I was reading this article on Read Write Web about the fact that the traditional comment system is about to change. In fact, the post is about the new product by the people behind the popular comment system JS-Kit, currently installed on more than 600,000 websites. The new comment system, called Echo, actually aggregates conversations from twitter, friendfeed and a bunch of other social platforms to give a better idea of what’s being said about your content outside of your website. Because let’s face it, more and more people talk about your content outside of your website.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while honestly. The amount of comments I leave on other blogs have considerably dropped in the last couple of months, but it is not because of my lack of interest. In a certain way, I still comment: it’s just not formal and traditional comments. I retweet posts, I comment on them on twitter, friendfeed and Facebook and sometimes on  blogs directly. I still show my interest and give feedback, but just not in a traditional way.

In fact, I think the 2 lines comment is dead. You know, the classic “nice post, you rock!” comment. While it is extremely annoying on a blog, it is perfectly suited for twitter. On the opposite, the smart 10 lines comment won’t and will probably never die.

I think we’re about to see some important changes in the blogging world, but all for the best. Things have already changed a lot with all the different channels available to produce content, but in my opinion this is only the beginning.

How do you see this evolving?

I’ve never been a huge fan of posts with topics such as “top 15 tools to…”. You know, I’ve found some blogs that successfully made those lists useful, but I feel that the added value is usually very low. Sure they do well in the search engines and are easy to read and share on social media platforms, but I much prefer a good analysis instead of a list and here’s why.

I stumbled upon an article on Mashable that express my feeling about “list posts”: Twittermania: 140+ More Twitter Tools!

I understand the funny reference to twitter with the 140 tools, but what really is the added value of such posts? I highly respect Mashable, but they do post a lot of similar articles and they spread viraly and I’m sure you know a lot of other blogs doing so. It’s not an isolated case.

I mean, what is the benefit of listing 140 tools, do you really expect me to try all of them? Of course not. That’s why I want an analysis. It’s easy to break down this post into 10 other posts that could be called something like “10 twitter clients compared”. Now that’s a useful post. But more work.

I can’t take any action with 140 twitter tools listed in a post, but I can surely take action after reading a comparison of 10 twitter tools. I don’t want to know every tool that is available to me, I want to know the best tools and why.

That’s the same reason why companies are ready to pay a lot of money for experts’ advices: they don’t have time to evaluate every single solution, they simply pay someone to do the evaluation and give them the top 3 options in a nice report.

You know, there are reasons why lists are popular and you might like them, but I just prefer a good analysis.

It hit me tonight. Have you ever looked at all the content you’re creating and that you do not own?

I’m the biggest fan of “own your content”. Whenever I evaluate different technologies or solutions when it comes to content creation, I always ask myself: will I own that data? When I say “own my content”, I mean on my own server or at least I make sure I will be able to leave the service with the data I created.

It is so easy to spend half a day on twitter and Facebook building a brand and retweeting your friends, but these are services that could shut down tomorrow with all your data. Of course you would keep the brand you worked so hard to build and all your connections, but without a solid home (website) and a central place to access the content that made you so special, you’re screwed.

Don’t take me wrong here, social networks are useful tools for sure, but they are only tools: they shouldn’t replace your home (your website). Your brand has to go beyond the tools you use because the platforms can be replaced anytime.

What do you think?

The Web has definitely changed a lot of things in our life and I find it fascinating when it has a direct impact on the way I see things offline. Among many other things, it has dramatically changed my expectations as a customer in my everyday life.

As a customer buying online, you have to trust the website, product and company you’re buying from. As an e-commerce owner, when you’re doing business online, you can’t fail and you have to meet customer expectations or they’ll just go elsewhere. This “meeting customer expectations” thing goes from the moment the customer arrives on your website to the after sale customer service: every aspect is important. Companies have worked really hard to build a safe and interesting enough environment so that customers would buy online instead of offline and trust me, nobody wants to screw that. Then, customers became used to live chat customer service, digitally delivered products, fast email answers, etc. This is all good because as customers, we like quality products, delivered fast and on time with an awesome customer service. The Web was able to deliver that. In fact, it had to, otherwise people would have continued buying offline. E-commerce businesses won such a big war.

Social media has also helped to bring that brand-customer relationship to another level. More than ever, customers are close to the brands and products they love and can “interact” with them. It’s all about building trust.

