Blogged - ranking blogs

So far I have been interested only in the Finnish blogs and used Blogilista for finding new blogs but now it's time to go little bit further. Yesterday I found Blogged and added Hidden treasure 2.0 there. Blogged is a service listing blogs by topics. The moderator rates the blogs but also the users can do the same. I was able to choose two categories so I added my blog to Internet and social networks. In the latter there's 277 blogs listed and my ranking was 173 - not bad from a blog this new. :)

Some of my followers are miniaturists (like me) so a tip for you: check the dollhouse blogs in Blogged and if you want to have more visitors, just add your blog there.

And a code for Blogged to verify I actually own this blog:

Yahoo vs Google

Yesterday I told you about the bookmarking by Yahoo. After that a friend mentioned that Google is also offering bookmark support and that made me to think about Yahoo and Google and their services.

I started to Yahoo very long time ago. My first email address was in the university, second one in Nokia and the third one in Yahoo. During that time it was not possible to read my university emails from Nokia office or from home and vice versa - I could not read my Nokia emails where ever. So I needed an email address that I could reach everywhere and Yahoo was the answer (the other option was Hotmail). Ever since that I've been using Yahoo for my private emails.

Then I found Yahoo Groups, Yahoo Photos (that was terminated when Yahoo bought Flickr), Yahoo's website builder Geocities and Yahoo's blogging service 360. I'm also using Yahoo's bookmarks and My Yahoo which is a portal where I can manage several Yahoo services (e.g. email, address book, calendar, weather, Flickr, news, notes, maps - even Facebook).

But Google was chasing after me. First my friends sent me invitations to Gmail and I created an account. Searching the emails works really well but still I was not tempted to start actually using the email - all my friends were using the Yahoo address and I was too lazy to inform them.

When the Yahoo Photos ended I moved part of my photos to Flickr but as you can show there only 200 pictures for free I took also Google's Picasa into use. It works like a dream too. (I'm going to talk you about the different photo services later.)

Then there started to be problems with 360 and most of my friends changed to Google's Blogger. I was loyal to Yahoo and kept waiting the blog change they have promised for 2 years now... I still have 2 blogs there but I have also 2 Blogger blogs and they work like a dream.

Google has a home page too, it's called IGoogle and I took mine into use today. The variety of themes was amazing (compared to Yahoo) and there was a lot of services too: bookmarks, maps, weather, Google Reader, Gmail, YouTube and Facebook.

So why do I still hang around with Yahoo? The main reason: because my emails are there. Maybe I should move to the next level and really compare these portals and choose the one that does the tricks for me...

There's also one interesting portal by Nokia: Ovi. There you have your contacts (easy to move them from your mobile phone), your calendar, maps, music, games, files, Flickr and my favorite: Share. I use Ovi for sharing my pictures and videos but have only tried the other features.

But hey, can I finally get the first real comment to this blog if I ask How do you choose which portal you are using and what are the killer applications for you?

Bookmarking @ Yahoo

I just introduced the Del.icio.us service, but it's not the only option for managing your bookmarks:

Yahoo! has a bookmarking site too. You can use folders or tags. I've created a folder for the sites for my kids, which looks like this:



with the image icons it is so easy that even a 3-year-old can navigate!

PS. How long will it take before they start teaching me how to use the web?

Social bookmarking @ Common Craft

A friend of mine asked how to manage bookmarks, so once again it's time for a Common Craft video:



I created a new account for me. It's easy to take the bookmarks from your browsers and add them to del.icio.us, here are the instructions for e.g. IE7, IE6 or Firefox.

You can choose to keep your bookmarks private or share them with your friends and the world. Have fun!

Johanna @ YleX

So I was the follower #100 in YleX and because of that I was interviewed in their blog. For the readers who cannot understand Finnish, here is the translation:

Moi jjanhone! How does it feel to be our 100th follower?
Great - it's like being part of VIP team ;).

Tell about yourself?
I'm Johanna Janhonen and I worked in the sexy web2.0 field: I help my colleagues in Nokia to use social media tools in their work. But since Nokia is leaving from Jyväskylä (where I work), I'm looking for a job, greetings to the head hunters ;).

Any hobbies?
I've been lucky: I've combined my work and hobby, I use my spare time to find new cool stuff from the web. I keep a diary about my findings in my blog, see e.g. my Twitter hints and links.

