Baby Boomers and Social Bookmarking Can You Digg it or Do You Stumble? PT.1

Posted on June 15, 2010 by blogcoach

This entry is part 1 of 10 in the series Baby Boomers and Social Bookmarking Can You Digg it?

A few boomer years ago, when I was computer thinner, I started signing up for social book marketing sites. Oh, I did a few Diggs and Stumbled on a few things but did not REALLY understand what I was doing. I DROPPED THE BALL.Now, I want to not only learn more but share with you what I am learning.

Now, many of you reading this post already have a deep understanding of this powerful strategy. You already know that Social Bookmarking is a great way for baby boomer bloggers to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of their web resources. But it differs from file sharing because the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.

So What! Can’t You Get an Automated Service or System to do That?

Yes, you can. But when a real read blooded human being does the bookmarking he or she understands the contents of the resource. For an automated software system it is just mathematical data. YOU can locate web pages that have not been indexed by the search engine spiders.

For us baby boomer bloggers it is also a great way to provide a list of super content for our clients, family, friends and other readers. Does that make any sense?

Ok, well I have one of those real nice and basic even I can understand it videos. I like it and hope you do too. Please subscribe to this site because I am going to share some empowering stuff. Why? Because as I get empowered I am going to empower you! Then we can all be dynamic baby boomer bloggers the internet will know we are in the house!
NOTE: THIS VIDEO IS OLDER BUT STILL VERY GOOD. THE STATS HAVE CHANGED.

Social Bookmarking and Baby Boomers-Different Strokes for Different Folks Pt.2

Posted on June 16, 2010 by blogcoach

This entry is part 2 of 10 in the series Baby Boomers and Social Bookmarking Can You Digg it?

Just as no two baby boomers are the same no two social bookmarking sites are same. They all have their own culture. Now, why is that important? Because you may be blogging about about technical material and someone else may blog more about politics. Well, you want to know which social bookmarketing site might be a good fit.

In addition some social bookmarking sites are more popular than others. And some looks like fun others may be boring to you without much action. So during this series I am going to take a peek at several popular and may be unknown to you social bookmarking site.

My challenge for you is to look at any sites presented in this series and decide if you want to try it. Don’t delay, sign up and start using it right away. Please note that some social bookmarketing sites have a fee for some publishing services. I am going to share the sites that do not have a cost.

Technet for the IT Professional or Baby Boomers That Know What IT Folks Know

Not many readers of this blog fit the above category. But you may know someone who does. Technet is a site focused on the IT community. IT’ stands for Information Technology. IT experts are involved in the study, design, development, implementation, support or management of software applications, hardware plus more.

Social bookmarking on TechNet Social was first launched in 2008, built on a new web platform that has user-tagging and feeds at its core. The goal of the social bookmarking application is to provide a method whereby members of the IT professional community can:

* Contribute to a database of quality links on any topic from across the web. By filtering on one or more tags, (e.g. “Exchange” and “security”) users can discover popular or recent links and subscribe to a feed of those links.
* Find and follow experts’ recommended sites. Each profile page includes a feed of the user’s contributions. Users can be discovered through a drop-down menu on each bookmark.
* Demonstrate their expertise through the links displayed in their profile.
* Store their favorite links online.

The initial release of the application provides standard features for the genre, including a bookmarklet and import capabilities. The TechNet web site is also starting to incorporate feeds of social bookmarks from experts and the community, displayed alongside feeds from relevant bloggers. (Source: Wikipedia)

Note that you can sign into this site and become part of the community if you have a Windows Live ID. I would love to know if anyone reading this is skilled enough to join this community. But guess what? If you want to get skilled enough seems to me a great place to hang out. I know believe that some of you might just evolve into an IT professional when you grow up. What do you think?

Social Bookmarking and Baby Boomers- Browsmi Pt.3

Posted on June 17, 2010 by blogcoach

This entry is part 5 of 10 in the series Baby Boomers and Social Bookmarking Can You Digg it?

There are many major social bookmarketing sites. And there are many “You never heard of them before” social bookmarketing sites. I am going to explore the good, bad and ugly.

