People to follow on Twitter in 2010 #follow2010

UPDATED May 21, 2010 with a link to @matushiq's Who to follow on Twitter article (in Slovak)

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 coolest 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 is another account worth following for online travel news.

Other English content
I find @mindhackblog tweets always succint and interesting.

@notcot posts lots of fun stuff. I am happy to have met @trendycrew in person thanks to Twitter. @HarvardBiz posts links to great stuff in the Harvard Business Review. @tmbchr is in 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 has lots of followers for a good reason. @MarekP is worth following for online marketing stuff. @dmagician 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 (in Slovak) 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 (true to form, came through first here), @alexbainbridge's, @matushiq's (better late than never - Matushiq posts his list in Slovak on May 21) 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?

Can Apple afford to be this unresponsive?

Image by ensign_at_e233net via Flickr

This was supposed to be a tweet but it's too twisted of a story for 140 characters.

I visited www.logofogo.sk, a friend's site. A weird pop up appeared (and I've seen it somewhere before):
User name and password are being requested by http://www.logofogo.sk. The site says: idisk.mac.com

When I clicked on Cancel, the site continued loading but the error popped up several more times and I had to click it away.

I coppied the error message and searched for it in Google. I was amazed to find a discussion of the problem on the official Apple site forum going back a month, to September 23. Another users asked in mid-October: Why is my site requiring a password to view?

Aparently, for users browsing with Firefox, the bug affects sites using Apple's Mobile Me service (www.me.com). The service synchronises info between iPhone, mac computers and other Apple devices. I have come across reports going back to 2008 on the problem.

Something seems amiss at Apple if user after user of their pricey software and hardware complain about a massive bug that hurts their websites for weeks, without anyone from the company responding. And I had for a moment considered getting a Mac (kidding, not really).

Some people obviously use the Mobile Me platform for ecommerce publishing. If I was one of them, this would definitely make me reconsider.

Oh and a bonus: when I was composing the tweet that never materialised I wanted to "ping" Apple's Twitter account but they actually don't seem to have one (other than @itunestrailers).

Is the conference discount on hotel room sometimes a surcharge?

Image by leozaza via Flickr

You stay in a hotel room. The man in the identical room next to yours is paying 40% less.

You are attending a conference. The organisers gave you a code to use when booking accommodation in the official conference hotel to receive a discount.

You make the reservation at the alleged discount and maybe never find out that the same room reserved through the hotel's public website costs far less and comes with better terms (I stumbled upon a Prague hotel offering a conference rate of EUR 88 during a recent editors' conference, the hotel website showed a rate of EUR 58 for the same date).

There are a few possible economic rationales:
- the hotel is simply using the pricing power gained from being the 'official venue'
- an intermediary marks up the rates (although sometimes the hotel itself does)
- the rates for accomodation subsidise lower charges to organisers for other services

I found a nice clarification called Why stay at the conference hotel on the website of a US computer association. They say:

On occasion, one of the many internet providers or sometimes the hotel itself will offer a few rooms in their inventory at a lower price than the conference is offering. There are often restrictions and penalties associated with these rates.

So next time you are attending a conference make sure to crosscheck the rates with the hotel website and third party sites.