Is to. Simply the Shortest URL Shortener Ever?

My Definitive List of Shortest URL Shorteners on this blog is now completely obsolete. All of them were four characters long (including the dot) but a new winer has appeared:

to.

This shortener leaves much to be desired in terms of interface and features BUT: it generates REALLY short URLs such as:

to./jre (which incidentally takes you back to this very post).

That's a total of seven characters. And you can get to it by typing mere three (to.) and hitting Enter in your browser.

This in fact is the shortest URL shortener I am aware of at the moment. It should be easy enough to emulate by other TLDs should the choose to.

I discovered this shortener randomly through a blog comment from Sal. The .to country top level domain (TLD) belongs to the Kingdom of Tonga (H.R.H. Crown Prince Tupouto'a seems in control) and you can register these through tonic.to, the registrar.

PROKOP 2010 - the new Slovak PR Award

PROKOP 2010, Slovakia's first ever PR awards, will be announced on February 11, 2010 at the "design factory" in Bratislava.

Jury shortlisted 13 projects from seven agencies for the competition organised by the Slovak Association for Public Relations and the advertising trade magazine Stratégie.

SEESAME, an agency from Bratislava, leads the nominees with four shortlists, followed by Neopublic Porter Novelli from Bratislava and Košice-based Communication House with two each.

The competition is divided into three categories: Corporate Communications, B2B and B2C PR, Community Relations and Internal Communication.

The jury is composed of six men and two women and is chaired by Vladimir Bystrov, the Strategic Planning Director at the agency Bizon & Rose in Prague, Czech Republic. The criteria judged are innovativeness, creativity and flexibility, with a view to demonstrated results.

Tickets for the awards ceremony cost EUR 10 and can be purchased by contacting waradzinova@gmail.com.

People to follow on Twitter in 2010 #follow2010

Technological progress can make your life better. I watched closely the growth of Twitter in 2009 and it has allowed me to listen to (and even communicate with) some amazing people.

They can be found in my follow stream but here is an incomplete annotated list sorted by topics:

Online marketing
@DoshDosh are some of the cleverest and coolect internet marketers out there. @Halfdeck is a SEO with a capital S. @JustinBoland (as @brainsturbator) can run circles around most people. @melanienathan is a very personable Canadian linkbuilder. I am not smart enough to always understand @memeticbrand but when I get it it's amazing content. @rishil rarely posts an uniteresting tweet. @rustybrick, the smart voice in SEO and author of the iPhone Siddur. @WesUnruh is another gem, a clever guy if there ever was one.

Online travel
@alexbainbridge and @hotelblogs are two people in the online travel industry I greatly respect. @travolution

Other English content
@mindhackblog always succint and interesting


@notcot @trendycrew who I am happy to have met in person thanks to Twitter @HarvardBiz @tmbchr who is an a class of his own

The honour roll
These are people who are legends on and off Twitter and justifiedly so.
@andybeal @dannysullivan @dcurtis @fredwilson @johnon @leeodden

Slovak (and CZ) tweets
This list includes a number of people I know in person but know even better thanks to Twitter):
@dusoft who has a well deserved cult following on Twitter, @baoding who converses intelligently in English, Slovak and Hungarian, @braque the most genuine Slovak marketer on Twitter, @kamelka, a funny Slovak studying abroad, @jurajjavorsky who seems a great guy on and off twitter and @kvasinka whose several social media streams are well worth following @madciapka @MarekP @dmagician who is also genuine and smart. @MarkoKolar is a smart and ambitious graphic designer who is a pleasure to work with online. @matushiq is a budding scientist and funny. @seocentrum is good at both domaining and SEO and would make a top class domain broker. @PxPxE are friends who are going to do well on Twitter. @radobato is a massively experienced journalist and a good guy, @TiborHoloda is the best tweeter among Slovak DJs and a genuine, great guy. @tobiasr sometimes has interesting stuff to say (in English).

A few more people/brands good at internet marketing @sifra @ataxocz @cuketka

Personal
@brendenwhalley is a long lost close personal friend I am happy to be around again on Twitter @nanotweets is a friend I hope to never lose touch with.
@georgin is a profile that won't be updated any time soon but luckily the last tweet is recursive. A colleague and friend who we tragically lost this year and really miss.

People I've left out
I've left out many great people who are not such great Twitterers (but have accounts and should use them more often in 2010). I've also left out some great Twitterers who I don't know personally or whose signal to noise ratio is inconsistent or unfavourable. I am sensitive to anyone who posts stuff that I find sexist, racist, rude or aggressive in a stupid way.

Who do I tag to share their people to #Follow2010:
Anyone I have mentioned is welcome to share a list on Twitter or elsewhere - let me know if you post one so that I can link to it. I want to see @dusoft's list, @alexbainbridge's, @matushiq's and @ataxocz's.

I will also update this post if I come across any omissions or errors. Happy holidays!

Don't Waste Your 'Potential', American Express

I saw an intriguing (to a search markering professional) ad in the underground in London and @dusoft was kind enough to snap this shaky photo of it for me.

American Express urges you to "realise the potential" by using the membership rewards programme. The ad contains a URL (www.americanexpress.co.uk/potential) but also another interesting bit: it says you can just search for 'potential'.

We had a small discussion with @dusoft what that meant. I thought maybe they had optimised for the probably not terribly competitive KW 'potential' on google and ranked. He said the top spots would definitely be taken by dictionary definitions.

