Another fantastic and easy to follow video explaining Social Bookmarking from The Common Craft Show featuring Lee LeFever.

The had this to say regarding the time limit;

90 seconds? While this might seem like an arbitrary limit, we thought long and hard about how video would complement the flickrverse. If you’ve memorized the Community Guidelines, you know that Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of “long photos,” of capturing slices of life to share.

Much more information is available on the official announcement and further on the video help page.

Neil Patel on his excellent personal branding blog wrote a post outlining the 4 essential elements of a blogger’s “About Me” page. Below are his 4 essentials and a brief on why;

1. An image of yourself - This is important to ensure readers can see who it is that is putting forth ideas and information. If you wish to be a thought leade, it is no good to just get your name out there - names are easily duplicated on the world-wide web.
2. A little personality - Rather than just your education credentials or previous industry experience, allow your readers some insight into what makes you tick - where is it you have been and what is it you have experienced that makes you who you are and gives you the opinions you have? (I believe this applies to all your posts and a bit of character adds depth to your posts and sets you apart from others)
3. Some value for the user - What is it you can do for your readers, or their friends, family or colleagues that all the other blogger’s in your niche, posting about the same issues you are, cannot offer? Neil says this is the key to being remembered amongst the thousands of other about pages a reader will come across. Let’s not forget there are over 71 million blogs out there.
4. Make contact easy - The key to building a fanbase (so-to-speak) is being approachable. You will notice that steaps 1, 2 and 3 are all focused around giving your readers insight into who you are and what you have to offer - once they have that information you must be willing and able to provide more to anyone who wishes to network.

I have given these tips from my own point of view so I highly recommend checking out the orignal article on Quick Sprout, and having a look at his about page. His final bonus tip is something I have already applied to my about page, however now that I have put up these essentials I best get my act together and write up some more content about myself and this blog!

Easy to follow video explaining Wikis from The Common Craft Show featuring Lee LeFever.

A top notch and easy to follow video from The Common Craft Show featuring Lee LeFever.

The data found if one employee spent an hour a day of company time on Facebook, it could cost their employer more than $6200 a year.

Projected across the 800,000 businesses with one or more employees in Australia, this one wasted hour a day equaled productivity losses of more than $5 billion a year.

NineMSN, however is running an article discussing Facebook as a “vital tool for productivity“. Interestingly enough I returned to this article for information on Facebook as a time waster and found that it had been altered to this new standpoint.

Facebook is a “vital tool for productivity” for Australian businesses, a leading Internet authority says.

Ross Dawson says claims that websites such as Facebook are timewasters is irresponsible and contradicts actual business practice.

Ninemsn’s Money website is also on board with an article titled “The dangers of being too social” that discusses social networking sites again from the time wasting point of view.

These sites can also be a huge waste of time. According to comScore, people spend an average of 186 minutes on Facebook per session. (To be fair, a lot of those visitors are letting the program run in the background while they perform other tasks — but three hours is still a long time.)

Aside from the time-waster vs time-saver debate, there is also a rising issue of threat from hacker activities. A concern shared throughout these articles as the popularity and growth rate of the site makes it an attractive target for hackers and spam monkeys. I have already come across groups and members on Facebook who are spamtastic. It’s not uncommon now to see members with a profile that invites friends to come along and view their webcam site or sign up at another site to see more pictures of them. This is something that will only get worse and I do hope it is an issue that can be tackled before it is too late.

I am not totally sold on the “vital tool” argument but I do see how it can be beneficial as a tool for some companies and also as a tool for networking with others in your industry for sharing ideas and perhaps even finding employees.

Almost all of the team at my office are signed up and we have multiple groups ranging from professional work groups to party organising groups. I have found it to be time saving for organising social activities but from a business point of view my mind switches more so to thinking about the productivity lost for my team checking out their buddies photos and writing on their “super walls” - and also the large amount of bandwidth these sorts of sites seem to guzzle up. We’re not ready to ban the site yet (as many companies have started doing) but we have given a softly softly warning to staff and asked them to keep their “facebooking” to lunch hours.

I am sure we will see more articles of this nature popping up in the mainstream press in the coming months.

For more information you can check out the post, but below is a quick checklist;

1. Be sure to test your feeds are working.
2. Ensure your contact page still works - which sadly mine does not at the moment!
3. Ensure your About page is up to date.
4. Thoroughly check each of the pages of your that they still display and link properly.
5. Re-check your AdSense to ensure it still displays correctly and is producing relevant Ads.
6. Regularly check your common outbound links to be sure none have gone dead.
7. Update affiliate links in your posts should you join any new programs.

I recommend checking out the source for more info.