I joined a site today called Browsmi. Now, I observed that most of the users do not post their pictures. So, unless you see their interests you hesitate to network with them. But the this site has great possibilites for baby boomers. Why? Because you bring your own crowd. You see this site lets you go and bookmark and site in “real time” and share with your friends.

It works like this:

It’s 12:00 at night and I am searching for some cool coins on ebay. I go to Browsmi and see that you are online. I then go to an Ebay listing and I click the thumbs up in green. You may go and click a thumbs up too. All the other baby boomers hanging out there can see what we have noted. PLUS we could go into chat mode and talk about it.

I included the information about the site from the publishers below. The site does not have a high page rank nor large numbers. Whereas, you can connect to your Facebook, I got a warning saying it might not be a good idea. So, I decided not to do it.

If you go and want to explore look for me “blogging betty boomer. Let me know you are there.

Browzmi is a place online where friends can instant message and surf the web together.

Browzmi makes the web more fun by allowing friends to share and discover stuff online in real-time, like you’re there together. Watching movies, discovering new music, playing games and sharing photos online is much more fun together with your friends than it is browsing alone.
Browzmi is not screen-sharing: it’s more like instant messaging. Browzmi’s buddy list displays the real-time web location of you and your friends as you surf in Browzmi. So as everyone surfs around the web, you can see where your friends are located and follow each other to share and discover good stuff online together.

Browzmi is a free web application and does not require any downloads to chat and surf with your friends. It is compatible with Firefox, IE and Safari web browsers. For the best social surfing performance, you can install the Browzmi Homebase Firefox extension to connect Browzmi to your web browser.

We built Browzmi so friends could chat and surf the web together. If you want to surf in private, just hop over to another window or tab in your web browser or simply sign off. Browzmi only shares what happens inside the Browzmi.com network.

You can create an account or you can add the Browzmi You can create an account or you can add the Browzmi Facebook application, which connects Browzmi to Facebook so you can chat and surf the web together with your Facebook friends. Soon we will be providing the ability to chat across all the top IM networks with all your friends.

10 Top Reasons Why Baby Boomers Bloggers SHOULD NOT Use Social Bookmarking

Posted on June 22, 2010 by blogcoach

This entry is part 6 of 10 in the series Baby Boomers and Social Bookmarking Can You Digg it?

I have discovered 10 Top Reasons Why Baby Boomers SHOULD NOT even think about using Social Bookmarking. You may disagree with me and that is your blogging boomer right but let me know why. So, here are my reasons:

Blogging Baby Boomers have a hard enough time blogging and posting in social networking sites like Facebook and Orket, so who has time, during pre and post retirement, to post to social bookmarking sites?
Most baby boomer bloggers only blog to entertain themselves or for therapy. Who cares about promoting an expertise, service or product when most of them are fishing, or baby sitting grands?
Social bookmarking sites are a waste of time when all you have to do is use the FAVORATES in Internet Explorer and BOOKMARKS in FireFox. ( Who caresabout Safari or Opera, etc because most boomers are on PC’s right?)
Baby Boomer Bloggers are not as smart as the generations before them. They will have a hard time keeping up with the passwords to all those extra sites.
Most Baby Boomer Bloggers can’t see the SHARE BUTTONS.
It has been said by critics of baby boomers that they are selfish. So why should the want to share good information, articles, products, music,videos, etc with others in their friend networks that they find on other bloggers sites?
Who said Baby Boomers had friends. If they join a network who will they talk to?
Most Baby Boomers no longer say “Hey can you Dig it?”
Aunt Bea, in Andy Griffith, Macgyver or the Snurfs never used social bookmarking.
Baby Boomers probably came up with those strange and scary names for the social bookmarking sites like the ones below. Who will trust those sites to be for nerdy boomers, scholars, business folks or artists?

* Digg

* Diigo

* Faves

* Flattr

* folkd

* GiveALink.org

* Identi.ca* Jumptags

* Linkwad

* Mixx

* MSDN

* oneview

* Reddit

* Sphinn

* Squidoo

If you disagree with me GREAT!! Join me on my Facebook Fan Page and let’s continue the discussion. Also, I dare you to join at least three(3) of these sites. Let’s work on it together.

