Category Archives: Internet Tools

Every once in a while, you need to pause from work, pick up a good book, and lay down on your couch. I know a lot of us have the impulse to work all the time, through weekends and through our lives, but even if work is the most enjoyable thing around, you need to take a break from it. Take a vacation, take up a new hobby, play with the kids (if you have them), learn a new language or skill (I try to always do this), or sleep some more.

And when you get really overworked, don’t forget to watch the Shiba Inu Puppy Cam. They won’t be on much longer, but damn they are so cute.

My last note: Organize your life better so you use less of your time on rote tasks and more of it on what really matters. Hire an intern or a virtual assistant if you have to. You’ll be surprised how much it pays off.

- Ben

Video streaming by Ustream

A lot of people who read my blog probably already have decent habits tracking finances, but I have been surprised before. The point of this quick blog post is to simply say this: tracking your finances has never been more important.

As gas prices fall and stores open up new deals, the temptation to spend more or lose track of your finances will creep up. This is during a time where, at any time, your job could be out the window due to a line of credit being revoked or pressure by VCs for their companies to cut costs now.

And it’s also not just about you – it’s about your friends who may not be as online-saavy, but still use the Internet regularly. Checking finances at least weekly should be a habit, not a chore. And there are a lot of tools that help in this regard.

Here are my top three financial tools. I use each of them in order to make sure my financial house of cards are in order:

• Mint.com: By far my #1 financial tool. The winner of the TechCrunch 40, it connects all of your online bank accounts, Paypal, credit cards, and investment accounts and sorts through the data to give you a budget, alert you to bills due, and give you a comprehensive view of your overall wealth.
• My online bank accounts: Not enough people take advantage of online logins for their banks. I’m a Citi customer, and all of my asset and liability accounts (checking, savings, credit, loans, etc.) are in one place. I have auto-bill pay set up for several expenses, and I have auto-transfer of my wealth to my savings account, which eventually goes into an investment account.
• Yahoo! Finance: Surprised? Yahoo Finance is one of the best products Yahoo! has. I do a lot of technical investing, so the bar charts and technical indicators available for free via Yahoo! Finance give me a lot of data very quickly. Profiles are easy to set up, as well as news alerts on the companies I have investments with. In conjunction with a good online investment firm such as Scottrade, you really do have all the tools you need to make educated decisions with your money.

It’s nice to have that new iPhone or play around with Twitter, but always be aware of the financial and time costs related to what you do and what you buy. With Mint, you’ll be able to tell whether or not you can afford those nice things.

And please, for the love of all that is holy, have six months of salary and finances hidden away in an emergency account. You’ll be glad you made it if you suddenly find yourself handing out your resume in a 6.7% or 10.5% unemployment rate economy.

- Ben

I am live at Northwestern University for Entrepreneur Idol, a midwest college entrepreneurship competition between teams from eight midwest schools for a $25,000 top prize. This is its second year; I was part of the team that created the event last year.

I’m embedding and streaming the entire event here on my blog. Keynote speakers are Harper Reed and Scott Van Dens Plas of Threadless.com and David Hoffman and Co. from The Next Big Sound.

It starts at 1:00 CST if you’re wondering. Enjoy!

(taken down temporarily)

Celebration Time!

I am proud to say that when you search for Ben Parr in Google, this blog is now the top search result! When I first started this blog back in April, I stated several specific goals. One of them, chronicled in this early blog post, was this:

To beat Ben Parr the UK model in Google

For those of you who do not know about my one-sided rivalry, Ben Parr in the UK is an actor, model, and blackbelt. He has a famous dad (the singer of St. Elmo’s Fire), but none of that stopped me from declaring war on him and his top search ranking.

Now, 3,000+ diggs and hundreds of thousands of visitors later, BenParr.com has assumed the top spot in Google. And let me tell you, I am not going to relinquish my crown anytime soon.

Now this blog is about practical and entrepreneurial musings, so why should you care about this great achievement? You shouldn’t, unless I give you a few quick lessons about how it happened.

