intelligent so I don’t have to answer that question. Aside from keyword stuffing and trying to game search engines, however, they’re doing something that every blogger and designer needs to learn. They are trying to direct search engine crawlers to properly categorize the article during crawls. This can lead to higher search engine rankings for the site and higher listings for the article which is especially important in highly competitive niches.

Bold titles and sub-headings

If you’re just getting started, this is key. Make an effort to bold sub-headings to help your readers understand your content. Think about it, if you were creating a search engine indexing algorithm, what is the first issue you’d want to tackle? Relevance: how helpful and relevant is content to potential search users. One warning, don’t be like the “SEO experts” out there that bold several dozen words and phrases throughout the entire article without rhyme or reason. It is cheap, they look more like desperate losers rather than “professionals”and frankly it is annoying and makes it harder to read what might otherwise be a quality article. If Google has any sense, it’ll start penalizing these so-called experts, because it’s exploiting and cheapening the search experience.

Try and figure out how search engines work:

Some people will tell you not to fret and simply write content that your writers want to read, it’s true, this is good advice. However, when you’re stuck in a difficult niche to crack, you -must- write for search engines in addition to targeting your audience. Google owns the world of search and this is significant for a number of reasons. If you aren’t finding ways to optimize your website to help crawlers and users find you, why bother wasting your time with blogging or sharing your creative mind with the world? I’m not trying to be mean here, you simply won’t be discovered or it’ll take several years before your work pays off. Seriously, unless you are an established blogger, you are going to struggle if you don’t learn to manipulate titles so both users and search engine crawlers will love your site.

The Lost Art Of Creating Quality Titles

Title phrasing is KEY

I cannot emphasize this enough. Pick a title that is both descriptive and interesting to your niche audience. Blogging is often driven by emotion and bloggers make the mistake of thinking their emotion can be conveyed to a prospective reader by using clever sounding titles or being “funny”.

Example: “This rocks!”

The title might entice bored users to click, but most people will roll their eyes and move along. If your article is about chimps besting humans in a memory competition, the title will not give your work-of-art, justice! Why?

1. Too vague, no description makes the title useless to search engines and it’ll get indexed improperly and your audience will likely never find you.
2. Social Network users will ignore vague titles because they are spoon fed juicy and descriptive titles on their social news site of choice.
3. If indexed by a blog engine like Technorati, people aren’t going to read your article. Most people seeking content are limited in their time so they’ll click on the title below that may be a spam article but has a script smart enough to provide quality titles.

Use your knowledge of human behavior and psychology to optimize your titles for Search Engine queries and social networking

For a more sophisticated audience, a better example:

“Chimps tested better than humans in cognitive study.”

If your crowd is a bit younger or the tone of your blog is dumbed down a bit, you might want to try this example:

“Proof that monkeys are smarter than humans”.

A final example that helps you cast a wider net:

“Are chimps better at memorizing numbers than humans?”

Before we move on, consider what these titles are doing for users and search engines alike. The latter title is useful because it is descriptive, it gives users what they are looking for, and even those that aren’t seeking the information might click because you piqued their interest with the inquisitive, provocative, if not humorous title.

Title Structure:

Keep it simple: Use as many relevant key words, make it readable and if you must, place the site name at the end.

Example: [title] [topic] [web site name]

The reason you place the title first is because sometimes words at the end of titles are truncated. Also no one likes seeing the domain name as a title, it looks like spam! Finally, the higher concentration of key words must be near the beginning of the title because that is the stuff that’ll probably be checked against your content to determine your web site’s relevance and subsequent search listing.

I hope this was helpful, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. If you haven’t done so, please subscribe to the itola.com – RSS News Feed. It’s a regularly updated column and costs ya nothing!

Professional Blogging and a quick lesson for budding Entrepreneurs

I’ve been meaning to write this article for some time. I found inspiration on the Problogger website off a guest article entitled: ‘be brave break your blog!‘ I’m new to blogging on the tech side of things, so please bare with me as I make a minor introduction! Despite the fact that this article focuses on blogging, please recognize that these tips generally apply to any kind of work you’ll do on the business side and entrepreneurial thinking.

