Category: Blog

  • Sailing Inspired SEO Blog

    Sailing is the art of controlling a boat with large (usually fabric) foils called sails. By changing the rigging, rudder, and sometimes the keel or centre board, a sailor manages the force of the wind on the sails in order to change the direction and speed of a boat. Mastery of the skill requires experience in varying wind and sea conditions, as well as knowledge concerning sailboats themselves.

    While there are still some places in Africa and Asia where sail-powered fishing vessels are used, these craft have become rarer as outboard and modified car engines have become available even in the poorest and most remote areas. In most countries people enjoy sailing as a recreational activity. Recreational sailing or yachting can be divided into racing and cruising. Cruising includes extended trips, short trips within sight of land, and day sailing. Google is like one huge ocean and SEO is the navigation process that you use to have your captain or webmaster find your port of call. Like Google the sea has many currents and wave patterns which all work like a huge Algorithm and much like studying the climate and the sea we can study Google’s algorithm. In computer science, an online algorithm is one that can process its input piece-by-piece in a serial fashion, i.e., in the order that the input is fed to the algorithm, without having the entire input available from the start (much like sailing there are weather patterns as well as storm warnings). In contrast, an offline algorithm is given the whole problem data from the beginning and is required to output an answer which solves the problem at hand. (For example, selection sort requires that the entire list be given before it can sort it, while insertion sort doesn’t.)

    Because it does not know the whole input, an online algorithm is forced to make decisions that may later turn out not to be optimal, and the study of online algorithms has focused on the quality of decision-making that is possible in this setting. Competitive analysis formalizes this idea by comparing the relative performance of an online and offline algorithm for the same problem instance. For other points of view on online inputs to algorithms, see streaming algorithm (focusing on the amount of memory needed to accurately represent past inputs much like wave patterns on the ocean), dynamic algorithm (focusing on the time complexity of maintaining solutions to problems with online inputs) and Online machine learning Absolute bearing – The bearing of an object in relation to north. Either true bearing, using the geographical or true north, or magnetic bearing, using magnetic north.

    Sailing like SEO can be either competitive, as in collegiate dinghy racing, or purely recreational as when sailing on a lake with family or friends. Racing and Regatta’s are common group activities in the sub-culture of boaters owning larger (twenty-five foot plus) small boats and larger Yachts, and are frequently organized around a Yacht club or Marina organization Sailboat racing can be done on conventional family sailboats racing under one of the simpler handicap formulas or Performance Handicap Rating Formula is one such rule), or can be done on specialized boats with virtually no accommodation or compromises for comfort. Racing is generally either one design, where the boats are close to identical, or handicapped where the boats’ finishing times are adjusted based on their predicted speed potential.

    Racing is further broken down into ocean racing, where boats start at one port and race in the ocean and back to the same port or a new destination, or buoy racing where boats race around prescribed courses and return to port at night. Several famous races cross oceans, like the Biennial Singlehanded TransPac Race from Los Angeles to Honolulu, or the Newport-Bermuda Race from Newport, Rhode Island to Bermuda. Other races actually circumnavigate the globe, like the Volvo Ocean Race or Vendee Globe Race. Weather you are a casual boater or an avid sailor getting ready to circumnavigate the globe Sailing like Google requires you to take time and read the currents and waves and the more time you spend on the water the better you become at reading the waves and this is just like optimization the more time you spend reading Google the better your optimization efforts will become. This Blog was inspired by Laurin Vroom who went sailing for the first time last weekend and loved it.

    It is not the ship so much as the skillful sailing that assures the prosperous voyage.

    George William Curtis

    Nexonta Technologies Inc

  • Long Tail and Short Tail Keywords

    Keyword research is a practice used by search engine optimization professionals to find and research actual search terms people enter into the search engines when conducting a search. The long tail in keyword research is basically an expansion of a core, generic, high volume keyword phrase to include numerous combination’s and permutations of the keywords and their associated or relevant phrases. These phrases individually are unlikely to account for a great deal of searches, but when taken as a whole, can provide significant traffic. The long-tail is unlikely ever to exceed searches for a brand name if the brand name is reasonably well established, but the volume of converting traffic these terms can generate by nature of their specificity and relevance is worth investigating.

    Comprehensive long-tail keyword research can be a highly effective strategy, since people making long-tail searches are arguably further along in the buying cycle (a significant amount of prior knowledge is needed in order for the searcher to know which words to use), so conversion rates can be higher. Recent long-tail keyword research has found that long-tail searches often exhibit a higher conversion rate by up to 200% compared to short-tail (generic) keywords, and can be extremely profitable for search engine marketers in terms of a lower cost per action and higher return on investment.

