It’s nearly 80 degress and sunny outside today in good’ol Brooklyn. It’s unfortunate that we have to be inside on a great day like this but to make things a little better, I’ve decided to give away free stumbles today for the entirety of the workday (for me until about 7:30-8:00 EST). All you have to do is post your to be stumbled link in the comments section and I’ll give it a thumbs up or submit it if it hasn’t been already. The only condition is it has to pertain to seo, sem, social media, wed design, essentially anything pertaining to this site’s industry or niche. So let’er rip and have a good weekend!

I decided to have a little fun today and created a page publishing tweet scan feeds based on search terms like linkbait, link building, and social bookmarking. Potentially, I can now find out about new sites and strategies pertaining to these topics all on one page instantly. Leave a comment below if there’s anything else you’d like me to add.

This is just a theory but I think it’s pretty sound. I was setting up Feedburner for a client earlier this morning and I was in the feed flare section where you can add additional services to your flare. I noticed there was a link to a catalogue of services. Clicking on this link brought me to a large list of sites that one could potentially add to their blog feed. Since Feedburner is now a Google operation, I’m guessing that these sites are trusted in Google’s eyes. Good to know when spreading the word.

Add This – Mass bookmarking blog widget
Add To Any – Mass bookmarking blog widget
Authorati – Socially rates your blog posts
Blinklist – Social bookmarking
Connotea – Online reference management for researchers
Crossfeednews – Religious News
del.icio.us – Social bookmarking
Digg – Social News
DotNetKicks – .NET and ASP programming social news
Facebook – Social network
Fark – Comedy/odd social news
Furl – Social bookmarking
Google Bookmarks – Social bookmarking
Kontrib – Multilingual socialbookmarking
Memeame – Spanish Social News
Mister Wong – Social bookmarking
Netvouz – Social bookmarking
Newsvine – Social news
Onlywire – Mass bookmarking service
Outside.in – Geolocational news tracking
Propeller – Social news
Reddit – Social news
Simpy – Social bookmarking
Slashdot – Social news
Sphere – Relevant content matching blog widget
Stumbleupon – Social bookmarking
TechBuzz – Tech social news
Technorati – Blog aggregator
Twitter – Mirco blogging/life streaming
Windows Live Favorites – Social bookmarking
Windows Live Spaces – Social Weblog
Yahoo! Bookmarks – Social bookmarking
Yahoo! 360 – Social Weblog
Yigg – German version of Digg

Paul Bragiel, former co-founder of Meetro ( an instant messaging service with geolocational functionality) is now introducing a new take on something tried and true. The Forum. Bragiel’s team of designers and programmers have created Lafora. Think standard forum plus, blog and news integration, embedded photos and video fuctionality, automatic newsletter generation for forum admins, WYSIWYG editors for publishing, threaded comments, member profiles generated from the by the topics participated in, a hottest topics section, forum search (search for content within all Lefora forums), unread message tracking, and lastly but certainly not leastly, everything has been SEO’ed! Sounds pretty cool right? Visit Lefora and be one of the first to take advantage of Lefora’s free forum hosting!

Screen Shots:

So over the weekend I attended a social dinner event here in the Williamsburg/Greenpoint area of Brooklyn. It was a great party with some really interesting people. As the night progressed, there were about four or five folks who asked me “do you Tumbl”? What an odd question I thought. Do I Tumbl?! I asked the first two people to explain themselves and they slightly recoiled in embarrassment or dismissed my inquiry as if I wouldn’t understand any explanation they could deliver. When the third person asked me this I was determined to know what they hell they were talking about. Now, I consider myself to be 110% in the know about anything pertaining to social media. I’m usually aware of new initiatives, programs, apps, site changes, whatever. Yet I had never heard of Tumblr. Oddly enough the explanations I received from people weren’t accurate. They had me convinced that Tumblr was A) like twitter and, B)a way to sync your blog with a community timeline. A) is kind of true but B) was not. Tumblr is probably the easiest way to start a blog. It’s incredibly simple (the website claims you can start blogging in about 10 minutes) and it is very similar to Twitter but more robust. You can add text, photos, chat, audio, and video. It also has to ability to be completely social. Much like Twitter you can follow people but you can also join or start groups. I can see this having a lot of potential for many different types of projects.

