What if your boss wants you on Google Latitude?

Lots of great questions are bubbling around the internet this week with the recent launch of Latitude for Google Maps.

If you’re not familiar with Latitude, in a nutshell it allows you track your friends whereabouts on Google Maps using the GPS system built in to their mobile device. Your friend has to allow you access to do this of course. You send them a request to track them and they have to accept before you see anything.

You can imagine the “big brother is watching” conversations that have ensued since its launch.

For me, because the service is only available to those you allow to track you, I see some much more practical ramifications of Google Latitude. For instance, what if your boss sends you a request to track your movements on Latitude? After all, it’s the company’s phone and why should you be worried about anything if you are where you say you are?

So do you let your boss follow you? And what does it say about you if you refuse the request?

I posed the question to friends and Twitter followers over the last couple of days and they had some great ideas:

Some said accept the request, and then:

1. Courier your phone around the world
2. Buy another phone and leave the work one on your desk
3. Turn off the GPS function
4. Destroy the GPS function

Someone suggested a very practical approach:

“Ask for what purpose, and if it’s for work hours only? And ask if you can follow him back.” (I think this is the best one)

Others said they would pretty much tell their boss to shove it:

1. “Just say no.”

2. “2 words: hell no. I’m already on your payroll and you want to know what I do in my free time? Forget it.” (my second favorite idea)

And finally there was the poor soul who requested to follow their boss on Latitude and, “my boss refused to let me follow him.”

So what do you think? Latitude could definitely make things awkward around the office.

Now what about when your girlfriend pings you wanting to track your every move on Latitude!?

Thanks to all the people that helped me write this post by offering up their thoughts, including @theJLV - @mkuplens - @exitpass - @illied - @jstoub - @julesjulesjules -

Want big traffic from Stumbleupon?

Was just re-reading this very comprehensive guide to driving big traffic numbers to your site using Stumbleupon by Maki who runs the site Dosh Dosh. I came across this article over a year ago and I keep going back to it to as a reference, as it has helped increase traffic to my websites big time.

I hope it helps you now too!

Improving your blog post’s search engine friendliness - Tip #1

I’ve been blogging full time now for close to three years and have been reading and talking to a lot of people over the years about the best ways to improve the targeted traffic I get from Google and the other search engines for any one particular blog post I publish.

I thought I would start to share the things I’ve learned that have worked well (and not so well) in a series of blog posts. These are more or less random tips, so my #1 tip isn’t necessarily the most important. After I do ten or so I’ll do a post that ranks them. So here goes.

Tip #1 - Internal Linking

Everyone is always talking about the importance of getting high quality links from other blogs and websites, and while this is hugely important many people overlook their own internal linking.

Read more »

Facebook might help you keep your job

Photo credit: California Studies Blog

During this economic downturn I would suggest that getting social on Facebook might help you keep the job you have.

Last week Comscore reported the astronomical growth in users of the monster social network Facebook. Naturally, I posted the article on my Twitter account (@kgrandia) and one of my online friends (Chris Eaton) posed a very insightful question: “think the increased facebook users have anything to do with the economy?”

I actually don’t think the economic downturn is resulting in more people signing up or actively using Facebook. If that was the case, we would have seen a big blip up in user activity in mid-September or so and any of the recent numbers I can find for Facebook show a pretty smooth growth curve, like this:

However, my Twitter friend Chris Eaton’s question did get me thinking really hard about Facebook and the real potential it has for helping you keep the job you have during these terrible economic times.

The sad truth is that a lot of people are losing their jobs right now and your employer may be put in that extremely horrible situation where he or she will have to choose who to keep and who to let go. Making such a choice comes down to a lot of “hard” factors like pay-levels, experience and sales performance. However, bosses are human after all and there are deeper cognitive “soft factor” processes at work in these decisions mas well. One of the biggies is empathy. The simplest definition of empathy is the ability to see a situation from “another person’s shoes.”

Read more »

Unforgettable Online Reading

Here’s some articles I’ve read recently that I am afraid I will lose track of if I don’t put them somewhere - in other words, they’re great articles:

20+ Great Greasemonkey scripts for improving your Twitter experience

SEOMoz headsmacking Tip #10 - Incentivize Links

9 SEO Plugins every wordpress blog should have

The definitive list (75+) of link building techniques in 2008

Announcing Plugins for Facebook Connect

5 things to make your Twitter.com life easier

If you’re like me and use multiple social media platforms (Facebook, Digg, Twitter, blogs etc.) for work and play, then you’re also always looking for easier ways to use and integrate all of them.

Twitter is one of my favorites right now and I’ve been experimenting with all sorts of Twitter apps, userscripts and plugins to try and keep my “Tweet Time” in check. Here’s a few that I found make Twitter easier and more fun to use:

(oh, and take a minute to go to my profile and hit follow if you want my sage advice sent direct to you on your Twitter feed from time to time)

1. Twitter automatic URL shortener: far and away the simplest and best Twitter add-on. It does exactly what the name says, it automatically shortens, even when you paste them in and they go over the 140 character limit. So if the character counter says -45 in bright red after you paste in a URL, just hit submit anyways and it will be shortened automatically. Note that this is a userscript, so if you don’t have “greasemonkey” for Firefox just go here, download Greasmonkey add-on and read the very straightforward instructions. If you don’t have Firefox, then… well, you can download that here.

2. Twitter Berry: I’m a devout Blackberry user and I will never convert, especially since I found the TwitterBerry application. Very simple to use and great way to waste time away on the commuter train home. Best part about Twitterberry is that it works on your data network instead on your SMS text messaging service. To download Twitterberry, just email yourself this URL: http://orangatame.com/ota/twitterberry/ and then click on the link in the email message on your Blackberry which will send you to the download page and the instructions.

