360angles

After two full business days of relentlessly negative coverage for Microsoft, the noise from the echo chamber is deafening. More than 500 separate posts on mainstream tech sites and in blogs have amplified the original story, most of them simply repeating the accusations from the Prevx blog post with no original reporting or fact-checking. The story has now taken on a life of its own…

…You’ll notice I didn’t link to any of the Prevx blog posts or IDG headlines in the account above. Here’s why: Doing so increases the rank of those pages on search engines and makes those inaccurate headlines and summaries even more likely to bubble to the top of a search for troubleshooting information on Windows. And given that most of those stories have not been corrected, it would be irresponsible to give them more Google juice than they already have.

Some good reporting on some bad reporting by Ed Bott, a reporter with search on his mind, at ZDnet.

This is a 5-step tutorial on branding your Twitter profile. It includes a Photoshop file for you to download and use as a template. (There’s more to this tutorial than just the template. So even if you don’t have Photoshop, read on for some Twitter-branding tips.)

Twitter is making a beeline for the mainstream. Marketers, friends and moms are finding more and more ways to connect using this social media service. You can scoop it, remix it or you can use it as a social news source and that’s probably just the beginning. Twitter is here to stay.

With more eyeballs flocking to the service, it’s high time we got rid of the default look and upgraded to something unique. Branding your profile will convey sincerity to potential followers. (Sincerity is just about the only currency that matters online, anymore.) It will be well worth our trouble. Let’s go… Read more