Before I offer tips, I’ll give you some background about my personal situation. A few years ago,I graduated from the University of Wisconsin Law School, primed to take the world by storm and showcase “my talent.” One little problem, the real world isn’t very receptive to non-traditional thinkers. Firms want rank and file types, and that isn’t me. If you are of like mind or in a similar situation, then at this point, you’re probably contemplating a major decision. Either you take the plunge and make a full transition into blogging and/or entrepreneurial flirting, or you stick to a ’safe’ job with a steady salary and spend the rest of your life wondering, “what if?”

The transition into professional blogging vs. blogging on the side “for fun”

Lets face it, few people blog ‘just’ for fun unless it’s a blog about life to keep others updated with your personal work, life, and family. If you are thinking “pro blogging”, chances are you’ve got the entrepreneurial twinkle in your eye, a desire to break away from the monotony of “the office” environment, or simply looking for something new because you are bored and would rather call the shots than have some idiot at work telling you what to do. It doesn’t mean life will be a bowl of cherries once you split off and take the dive into pro-blogging, in fact.. life may be much more grueling and challenging, but at least it’ll be under your control. That said, I’ll have tips later this week on how you can prepare to make the move into blogging especially if you aren’t ready to take the plunge.

The best advice you’ll ever read, is this:

DON’T BE AFRAID TO TAKE RISKS.

I emphasize that point, because if you don’t have the guts to screw up and learn from your own mistakes, you’ll go nowhere fast. No guts, no glory is very applicable to blogging. Trust me, every professional blogger and entrepreneur would agree with that mantra.

“Be brave, break your blog” is valuable advice on how to develop blogging and design skills over the long haul. I’ve had an argument with numerous close friends who develop software. The question arises over what constitutes ‘proper’ blogging techniques. I’ll concede it’s not a black and white issue, but software development is a different beast from blogging, period.

Creating a secondary site is useful for major site overhauls and changes and especially for software development and other ‘business’ environments where presentation is key and the slightest hint of amateurish design could ruin your reputation. I could be convinced that creating a second blogger website to test out design is also a good idea, it depends on how you use this tactic and how frequently you resort to this ‘detour’. Generally, in my experience, it can and is a major waste of time to set up a secondary site if you simply don’t know what you’re doing and you are doing it purely for the sake of avoiding embarrassing newbie mistakes.

Is it even appropriate to consider a secondary site if you’re an amateur blogger?

If you are visiting a web site on blogging or pro-blogging, chances are you are new to blogging or an amateur (at best). You may or may not be into graphics and web design, but there’s a good chance you couldn’t tell me what a “shell account” is if I asked. You might not have any knowledge about image compression, e.g. when it’s appropriate to use a .jpg, .gif, or .png. If this is the case, forget about this secondary site nonsense, you’ll never get off the ground because you are WAY behind the competition and have a lot of learning to do.

Remember this important tip: the more obstacles you put in front of you so that you don’t look bad, the more obstacles you create that you’ll have to overcome in the future. What this means is it’ll take you much longer than you probably would like for a shot at “prime time.” Don’t try to do too much, secondary sites are only good under certain circumstances and if you over think the issue, you are just asking for trouble!

Self-evaluation is key, you need to figure out where you stand on the skills front, and whether your traffic even justifies obsessing over making mistakes. When you start setting up multiple sites, mirrors, svn, etc, you’re basically creating obstacles to your success. It’s helpful for software developers and teams of web developers because so many people have their hands on the same files and not all are great at documenting their work. By having a test site, software developers are able to keep the ‘live site’ stable, steady and efficient in handling http requests and marketing their product.