It’s about visitors, it’s about SEO, it’s about inbound links, and it’s about consistently updated, quality content (sounds a lot like spine-health.com, the great health website I work for). Here’s some events that I believe helped in the process. Hopefully you can use these tips to help improve your ranking in Google for your targeted keywords

• 1) Google Pagerank of 4. When you start out with a new website, your pagerank in Google is a big, fat zero. That rank is a big factor in how highly search engines view you. I rose from 0 to 4 by having several articles hit high traffic and keywords.
• 2) Over 3000 Diggs total. This blog has over 3000 diggs total and has hit the front page once, an article on Digg and Google that drove nearly 50,000 people in a single day to this blog. It’s got a PR of 3.
• 3) Being linked from Wikipedia. Wikipedia is a major referrer to this blog, mostly due to an article I wrote on the definition of social media (PR3). It’s used as a reference for the definition of social media on Wikipedia. Although Wikipedia uses nofollow tags for outbound links, the consistent traffic and secondary linking caused by wikipedia has resulted in a high traffic page. I hope to continue to be a positive source of information for Wikipedia as I write and blog.
• 4) Good SEO and Clean code. Good link structure, title tags, and wordpress plugins have helped. Caching, fast loading speed, and a clean interface make sure people stay. Although this blog is not completely SEOified, it is a good and consistent model for driving traffic via Google.
• 5) Constantly updated content. I try to blog every week, even if I am busier than hell. Rather than my website going down in the last few days (Ben Parr UK), my site stays updated and fresh with content people want to read. Without that, this blog means nothing.

So I hope you understand my enthusiasm and you use the lessons I’ve learned and put them towards improving the ranking of your blog or website. There is no magical formula that improves your site’s rankings. Seriously, it’s about hard work, good code, and people linking to you because they think you are a quality website.

- Ben

So last week, I was, well, coerced into doing an online show. It became a show about the impact of the economy on technology, two areas of which I have some expertise, and people got to ask me questions live, and I answered them.

So I’m going to do a show, as a trial, twice a week at 10:00 PM EST/7:00 PST on Sundays and Wednesdays.

Today’s a Sunday, so this will be the first “official” episode of TechThrill TV. Below is an embed of the show if you’d like to watch from the blog.

Wish me luck!

- Ben

Live Videos by Ustream

A nice side-effect of tracking the blogosphere’s reaction to my Mashable post on Social Media Jobs has been a debate on the definition of Social Media. What the hell is it?

I agree – the definition is vague and sometimes completely idiotic. So let’s finally put this question to rest and get a consensus. What is Social Media?

I’m going to define it in the most basic way possible – by breaking down the term into its core parts:

• Social
• Media

Social:

First line of Wikipedia: Social refers to human society or its organizations.

The social in social media refers to human society and human organizations. Broad, but it’s a start.

Media:

First line of Wikipedia: Media are the storage and transmission tools used to store and deliver information or data.

So Media is about communication and communication tools. Alright. Still too broad, but we’re getting somewhere. We’re talking about primarily electronic media – you haven’t seen someone use a chisel or a pen to Tweet, have you?

So now we’re talking about using electronic communication storage and transmission to deliver information or data. Because we have “social,” that means it’s the transmission of data to other people and other social groups.

So far, social media is the use of electronic tools by humans to communicate with one another.

Closer, but we’re not there yet.

The vein that flows between FriendFeed, Facebook, Digg, Twitter, etc. is sharing. The sharing of experiences, of information, of Rick Astley to unsuspecting YouTubers. Traditional media presents information to you for you to digest. Social media allows you to pick, choose, comment, parse, and retort – all at the same time.

Now we have it to this: Social media is the use of electronic and Internet tools for the specified use of sharing and discussing experiences and information with other human beings.

But doesn’t a general website do that?

Sort of but, social media tools do it more effectively and they do it faster. That’s the point of Digg – you can share something you found with a lot more people than your IM buddy list. It’s more efficient.

