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part 10 in my 10-part series on ’social media and simplicity’ is up.

so many new services are launched everyday that you can hardly keep up with all of them without completely losing sight of your actual goals. at the same time, it is hard to ignore these services and not feel as if you’re out of the loop and not using the web to its fullest potential. to the untrained eye, it seems that our options are limited, but as we have shown, by following a few simple rules, you can be successful and largely free of complexity in 10 days (or even less).

head on over to freelance switch to simplify your social media workflow today.

Technorati Tags: blogging, freelancing, social media, business, muhammad saleem, freelance switch

part 9 in my 10-part series on ’social media and simplicity’ is up.

your mistakes and your failures are what force you to strive to better yourself everyday, and nothing is more valuable than that.

head on over to freelance switch to simplify your social media workflow today.

Technorati Tags: blogging, freelancing, social media, business, muhammad saleem, freelance switch

part 8 in my 10-part series on ’social media and simplicity’ is up.

trust is one of the most important elements of any relationship. whether it be the relationship between a writer and her audience, a consultant and his client, or an individual and his fellow community members, without trust, the system screeches to a halt.

head on over to freelance switch to simplify your social media workflow today.

Technorati Tags: blogging, freelancing, social media, business, muhammad saleem, freelance switch

there has been plenty of debate about the merits of the two most popular lifestreaming services, and i have gone on the record saying that i prefer socialthing over friendfeed. but you don’t have to take my word for it, why not try socialthing and make the decision for yourself? please leave a comment if you would like an invite (don’t forget to use an actual email address).

Technorati Tags: lifestreaming, friendfeed, socialthing, invites

before we discuss the button, here are the positive and negative voting options on the 4 main social news sites: digg allows people to either ‘digg’ the story or bury it as duplicate story, spam, wrong topic, inaccurate and ok, this is lame, propeller allows users to either vote on a story or ’sink’ it (and separately report a story as broken link, duplicate, inflammatory, inaccurate, lame, and spam) reddit allows upvoting or downvoting, and stumbleupon gives you the option to vote either ‘i like it!’ or ‘no more like this’ on a given story.

as you can see, the options for burying content are quite robust and allow the algorithms behind these sites to accurately determine how much people dislike the story and want it gone, but the options for promoting content aren’t as developed. for example, the question i ask myself whenever i’m voting for stories on social news sites and come across something truly outrageous is: yes, i want the story to receive more attention so the issue can be resolved, but do i really like what is happening? of course not. while in practice it’s not really a problem, in spirit i don’t want to be ‘digging’ or ‘i like it’ a story about child rape.

in fact, i think that when we vote on stories, we should have just as many options to ‘vote as…’ as we do when we bury something. here are some of the classifiers that i would like to see:

1. general vote.
2. vote as funny.
3. vote as interesting.
4. vote as important (timely/time-sensitive).
5. vote as outrageous.

just as different ways of burying something carry different weights (for example, something that is buried as spam will be removed from the queue where as something can be promoted, marked as inaccurate but still stay on the front page) different ways of voting on something should also carry different weights. something that has the most amount of votes as important (breaking news, heath ledger’s death) should probably be promoted faster than something that has lots of votes as funny (pictures of a cats).

furthermore, we can actually display a tag next to the story so that once it is promoted to the front page, visitors can decide wether they want to read a story or not based solely on the tag (funny, important, outrageous, etc.). the one site that does a somewhat decent job at that is fark.

what do you think of this idea and what kind of ‘vote as…’ or ‘promoted as…’ tags would you like to see?

Technorati Tags: social media, digg, propeller, reddit, stumbleupon, fark, vote, bury

part 7 in my 10-part series on ’social media and simplicity’ is up.

not everyone has to like what you have to say. not even most people have to like what you say. if you can get enough people to love you and hate you enough to be interested in what you have to say and respond to it, you’ve accomplished what you set out to do.

head on over to freelance switch to simplify your social media workflow today.

Technorati Tags: blogging, freelancing, social media, business, muhammad saleem, freelance switch

i’ve written a post on problogger on discussing my reasons for starting and continuing to write.

ultimately, whether it be out of a passion or to make some cash on the side as a freelancer, we all have a unique voice and a unique reason for why we should be heard. the single reason why I wrote this post is because I am genuinely interested in hearing each and everyone’s story.

head over to problogger and let me know, why do you write?

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging, writing, education, branding, networking, escapism, money, problogger

note: follow me on twitter.

twitter launched an updated version of their people search earlier today, but unfortunately it’s not very useful in the absence of the following features:

1 - more sorting options - by default, it seems that the results are largely randomly ordered. right now i’m seeing people who have been inactive for over 3 months (some even a year) as the first results for my query. not only would i love to see an option that allows me to sort users by ‘last active’ but also by how active they are on a daily basis. i don’t want to follow inactive people but i also don’t want to follow hyperactive people that are bound to clutter my stream.

2 - more information - right now when you search by location, you see the people’s name, location, web and bio, and last twitter message (and when it was updated). i would love to more recent messages (maybe last 5 messages) from these people, who they interact with (who follows them and who they follow) and which follows/followers we have in common. this would help me make a judgement call regarding how useful it would be for me to add them and for them to reciprocate.

in the absence of these options, i think twubble is a much more robust and useful way to find more friends (and better, more targetted friends) since it tells you which friends you have in common with recommended twitterers (social proof people!).

Technorati Tags: twitter, people search, twubble

i’ve written a post on search engine land on the past, present, and future of mixx.

mixx, a social media submission site, is a newcomer on the scene, so it understandably will take a while for it to catch up with older sites like digg, propeller, reddit, and stumbleupon. that said, this article looks at the current state of mixx and the potential future of its small but devoted community.

please check out the article and let us know what you think.

Technorati Tags: search engine land, social media, digg, propeller, reddit, stumbleupon, mixx, community, growth, roi

part 6 in my 10-part series on ’social media and simplicity’ is up.

based on the previously discussed rules, you should by now have a fairly good idea of what tools you should be using. while each of these tools (social bookmarking, networking, etc) ultimately help you accomplish your goals of increasing brand awareness, increasing engagement, making money, etc., it is important to understand that each of these services do so in their own unique way and must be used accordingly.

head on over to freelance switch to simplify your social media workflow today.

Technorati Tags: blogging, freelancing, social media, business, muhammad saleem, freelance switch