If you’re a lone blogger that wears many hats, there are important ideas to consider:

1. Don’t be afraid to screw up! The biggest obstacle that inexperienced bloggers face is fear of making a mistake and looking bad. You know the “be brave, break your blog” article I liked? It’s great advice on its face but some of the hints are counter-productive if you are just getting started on your journey.
2. Content is king in blogging, duh! No matter what the neo-blogging experts are saying these days, people are looking for information first and foremost. You can have a killer design and great interactive functionality, but what does it matter if your content is crap, or worse yet, you have none?
3. Tighten up your writing skills Consider the first six to twelve months as boot camp for blogging. One of the greatest weapons for any blogger’s arsenal is the ability to communicate, connect with audiences, and write effectively. There is a time and place for long articles and short articles, you need to figure out how to push content regularly and when to modify your style to cater to the audience. The short of it is, you need a good mix of both long and short articles to capture different audiences within your niche.
4. If you blog it, they will come. If you don’t know how to design or install bells and whistles on your web site, please do yourself a favor and just start blogging. Take baby steps, first! Remember, blogging is a marathon, not a sprint. One article a day over a year gives you over three hundred articles one year from the day you start blogging! If you spend too much time trying to do too much, you waste time (assuming you’re not an ultra multi-tasking machine, most people are not).
5. Learn from others before you make a move on design. It’s important to wait until you’ve saturated your site with some quality content. By the time you reach 100 articles or 30-50 high quality longer articles, you’ve already learned so much about blogging because it’s likely you’ve read through countless blogs and ‘how-to’ articles along the way. Blogging experience is more important than any other aspect, including design. Until you get a point where you can write with authority and produce valuable work, the bells and whistles won’t matter! That stuff is primarily to keep visitors coming back, but it’s not gonna happen if you don’t update your blog or write your own material.
6. Wasting time is a blogger’s biggest enemy. Trust me on this, if you suck at blogging, your fancy secondary site will be irrelevant in the long run… so pump out articles, get comfortable with blogging, and blog some more. Do it until it happens naturally, it takes a long time to feel comfortable pushing content if you don’t write on a regular basis or lack the discipline and work ethic to become a success.
7. The eureka moment. You’ll arrive at a “eureka” moment multiple times as you grow into the professional blogger mode. The good news for newbie bloggers is that the greener you are, the more special moments you’ll experience!
8. Stay organized and set up goals. Expectations and a timetable for progression are important, they keep you focused and help you develop your skills. Never get ahead of yourself if you don’t know what you are doing, make a major effort to learn and tweak your site constantly to get to the pay dirt.
9. Break your site! It’s funny, because my tech friends constantly tell me “stop breaking your site!” It’s become a term of endearment, almost, because I’m very good at doing just that. I can’t stress enough, what great advice it is. (to break your site, that is) You will encounter problems, you will screw up, you will get frustrated, you will stop, reflect, and second guess yourself. These are all necessary evils, the growing pains happen, deal with it. So your first task after blogging a handful of articles is, GO BREAK YOUR SITE! Install that first php snippet you picked up off your favorite blogging site. Figure out how to fix the damn thing after you break it. Use google religiously and look up errors, chances are there were people before you that made the same mistake.
10. Forget about traffic. If you are learning and just started blogging, your traffic is insignificant. If the twenty people a day you get happen to see a PHP error for 3 hours or never get to see your article, who cares? If you want to make it in the blogging world, you have to think big. You want to aim for one thousand users a day, then ten thousand, then fifty thousand… the sky is the limit. This is why I believe you should just experiment to start off.
11. Consider your first year as your personal training session. Learn, learn, learn! People who gather information online, generally have a short attention span. Even if 5k users find your article because someone Diggs one of your gems while your site is broken, the short attention span will remove your web site from their memory. It’s no big deal, really, think about the big picture. Users will return if you give them what they are looking for. They don’t care about broken sites so much as they do the information that they are trying to acquire, so relax about the aesthetics and broken scripts and take a plunge.
12. Bloggers are a lot like Entrepreneurs. We’re all “Visionaries” to an extent. YOU have an idea and a vision of what you’d like to produce and it is time to put the idea into action. The greatest visionaries in Silicon Valley, happen to head up the largest corporations in the world. Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and even tech start-up guru Guy Kawasaki know something about success and they’re all risk takers. Guess what happens when they have a problem or make a mistake? They hit the books, make some calls, do the research and learn how to fix problems. That’s what you are now, a problem solver, don’t fret about the small stuff. If you want to succeed, you must be very resourceful, confident, and intelligent and for God’s sake, don’t give up!

Just do it! Remember, there’s no light at the end of the tunnel for people overwhelmed by fear and lack of confidence.

The above links to my personal news page that I use for blogging purposes and to stay informed on the latest tech news, enjoy.