Online Media Cultist

I’ve joined Web Worker Daily as a contributing writer, a GigaOM Network site. Pretty cool stuff as I have the opportunity to continue to explore new products, ideas, and trends surrounding social media and the webs, in this case to help (hopefully!) empower, inform, and occasionally entertain web workers around the globe.

Here’s a glimpse of my first several posts over there:

Tracking Twitter by Topic: What’s the Best Solution?

Web working increasingly means having to read up-to-the-nanosecond trending topics and conversations across the social web, and on Twitter in particular. With the huge and growing number of Twitter apps and related services that are now available, it can be confusing to figure out the best way to quickly and easily extract those keyword-based threads that you need.

Searchles’ Related Content Widget Wants To Make Your Web Site Stickier

If the “Web 2.0 era” marks the time when widgets became a household term (in web workers’ homes, at least!), 2009 is looking like a year when widgets are evolving and maturing to add real value for web site publishers and their visitors.

Whether you’re running a corporate blog, commercial web site, or any online media product or service, the name of the game is to engage users and get them to achieve the goal that you’ve set out. That goal might be to encourage multiple page views and return visits, to sign up for a service, to buy a product, and so on. And while “related stories” have long been a feature on online news sites and blogs, “contextually relevant” content widgets have become the latest trend in empowering web site publishers to quickly and easily install tools that will help them to reach their goals.

ReadBurner’s BurnURL Fires Up Social Web Sharing

It’s easy to understand why URL-shortening tools such as TinyURL and bit.ly are popular on the social web. For web workers, the ability to quickly absorb, organize, package, and redistribute information is a critical and demanding task. BurnURL, a new service produced by ReadBurner (first mentioned here, and currently awaiting relaunch), seeks to add value to this process by making it easy to allow people you’re sharing with to do additional sharing.

It’s a matter of reducing the steps to the bare minimum in order to allow a piece of content to “go viral.” BurnURL does its part by with something called the “ShareBar.”