#the users should just learn to read epoch time

[not-a-choice]

[commodorecliche]

Gimme all the book recs Please :D

yaaaaaaaaaaaas okay great. i love sharing books i love.  

1. The Thief of Always - Clive BarkerGenre: Dark FantasyBig personal favorite of mine. My father read this to me when I was a kid, and it literally has stuck with me since then. Every now and then I go back and reread it just for fun. It’s a wonderfully spooky little story, accompanied by some really lovely and somewhat off-kilter illustrations. Much like Coraline, it’s a novel that is a fable for children, and a tale of terror for adults.

After a mysterious stranger promises to end his boredom with a trip to the magical Holiday House, ten-year-old Harvey learns that his fun has a high price.

2. House of Leaves - Mark Z. DanielewskiGenre: Postmodernism, horrorHands down an absolute favorite. This is a book I literally recommend to everyone. This is a book that made me viscerally uncomfortable, at times I didn’t even sleep in the same room as it. I made it sleep in the living room. There is nothing overtly terrifying about the book, but its format and its unsettlingly immersive nature will lead you down a road unlike any other. 

In 1997, Johnny Truant has stumbled upon a chest full of scrap papers that had once belonged to a man named Zampono. The papers aren’t just scraps though, they’re a chaotic but detailed transcription of a series called the Navidson Record. The Navidson Record is a series of videos made by a family who has discovered that their new house appears to change dimensions almost daily, it has hallways that shouldn’t exist, doors that should lead outside but instead lead into nothingness. Johnny attempts to re-order and reconstruct Zampono’s papers, and along the way begins to lose himself as well. 

3. The Postmortal - Drew MagaryGenre: Science Fiction, Postmodern DystopiaReally funny, really dark, and full of a surprising amount of morality and humanity in a pre-apocalyptic world. 

Imagine a near future where a cure for aging is discovered and-after much political and moral debate-made available to people worldwide. Immortality, however, comes with its own unique problems-including evil green people, government euthanasia programs, a disturbing new religious cult, and other horrors.    

4. Horrorstor - Grady HendrixGenre: Comedy, HorrorHonestly this book is just balls to the wall fun. It’s a horror novel that’s laid out like the world’s most messed up IKEA catalog. Spooky at times, ridiculous and funny, at times moving, while also offering great social commentary on consumerism and the the current status of retail workers. 

Something strange is happening at the Orsk furniture superstore in Cleveland, Ohio. Every morning, employees arrive to find broken Kjerring bookshelves, shattered Glans water goblets, and smashed Liripip wardrobes. Sales are down, security cameras reveal nothing, and store managers are panicking. To unravel the mystery, three employees volunteer to work a nine-hour dusk-till-dawn shift. In the dead of the night, they’ll patrol the empty showroom floor, investigate strange sights and sounds, and encounter horrors that defy the imagination. 

5. Rant - Chuck PalahniukGenre: Science Fiction, Horror, SatireThis is a book I read several years ago and that I still think about from time to time. I haven’t had time to sit down and reread it, but parts of it still resonate with me today. This is a very peculiar story and it is told in a rather peculiar fashion (it is an oral history, and as such is told in a very conversational way by a number of different characters with a wide variety of thoughts and opinions on the titular Rant. It’s hard to properly describe this book, but let’s just say it’s been in my reread list for a while now. 

Buster “Rant” Casey just may be the most efficient serial killer of our time. A high school rebel, Rant Casey escapes from his small town home for the big city where he becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing. Rant Casey will die a spectacular highway death, after which his friends gather the testimony needed to build an oral history of his short, violent life. 

6. John Dies at the End - David WongGenre: Comedy, Horror, Dark FantasyHoly god what do I even say about this book? It is just hilariously and marvelously insane. A perfect mix of cosmic fantasy, horror, comedy, and lunacy, and I loved every minute of reading it. I still have the rest of the series lined up to read, too!

The drug is called Soy Sauce and it gives users a window into another dimension. John and I never had the chance to say no. You still do. I’m sorry to have involved you in this, I really am. But as you read about these terrible events and the very dark epoch the world is about to enter as a result, it is crucial you keep one thing in mind: None of this was my fault. 

7. Sphere - Michael CrichtonGenre: Science Fiction, Deep Sea HorrorThis is one I actually JUST finished, and I absolutely adored it. I had a couple small complaints about it, but overall, it was a wonderful read and very engrossing. Plus, I’m always a sucker for deep sea horror. 

