I’m very happy about two things, “Delicious” related. First, Del.icio.us now simply goes by Delicious. And, more importantly, Yahoo! has sold the service to the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world. Delicious will become part of their new Internet company, AVOS.
Why do I care?
Since October 2008, ABS has bookmarked more than 200 articles. It allows us to tag, save, manage and share web pages from a centralized source. Rather than adding web pages to our ‘Favorites’ menu in each of our web browsers or on our hard drives, our team can bookmark them using a social bookmarking site for future access by all.
When Yahoo! reported in December that they were discontinuing Delicious, they provided alternative sites to migrate bookmarks since they had no buyer lined up at that point. We just hadn’t got around to doing this so I was relieved when the notice came up when I logged into Delicious to see if it was still there…
How easy is it to move my bookmarks?
All we needed to do to continue using Delicious was agree to let Yahoo! transfer our bookmarks to AVOS.
According to the website, as soon as you let Yahoo! move your Delicious account, you will:
* Enjoy uninterrupted use of Delicious.
* Keep your Delicious account and all your bookmarks.
* Keep the same look and feel of Delicious as you have today, and enjoy future innovations for the product.
How is Social Bookmarking Social?
Social bookmarking occurs when users share their bookmarked web pages via social bookmarking communities. When you share your blog posts through social bookmarking, you can increase traffic to your blog. Alternatively, when you view other users’ bookmarks, you can find new blogs to read, new post ideas, new conversations to start, new communities to join for further networking and more.
YouTube Founders Acquire Delicious From Yahoo! April 27, 2011 press release
Promise Users the Same Great Service And Even Easier & More Fun Ways To Save, Share, and Discover the Web’s “Tastiest” Content. http://www.avos.com/delicious-press-release/
Sunday, February 13, 2011
Laurie Pellichero
SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
Thanks to the generosity of Times readers, local companies, organizations and charitable foundations, The Times 2010 Holiday Appeal has raised a total of $92,247 in support of the Rescue Mission of Trenton.
“The Times is grateful for the overwhelming support of this Holiday Appeal,” said Brian Malone, publisher and editor of The Times. “It’s a reflection on the great work being done day in and day out by the dedicated folks at the Rescue Mission. And it’s also a reflection on the generosity of our readers who came through in very difficult economic times.”
“The community’s response to this year’s Times Holiday Appeal has exceeded our most optimistic expectations,” said Mary Gay Abbott-Young, CEO of Rescue Mission of Trenton. “We recognize that these continue to be very difficult times for many in our community, and for this reason, we especially appreciate the generosity shown to the Mission by individuals, area companies and area foundations,” she said.
“We would also like to express our heartfelt appreciation to Hutchinson Industries for its continued support of the Mission and its most generous $25,000 upfront challenge grant,” continued Abbott-Young. “We have no doubt that this jump-started the campaign and contributed to its overall success,” she said.
“On behalf of the Mission staff and clients, I want to especially thank the dozens of individuals who took the time to make wonderful comments about the programs and services offered by the Mission,” she said. “Their kind words meant a great deal to all of us.
“Last, but not least, we want to thank The Times and its compassionate publisher/editor, Brian Malone, for being a wonderful neighbor for so many years and for selecting the Mission as this year’s Holiday Appeal recipient. We wish Brian the best as he embarks on the next pages of his life. We will miss him. We also want to thank Laurie Pellichero, Times promotions manager, for the many stories she wrote and her help in shepherding the campaign.
Do you have 10 full-time employees or more? You could add thousands of dollars back into your budget while reducing unemployment costs.
NJ Unemployment Insurance tax has increased by an avg. of $130 per employee.Switch to UST before Jan. 31, 2011and avoid paying the increased rate after that date.
UST(Unemployment Insurance Trust) is an alternative to the state unemployment insurance system, helping nonprofit organizations save money on their unemployment costs through lower rates and expert claims monitoring. This savings can then be put toward fulfilling organizational missions, including building assets to fund programs and to enhance outreach.
I came across a helpful article from Omnipress. It highlights different avenues for using video to raise awareness about your conference and build event attendance.
2008 National Association of Realtors Convention in Orlando, Florida Interviews direct from the convention floor. Great way to capture the experience http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsKI6mUAQis
One of our New Year’s resolutions at ABS is to use video to deliver quality content to our audience. We will be utilizing a professional to get us started. Beyond that, there are many tips posted about what we can do to maximize the reach of our videos. We follow Mashable and have collected 8 articles this year that may help small business in this area.
Here is an excellent article about avenues to improve search engine rankings through your website presence.
By Jim Lodico
Published December 27, 2010
Are you looking for innovative ways to improve your search engine rankings?
In an earlier post I talked about the need to fully optimize your website and blog posts for search engines.
However, content optimization will only take you so far. For a website to really take off in the search engine rankings, it needs to generate incoming links from relevant and reputable websites. And you have little control of incoming links.
To increase the likelihood of obtaining high-quality incoming links, here are seven things you can do:
Yahoo reported last week that they may be dropping Delicious and their other Social Bookmarking services. ABS has used this service for the past few years and hope they continue independently from Yahoo. Here is the latest news and some alternatives to explore.