    Since long-tail keywords are naturally more specific in nature than short-tail keywords, long-tail keywords present a great opportunity for search marketers to provide highly relevant ads which cater for the specific needs of highly-qualified searchers. If done skillfully, a paid search campaign with long-tail keywords can exhibit a considerably higher CTR than one with short-tail keywords. What’s more, since paid search click prices (CPCs) vary depending on a real-time supply and demand auction, long-tails can often be cheaper by up to 50% due to less competition.

    Many company leaders and managers have their own interpretation of how they want their brand to be portrayed and ostensibly perceived online. A luxury second hand car dealer, for example, may only want to include the words ‘pre-owned automobiles’ on their web site, and not ‘used cars’. The fact that thousands of people are searching for a used car, and very few are searching for a pre-owned automobile needs to be communicated.

    Depending on what a company sells or offers, overlooking the likelihood of the inclusion of geographical locations in the search query may be highly detrimental. The following are examples of queries with city names included in a search: ‘homes for rent Edmonton’, ‘used car dealer New York’, ‘Montreal hotels’, ‘Vancouver Chinese restaurants’ etc.

    Poor minds talk about people average minds talk about events great minds talk about ideas.

    Eleanor Roosevelt

    Nexonta Technologies Inc

    Ideas!

  • SEO where to start!

    There are many websites these days that are not setup for the search engines. This is important because if you do not have a website which is optimized and shows up in search engine results, you cannot get traffic to your website without having to buy it and this gets expensive. There are three main areas to search engine marketing: links, your content, as well as your key words. It is also important to analize the competition on the first page of your industry. This is done to see how your website stacks up against the competition along with which companies are in the top ten results and why they are there. As an SEO firm Nexonta Technologies will examine your keywords. This is done to determine competition for keywords and how you can make sure you are receiving as much traffic for various keywords as you can.

    Also it is important to note that when it comes to thorough site analysis a good SEO company will also examine page optimization of your website. This is significant because your website will have a set of different keywords and certain keywords are used for certain pages. In addition to keyword relevance we focus on site navigation and user ease this is important because you want your website to be very easy to get around so that your audience is able to find what they are looking for. Off page optimization such as link building is the next area which will be focused on by search engine marketing services companies. Link building is important because this is a factor in search engine rankings.

    The second approach should be to publish testimonials and comments from your customers. A good idea would be to publish both great and bad comments; that way prospects will be truly convinced that these testimonials are real. When prospects see testimonials on your site, they will have the confidence to buy from you simply because human beings follow the herd mentality; when others have bought and proven it authentic, they will jump on the bandwagon and invest in too. We here at Nexonta Technologies Inc want this to be a sort of frame work when considering SEO consulting services weather with us or another firm and we hope that this blog acts as a guideline for your SEO efforts.

    Nexonta Technologies Inc

     

  • “Burn The Ships”

    This phrase “Burn The Ships” comes from a historic conquest of history when, in 1519, Spanish Conquistador Hernando Cortez landed in Mexico on the shores of the Yucatan, ( Though this is only one version of this urban legend it is going to serve our purpose for our blog.) with only one objective…seize the great treasures known to be there, hoarded by the Aztecs. Cortez was committed to his mission and his quest for riches is legendary. Cortez was an excellent motivator, he convinced more than 500 soldiers and 100 sailors to set sail from Spain to Mexico, commanding 11 ships, to take the world’s riches treasure. The historic question is “how a small band of Spanish soldiers arrived in a strange country and swiftly brought about the overthrow of a large and powerful empire that was in power for over six centuries?”

    For Cortez, the answer was easy. It was all or nothing! A Complete and Total Commitment. Here’s how Cortez got the “buy in” from the rest of his men. He took away the option of failure. It was conquer and be hero’s and enjoy the spoils of victory…or DIE! When Cortez and his men arrived on the shores of the Yucatan he rallied the men for one final pep talk before leading his men into battle, and utters these three words that changed the course of history. “Burn the Ships”.

    He met with resistance from his men. “Burn the ships,” he repeated. He then uttered these words “if we are going home, we are going home in their ships”. With that, Cortez and his men burned their own ships, and by burning their own ships, the commitment level of the men was raised to a whole new level. A level much higher than any of the men, including Cortez, could have ever imagined.

