There’s been much rumor during past four days regarding The Pirate Bay getting ready to launch The Music Bay – their new peer-to-peer music sharing project. So far there’s only a domain name – themusicbay.org – registered and currently being redirected to thepiratebay.org, but their intensions are really serious. It’s hard to keep from quoting the opinion, The Pirate Bay insider shared with the torrentfreak.com blog: “The music industry can’t even imagine what we’re planning to roll out in the coming months. For years they’ve complained bitterly about piracy, but if they ever had a reason to be scared it is now. It will be a special surprise for IFPI’s 78th birthday, and we’re thinking of organizing a huge festival in Rome where IFPI was founded.” Read the rest of this entry »

Blogging for Promotion. Image Source: flickr.com

Nowadays any serious company aimed at constant growth and concerned with its reputation is being actively promoted in social media. B2C relations and behavior models have changed, so now the companies do not just inform their users – they communicate with them, expecting feedbacks, alternatives, suggestions, etc. Those relations become more and more bilateral; therefore it is very important to work out a social media strategy.

First of all, a company should use social media as a mean of communication with its customers. It is very important, since the more customers share their ideas and suggestions, the better the service will be. Another point is inter-customer communication which is important for community building. Finally, building brand advocates around a company will definitely attract those, who may become customers later.

Social media strategy usually involves constant and active communication with customers within social networks. Twitter and Facebook are the most popular ones. Another means are newsletter delivery and launch of the corporate forum on community building purposes. Additionally, if a company sells some goods, the social media marketers may create a dedicated YouTube channel to release videos with their products commercials, tests and how-to’s, etc.

Today we are going to talk specifically about blogging as a means of social media promotion. Read the rest of this entry »

Google Buzz and Gmail logos

On Feb 9 2010 Google launched its new product named “Buzz”. This is an integrated into Gmail Google social network, the primary purpose of which is provision of social networking capabilities to Gmail accounts. For any Gmail account holder social Buzz now appears as an additional option in their menu. As posted on Google Official blog, developers see a huge social network underneath Gmail. This vision is really reasonable, as Gmail services are not only free and very popular, but are also much interconnected. A great example of the linking and integration is a bundle of Gmail and Google talk, which let’s you chat to people you send emails to from your Gmail. In this post you will find a brief Google Buzz review describing its distinctive features. Read the rest of this entry »

In this post I would like to share some of the great WordPress plugins available today free of charge. As you probably know, there are thousands of plugins available today. It can be a tough goal to select the ones that not only perform the required actions, but also are stable and secure. In order to provide you with some kind of a starting point I have conducted a search for essential WordPress plugins. This is a sort of a recommendation review aimed at introducing available capabilities and helping you choose what suits you best.

I tried to introduce some order into the numerous plugins functionality descriptions and came up with the following purpose classification matrix:

Plugin purpose classification matrix

I placed the useful plugins into groups according to this matrix. So let’s take a closer look…

Read the rest of this entry »