It looks like your (and my) personal search engine of interesting web pages is about to go away. Yahoo hasn’t formally confirmed, but all signs point to the impending demise of delicious.com.
What are we going to do with all of our bookmarks?
There are several alternatives available and, if you’re like me, you’re going to have to test some of them out until you find the one that best fits how you like to save bookmarks and later search for them. You’ll also want to export your existing delicious.com bookmarks and, if possible, import them into the new service you choose. Instructions on that are below, but first, here’s a list of options for your post-Delicious.com bookmarking.
10 Delicious.com Alternatives
(in alphabetical order)
Blinklist: Blinklist has some of the same features that Delicious has, like quick bookmarking and sharing with others. Pages can be read offline, as well. But … there doesn’t appear to be a way to import bookmarks, so this is probably a non-starter for existing Delicious.com users.
Connotea: The site advertises itself as a service for “researchers, clinicians, and scientists.” And many of the features are specifically designed for academic users. But it acts in much the same way Delicious does: find a web page, add it to your “library,” add keywords for later retrieval, and so forth.
Diigo: Diigo lets you save web page bookmarks, files, images, and much more. It bills itself as a personal information management service. You can bookmark web pages via a Diigo toolbar and/or a bookmarklet in your web browser.
Evernote: Like Diigo, Evernote isn’t just for bookmarking web pages — but that’s one of the things you can do, and I know a few fellow search marketers who are already using Evernote instead of Delicious. You can save URLs or just text clippings from a web page.
Faves.com: This is not a pure bookmarking site, but a site that acts as a combination of, say, Delicious and Google Reader. When you register, Faves.com installs its toolbar in your browser and that’s how you save content. Your Faves.com home page includes the links that friends have saved (if you choose to connect to others who use the site), making it as much about content discovery as saving.
Google Bookmarks: You may already be using this without even knowing it. If you’ve ever starred a search result on Google.com or starred a place in Google Maps/Places, it’s already been saved into Google Bookmarks. You can also add sites to Google Bookmarks via the Google Toolbar. In fact, here’s a list of the various ways to add pages to Google Bookmarks. And yes, it supports importing bookmarks.
Historio.us: This bookmarking site even has a .us TLD like Delicious.com used to have. Histori.us offers one-click saving, makes snapshots of web pages when you save them, offers tagging and full-text search. It does support importing bookmarks from other sites. There’s a limited free account option, but if you have more than 300 bookmarks, you’ll need to use one of the paid accounts.
Instapaper: If you’re a heavy Delicious.com user, this one’s probably not for you. Instapaper allows you to save web pages for reading at a later time, but creator Marco Ament warns that it’s not “optimized for keeping track of thousands of pages. This isn’t the right tool to collect, categorize, tag, filter, and search the contents of every web page you’ve ever found.”
Pinboard.in: This is not a free service. It offers a basic service for about $7 (one-time fee) or an archival service for $25 a year. The archival service stores copies of your bookmarks and provides full-text searching. Conveniently, you can see a Pinboard vs. Delicious comparison to help you decide if this is the right service for you.
Zootool: Like some of the others above, Zootool isn’t just for URLs; you can save images, documents, and other web-based content. Saving is done via a bookmarklet and, unlike Delicious.com’s blue links, Zootool saves your content as thumbnails. It offers organizing tools like tagging, too.
How to Export Delicious.com Bookmarks
You’ll probably want/need to export your Delicious.com bookmarks in order to get the most out of any of the services above. I’ve mentioned cases where importing is or isn’t available, at least based on the sites’ help pages.
Fortunately, exporting Delicious bookmarks is easy:
1. Login to Delicious and go to your “Settings” page.
2. Under the “Bookmarks” heading, look for the “Export / Backup Bookmarks” link.
Delicious will save your bookmarks as an HTML file, and you have the option to include your existing tags and/or notes.
Your turn: If there are other Delicious.com alternatives that I’ve missed above, or if you have experience with any of the sites above (good or bad), let us know in the comments so that all readers can benefit.
Hard to imagine that you started down this road to blogging bliss less than two months ago, isn’t it? What once seemed to be an insurmountable unknown has evolved into a 2011 must-do. In the spirit of you have to start somewhere, just embrace your inner athlete and as Nike says, “Just do it!” But maybe you’re feeling just a bit under-inspired? If that’s the case then how about a quick recap?
- To Blog or Not To Blog: Part 1 (The Four Letter “B” Word?)
The best place to start is at the start. What we learned here was that blogging isn’t as bad as many interpret it to be. In fact, blogging is just another fairly simple way to communicate.
-To Blog or Not To Blog: Part 2 – Self-Publish or Perish
Things picked up a bit on Part 2. I explained that as marketing evolves from being one directional to conversational a blog is the perfect way to embrace your public, and they you. Regardless of simplicity, for those organizations that want to reap the benefits, blogging is becoming the new business card. That is, it’s a necessity.
- To Blog or Not To Blog: Part 3 – Social networking friends with blog benefits
You asked for more benefits and you got ‘em. The content in a blog can be instrumental to improving your website’s SEO (search engine optimization). In short, Google’s bots and algorithms like blogs. A blog is also a great way to disseminate information by harnessing the power of social networks and the “share culture”.