Social Bookmarking for Baby Boomers-Digging Deeper with Digg Pt.4

Posted on June 18, 2010 by blogcoach

This entry is part 7 of 10 in the series Baby Boomers and Social Bookmarking Can You Digg it?

When I first started using Digg I would merely sign in to be able to Digg an article I liked. But like most baby boomers reading this post, Sometimes you want to go deeper so it makes sense. You also go deeper so you can see how relevant it is to your blogging.

Here is Wikipedia’s definition of Digg.

Digg is a social news website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories.

Digg is supposed to be one of the best ,biggest and baddest social bookmarking sites out there right now. If you know how to treat it, you can get amazing floods of traffic regularly. However using just their homepage and simple techniques like I have done aren’t enough.

Some Applications to Consider that Can Help You Go Deeeeeeper into Digg.

Digg Labs

Just like Google has labs so does Digg, The labs provide a deeper view of Digg. A lot of materialf gets submitted to Digg every day, so good things can sometimes easet past you. Labs projects look beneath the surface of the Digg community’s activities. Here you can find several tools to make browsing and digging more fun as well as analyze internet activities. Oh, if you want to get to it from the site just go down to the very bottom and you will see it in tiny letters. Put your glasses on.

So, I just checked out Swarm. Very cool. Go play for minute or two.

Social Blade

Now this application is not for the faint of heart. Actually, if you have a little anal retention going on or simply love analysis you are going to love this tool.

This application provides detailed analysis, graphs and statistics allowing You to understand how many comments, diggs, friend diggs etc. are needed to hit digg front page. Analyze, what’s really happening on digg’s front page.

Now, you can go and play here for some more minutes. I will discuss some more applications in the next post.

Some Digg Applications You Can Consider

Social Bookmarking and Baby Boomers-Blog Comment Before Bookmarking

Posted on June 25, 2010 by blogcoach

This entry is part 8 of 10 in the series Baby Boomers and Social Bookmarking Can You Digg it?

I urge you to use social bookmarking as part of your blogging strategy. However, when you are about to make a comment on a blog, do that first. Comments and bookmarking command separate attention and time.

Follow this little scenario for a few moments.

I just went to the blog of someone who posted a comment on my blog. Now, as bloggers with good home training, we will reciprocate by posting a comment on that person’s blog. (Of course I am not referring to the spammers or hateful) So I read a post that captured my attention because of the title. I was hooked. Not only was the content exceptional but I was ready to follow the steps right away.

But I knew that I needed to curb my enthusiasm and be about the business of writing my comment. I put the link to the article in a notepad on my comuter. Then I proceeded to make my comment. But, oh my, I was just about to enter the comment box when I saw those SHARE BUTTONS STARING BECKONING ME TO CLICK ON THEM. I thought to myself, “Haven’t I been preaching about this to others lately?” And if you know anything about me, I really do try to practice what I preach. So, I brought my curser out of the comment box and scanned the available options.

Now, I was ready to bookmark as well as connect with social networks like Facebook and Twitter. I had my passwords right next to me. No excuse, this was going to be done. So, I started with Digg. After signing in I Dugg the post. Then I decided to check my other submissions. Did anyone Digg them? Then I went to the popularDiggs. Later, after about 5 minutes, I went back to the post. Instead of clicking off the tab I clicked the back button 1, 000 times.

Then I was back at the blog post. I decided to go to Stumbleupon but then thought perhaps I should Tweet it also. After clicking on the Twitter button I signed in and tweeted the post. I then retweeted a few posts that were current. I then preceded to check if I had any direct messages, retweets or if anyone used my name in a tweet. Wow, what else was happening in the blog30# world I needed to check that too.

Oh my, time to get back to the comment I was going to leave on the post. So I tracked back again. At this point, after answering the phone, I decided to create my comment. I would get back to the other bookmarks or social networks later.

The bottom line is sometimes it is better to stay focused on the comment. Then focus on the social bookmarking. As baby boomers many of his have such varied exciting interests that we are easily distracted by other interests. Commenting demands it’s own attention and bookmarking must be given it’s valued attention as well.

