Kl.am – The Short URL Site For Social Media Link Campaigns

April 23, 2009

raven-bigKl.am is the URL shortening site created by Raven, the SEO and social media campaign tracking application portion of Sitening. But, unlike Nashville’s premier short url site URLzen, the Raven team has provided several bells and whistles that give Kl.am its own unique edge.

Kl.am offers users the ability to not only customize their short urls, but track them at the same time. Yet, the most notable difference between kl.am and other sites like it is the information gathered from an individual’s user account. The site will archive and track each link you Kompress, and then goes a step further by allowing users to sort their short urls by either keyword or domain name — thus giving people the ability to run mini campaigns for what they send out over the day.

klam-21

If you use your Twitter account to pull in a significant portion of your traffic, this can especially be helpful in determining what information your audiences responds to verses what they do not. Kl.am even lets you see a time frame for when people clicked the link. This is an essential tool for anyone using social media at work. Screen shot below…

klam-1[Check back soon for an in-depth look at kl.am courtesy of Sitening's Alison Groves.]


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Posted by Tom Cheredar

URLzen: Archive of Short URLs Sent Via Twitter

March 30, 2009

tchedzen

Months ago Jackson Miller, creator of URLzen, sent me a link that allowed me to view a collection of all the links I had shortened through URLzen and then transmitted over micro blogging platform Twitter. I asked him if it was public knowledge, but I was toiling away at something and can’t remember his exact response.

But since he’s about to roll out a slew of new features for the URL shortening service, this trick will soon be small potatoes.

All ur shortyz r belong 2 TChedzen

Anyone can access an archive of past short URLs and sent via twitter by manually typing in the URL path as follows:

http://urlzen.com/twitter/USER_Name [Your Twitter ID]

I’ve run into a few instances where my Twitter ID was case sensitive, so make sure you type your own ID exactly how it’s listed on your profile. For instance, urlzen.com/twitter/tched did not work, but urlzen.com/twitter/TChed was fine.

The URL archive isn’t organized by the date it was shortened, but it’s fairly current. Also, the statistical information is all preserved. I imagine the archive will get some large tweaks in the future, but it’s very functional in its current state.

[EDITORS NOTE: Just to be clear, the archive contains only short URLs that passed through URLzen.com. This redundancy brought to by smart men and women who will ask me about this anyways.]

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Posted by Tom Cheredar

A Facebook, Twitter Collision: As Told By Fishes…

March 6, 2009

Original Image Credit: mpv-sam.com

Original Image Credit: mpv-sam.com

It happened again. Facebook decided to absolutely change everything very quickly and drastically to “better accommodate” the true intent of the site’s purpose. But if you caught the initial reaction from media bloggers, you heard something like Facebook is copying microblogging platform Twitter.

No, this isn’t grade school and these companies definitely aren’t taking tests.

Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m not the biggest fan of facebook, however, that doesn’t mean I’m ignorant to how much value it holds. A large chunk of total web traffic to this very blog comes from facebook and it’s by far the best database of personal contacts that I’ve ever used. So when so called “professionals” covering the tech industry start labeling facebook as a wanna-be, copying, poseur; I have to restrain my urge to flame the comment sections.

The real explanations for  facebook’s changes are much more complex and quite intelligent from a development perspective. Silicon Valley Reporter Sarah Lacy wrote a great observation about the coming collision course between the over-valued facebook and over-hyped Twitter — both relative heavyweights in world of  social media.

And while I typically keep all of the content on my personal blog relatively local and news oriented, I’m cheating with this post. For those who don’t know, Lacy is originally a Tennessean — Memphis to be exact.

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Posted by Tom Cheredar

NashMash Adds Tweet Voting Feature

January 23, 2009

nashmash-buttonsNashMash, the Nashville-specific social media Mashup site, launched its second update this month and with it a handful of new features that allow users to mold the localized feed once they’ve signed in via Twitter ID.

The most visible of these is the appearance of a new Digg-like button for each 140-character Twitter message (shown in the picture) on the front page. This is particularly interesting because it treats each message as if it was a separate piece of news, which in all likelihood will probably contain a link to a blog post or news article.

nashmash-totalIt’s good news for me since the majority of tweets I send contain links that point to an article. With that said, it would not be dificult to game links to the top. While tinkering with the new features and as a personal disclosure, I “liked” one of my own tweets about Nathan Baker’s deadyard, but left the others to the community to decide. In the future I wouldn’t be surprised if the functionality to vote on your own tweets was removed for this purpose. Then again, with 4,813 recognized nashville twitter users, I can’t imagine it would be too difficult to weed out bad eggs and ban ip addresses (so I wouldn’t advise anyone to game their stuff, or even their friends stuff to the top). Still, I’m reserving all judgement until the site pushes out all intended features to the public.

Other features include keyword monitoring, a dashboard for logged in users and personalized statistics. For more information about the new features, check out the NashMash blog.

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Posted by Tom Cheredar

TinyWTF – Why aren’t you using URLzen?

January 11, 2009

urlzen-logoURLzen is a URL shorten-er in the same vein as the default TinyURL and increasingly popular is.gd (is good) and ow.ly. These shortening sites just recently became useful due to Twitter, which only allows 140 characters to be sent per message.

But unlike the similar competitors, URLzen is unique in two distinct ways: A) It was created as a side project to help track the statistics of the original URL and B) it was produced locally here in the Nashville area.

statzen_logo_100Local developer and genius mind of the best iPhone game that hasn’t been released, Jackson Miller created the shorten-er while working on Statzen –  a site that promises to offer up blogger specific web statistics with a beautiful user interface. (I’ve seen screen shots. The Statzen team is going to deliver).

From the Statzen blog:

“A few months ago we decided to experiment with Google App Engine. We also wanted to scratch an itch that we had. So, in the course of about six hours we created Urlzen.com.”

Now many people will still probably say, “well URLzen is too many characters” and that is true compared to is.gd. But, consider this fellow Nashvillians:  We often talk about the city’s potential as the technology capital of the south, but what are each of us doing to help it along?

Jackson is one of the people that will help us achieve that future. TinyURL will not. So do us all a favor and switch to URLzen.

Thanks to Chuck Bryant for alerting me to URLzen months ago and also to Erin Cubert who indirectly gave me the idea to post something about it on this site. You guys rock!

3 Comments | Technology | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Tom Cheredar

NashMash Lists 50 Most Influential Twitter Users in Nashville

January 4, 2009

Who are Nashville’s most influential Twitter users?nashmash

Community site NashMash, a new mashup consisting of only Nashville residents, has created a list of most influential users based on information from their twitter updates. The site launched a public beta January 1 that features the 50 most influential users, as well as its localized twitter feed, user directory and 50 most active users. Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment | Social Media | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Tom Cheredar

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