    If we know that our ships are still out there, when things get tough we instinctively head for our ships so we can escape. It’s just human nature. The path of least resistance. This level of thinking and commitment sees sacrifice as a positive thing, not something weird or impossible (blog writing), but something to be cherished and fought for. Cortez didn’t allow himself or his men to have the option of going back to Spain. By removing this option, Cortez and his men were forced to focus on how they could make the mission successful. And so it is with your company. How can you make the missions in your SEO successful? At Nexonta Technologies while we do not advocate burning anything we do believe that SEO is a full commitment like in life there is only room for a few on the first page of Google in any given industry and so if your company really sees the value of first page advertising on Google then you might want to consider burning the proverbial Ships meaning drop all other forms of advertising and focus your resources on search marketing and SEO.

    When it comes to SEO you get out what you put in in terms of time, effort and blog writing and key word research but trust me the results are worth it and like anything else you will actually get better at it as you do it more. Keep in mind most successful businesses started purely by accident or a mistake that someone stumbled on to a great idea and ran with it. It is also worth mentioning that if your original model is not working you can always adjust it to accommodate changes in the current as life changes rapidly today so sometimes you need to adjust your sail but definitely stay the course towards success since there is no winning in stopping the race all together.

    Nexonta Technologies Inc

  • Copy Writing For Google

    Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Copy writing is textual composition for web page marketing that emphasizes skillful manipulation of the page’s wording to place it among the first results of a user’s search list, while still producing readable and persuasive content.

    The text appearing at specific locations, such as in the title tag and the Meta Tag of the page’s code, gets special attention during SEO, because search engines compare information found there with other pages to determine relevance. However, SEO copywriters also strive for unique written content on the page, distinguishing it from similar pages competing for placement in the search results. Other factors that determine relevance during a search are the page’s Keyword Density, the placement of the keywords, and the number of links to and from the page from other pages.

    While an obvious goal of SEO copy writing is to cause the business’s or product’s web page to rank highly in a search, most experts in the field would argue that it is of secondary priority. The foremost goal of SEO copy writing is to produce succinct, effectively persuasive text for a well-written web page. Writing that “optimizes” a search, but which offers little useful information or only weak persuasion, is frowned upon in the profession as at best ineffective. At its worst, it becomes a costly resource inducing potential buyers to turn away from the site rather than generating sales.

    SEO copywriters often work with “optimizers” who are more expert in the technical aspects of SEO. Together they will not only rewrite text but also alter the code to design a page that is most favored by search engines. It is not a clear, scientific process, however. Attempting to keep themselves competitive and defending against the composition strategies of so-called black hat SEOs, search engine designers today do not disclose the complex algorithmic processes of their search engines. In spite of the insights of optimizing technicians, SEO copy writing requires finesse and repeated experimentation to assess how the team’s page revisions will fare in a potential customer’s search.

    Techie is a slang term, derivative of the word technology, with several distinct but related meanings. The term is used to describe a person who displays an above average aptitude for technology. Here at Nexonta Technologies we do not refer to our programmers as Techies and we do not consider it polite to make fun of these people who perhaps speak a different language than the business world however their role at companies is vital to staying on top and so while allot of technical programmers might not have an aptitude for various aspects of the business world it is vital that you make them a part of your business operation as they are the puppet masters of today’s organizations and so the next time that you are at the water cooler and you see your company’s IT person ask them a technical question that only they would understand and trust me you will make a friend for life.

    Nexonta Technologies Inc

     

  • DIY SEO

    Do it yourself (or DIY) is a term used to describe building, modifying, or repairing of something without the aid of experts or professionals. The phrase “do it yourself” came into common usage in the 1950s in reference to home improvement projects which people might choose to complete independently.

    In recent years, the term DIY has taken on a broader meaning that covers a wide range of skill sets. DIY is associated with the international alternative rock, punk rock, and indie rock music scenes; indymedia networks, pirate radio stations, and the zine community. In this context, DIY is related to the Arts and Crafts movement, in that it offers an alternative to modern consumer culture’s emphasis on relying on others to satisfy needs. Our educational system, in its entirety, does nothing to give us any kind of material competence. In other words, we don’t learn how to cook, how to make clothes, how to build houses, how to make love, or to do any of the absolutely fundamental things of life. The whole education that we get for our children in school is entirely in terms of abstractions. It trains you to be an insurance salesman or a bureaucrat, or some kind of cerebral character. But I digress for our DIY purposes we are referring to Seo using a past projects module, Blog or a Client testimonial module. Regular up dates to your website are vital to obtain and maintain a quality ranking on Google in fact this is Seo 101

     

    PageRank is a probability distribution used to represent the likelihood that a person randomly clicking on links will arrive at any particular page. PageRank can be calculated for collections of documents of any size. It is assumed in several research papers that the distribution is evenly divided between all documents in the collection at the beginning of the computational process. The PageRank computations require several passes, called “iterations”, through the collection to adjust approximate PageRank values to more closely reflect the theoretical true value. The more current information on your website the greater the probability that Google will recognize your site and you will appear well in search results.