Now, whenever I go to the restaurant or go shopping “offline”, I expect all of the above. I expect to be able to talk to someone when I need it, I expect to be able to ask all the questions I want when I want to, I don’t want to talk to someone who simply try to sell me stuff: I want to talk to someone who’s trying to help me, I expect the buying process to be smooth, I expect awesome customer service, I expect a positive experience all the way. I simply expect this offline because I can get it all online. If I can chat live with a customer service rep online, why would I wait 25 minutes in store for an available rep?

There is just so much offline businesses could learn from e-commerce. Offline businesses will always be around, but some will have to re-think the way they work in order to stay in business. That’s just how strong the Web is.

Honestly, I think saying “don’t write for search engines” is just as ridiculous as saying “write for search engines”. Both are bad ways of doing things. I prefer to say: don’t write for search engines, but think about it.

I’m all about building communities, authenticity and transparency, but why are we always putting social media efforts and SEO appart? Why do people say: “I don’t care about SEO, I prefer to spend time building a community”? Both can go together.

I would never advise someone to write an article solely for search engines, but why not think about the fact that Google, Yahoo and Bing will index your content? I mean, your content is going to get indexed anyway, so having search engines in mind when you write content isn’t a bad thing for extra visibility. Having search engines in mind doesn’t mean writing keywords stuffed articles, it just means paying extra attention to basic SEO.

Then you know what? You can still build that community and benefit from some search engine traffic.

Yes, social media takes time. Being on twitter or Facebook and blogging can be quite time consuming and it’s one of the most common complaint from businesses and individuals. I can’t deny the fact that social media is extremely time consuming, but to be honest, that’s totally fine: it’s called natural selection.

Time is the best way to separate the serious people from the non-serious people and not just in social media, in real life too. Just ask an Olympic athlete how many hours he had to train to get to the Olympics, what sacrifices he had to make. Well, not everybody is ready to make those sacrifices and invest the necessary time and that’s totally fine: if it was easy to get to the Olympic, it would be one hell of a boring event. The event is great because only the best athletes compete and if they are great, it’s not only because they are talented people: they didn’t fear to put time and efforts.

Social media is no different. Of course it’s important to have a good strategy to make the most out of your time, but it takes time. Gaming the system just won’t work…long term.

I’ve spent some time lately thinking about the challenges ahead when it comes to the real time Web. There are a lot of challenges for sure, going from building an infrastructure able to index the real time web to being able to deal with the flow of information. To me, the real problem has never been about whether or not I’m going to be able to keep up with the flow of information that is only going to get worse or how Google or twitter is going to make all this scalable, but more about how are we going to make this information relevant, searchable and accurate? (more…)

I noticed something today that I think is fairly new on Google Search. There are now more useful informations on the LinkedIn profiles you will find in the search results. Searching for my name for example now brings the following LinkedIn profile on Google:

As you see, there is an additional line that shows my geographic location and my official LinkedIn profile title. I really like it as it makes results more useful and I see it as a good initiative. Nobody likes to click on 3 or 4 different profiles to find the right one and with this new addition to the search results it solves the problem.

I am sure we’ll see more and more of these for trusted domains in the future and it is definitely a good thing. Well, as long as it improves our search experience of course.

I found a very useful online tool for all of you, twitter lovers. The service is called twitter analyzer and it is some sort of Web analytics software, but for twitter. Honestly, I don’t know if there is some sort of service similar to Twitter Analyzer so you’ll tell me if it’s not the best tool out there, but so far from what I’ve seen, it is pretty powerful.

My favorite feature is by far the “How many of your followers are online” which gives you, as you expect, how many of your followers are online at the moment. Pretty useful if you want to share a link or one of your post and want to maximize exposure. Of course, that’s only one of the many features of twitter analyzer. (more…)

Without much advertising, I recently started a tumblr blog called ishare. I didn’t really talk about it until now because I wanted to test the platform and see if there was any benefit for me and of course, you. The reason I started a tumblr blog is that I had to solve a problem: how to reach the perfect combination of blogging and microblogging while still owning my content and providing value. For example, I love to share links on twitter, but 140 chars is very limited and it doesn’t allow me to comment and give my opinion on what I’m sharing. On top of that, it’s usually not worth it to blog about what I’m sharing on twitter as my comments would generally be one or two paragraphs. Finally, it’s important for me to own my content, I don’t like to give away too much content & traffic without receiving anything back eventually. So, how is it possible to microblog, blog, share material and own your content all at the same time? A tumblr blog. (more…)