I followed up, first trying to search for potential on google.com but nothing related to the campaign came up. When I tried google.co.uk, here is what I saw:

American Express uses Adwords to serve an ad for searches for potential. Surprisingly, the URL displayed with the ad, http://americanexpress.com/Potential fails to resolve. The UK version (www.americanexpress.co.uk/potential) does work, but redirects to the hideous http://www212.americanexpress.com/dsmlive/dsm/int/gb/en/personal/membershipbenefits/rtphomepage_pr.do?vanity=americanexpress.co.uk/potential&vgnextoid=be57afbe98603210VgnVCM100000defaad94RCRD

So here is my free advice for UK's American Express:
1. Do not waste your potential!
2. Optimise organically for 'potential', maybe the top position isn't achievable but a top 5 should be for someone with your resources
3. Make sure the display URLs you use for Adwords ads actually resolve
4. Users appreciate clean URLs

Danny Sullivan mentions two examples of entities using a call for search for navigation - Matt Mullenweg says to search for 'Matt' on Google on his business card (see here) and Sony said to search for '2012' to find the film. Unlike American Express, these two seem to work.

Someone with their resources should really be able to do better than this, right?

Professional deformation makes me leave deformed rants on a great website

I was leaving a rant on a Polish graphic designer's blog about the poor usability of a flash-based site they have produced.

The website Voices from the Center covers an amazing project by Janeil Engelstadt, an American artist who spent time at the Bratislava Academy of Fine Arts and Design as a Fulbright Scholar. She interviewed people around Central Europe on the end of Communist Rule - very topical since we are doing a lot of soul searching for the 20th anniversary of the "Tender Revolution" (that's what we call the Velvet Revolution here in Slovakia).

My mother sent me a link to the site and I first couldn't understand why. Later she showed me the site, since both she and my father are interviewed there. I enjoyed browsing around but I shared her frustration with the user experience - a Flash site by obviously talented graphic designers but with little regard to conventional usability principles (this is not my first Flash rant, of course).

I was frustrated enough to leave the rant and the authors were nice enough to reply, saying they disagree, since the site isn't strictly informative and aims to encourage exploration.

Of course, my professional bias made me respond again: drawing on Nielsen I argued that a more usable website would better encourage exploration (and sharing of this great content).

By the same token I admitted that they would find many of the sites I am involved with ugly. I tried to explain that harping on usability was for me what we call a "professional deformation" in Slovak. I realised though that this expression did not have the right meaning in English. I googled for the right English equivalent, since I 've had a need for this phrase repeatedly. I came across this great discussion on wordreference - shows that there really is no functional English equivalent. The best they come up with is saying you're biased by your profession, which I guess is a reasonable substitute but does not quite cover the connotational meaning of the "deformed" or "distorted" professional. You can lose a bias but once something is malformed it is harder to put right.

So apologies to the talented Poles for party crashing their blog and kudos (and some link love) to Janeil for Voices from the Center.

Ameritania Hotel NYC Paying Indian "SEO's" to Post Comment Spam?

The comments on this blog are moderated. I was surprised yesterday when this comment on my post about my 2008 stay in New York landed in my box:

Amsterdam CourtHotel,belvedere hotel new york,boutique hotels new york,manhattan hotel rooms,boutique hotel manhattan,ameritania hotel new york-http://www.ameritanianyc.com

from a blogger.com user without a public profile.

My post does mention the Ameritania, a hotel in the Theater District where we spent a few nights. But I would not expect a company of such stature to resort to such obsolete tactics as blog post spam.

When I checked my blos stats today, this is what I saw:

In other words, Ameritania in New York hired an Indian "link builder" to help improve its search engine rankings. He or she searched google for blogs on blogspot containing the words ameritania hotel new york and posted comment spam containing a link to the hotel.

As an experiment a little while ago I paid for a few links to an Indian link building company. I was apalled with what they came up with. The quality of these links on a variety of fake blog sites was beyond poor and they could easily hurt rather than help.

The same applies to comment spam in 2009. It's not going to help Ameritania and it's quite embarassing. If I did actually want to leave comments with URL I would make a comment that speaks to the content of the blog post. Or at least one of those usual spammy coments, that sometimes look genuine (along the lines of "Wow, what a great site. Enjoyed reading your stuff. Why not check out XYZ.com").

With that kind of assignment, at Pizza SEO we would have contacted the blogger and tried to convince him to turn the mention of Ameritania into a link. Often this is doable and results in great links. But then agan we cannot afford to offer something like 20 links for $100 the way many of our Indian competitors do.

You need cool things to put on Facebook?

Image via Wikipedia

You sign up for an account on Facebook and you try to excel - you see that the people who post lots of fun stuff are popular. Since it's 2009, you Google it: Cool things to put on Facebook is aparently a searched term and gets this blog post on Facebook ads a steady trickle of traffic.

Unfortunately that post is no help in answering. So before Demand Media get the "Cool Things on Facebook" video out, I decided to dig a little, have some fun and think of and research sustainable ways of generating fun things to put on Facebook.

1. Start following funny video sites, joke sites, etc.
There are tonnes of these, search for them, follow them, repost the really funny stuff. A good twist on this is to track sites few other people know. Maybe look for niche humour sites or foreign sites.

2. Befriend various people who post cool stuff and repost their stuff to friends who do not know them

3. Know that you are not alone in this quest. Check the replies in the following Yahoo Answers threads: What funny things can I post on Facebook?
BTW, the user was looking for things as clever and funny as "I have just woke up, i would of woke up earlier but i was asleep." or "right i think it is time to check the inside of my eyelids, ill be back in 8 hours."
What are some cool things to post as your status on facebook?
What are some cool things i can add to my facebook page?

Do you have any other ideas of cool things to put on Facebook to share with the readers here?