     

    At Nexonta Technologies we build SEO ready websites that can be easily updated by the client daily, weekly or monthly if they choose all they have to do is allocate a few hours per month to do the updates and this can mean fantastic positioning on Google but if they want to pay us to do the updates then we would be happy to keep up the on going SEO services.

    Nexonta Technologies Inc

  • Search Marketing as it relates to Conventional advertising

    Conventional marketing dictates and maintains control of messages to cause the greatest persuasion in consumer decisions. Given the proliferation of peer to peer consumer reviews and other social media platforms that enable consumer generated media, marketing agencies can no longer control the skew of that information. Marketers who are creating and participating in online platforms to facilitate conversation are radically trusting the consumer to build the brand based on the experience that is most relevant to them. The Internet has brought media to a global audience. The interactive nature of Internet marketing in terms of providing instant response and eliciting responses, is a unique quality of the medium. Internet marketing is sometimes considered to have a broader scope because it not only refers to the Internet, e-mail, and wireless media, but it includes management of digital customer data and electronic customer relationship management (ECRM) systems. Internet marketing ties together creative and technical aspects of the Internet, including: design, development, advertising, and sales.

    Internet marketing also refers to the placement of media along many different stages of the customer engagement cycle through search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), banner ads on specific websites, e-mail marketing, and Web 2.0 strategies. In 2008 The New York Times, working with comScore, published an initial estimate to quantify the user data collected by large Internet-based companies. Counting four types of interactions with company websites in addition to the hits from advertisements served from advertising networks, the authors found the potential for collecting data upward of 2,500 times on average per user per month.

    Media Buyers are individuals responsible for purchasing time and advertising space for the purpose of advertising. When planning what to buy, they must evaluate factors based on but not limited to station formats, pricing rates, demographics, geographic, and psycho graphics relating to the advertisers particular product or service objectives. The Media Buyer needs to optimize what is bought and that is dependent on budget, type of medium (radio, internet, TV, print), quality of the medium (target audience, time of day for broadcast, etc.), and how much time and space is wanted. Media Buyers can purchase spot, regionally, or nationally. National Media Buyers might have to factor in determinate based on a state by state basis. Rates, demand of leads, space, and time, and state licenses will vary from state to state. National Media Buyers will need National Media Planning to generate National Media Marketing strategies and National Media Advertising that can be adaptable from area to area but also work on a national level.

    There is an apparent distinction between General Marketing Media Buyers and Direct Response Media Buyers. General Market Media Buyers enact or actualize media plans drawn up by media planners. They negotiate rates and create media schedules based on a media plan constructed by a Media Planner. Through the Media Planner, General Market Media Buyers rely on published cost per point guides which in actuality, are often based on hypothetical benchmarks, and rather outdated models. An experienced Direct Response Media Buyer knows what stations generate a specific quantity of response and knows within reason, the break even point of the expenditure versus the return. With that information, the Direct Response Media Buyer is efficient in negotiating a functional rate and in purchasing media from the appropriate stations. The Direct Response Buyer attaches unique phone numbers to each station they purchase media from and track the sales, and make adjustments to the media plan and schedule as necessary to optimize results. With these differing methodologies, Direct Response Marketing can be considered a specialized arena. Few advertising and marketing agencies are qualified to support clients in their Direct Response efforts.

    Media Research Planning can be done by Media Buyers as well as Media Specialists. Depending on product and service, Media Buyers and Media Specialists must do a fair amount of research to determine how best to spend the allotted budget. This includes research on the target audience and what type of medium will work best to reach the largest amount of consumers with the most effective method. Media Planners and Media Specialists have a vast array of media outlets at their disposal, both traditional media and new media. Traditional media would include radio, TV, magazines, newspapers, and out of home. New media might include Satellite TV, cable TV, Satellite radio, and internet. The internet offers a number of Online Media that has surfaced with the improvement of technology and the accessibility of the internet. Online Media can include emails, search engines and referral links, web portals, banners, interactive games, and video clips. Media Planners and Specialists can pick and choose what and/or which combination of media is most appropriate and effective to achieve their goal, whether it is to make a sale, and/or to deliver a message or idea. They can also strategize and make use of product placements and Positioning. Inserting advertisements as print ads in newspapers and magazines, buying impressions for advertisements on the internet, and airing commercials on the radio or TV, can be utilized by Direct Response Advertisers as well as Remnant Advertisers. Internet marketing, also referred to as i-marketing, web-marketing, online-marketing, Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or e-Marketing, is the marketing of products or services over the Internet. At Nexonta Technologies Inc we will not only work with your budget we will assist you with all of your marketing needs.

