Social bookmarking seems to be the web 2.0 version of what catalogues and directories were originally created for back when the web was born – sites that contain useful links. Or trusted links. Or categorized links. All kinds of links.

But with social bookmarking instead of a few trusted editors for each directory (or topic within the directory as in DMOZ) here comes the power of the crowd that chooses the best sites and pages, instead or limited number of categories – myriads of tags that describe the links as precisely as possible and instead of just one place where the link would be found in a catalog, one wise submission to a social bookmaking site might mean tens or hundreds of links to your site syndicated all over the Internet.

Submitting your link to social bookmarking sites might seem a nice alternative to submitting it to directories. You do not have to wait till the link is approved by the editor (it will appear at the site at once, you can add as many tags describing the links as you need, and much more. If you just want to keep your bookmarks somewhere online instead of just within your browser and share selected links with a few friends and colleagues then any of social bookmarking sites will do for you. You can even go to semi-automatic submission to several sites, with the help of this tool for example.

You can test it on our page if you like: Socialize this page

If you follow this link above, you’ll get a list of services the link will be submitted to. And choosing any service in which you already have an account will bring you directly to the page where you add your link. You will not even have to type the link and page title into each form, the tool will do that for you.

But of course for each good idea there will be people who misuse it. People who will try to spam the social bookmarking sites. And of course these sites will fight such spammers. Some sites would use redirects instead of direct links. Some sites would use nofollow. This means that while any site from the list they use at
this Socializer tool will be fine for just using it to store your link collection not each and every one of them will be fine for SEO. My own top list will include del.icio.us, Yahoo MyWeb and stumbleupon.com and in the following posts I’ll cover each of them more in detail, explain why I chose these 3 sites and give a list of services that seem a complete waste of time for someone who is promoting a site, not just collecting links for fun or future use.

Tags: catalog, cool links, del.icio.us, dmoz, internet marketing, links, SEO, social bookmarking, social bookmarks, stumbleupon, yahoo
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At MoveYourWeb we pay a lot of attention to the communication process. A number of customers switched to us after using offshore development resources due to the communication problems they experienced in those relationships.

One of the important aspects of effective communication is stable and reliable internet connection (currently we have 8mb down and 1mb up stream). The sad fact is that even the biggest internet provider in the country has some downtime happening. So the last week we signed agreement with another alternative providing another back-end up and down links to our office. The administrators already performed the necessary updates of the routing server to handle the change of one ISP to another during the downtime. Stay tuned!

Tags: general thoughts
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While reading some stuff on outsourcing, I came across a peculiar new title of a Chief Globalization Officer. This position was new to me, and I thought that it might be new to somebody else, too. So, I got down to my next article for the blog, which, as I decided, would be dedicated to this new C position.

The necessity of creating this new position was conditioned by the fact that many companies that work on an international level are very often puzzled when it comes to the real issues of targeted or online marketing with a local flavor. In fact, “website globalization puts this issue front and center as firms market their brand and wares through their corporate URLs”. Companies often lack a high profile specialist to control the messaging, budget, technology infrastructure, and other key elements for the channel of global communication and commerce.

It happens that this is exactly a CGO who should take upon all these duties. The CGO is often compared to that second steady hand: the catalyst for global thinking, and responsiveness.

The CGO’s main functions include:

1) to form a corporate global mindset to help the organization enter new markets, and maintain competitiveness in those markets for many years to come;

2) to pursue the best global leadership talent to be able to respond to local conditions;

3) to continuously improve organizational structures to meet local conditions;

4) to conduct the management of knowledge and information, and utilize it through the best use of technology.

The first company to appoint a Chief Globalization Officer outside the US is American Cisco Systems, Inc. With that, one more C level position has been created in corporate America. Wim Elfink, the first professional Cisco’s Chief Globalization Officer will go to Bangalore and work from there, thus creating the first CGO job in Corporate America outside its borders; i.e offshore.

According to Mr Elfink, as a Chief Globalization Officer, he will be in charge of “executing the growth strategy for the company globally, including collaborating with Cisco’s worldwide functional leaders to innovatively globalize and scale all functions by leveraging their work in India as a platform”.

Besides, he will take up elaborating disruptive business models for Cisco to create new markets, go-to-market channels, and technologies. Additionally, he is planning to carry out an analysis of possible implementation of Cisco’s $1.1billion investment in India. He emphasizes that developing and strengthening existing partnerships with Indian IT partners on a global scale is of vital importance to Cisco. The reason is not only that India’s market is growing for Cisco products and services. In fact, India was chosen due to many other factors. First, India is an open culture, unlike, say, China. It is well known for its strong sense of partnership, which is beneficial for implementing Cisco’s globalization strategy. Secondly, it has educated workforce, innovative customers, and skilled partners that have global capabilities. Finally, India’s government pays much attention to economic development across all levels of society.

Overall, time will show if the position of a Chief Globalization Officer justifies itself. However, already now it is clear that with the development of the modern global economy, and growing availability of the offshoring services, this new C position can become irreplaceable for implementing modern globalization strategy.

Tags: CGO, chief globalization officer, general thoughts, globalization, offshoring services, outsourcing
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At recent IT English classes that are organized in our company (personally I attend upper-intermediary level as a lot of other management do, we also have intermediary level classes) we discussed the evolution of advertisement on the internet. Everybody could remember the crappy ad banners that were flooding the web sites 4-6 years ago. Those were simply untargeted and spent a big deal of advertising budgets of .com companies. Nowadays the advertisement is getting more context and relevant with ad programs starting from AddWords and Overture and finishing with Amazon  having ‘customers  who  bought that  book also  bought‘ feature, which provides the results based on the sales history. The advertising and marketing are getting less offensive and are getting more and more focused on target audience.

The world of marketing is definitely getting smarter with the marketing masseges hitting very small targets. The successful marketers of the future and successful business ventures are those who will be able prepare X versions of the same basic ad delivered to X different users based on both data that is mined behind the scenes, and data that they directly input.

Web 2.0 is in power now and the most valuable companies are those focused of competitive differentiation based on data. Those services succeded because they effectivelly gather and use the data – there is no much sense listing all of YouTubes, MySpace, Facebook and others here. They are known not for the security, reliability or security. In fact many have experience outage that would have killed any other traditional web company. Data is the most important component of internet success nowadays. Think about the way you utilize and use the data while starting your next business venture or rethinking the functionality of the current solution.

 p.s. I’m a big fan of our English classes not just because we polish our English speaking skills here but because this is a great opportunity to discuss ideas, trends and innovations happening in the IT industry.

Tags: advertising, general thoughts, internet marketing, marketing, web 2.0
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