What kind of music do you listen?
Quite boring answer but I'm omnivorous what it comes to music. I listen a lot of radio while driving and when ever I hear e.g. my teenage favorites I sing along (but let's keep this just between us;).

When did you joined Twitter?
9.3. - I am still a Twitter newbie. I had heard about Twitter earlier but only after the Yle's main news broadcast told that Twitter is hot also in Finland I needed to put my nose there too.

Why do you use Twitter?
Because of my work: I like to familiarize myself to social media phenomena. My friends are using Facebook for sharing their news and I don't believe they are moving to Twitter very soon. But while Facebook is private (you share your status updates only to people that you know) Twitter is a public media: I have found e.g. celebrities, communities and my Nokia collegues, it's very easy to follow them, even by using a mobile phone.

How did you find YleX from Twitter?
To get something out of Twitter you need something to follow and there are not that many Finnish sites in Twitter yet. I found out that my colleagues are following YLE News and I checked who else is following that. From that list I found some acquaintances and some new Yle sites, e.g. YleX and I happened to be the 100th follower :).

What kind of tweets you are expecting from YleX?
Ads about YleX happenings, competitions and web page updates, just like you have done so far. If there is a lot of inside humor the followers might go away but you need to include some fresness and fun in the tweets too. Tell e.g. about coming visitors and song premieres.

Thanks for this and nice that you are following us!
Thanks for the interview and good luck in occupying the new media. It's exciting to see how many followers you are getting now that you started to promote the service :).

Yle @ Twitter

On Wednesday I wrote: Yle is tweeting its news, but only in English. Interesting, what will be the next Finnish media to join Twitter?.

After that I found new Yle teams in Twitter, this time tweeting in Finnish:
Elävä arkisto
Yle tiede and
YleX .

PS. I happened to be the follower #100 in YleX :).

Blogs @ Common Craft

Yet another Common Craft video, this time about blogs:



I've watched that several times every now and then and still find very useful ideas from it. Until now I have used Blogilista to find the new blogs to follow since I've been interested about Finnish blogs and bloggers. Now that I'd like to start building a global blogosphere for me with blogs and followers from all over the world I need new tricks. The video recommended to search blogs from Google's blog search or Technorati. I added my blog to Google's blog search and also to Technorati by claiming it (sounds like a gold rush, does it? Well, I have a hidden treasure here ;). For that purpose I needed to add this code here:

Technorati Profile .

I hope I can get new readers from those search, so welcome :).

PS. I also started to follow Common Craft at Twitter.

Google knows

Yeah, you know how to use Google, but here is a handy tip:

A picture is worth thousand words, right? Next time you are talking with a foreigner and you looking for the correct translation, use Google's picture search. The tip was originally about "spargel", but do you know what are "kirjolohi", "raphia", "Spatenmeissel" or "trankokeri". Now you do :).

Twitter irony

Harhar, see this video.

Social media figures

Yle is tweeting its news, but only in English. Interesting, what will be the next Finnish media to join Twitter?

The latest news was about Facebook: "While some employers are blocking employees from logging onto the social utility site Facebook during office hours, other companies are urging their marketing people to tap into the money-making potential social media holds."

Guess how many Finnish FB users there is? According to Yle: some 1.5 million Finnish users! Recently I read that 20% of Internet users in the world use Facebook, now I'd like to know how many Finns use Internet.

Some stats from Tietoviikko:

1. Qzone has 200 million users
2. Facebook has 175 million users
3. Microsoft Windows Live Spaces (blog network) has 126 million users
4. MySpace has over 100 million users.
5. Google's Orkut service has 67 million users.
6. LinkedIn has 36 million users.

Twitter mania is ongoing in States: they were 4 million people in the U.S. visiting the site in February while in January it was only 2.6 million.

LinkedIn - what it is for me?

I showed you the video about LinkedIn. Now I'd like to add some other nice sides of the service:

1. It's always interesting to see who knows who. Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo has only 6 contacts in LinkedIn (Bill Gates has 5 and Jari Sarasvuo has 2). Anssi Vanjoki has 1 recommendation (he has recommended 3 persons) and 189 contacts and I have 18 colleagues who are connected to one of Anssi's colleagues. And there's only two persons between me and Obama according to LinkedIn...

2. LinkedIn shows very clearly who are the contacts that I and x shares. If I am looking for a job, I can see if the hiring person knows someone from my network and ask my contact e.g. if he/she would be a nice boss to work with ;). I have also been often very surprised to see how small the world really is: e.g. my Spanish friend knows my Russian colleague.