    Nexonta Technologies Inc

  • Nexonta on to the Next Level

    Pain, suffering, stress, and other difficulties are the admission tickets to the game of life. But, at times, we cannot help suspecting that life would be much more pleasant without the hassles. Is that what you think? Before answering, ponder the following. In a world without hurdles, there are no champions; without suffering, there are no saints; without battles, there are no victories; without rain, no rainbows. Doesn’t it appear that a world that includes pain is more rewarding than one that doesn’t? Isn’t heat necessary to produce gold, pressure and polishing necessary to produce diamonds, and adversity necessary to produce character?

    Here’s how Henry Ford expressed the same sentiment: Life is a series of experiences, each one of which makes us bigger, even though sometimes it is hard to realize this. For the world was built to develop character, and we must learn that the setbacks and grieves which we endure help us in our marching onward.

    Adversity. It’s one of life’s inescapable realities. If you haven’t already been through it, you can count on facing it some day. Why do some businesses falter or fail in the face of adversity while others are able to leverage it into incredible success? Welcome to The Adversity Paradox. Realize it could be worse. Count your blessings. Keep in mind the Persian proverb: I cried because I had no shoes until I saw someone with no feet.As in life in business adversity is unavoidable. So, don’t fight it, accept it. Develop the proper attitude, for as Havelock Ellis wrote, setbacks and hardships are part of business. To reject them is to reject success itself. Although pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. We can choose to be strong. It is not misfortune that produces suffering, but an improper reaction to it. The power of next or moving forward lessens your suffering by refusing to linger on past difficulties or expecting future ones. Problems of the present are difficult enough to deal with. Don’t add to your misery by regretting the past or worrying about what might happen in the future. Mark Twain understood that it was pointless to fret about the future when he said, I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

    Even under the worst circumstances, we can choose to focus on the positive rather than the negative. Thomas A. Edison is an example. In 1914, a fire almost destroyed his New Jersey laboratories. Valuable records of his experiments and two million dollars worth of equipment were lost. When surveying the damage, the sixty-seven year old Edison said, There is great value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God we can start anew. Here at Nexonta we focus on the power of Next since life is ever changing and business moves fast we make it our goal to pursue what can be as opposed to what should have been. Nexonta on to the next level.

    Just as a cautious businessman avoids investing all his capital in one concern, so wisdom would probably admonish us also not to anticipate all our happiness from one quarter alone.

    Sigmund Freud

    Nexonta Technologies Inc

  • GOOGLE and THE ART of WAR STAYING on TOP

    The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand.

    Sun Tzu

    Competitor analysis in marketing and strategic management is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. This analysis provides both an offensive and defensive strategic context through which to identify opportunities and threats. Competitor profiling coalesces all of the relevant sources of competitor analysis into one framework in the support of efficient and effective strategy formulation, implementation, monitoring and adjustment.

    Given that competitor analysis is an essential component of corporate strategy, it is argued that most firms do not conduct this type of analysis systematically enough. Instead, many enterprises operate on what is called “informal impressions, conjectures, and intuition gained through the tidbits of information about competitors every manager continually receives.” As a result, traditional environmental scanning places many firms at risk of dangerous competitive blind spots due to a lack of robust competitor analysis.

    Here are a few common and useful technique is constructing a competitor array. The steps include:

    * Define your industry – scope and nature of the industry

     

    * Determine who your competitors are

     

    * Determine who your customers are and what benefits they expect

     

    * Determine what the key success factors are in your industry

     

    * Rank the key success factors by giving each one a weighting – The sum of all the weightings must add up to one.

     

    * Rate each competitor on each of the key success factors

     

    * Multiply each cell in the matrix by the factor weighting.

     

    This can best be displayed on a two dimensional matrix – competitors along the top and key success factors down the side.