Social Media:

First line of Wikipedia: Social media is an umbrella term that defines…

Enough.
From our deduction, here’s a standing definition:

Social Media is the use of electronic and Internet tools for the purpose of sharing and discussing information and experiences with other human beings in more efficient ways.

One too many “ands”, but oh well – I’m very happy with this definition. If you disagree with me, please debate it in the comments. Otherwise, someone change the first paragraph of the Social Media article on Wikipedia, because I’m tired of the ambiguity.

People need medication to relieve their pain.
People don’t need another way to bookmark and share websites.

People need to learn about their options in battling cancer.
People don’t need to learn about their options for microblogging.

As a technology evangelist, I feel weird saying all this, but really, think about it. Back pain is a problem that has existed since human existence. Social media overload and noise is a problem that has existed for a year, maybe two tops. It’s important to solve the new problems we’ve created with the Internet, but it’s still more important to solve the problems that can kill us.

I’m not saying start a health website – follow your passion, always. But I want you to think and understand why so many technology blogs have low eCPMs and health websites the opposite. Learn from that.

If you’re writing about technology and want to make a living off of it, you need to help solve a problem people actually have. If you’re aspiring to start the next Google, you need to solve an actual problem, not a niche problem. Manage your expectations based on how many people actually have that problem.

Just a little something I’ve picked up working for a web health company.

- Ben

First of all, I want to thank everyone who has visited my article on the things Google would do if it bought Digg. It’s been an incredible response (over 2100 Diggs as of this post) and I’m honored you think so highly of my article.

I want to keep everyone up-to-date on my blog happenings. As I have hinted on both Twitter and FriendFeed, I am building a new blog to replace BenParr.com. It’s going to be called TechThrill and it is in the early stages of being built.

The blog’s goal is to make the internet technology you use more useful and more accessible to the average person. To that end, here are some of the features of the TechThrill blog:

• A live, weekly web TV show co-hosted by Matt Schlicht and me, that will focus on Internet trends and internet technology
• A daily round-up of the most useful posts and discussions related to technology and productivity on the web
• “Centers” that will house and link to the most useful third party apps for websites such as Twitter and FriendFeed.
• Bi-weekly articles on making existing technologies more useful
• Reviews of new technologies and whether or not they’re worth your time to adopt
• Question answering posts and sessions by multiple authors answering the questions that plague most people about technology.
• The Internet Tools Wiki, which will expand in scope and strength.
• A new, multifaceted, and entertaining approach to technology.

It’s not going to be just a blog, but a center for technology information and technology development. I’m looking for help in executing my goal, so if you are interested in writing or are just interested in learning about the blog when it launches, subscribe to my RSS feed or keep in the loop by adding me to Twitter, FriendFeed, or the other services I have put in the left-hand side of the site. You are also welcome to IM me at my AOL IM: YGRPG.

- Ben

I thought I would remind everyone of that. In the meantime, I am working on the design of my new multimedia weblog (multilog? mlog? I haven’t though of a name since it isn’t completely a blog). That’s why posts have become a bit more infrequent. TechThrill will incorporate FriendFeed, a uStream.tv web show with Matt Schlicht, a Tumblr, and other multimedia in the goal of making tech exciting, useful, and more accessible. It will have daily gems as well as your standard blog posts, so you’ll always get something interesting every day on TechThrill.

Now I need to find a way to get work done on a computer without sitting on my ass or standing for three hours.

So the last background on my Twitter profile was of Cancun, Mexico. Nice, but not unique or all that interesting. Then I read this post on Digital Inspiration about how to make a photo collage of your Facebook friends. I decided it would be fun and interesting and thus I went nuts, created a rectangular collage of my friends, and put it up on my Twitter page.

It’s one of many ways to see your social graph – doing this type of collage can be a quick way to take in your entire social graph in a quick and visual way.

If you make one, please post it in the comments and share with the rest of us!