3. Speaking about jobs, there are also job ads in LinkedIn.

4. From LinkedIn you can easily follow where your old colleagues or class mates are currently working and you can see their email addresses from there.

5. Your turn: what is the feature that you like in LinkedIn?

LinkedIn @ Common Craft

Don't know what LinkedIn is or what to do with it? See this neat video:

Twitter @ Common Craft

I just love the Common Craft videos, check the one about Twitter.

Judging people every day

Not that long ago you needed to make hard decisions once a year: to whom to send Christmas cards. Who belongs to your (extended) family, are your neighbours worth a card, do you still want to greet your old class mates or colleagues that you saw 10 years ago and what about people you never see: the postman, your landlord.

Now you need to judge people every day: to accept an invitation or not in one of those social networks. E.g. Facebook was meant for friends and LinkedIn for colleagues, right? Now I got FB invitations from people that are not in my phone's contacts and from people that I have never seen in real life. Sounds like a close friend? How about people that share the same office but with whom you never worked or even talked, you know their name but that's it - can you really consider them as your colleagues in LinkedIn?

I'm a friendly person and sometimes making these decisions is very difficult. If i accept an invitation from x that I don't know that well do I then need to invite y that I know much better? If I reject an invitation do I need to explain why I did it? If I have way too many friends in a system, I can't actually follow them all - a recent study was saying that you can follow "only" about 150 persons. And then the privacy issue: I don't want to share the same stuff with my friends and my so called friends. I wrote earlier about my blogs: I have several of them and their themes are tailored for the audience. At the moment I can't do the same in the social networks - or should I create several accounts? Not very handy...

Any comments? Do you find it easy to make these decisions?

Toikkanen's microblog service network

Tapani Toikkanen draw this amazing picture about the microblogging service interconnections (it's ok to loan the picture here because it has Creative Commons licence and I told the origin).

A blog and a microblog, what's the difference?

I compare blog entries to emails and microblog entries to SMSs. Blog entries are typically longer and can contain pictures while microblog entries are often plain text and quite short (in Twitter 140 signs in Facebook 160 signs).

Twitter: first experiences

After Facebook Twitter looks really messy.

See e.g. Martha's page - her updates and her answers to other Twitter users (comments begin with @) are shown in reversed chronological order and in order to follow the conversations you'd need to jump to the back and forth (and even if I did it, I didn't notice to which update she was referring).

When you move your cursor above the tweeties (I think that was the term for Twitter status updates?) they are highlighted in grey and there are two icons: with star you can mark your favorite tweeties and with arrow you can answer to them.

Normally the tweeties are public to everyone in Internet (see the latest tweeties by all Twitter users from here) but you can also choose to protect them by choosing the persons who are able to follow them. Once again you need to make decisions: what to share and whom to share.

Blogging and Blogilista

After 7 blog entries it's time to promote this blog to readers (I don't want to be one of those persons who put up a blog, writes the first entry, tells the world about it and then never go back). Starting a blog is easy, all you need is a name and idea about the topics you want to include (adding topics afterwards is easy too but it is good to think about this already from the beginning).

I started blogging 4 years ago and now I have several of them. For close friends and family I have blogs about my private life and sharing the pictures of kids (I don't want put our faces to Internet, not even to FACEbook). Then I have blogs about my hobbies (from public Share on Ovi photo-blog to semi-public Yahoo's 360 blog) and my work related blogs: Hidden treasure in Nokia's intranet and Hidden treasure 2.0 here.

Why do I have so many blogs? Because the audiences are different: my friends might not be interested about my hobbies, my colleagues might not like to watch my kids playing in the snow and only part of my hobby friends are carried away about web2.0. I also need to keep Nokia confidential information inside the company, that's not to be shared in Internet. So I can't tease my contacts by putting all fruits in the same basket - I let them to choose the apples and berries they find tasty. That's the nice thing about RSS feeds: the reader makes the decisions.

So where do I find the eaters for my juicy web2.0 stuff? As I come from Finland the obvious answer is Blogilista. I just added my blog there. In web20 category there were 11 blogs, in web2 64 (I need to check those blogs and start networking with the interesting ones). Blogilista is the place where you can find the blogs about the subject that you are interested, there is something for everyone, the variety is huge! You might use Blogilista as a feedreader service too.

