Jon DiPietro is Domesticating IT

Weekly High Five lists the most interesting, compelling, and/or useful links of each week.

This week’s High Five theme is, “Social Media Grab Bag.”

#5: Government websites get the chop

As part of the UK government’s austerity measures to combat rising debt levels, it announced that it will be shuttering over 600 web sites.  But that’s not the interesting statistic. As Chris Rand puts it, “Sadly, like most public sector projects, the cost of running them is eye-watering.” He cites one example in which a UK government web site cost over $7M to build and received just under 400k visitors at a cost of over $15 per visitor.

Link: BMON

#4: Former Facebook Executive Adam D’Angelo Confirms New Google Social Networking Effort

There has been some Buzz (rimshot) about Google’s next move to combat Facebook’s growing threat in the social search space. This article suggests that Google drastically underestimated Facebook’s potential and never made social networking a company priority – until now.

Link: Inside Facebook

#3: How To Rank #1 In Facebook Search In 60 Seconds For Any Term

My reason for highlighting this article isn’t so much for people to learn how to accomplish this feat, but to understand the implications of the 21st Century Land Grab. Whether or not you intend or a ready to fully engage in social media marketing, it’s important to plant a flag to prevent someone else from claiming your territory.

Link: All Facebook

#2: How This Author Got 674,716 Facebook Fans (Worth, Uh, $92 Million!)

Like the previous article, the most important lessons of this story aren’t the most obvious. While the author and columnist question the true value of a Facebook fan, what struck me was the negative impact that such a throng of the wrong fans can have on your brand. Like accidentally optimizing for the wrong keyword, having a fan page populated by the wrong demographic can be just as damaging.

Link: Advertising Age

#1: Clay Shirky: How cognitive surplus will change the world

There are a trillion hours per year of “spare time” that are currently spent watching television. When you think about social media and wonder aloud, “Where do people find the time?” now you know. Shirky wants to start talking about how we should be using this cognitive surplus.

Link: TED: Ideas worth spreading

Feel free to provide your thoughts and/or contributions…

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This post is one in a series that discusses the results of the Online Footprint Survey results.  For a complete index of questions and topics, refer to the Online Footprint Survey Results post.

The results showed that 48% of respondents did not own their own name or a reasonable facsimile.  I had, actually, expected that to be a higher percentage.  Be that as it may, this is something that is important now and going to get very important in the near future.

Here are three reasons why you need to register your :

1. There are several billion people on the planet and not nearly enough domain names to go around.  This is leading to what I labeled the “21st Century Land Grab.”  It means that time is quickly running out and the longer you wait, the less likely it is that you will be able to register anything resembling your name or personal brand.
2. We live in the Age of Content, where more and more, the content you produce will shape others’ first impression and lasting perceptions of you.  Owning your own domain name is the most effective way to centralize and control this first impression.
3. Hosting your blog or personal web page as a subdomain on a third party service (for example, jondipietro.blogger.com) is the Internet equivalent of being a tenant at will.  You don’t own the property, can’t implement your own improvements, and could be kicked out at a moment’s notice.  It’s too precarious a position to hold your online identity.

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