New Google Layout

Tonight I was searching with an anonymous proxy on Google when I got a new (at least for me layout). The new choice of colors is way more pleasant than the old colors and there are also a few other changes (icons and labeling) on the more options sidebar. Hope that this test passes and we will see a general rollover

New Google Layout (March 2010)

New Google Layout (March 2010)

Facebook Fan Pages Tips & Tricks

Just read a great summary of the tricks that you can do on your Facebook fan page in order to increase both user interaction and satisfaction. The “12 steps to creating a compelling Facebook Page” article is aimed to both starters and to those that have some experience with Facebook fan pages.

The tips I liked the most and were totally new to me were these:

7. Create a custom navigation sidebar – A few months ago, I showed you how to add an interactive sidebar to your Facebook Page. This is a creative way to help visitors find exactly what they are looking for on your Facebook Page.

and

10. Import your YouTube videos – Check out the application called YouTube Video Box. It includes an integrated search to find videos on YouTube and a Tab where you can display videos from YouTube. You can also import videos from an existing YouTube.com account.

Wordpress Plugin: Alphabetic tag index

WordPress › Multi-column Tag Map « WordPress Plugins

Multi-column Tag Map display a columnized, alphabetical and expandable listing of all tags used in your site. This makes it easier for visitors to quickly search for topics that might intrest them.

This is a plugin that I’ve searched for almost 2 years. Before this plugin, I have used static pages to list tags alphabetically but this was to hard to maintain (on an instance where you have more then 900 tags). Mostly is for Wordpress CMS cases because it targets those users familiar with a certain niche and taxonomies within it, making it easy to locate a certain tag.

Use cases:

  • Music blogs where tags are bands.
  • Blogs about celebrities

In a few days I’ll post a link to a live demo

Getting more targeted followers on Twitter

If you have followed the tutorial that I posted here, by now you should have a pretty decent list of followers and most likely you have more than 2000 followers, moving over past the first Twitter limit. But also you might have come to some limits in finding new, targeted followers. Here are 3 tips that will help you move on:

  • Do not focus only on the followers of the your vertical leaders. More important than those, are the people that they follow. This are pretty hard to get persons, but also more valuable so the effort is worth it
  • Use Buzzom to identify people that use your niche keywords on their bio.
  • Use Buzzom to identify people that interact with your vertical leaders. For this, use the people search option and look for @username (where obviously username=the profile of your niche leaders). Those are very important profiles because they have 3 important traits: they are interested in your niche, they are active users and they interact with others from your niche

Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) errors

As I previously mentioned, a few days ago I was testing some new features on Google CSE. Unfortunately nothing worked as expected. I tried using the forums and directly contacting one of the CSE team members with no results. Today, using a new account, I started fresh and everything worked as advertised.

Looks like Google’s Achilles Heel is client support and this doesn’t look like a issue to be fixed soon as Google is betting on crowdsourced support rather than investing in it. Short lesson: if something doesn’t work in Google and is not vital (gmail/adsense/adwords) create a new account and start from scratch