- To Blog or not to Blog: Part 4 – They say, “Everyone has at least one blog in them.”
And then in the previous chapter we resolved your final set of fears. “I don’t know what to write about,” and “I’m not that good of a writer,” and “I’m too busy,” were all resolved. Another answer was the soft sell – contact Karla or Paula at ABS and they’ll work with you to develop a solution to meet the needs of your business. Done deal!
Regardless of what your personal feeling are about the Internet, I think it’s pretty safe to say that it’s here to stay. It’s certainly not going to go away just because you ignore it. Whether it’s blogging, using photos & video, tapping into social media or whatever other innovative trend or staple is ahead, your brand is going to have to participate in some way. There’s no need to overwhelm yourself, just chip away at it. The more you do, the more you’ll learn. And of course there are also resources such as myself to guide you along the way.
When it comes to business and marketing what I like to say is, The Internet. You can figure it out now, or you can figure it out later. But you will need to figure it out.
We’ve finally rounded the corner and we’re in the home stretch. We’ve gone from blogging? to blogging! In fact, given today’s business climate and consumption of information, blogging is an ideal medium. Now comes the fun part – we just need something to write about.
“What’s that? Now comes the hard part?”
No, now comes the fun part. Remember (from Part 2) the theme of the moment is sharing. It’s not about what you know. Or about rattling off some list of examples of why you’re the best. It’s about being on the other end and receiving something that adds value to your life. For example, this article. I’m trying to share with you my passion for blogging, as well as why I believe it should be your passion too. Would anyone really care if I talked about what a great blogger I am? See?
So with that context in mind, let’s just keep it simple and we’ll all agree that
there must be at least one thing in the course of a given week that at least
some of your followers would also be interested in.
Maybe you attended an event? You could share some details and ideally some photos too.
Maybe you saw the advertisement for a particular movie, TV program, lecture or seminar? Let them know about the what and the when, and of course a bit on why you think they might enjoy such a moment.
Maybe you just finished a great book (or a video on YouTube) that is relevant to your business and the interests of your target market? Share your experience and possibly throw in a couple links to other relevant media and/or articles.
The truth is, when you keep your eyes and ears open and your radar on, the
possibilities of what to share soon become endless. Just always be sure to try to keep it relevant. Convey your passion but don’t lose sight of the receiver’s wants and needs.
“Ok. I’m sure if I tried I could initiate a conversation with my audience. But…”
Stop! I know where you’re going next. At this point it’s about time and/or
writing ability, correct? Please pardon me a moment while I shift into soft sell mode. If you’ve made it this far (i.e., you too believe in the idea of blogging) then relax, there are viable solutions available to you.
There are plenty of communications and public relationships outfits who will be glad to work with you. A perfect example would be ABS. Blogging is a natural extension of their other written-word based services. For ease as well as the sake of consistency you could have blogging added to your current package of services. And if you don’t have a relationship with ABS (or similar) then it’s probably time to establish such a relationship. If you don’t have a blog and don’t know where to start they can help make that happen for you. Of course, if you’d rather, you can reach out to me as well.
“That’s great. I was really worried about the actual writing part. Thanks!”
Glad I could help. The bottom line is to get the ball in play, get things
rolling. You don’t have to be Shakespeare, or Tolstoy. And you’re certainly not writing, “War And Peace.” Once you get started – either solo, or with support – you can grow and progress, or just kinda meander along. The pace and tone is entirely up to you. Quite often your audience will give you feedback so you can modify your game plan as you go. And of course, if you’re using a professional for support they will be able to provide guidance as well.
There’s one more part to this series, Part 5, and then I’m done (for now). If
you have any questions in the meantime please feel free to contact ABS, or
myself, and we’d be glad to help you get your blogging ball rolling.
As NJ business owners and residents, Paula & I strongly support Governor Chris Christie’s property tax reform measures. We believe our legislators should put partisan politics in order to pass the property tax reform tool kit before time runs out. This will help spur economic development and private sector job growth in New Jersey. We hope you consider joining us in contacting your legislators this week! Karla Pollack
The state has enacted a 2% cap, effective January 1, 2011, on the amount a school board or municipality can raise property taxes each year, but if the Legislature does not give local governments the tools they need to cut spending and control costs, the property tax cap may not work.
Governor Chris Christie has proposed 33 specific property tax reforms that will help local governments control spending, but the Legislature has not acted on most of them. Christie calls it his “tool kit” for reforming property taxes.
Please contact your legislators and urge them to support Governor Chris Christie’s property tax reform tool kit before the end of the year.
I’m very happy about two things, “Delicious” related. First, Del.icio.us now simply goes by Delicious. And, more importantly, Yahoo! has sold the service to the founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. As creators of the largest online video platform, they have firsthand experience enabling millions of users to share their experiences with the world. Delicious will become part of their new Internet company, AVOS.
It looks like your (and my) personal search engine of interesting web pages is about to go away. Yahoo hasn’t formally confirmed, but 