3. Friend or Follow: just type in your user name and find out who you are following on Twitter that has not reciprocated and followed you. I use it about once a month to cull the list of people I’m following down to those who are following me in return. Friend or Follow also tells you who’s following you, that you are not in turn following.

4. Twitter Facebook App: going on Twitter and answering the “What are you doing” and then clicking on over to Facebook and answering the same question in my status update bar is kind of redundant. Actually it’s not kind of redundant at all, it’s the exact definition of redundant. Instead, you can just load the Twitter Facebook app so that everytime you Tweet on Twitter it will automatically update the “What are you doing right now” section on your Facebook profile. Very cool and a good example of how mush easier life would be if all these social media platforms opened up their information to allow for such easy cross-pollination.

5. Tweet This Wordpress Plug-in: if you are blogging on Wordpress, I found that that the Tweet This Plug-in is by far the best if you want to include a button on your posts so people can easily tweet your posts.

So those are my very favorite and they’re the only ones that I found truly useful. But that’s just me. There’s hundreds of other Twitter applications on Twitter Fan Wiki Apps page to choose from so have at it and let me know what other gems you come across.

Turbaconducken: the ulitmate Thanksgiving feast

Honestly, is there a better Thanksgiving dinner than a chicken stuffed in duck stuffed in a turkey, all wrapped in bacon.

It’s the Thanksgiving dinner that will keep on giving.

Walk before you run: Google releases Search Engine Optimization 101 Guide

The first thing you learn in baseball is how to hold the bat (remember to line up your knuckles) and its pretty hard to go any further with the game until you figure this out.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is no different. There’s a whole world of amazing resources that discuss the day-to-day minutiae of SEO, and my two favorites are SEOmoz and SearchEngineLand.

However, before you dive into the technical details of How Google Improves Search Quality Through The User Interface I would suggest that you take time to understand the fundamentals. Just so happens that Google released a short and sweet beginner’s guide to Search Engine Optimization today.

So dive right in, the water’s fine and after you nail down the basics you’ll be talking Differential Diagnosis: A Broken Website Ranking Atop Google with the best of them.

Beware of the Wordpress ‘noindex’

Are the search engines possibly ignoring your Wordpress blog because you’ve unknowingly been plugging ‘no index’ code into every post and page?

Wow, so I was just about to write a post about basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) codes for bloggers when I thought, “Gee I better check the source code on TMOW before I go telling other people what to do.”

And lo and behold, guess what’s pops up? This evilness:

<meta name=’robots’content=’noindex,nofollow’/>

This little piece of code is known as a ‘no index’ instruction for search engine ‘robots’ in that it tells search engines to not index your pages in their search results. So Googlebots (also called spiders) show up to index your site and that nasty piece of code tells it you’re just not interested in being part of their search results.

In other words, potentially millions of adoring fans have been missing out on all the funny youtube videos I’ve been posting lately.

You’ll notice that there is a ‘no follow’ instruction in the code above as well. ‘No follow’ tells search engine robots to not follow any hyperlinks you include in the page. Relative to the ‘no index’ instruction,
the ‘no follow’ is not as big of a deal, but the combination of these two pieces of code and you are totally banishing yourself to internet irrelevance.

As I’ve found out the hard way, the easiest way to screw up and include ‘no index’ code on your Worpress site’s source code is to mess up the privacy settings.

I’ve never changed any of the privacy functions on The Meaning of Web and if I did it was totally by accident and I really deserve a slap upside the head. If I didn’t, then that means that the ‘no index’ code was a default setting either for this theme or for the Wordpress download.

Most likely it was my fault, but I just wanted to put this post up to ensure others aren’t unknowingly doing the same thing. It’s easy to find out if you have ‘no index’ code on your site, just go to the main page of your website, click the ‘view’ tab in your web browser (I’m using Firefox) and click on the ‘page source.’

You’ll get something that looks like this:

An example of page source with no follow text

Click to enlarge and you will see the ‘no index’ ‘ no follow’ code in the third line from the bottom.

If you do see something that looks like this in the source code of your Wordpress site: <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW”>

or this, <META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOINDEX”>, and you don’t want it there, here’s the easiest way to fix it:

1. Go to the admin section of your Wordpress blog

2. Click on the “settings” tab in the top right corner

3. Click on the “privacy” tab in the blue bar

4. You should see a section now called “blog visibility” that looks like this:

5. Make sure that it is set to: “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone, including search engines (like Google, Sphere, Technorati) and archivers.”

If this doesn’t work (it did for me), then there are some more technical fixes out there, just google something like: “no index code wordpress” and you’ll see lots of great ideas and information.

Would be great to know if anyone else has encountered a similar problem with Wordpress.

UPDATE: Alright, its only been about 5 hours since I turned off the “noindex” and “nofollow” code and its already paying off. Woohoo:

Click to enlarge

Social media and SEO reading for the train

I ride the train a lot and its where I have the luxury of at least an hour a day of uniterrupted reading on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and social media.

I thought I would share what I read from time to time. So here goes:

Reddit Updates Widgets, Launches FireFox Plugin, and Updates Their Site

Search Engine Optimization and User Behavior

Customer Service and Reputation Management the Twitter Way: A Case Study

How to Change the World Using Social Media

How Audi Uses Viral Marketing

An SEO is Not a Link Builder

10 Tactics to Rank Higher In Search Results

The 22 Step Social Media Marketing Plan