Gaffney3.com

With my recent speaking gigs across the country on how to start an online initiative and the art of effective marketing,  I’ve been trying to focus my thoughts and writing on online marketing and the specific technologies that support those efforts online.  I’ve always attempted to write about the online industry as a whole, however now with every post will I ask myself the question, “How would one use this information to either introduce or enforce a brand online?”

With my renewed focus, I was glad that I found Wordle:

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

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Yahoo! Search is making several changes to provide a more functional, useful and visually appealing experience to is users.  As of July 31, they’ve introduced more structured data into their results from LinkedIn, Yahoo! Local and Yelp with the use of SearchMonkey apps.  With the automatic inclusion from these site, users no longer need to go into the search gallery and add them manually.

In May of 2008, Yahoo! announced SearchMonkey, a new developer platform, to open up their search to website owners and all third-party developers.  This platform uses data web standards and structured data and is a key part of their attempt to embrace the semantic web and open standard.

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TechCrunch tells us today that Julia Angwin, a WSJ reporter working on a book about MySpace, has uncovered some dirt about everybody’s first and foremost friend (if you are a MySpace member), Tom Anderson. Apparently, he’s been lying on his profile about his age. According to anonymous sources, he’s 36 or 37. Scandalous!

So, what does this tell us about the credibility of user profiles? Nothing we didn’t already know.

The cloak of anonymity and the veil of the internet empower people to stretch the truth to portray themselves as they want to be seen, not as they actually are. This deceit runs from the casual user to the corporations that run them.

The latest reports cite the California wildfires have forced more that 500,000 people to evacuate with two confirmed deaths. The dozen or more fires have burned roughly 500 square miles stretching from LA to San Diego, and 1,000 houses have been lost.

My thoughts go out all those driven from their homes by the California wildfires.

Resources for tracking the crisis:

• Government
  • San Diego County: Emergency Information
  • City of San Diego: Emergency Fire Information
  • State of California Consolidated Report on Fires
  • National Interagency Fire Center
  • AIRNow: Air Quality Overview
• Google Maps
  • LA Times managed Google map showing fire locations and relevant information
  • KPBS managed Google map with detailed San Diego area information
• Traditional News
  • CNN: Wildfires Updates
  • SignOnSanDiego.com fire blog
  • KPBS (San Diego) updates via Twitter
  • The San Bernardino Sun & Inland Valley Daily Bulletin fire blog
  • The Orange County Register Fire Central

With relatives in southern California, I’m a bit distracted following the paths of the wildfires and determing which have been handles and which run rampant.

CenterNetworks post “Firestorm 2.0″ investigates how the most popular social media services are being used to report and inform. What Allen found is that together, the sites form a fairly complete view of the crisis in real-time, but they are without anything to pull them together. The thought of a “crisiscenters” to properly aggregate this data is a start one.

For me the google maps mashups prove to be the most useful from a top level down perspective.

• The LA Times has a Google Maps mashup showing where the fires are burning
• Another mashup of San Diego allowing GPS and coordinate submissions

Any sites that trump those listed at CenterNetworks? Or is anyone already aggregating the data?