I recently came across three really cool visual search engines.
The first is Searchme. This is a search engine with Oomph. It has a cool Mac like interface of flipping through searched web pages. You can preview pages, even read a little bit as text. The search engine is a little slow though. And it doesn't return the large number of results as say a Google does. But it sure has a great interface.
The second is even better. Addictomatic searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. It's the perfect tool to keep up with the hottest topics, perform ego searches and feed your addiction for what's up and what's now. It presents the result in a great dashboard interface with different search results showing up in small windows of their own. I love this one.
Finally, searchCrystal lets you search and compare multiple engines in one place. It is a search visualization tool that enables you to compare, remix and share results from the best web, image, video, blog, tagging, news engines, Flickr images or RSS feeds. It visualizes the overlap between search results and places the most relevant items close to the display’s center. You can even embed searchCrystal as a Widget on your site or blog to share personalized crystals. Take the searchCrystal Analytics Toolbook Guided Tour for more info.
I am renaming this blog to "Life, The Universe and Everything about Learning and Content Development". Changed eLearning to Learning in the blog name.
Continuing with my writing about blogging, another interesting question before me is whether senior management should blog, and if so where, as in inside the firewall or have public blogs? There has been much written about CEO blogging and corporate blogs. In this post I list various sites I found, some I really liked.
The big question that still remained for me is whether senior management should blog within the firewall or outside? Of course if they are connecting with the customers or partners, it is best to have a public blog. But if the main purpose is to connect with the employees, should this with only confined to password protected (or otherwise) within the firewall or should be a public blog? There are advantages of a public blog. I believe the corporate information walls are anyway so porous that it doesn’t really matter having a blog within the firewall. We regularly find corporate emails written by CEOs/senior executives being forwarded endlessly. A public blog will help connect senior management to potential employees, and also stay connected with former employees. Both these are important in this age of talent crunch. Of course, having a blog within the firewall makes it easier for management to talk about clients, failures and be more specific about projects and internal policies. So the jury is still out there about which is better.
Would love to hear more views on this subject.
My Top 10 CxO Blogs:
- Bill Marriott, Chairman & CEO of Marriott International – well written and connects with customers and employees. I quite like this one.
- Tom Glocer, CEO of Thomson Reuters – As per Tom, in his blog he is going to “write about what interests me, which is often my work at Thomson Reuters, as well as wider issues like technology and media - two areas that I am fascinated by.” Seems like a genuine attempt to connect with employees and make the leader in Tom more human.
- Vineet Nayar, CEO, HCL Technologies – reads like a blog aimed at conversations with employees. Vineet wants this blog “to yield an untiring momentum that will help us collaborate to transform our today and craft our own tomorrows.”
- Rajeev Karwal , Former President and Chief Executive, Reliance Retail, Reliance Industries Limited –truly a personal blog “to express gratitude to people, organizations, stories and situations which have taught me some important lessons in professional and personal life.”
- Scott Ragsdale, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, naseba – Very un-CEO type blog, written from the heart, couldn’t care less about what people might think. As per Scott, “the main purpose of this blog is to communicate with my 300+ employees, my future employees and leaders of naseba, my clients, future clients, and investors – at the same time helping me stay focused on my climb — to build naseba into a multi-hundred million euro company.”
- Jonathan Schwartz, CEO Sun Microsystems Inc. – writes mostly with customers as intended audience. Seems more like the Sun website and less like a blog.
- Kevin Lynch, Chief Technology Officer, Adobe – software development is Kevin’s passion that has led to great products from him and his team.
- John Dragoon, Chief Marketing Office for Novell – a nice mix of company specific and generic content. Has good content for marketing folks.
- Sanjeev Bikhchandani, CEO, Naukri.com – a personal blog, unfortunately not updated frequently
- David Neeleman, Founder and Chairman of JetBlue Airways – “Each week I fly on JetBlue flights and talk to customers so I can find out how we can improve our airline. This is my flight log”, one post a month, however unfortunately last updated in Oct 2007.
Corporate blogs (in no particular order):
- Tata Interactive Systems – combination of blog and corporate website
- Infosys – lots of technology channels
- Wipro Campusarena – surprisingly reads like a blog. Aims to facilitate one-to-one interaction with Wipro’s Campus Hiring Team and Wiproites so that students get a taste of what working for Wipro is all about, the release added. As per their policy doc, “a platform for students to share and discuss information about life at Wipro Technologies and activities”.
- Southwest Airlines – “state of the art use of social media by a big company: a blog, Flickr pics, video, polls, news and more”, could well be a company website, doesn’t quite have the feel of a blog.
- Dell – a blog about Dell products, services and customers
Interesting links about CEO/Corporate blogs
Recently, I have been asked about blogging a few times, both from friends and professionally. I was asked how to make your blog searchable, how do people find the blogs, can a blog be found by searching on Google or other search engines?
There are so many really useful sites out there that teach you various tips and tricks of blogging that I really wondered what value I had to add. I am no authority in blogging, so IM’very’HO I shared my blogging experiences with them. It would be great to hear more from experienced bloggers with more tips for new bloggers.
Your blog needs to be up for sometime before it starts showing up in Google search results. Of course people need to be searching for something that is available on your blog. There are syndication sites where you can post register your blog. This enables your blog to appear in categories that might interest others. BloggerBarter has a fairly comprehensive list of such syndication sites.
There are hundreds of new blogs coming up every day so it is a little hard to imagine people are actively looking for new blogs, though I am sure some people do. You may find some of the tips below useful to get a larger readership to your blog:
- Publicize your blog to your friends – send email, put it on Facebook, put the link in your email signature etc. Direct your friends/colleagues/acquaintances to your blog and recent posts.
- For people to return to your blog, it must have interesting things to read. Have a theme for your blog. If it a rant so be it, but then it needs to be interesting, spicy, saucy, or something that will pull the readers.
- Good writing is critical for people to return to your blog. Poor writing is a great turn-off to the reading experience.
- Read other people’s blogs. Read many different blogs. Then start commenting on them. When you comment, you leave a trail back to your blog and other people start visiting your blog.
- Liberally refer to other people’s blog in your blog. Eventually other bloggers will start mentioning your blog in their blog, increasing your readership.
- For readers to return to your blog, it needs to be updated frequently with new content. I have been reading blogs and many bloggers post practically every day. I started with posting once a month but now I post about 5-6 posts a month, which is low compared to many other blogger. It is quite hard work trying to keep pace.
- Write about something that people are searching for. Surprisingly I wrote a post on iPhone that is the post that has most hits through search results. Set up Google Analytics on your blog. This will help you track keywords that are being used to reach your blog.
- Become member of various online groups. Basically build your digital footprint.
- Read about blogging as such. There are also many slides on Slideshare. These give you tips to become a blogger. Interestingly a recent post from Sue Waters has some interesting insights about Technorati and searching for blogs. Blog Bloke also seems like an interesting site with lots of resources about blogging.
Happy blogging... :-)