I found that there were about eight people at the dinner event that had planned a meetup. They all Tumbled and they all followed each other’s Tumblr blogs. They were all very much into cooking as this is what the event was mostly about. It was interesting to see a previously unknown online app bring people together like this. I was sure to know about an app with that kind of social power but before that night I never heard of Tumblr. I’m glad I now know about it and I’m seriously considering using it in the near future.

I had never been to the monthly Web 2.0 Meetups before and figured it would be a good networking opportunity. These Meetups are a creation of Brett Petersel from NextWeb. From what I can gather off of the website, NextWeb is composed of four dudes, Chris Boucher (Sales), Brett Petersel (Founder), Oz Sultan (Technology), and Johnathan Dingman.

The Meetup was held at Webster hall which is mostly used as a 18+ club. The place was a dark and stale cave but you get that anyway with many of NYC’s old buildings. For a rainy Monday evening the turnout was quite impressive. I don’t know what the headcount was but there are 186 confirmed attending on Facebook and 90 maybes. From the looks of it, I’d guess there were around 200 people in attendance.

First up was Jack Bury of EyeBees.com. Jack buddy, you’ve got to work on your power point and presentation skills man. That was rough going in the beginning but once the Q&A started things got a little interesting. EyeBees is a snippet of code that one can place on their site so when people visit, this little floating box pops up illustrating others who are on the site at the same time. You can then click on their little dots inside the box and chat with them. During the presentation about 12 different users logged on to the same website that was up on the presentation screen. We could see all the little dots present in the EyeBees box. I think the general audience response was that of being mildly impressed and personally I don’t see an application of this nature being practical for all websites but for some I think it could be really beneficial. Websites that are based around common health issues or illnesses, hobbies, or niche interest sites.

Next was Ben Kaufman of Kluster. This guy was a loud ball of energy and was quite a refreshing contrast. Kluster is really unlike anything I’ve ever heard of. I thought at first it was a Basecamp like app but then Ben got into the details. Kluster uses group decision making and participation to see a project from beginning to end. They use their own monetary system called “Watts” to reward those who participate. The more Watts you have the more influential you are within the system. Kluster can be used for any type of project music production, logo design, toy design. If someone needs a logo created and is willing to pay $500 for this logo, 33% of that $500 will go to Kluster and the remaining money will be the cash prize for the best/chosen logo by the Kluster network. Really interesting idea. Ben says they have about 10,000 members and have only been live for a few weeks. Looks like this company could be catching on. Oh, and thanks for the free drinks guys. Cheers!

Next was Eric Litman of WashingtonVC. WashingtonVC is a brand new VC firm out of yes you guessed it, Washington DC. Eric was the most articulate of the bunch and gave a quick speech about what he does. He then introduced Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV. If you haven’t heard of Gary then you’ve probably been living in a cave (Webster Hall?). Gary took an extremely unusual approach to the promotion of his family’s wine business. He started a website doing wine reviews. Gary admittedly talks about the New York Jets a good portion of the time but that’s what he loves. If I could summarize what Gary said during his speech it would be ‘do what you love and the money will follow’. Although I enjoy a nice glass wine here and there I’m not too into listening to Gary scream about wine or the Jets. However I absolutely applaud his creative approach and ambition. Gary’s speech was the most interesting and inspiring of the evening. He also poured out 60 bottles of wine for the audience. Schlepping those cases down to Webster Hall probably wasn’t a walk in the park. Thanks for that Gary.

Overall the Meetup was pretty good. There was a good turnout and some interesting speakers. The most negative takeaway would be the location of the event. The most positive thing I would have to say was Gary’s speech.

Thanks for putting that together Brett. Maybe I’ll see you again next month.