Does this make any sense?

Baby Boomers and Ebay Collectors and Sellers

Posted on January 13, 2011 by blogcoach

This entry is part 10 of 10 in the series Baby Boomers and Social Bookmarking Can You Digg it?

Did you know that a Teddy Rooselvelt Marble sold on Ebay for $4,500?
I just saw a great blog established by Ebay for collectors and buyers of collections. It is called Ebay Collectors. The blog shares collector items that have sold as well as tips for purchasing an item to add to your collection.

I was more than impressed to see that Ebay designated a blog specific for this market group. I am also excited when I read about the prices that some of the collector items have fetched.

Now, note that the site does not have the comments currently open so I cannot suggest you go and post your insights or questions. Ebay has other great resources for answering your questions. In addition you can email them your questions. But the blog is a gold mine for baby boomer collectors who are on Ebay or want to purchase a collector item from Ebay.

Notice that the header is simple with just the logo and tabs for seven (7) pages. This makes navigation pretty easy for folks not used to blogs. Also, there is currently only one social bookmark for Digg and social network interfaces for Facebook and Twitter.
However, the very fact that those three options are available makes for powerful blogging. I am certain that it will expand as Ebay goes deeper and deeper into social media.

Note also that the Twitter feed is in the sidebar and tag cloud is extensive. If you think the comments should be open then shoot them an email. But as a blogger you also know how much work is involved in maintaining a blog. For now, you can always follow them on Twitter to ask questions.

This blog is still very new and it pays to keep an eye on how it progresses. I just love it when businesses expand and use the power of blogging. I also relish the appreciation for collector items that baby boomers know so much about.

If you are not currently on Ebay but want to get started here is an excellent starter resource. Of course there are a lot of books out there on Ebay but this particular author has 35 books to her credit. It is easy to read and chuck full of information.

A few boomer years ago, when I was computer thinner, I started signing up for social book marketing sites. Oh, I did a few Diggs and Stumbled on a few things but did not REALLY understand what I was doing. I DROPPED THE BALL.Now, I want to not only learn more but share with you what I am learning.

So What! Can’t You Get an Automated Service or System to do That?

Technet for the IT Professional or Baby Boomers That Know What IT Folks Know

I have discovered 10 Top Reasons Why Baby Boomers SHOULD NOT even think about using Social Bookmarking. You may disagree with me and that is your blogging boomer right but let me know why. So, here are my reasons:

Blogging Baby Boomers have a hard enough time blogging and posting in social networking sites like Facebook and Orket, so who has time, during pre and post retirement, to post to social bookmarking sites?

Most baby boomer bloggers only blog to entertain themselves or for therapy. Who cares about promoting an expertise, service or product when most of them are fishing, or baby sitting grands?

Social bookmarking sites are a waste of time when all you have to do is use the FAVORATES in Internet Explorer and BOOKMARKS in FireFox. ( Who caresabout Safari or Opera, etc because most boomers are on PC’s right?)

Baby Boomer Bloggers are not as smart as the generations before them. They will have a hard time keeping up with the passwords to all those extra sites.

Most Baby Boomer Bloggers can’t see the SHARE BUTTONS.

It has been said by critics of baby boomers that they are selfish. So why should the want to share good information, articles, products, music,videos, etc with others in their friend networks that they find on other bloggers sites?

Who said Baby Boomers had friends. If they join a network who will they talk to?

Most Baby Boomers no longer say “Hey can you Dig it?”

Aunt Bea, in Andy Griffith, Macgyver or the Snurfs never used social bookmarking.

Baby Boomers probably came up with those strange and scary names for the social bookmarking sites like the ones below. Who will trust those sites to be for nerdy boomers, scholars, business folks or artists?

Digg is a social news website made for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the Internet, by submitting links and stories, and voting and commenting on submitted links and stories.

Some Applications to Consider that Can Help You Go Deeeeeeper into Digg.

I urge you to use social bookmarking as part of your blogging strategy. However, when you are about to make a comment on a blog, do that first. Comments and bookmarking command separate attention and time.