     

    The strategic rationale of competitor profiling is powerfully simple. Superior knowledge of rivals offers a legitimate source of competitive advantage. The raw material of competitive advantage consists of offering superior customer value in the firm’s chosen market. The definitive characteristic of customer value is the adjective, superior. Customer value is defined relative to rival offerings making competitor knowledge an intrinsic component of corporate strategy. Profiling facilitates this strategic objective in three important ways. First, profiling can reveal strategic weaknesses in rivals that the firm may exploit. Second, the proactive stance of competitor profiling will allow the firm to anticipate the strategic response of their rivals to the firm’s planned strategies, the strategies of other competing firms, and changes in the environment. Third, this proactive knowledge will give the firms strategic agility. Offensive strategy can be implemented more quickly in order to exploit opportunities and capitalize on strengths. Similarly, defensive strategy can be employed more deftly in order to counter the threat of rival firms from exploiting the firm’s own weaknesses.

     

    Clearly, those firms practicing systematic and advanced competitor profiling have a significant advantage. As such, a comprehensive profiling capability is rapidly becoming a core competence required for successful competition. An appropriate analogy is to consider this advantage as akin to having a good idea of the next move that your opponent in a chess match will make. By staying one move ahead, checkmate is one step closer. Indeed, as in chess, a good offense is the best defense in the game of business as well.

    A common technique is to create detailed profiles on each of your major competitors. These profiles give an in-depth description of the competitor’s background, finances, products, markets, facilities, personnel, and strategies. Here at Nexonta Technologies Inc we encourage you to “Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.” Seo is competitive and expensive however the results are worth the investment but it costs to stay on top we build SEO ready websites but the fight to stay on top of Google is a whole other battle in itself.

    Sun Tzu

    Nexonta Technologies Inc

  • GOOD AND BAD SOCIAL NETWORKING

    A man should not strive to eliminate his complexes but to get into accord with them: they are legitimately what directs his conduct in the world.

     

    Sigmund Freud

     

    The original social networks were about describing social relations that were not just dyadic or binary. In the world we influence others and they influence us, usually on many levels at the same time. It is not just one on one. Colds, jokes and many other things travel through networks of people. Networks rapidly become complicated, and how do we know how they are organized, and how do we talk about what we see? Social network analysts are excited by the 6 degree thing because it allows to make guesses about what the human networks are like. Good or Bad.

    The newer community came from the merger of two ideas: collaborative software and networking. Collaborative software is such things as e-mail, this wiki, IM and so on. This has roots going back to Vaneever Bush’s 1945 paper “The Way We May Think” where he proposed a collaborative system that inspired hyperlinks and the World Wide Web. It was followed up by Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart and there is a long tradition of working towards better collaborative software in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. Software that mediated human interaction came to be called “social software” (the term was coined by Eric Drexler, the same person who coined the term “nanotechnology”).

    Meanwhile, as women increasingly joined the marketplace in the 70’s and on they realize that they were running into established networks that blocked their entry. They started forming groups to mentor and help each other. This activity came to be called “networking” and by the the 1980’s it was an established business idea. In 1985, for instance, the organization Business Networking International was started, which still exists and is huge. In personal communication, the CEO (Ivan Mischner) said that the US Chamber of Commerce claims to have coined the term “networking.” In any event, the term “networking” meant to actively expand your networks for business purposes.

    In the late 90’s some folks got the idea to start businesses that did “networking” using collaborative software. Most of them thought of themselves as “business” or “professional” networking, but Jonathan Abrams wanted to network for friends and he called what people did on his site, Friendster, “social networking.” The term caught on and links a person makes through using MySpace, FaceBook, LinkedIn, FriendSter and so on came to be called “social networks.” In the abstract these are “social networks” in the first sense, and there have been some papers that explore this, but in the main the older one is talking about networks in general and the newer about networks that revolve around specific Web sites. It was unlikely that Johathan was familiar with the older term.

    The social networks of collaborative software are wonderful, exciting technologies. Occasionally someone will comment to me that the older kind of social networks are not as important and somehow overly academic. I would hope that people can realize this is not true at all.

    In the 60’s the idea of interdisciplinary research was popular (it is again). At Harvard they started a program called “social relations.” This program took the common aspect of social psychology, economics, sociology: social relations and made that the foreground of study. Many people who are still quite well known were there, Stanely Milgram, Mark Granovetter, Harrison White, Barry Wellman, Ivan Chase, … (heck even BF Skinner was there, but he was in that department) – some were teachers, some students. Some of the ideas they had then and subsequently about how our social world works are still revolutionary. A civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them into revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence.

    Sigmund Freud

    Nexonta Technologies Inc

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