Joining Twitter

So I joined Twitter. Creating the account was pretty easy but the next step failed: I was not able to see if my contacts in Yahoo email are Twitter users. Then I was suggested some popular people and organizations to follow and I chose e.g. Martha Stewart since I love crafts. Amazing amount of followers she has... My profile is visible here. So Twitter, here I come, I hope you have something interesting for me!

Yle news promotes Twitter

Funny to see Twitter in the main news :). They tell Twitter has come to Finland, Pepsi Max uses it for promoting. E.g. Barack Obama is using Twitter and anyone can start following him - the difference between Twitter and Facebook is that in the latter people need to approve friends.

Not only companies but for celebs this is a great thing: they can promote themselves for free, and only to the persons who are interested about them, not sending spam messages (which I BTW hate!).

So far I have avoided Twitter since none of my friends is actively using it, i.e. they have not sent me any invites. But now that even Yle says Twitter is the cool thing, I need to go there too. ;) To be continued...

Netpop research: web2.0 users

I found an interesting study about American web2.0 users from here and here in Finnish.

"There are 7 million people in the U.S. are contributing content online through six or more activities (videos, photos, (micro-)blogs, wikis, social networks, posting ratings/reviews, tagging). Among them the heavy users (7% from all, half of them women, their average age being 33 years) on an average week are connected with 248 people. They are idling most of the day with several gadgets (pc, mobile device). The news they choose to spread can change the marketplace overnight with such scale that companies must tune in and be in a position to react quickly and decisively. In two years, the time used for communication has increased 18% while the time used for entertainment has gone down by 29%. "

I am not that surprised by the increasing time for communication since between 2006 and 2008 the Facebook hit the market. Before that only few of my friends were sharing in Internet, they did not have a home page or a blog, not that many were sharing photos either. In 2006 they were emailing: sending e.g. spam messages and boy was I lucky when they started to use FB for that - I finally got rid of it :). I am not interested of bad jokes or videos (read: entertainment), I'm interested about my friends so when then they started to use FB status updates for sharing their news I was addicted!

PS. If you buy the full report from Netpop research, you will learn also

• Public versus private sharing of Web 2.0 comments and content: who shares publicly online and what motivates their Web 2.0 involvement.
• A profile of six unique Web 2.0 brands: Digg, Flickr, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yelp and YouTube that compares the types of users and motivations that underpin the community found at each of these sites.

Facebook changes

Facebook is going to change soon, see what's coming. It's about filtering the data: you get more freedom who of your friends and what kind of data you want to follow more closely.

***

Already now you can choose how much you are sharing.
Go to My Account - Settings - Privacy manage

News Feed and Wall

Control what stories about you get published to your profile and to your friends’ News Feeds.

Actions visible to friends:

Stories are published when you edit your profile information, join a new network, or update your Status. Also publish stories when you...

		Remove Profile Info
		Write on a Friend's Wall
		Comment on or like a Note
		Comment on or like a Photo or Album
		Comment on or like a Video
		Comment on or like a link
		Post on a Discussion Board
		Add a Friend
		Change Relationship Status
		Leave a Network

Moozement, connect with your training buddies

While going through my RSS feeds in Bloglines I found out that Ivan had introduced his hobby project called Moozement, a social network for sharing sport activities. Really interesting, go and check it out. :)

Adding a hit counter

First of all I want to know if someone finds me and my brand new blog.
How to know it since not that many people leave comments?

The answer is a hit counter and I chose to use SiteMeter (there are many free hit counters available but this has worked for me so far). Here's a good video about how to add a counter in practice to a Blogger blog.

The amount of hits are now shown bottom of the page and if you click it you will see more information. "Visits"tells the amount of visitors and "page views" tells how many pages those visitor have watched. You can see more details about the visitors, e.g. the countries they come from.

Welcome to Hidden treasure 2.0

I have had a blog called Hidden treasure in Nokia's intranet over a year now. I decided to have a sister blog in Internet in order to reach a bigger audience. I would have liked to continue with the url "hiddentreasure" but that was not available in Blogger so I added "2" in the end: it means this is my second hidden treasure blog but in the same time it is refering to web2.0 which is the main topic of my blog.

What is web2.0 then? Well, you can look from wikipedia but my dummy description is this:

web2.0 is not anything new technically, the term refers to the social aspect of Internet - we can easily create things together using web2.0 tools like wikis, blogs or Facebook.