social media | Technology Bloggers

IT Security Column Competition

25th February 2012 2 Replies Christopher Roberts

Alan Tay is one of Technology Bloggers writers, and to date has published 6 articles, and loads of comments. Alan runs his own blog on IT Security, and has recently launched a great competition, (to celebrate the 1 year anniversary of his blog) that he has asked me to write about.

Alan is hoping to get some sponsors to provide him with some great prizes, but has also offered $100 of his own cash to the winner. Alan stresses in his article about the competition, that it is not a free giveaway, but a competition, whereby the author who is able to write the best article for his site will be rewarded.

Alan's blogs logo

To enter Alan’s competition, you need to write an article for his site – which is based around IT Security. After his approval, your article will go live on his site.

The winner of the competition will be the person who’s article drives the most traffic to Alan’s blog. Alan says that the article he will choose as the winner is the one which his readers love the most, the one which gets shared the most via the social web, the one Google ranks highest and the one the content sponsors like the most.

The competition officially opens on the 6th of March, and the last entry date is the 15th of March. The winner of the competition will be announced on the 22nd of April 2012.

I hope to hold a competition to celebrate Technology Bloggers 1st birthday soon, so stay tuned for that competition too 🙂

Will you be entering Alan’s contents to try to win his $100 and any other prizes he may get from sponsors? I will be 🙂

UPDATE: I came second in Alan’s competition, winning $30 and a copy of Auslogic Disk Defrag Pro! My thanks go to Alan, as well as to everyone who read my article, commented and voted 🙂

What we now know about Facebook

3rd February 2012 21 Replies Christopher Roberts

As you may have heard, Facebook plans to become a public limited company (plc) and float on the stockmarket. It hopes that this will raise around the sum of $5 billion USD (this is only about half what most people thought it would try to raise) in finance for the business, a colossal amount!

Thanks to the flotation it is estimated that around 30% (roughly 1,000 people) of the companies employees will become millionaires! That said, Mark Zuckerberg is reducing his annual salary to just $1 as of January next year. Why? Because he will have shares estimated at the value of around $100 billion!

Anyway, due to Facebook wanting to become a plc, it needed to release more detailed financial data than it ever had before, into the public domain. This means that we now know much more about this previously rather secretive internet giant, than ever before!

Finances

Thanks to its choice to become a plc, we now know that Facebook makes 85% of its income from advertising. Furthermore we know that last year it made almost $4 billion USD! Out of this, it turned an impressive 25% into profit, bringing it in $1 billion (supposedly exactly) in net profit.

It is now possible to value to company as a whole, and it is thought to be worth $100 billion USD. To compare that to other industry giants, Amazon is valued around the same amount, eBay is values at about half that figure, and Google is thought to be worth double that.

Ownership

Facebook will still be owned and controlled largely by Mark Zuckerberg. He currently owns 28.4% of Facebook and has a majority in terms of voting rights with over 50% of votes. Basically Zuckerberg owns Facebook still, and he seems to want to stay in the driving seat for a while yet!

Users

We now also know that Facebook have around 845 million active users around the world, of whom, around 450 million visit the site very regularly – that is a crazy amount!

The Future?

Facebook would be worth nothing without its users. Some people say that its users are not Facebook’s customers, but in fact the networks products. If people get bored or move on, the site will die.

If you were buying shares in an internet based business, Google would probably be a much safer bet than Facebook, as its future looks much more certain. Facebook may pay massive dividends to investors in the future, or it may go into decline and cost investors a collective $5 billion!

Friends Reunited was once great, now it stands in Facebook’s massive shadow, as does Myspace, Bebo, Foursquare and many other social media sites. All these sites how now been superseded by Facebook, the question is, will Google Plus or something else dwarf Facebook? Personally I believe that in 10 years, there will be something bigger, but we will just have to wait and see 🙂

Are you doing your bit for the blog?

11th January 2012 17 Replies Christopher Roberts

Yesterday Jonny, one of our authors, emailed me to let me know about the post he had written on the site he writes for (the Bassetti Foundation) where he wrote about the community awards he picked up, praised the blog and talked about and linked to the posts he has written for us.

Jonny asked that I promoted the idea of the community a little bit more through an article, which is exactly what I am going to do!

It is time for the poster again 😉

The idea of a community blog is that everyone benefits. It’s in our slogan:

“Read | Contribute | Benefit
A whole community of technology bloggers”

The three keywords there are contribute, benefit and community. We are a community blog, designed in such a way that everyone is able to benefit.

If everyone is helping to improve the blog, the better the blog is, therefore the more we all benefit. Basically the more we all put in the more we all get out.

I really do try hard with this blog, I give it my all, and I feel that if we all did a tiny bit more (like Jonny has) we could make this blog so much better – and it is already really good! A better blog means more benefit for all!

Let me explain.

PageRank

If all of our readers, writers and commenters (I know some of you are all three!) were to write a post like Jonny’s, more PageRank/link juice would be flowing into the blog. This would increase the blogs PageRank overall – not that a high PageRank is anything to really fantasise about.

If the blog is of a higher PageRank, more flows back to all those commenters and writers who have links on the blog, therefore they get an increase in PageRank too – a benefit directly derived from Technology Bloggers.

Traffic

PageRank is maybe not the best of examples, so let me give you another example, using traffic. If you write about the blog, include it in your bio, tweet about it, post about it on Facebook and generally share it via all your social internet channels, then the blog’s traffic will increase.

More people (traffic) means more people reading the content, more people commenting, a bigger, better and stronger community, more opportunities, more articles etc. it also means that for those writers who are adding AdSense to their posts (like Alan) the chance of making more money increases.

More people means more articles getting read, so writers are getting better exposure/greater publicity. Commenters links are more likely to be followed etc.

Brand

Having a bigger, better blog and community, make Technology Bloggers a stronger brand. This means that your association with the blog is a greater benefit for you. Saying you are a writer for TechCrunch brings you a lot of credibility, due to your association with the strong brand, we can make Technology Bloggers like that too!

The bigger we get, the more everyone involved gets out of the blog!

You

So what can you do to help your blog? The answer? Help us by promoting the blog further. We have a great community here, loads of fantastic writers, writing brilliant content daily, so what we really want to do now is expand, and to do that, we need to help more people find out about us.

Why not tweet if you read an interesting article here, also, if you can +1 it, share it via Facebook etc. please do!

Why not tweet or post a comment like:
I am part of the great dofollow community over at Technology Bloggers (www.technologybloggers.org) why don’t you come and join me?
or how about
Why not check out the great dofollow community over at Technology Bloggers – www.technologybloggers.org?

Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, share our articles!

If you are a blogger why not add us to your blogroll, or page of favourite sites? Why not add a link to us into your bio? You could even write a post like Jonny has done.

Here are some images you could add to your blog, or post via social media to help promote us:
a smaller version – more are available, just contact me 🙂show off that you are part of the community!
If I was a normal blogger, that might have seemed like a very needy plea for help to improve our traffic (which is already very respectable) however I am not, I am a member of a community blog. That is the difference, I am doing this on your behalf. You reading this are going to benefit (hopefully!) from this article, through the communities (that includes you!) response.

What are you going to do to help the blog? Let us all know below! If we get enough people writing about what they have done, I might write a post promoting those people!

Technology Bloggers – a community blog from which we can all benefit!