A group of American scientists are rushed to a huge vessel that has been discovered resting on the ocean floor in the middle of the South Pacific. What they find defies their imaginations and mocks their attempts at logical explanation. It is a spaceship of phenomenal dimensions, apparently, undamaged by its fall from the sky. And, most startling, it appears to be at least three hundred years old…. 

8. I, Lucifer - Glen DuncanGenre: Religious Fantasy, Occult FictionThis book is incredibly well researched, thought out, and characterized, as well as funny and extremely thought-provoking. I’d never expected to see a story that would give me a realistic and modern look into the Devil’s side of the story. I especially never expected to see a story that would make the Devil learn what it is to be human, either. All in all just an A+, fantastical read. 

The Prince of Darkness has been given one last shot at redemption, provided he can live out a reasonably blameless life on earth. Highly sceptical, naturally, the Old Dealmaker negotiates a trial period - a summer holiday in a human body, with all the delights of the flesh. The body, however, turns out to be that of Declan Gunn, a depressed writer living in Clerkenwell, interrupted in his bath mid-suicide. Ever the opportunist, and with his main scheme bubbling in the background, Luce takes the chance to tap out a few thoughts - to straighten the biblical record, to celebrate his favourite achievements, to let us know just what it’s like being him. Neither living nor explaining turns out to be as easy as it looks. Beset by distractions, miscalculations and all the natural shocks that flesh is heir to, the Father of Lies slowly begins to learn what it’s like being us. 

9. The Wasp Factory - Iain BanksGenre: Psychological HorrorLook, I want to say this right off the bat. This book is… not for everyone. Trust me when I say this is an extremely dark book with a lot of dark content. I would say that if you have any potential triggers, you may want to message me first and I will give you a better rundown of what all this book entails. This is a true piece of horror fiction. But it’s also incredible. I ate this book up in about two days and it is one of my favorite pieces of dark fiction to date. So yeah, chat with me if you have any concerns, but if you enjoy truly dark fiction, then this is up your alley. 

Two years after I killed Blyth I murdered my young brother Paul, for quite different and more fundamental reasons than I’d disposed of Blyth, and then a year after that I did for my young cousin Esmerelda, more or less on a whim. That’s my score to date. Three. I haven’t killed anybody for years, and don’t intend to ever again. It was just a stage I was going through. 

10. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (the whole series, trust me)Genre: Comedy, Science Fiction, Cosmic FantasyJust trust me when I say this is a series that literally everyone should read at least once in their life. They are unflabbably hilarious in a way that only Douglas Adams could be, and they are just truly unique. This series is (rightfully) a classic and shouldn’t be missed. 

Seconds before the Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by his friend Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy who, for the last fifteen years, has been posing as an out-of-work actor. Together this dynamic pair begin a journey through space aided by quotes from The Hitchhiker’s Guide (“A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have”).

11. World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War - Max Brooks Genre: Zombie horror, Faux HistoryI beg you - do not judge this book by the very terrible movie that was made about it. It is an entirely different animal than that mess of a movie, I promise. World War Z is a masterfully crafted book that details the zombie apocalypse in ways never before done in fiction. The Battle of Yonkers scenes and the testimony of Tomonaga Ijiro still stick in my head to this day. This book is a triumph of horror, ‘history’, and humanity, all balled into a distinctly unique experience. 

The Zombie War came unthinkably close to eradicating humanity. Max Brooks, driven by the urgency of preserving the acid-etched first-hand experiences of the survivors from those apocalyptic years, traveled across the United States of America and throughout the world, from decimated cities that once teemed with upwards of thirty million souls to the most remote and inhospitable areas of the planet. He recorded the testimony of men, women, and sometimes children who came face-to-face with the living, or at least the undead, hell of that dreadful time. World War Z is the result. Never before have we had access to a document that so powerfully conveys the depth of fear and horror, and also the ineradicable spirit of resistance, that gripped human society through the plague years. 

12. The Raw Shark Texts - Steven HallGenre: Fantasy/Realism, Meta-fiction, MysteryThis is a tough one to put into words. I read this many years ago, and I remember it more as a series of emotional experiences rather than just as a singular plot. Which I think really speaks to its character as a book. This is a book that deals with dissociation, memory loss, our sense of self, how easily we can lose that sense, and our struggle to hold onto or to rediscover the world we know and the people we believe ourselves to be. This book is just… an experience, much like House of Leaves. It’s immersive, and at times quite unsettling. 

Eric Sanderson wakes up in a house he doesn’t recognize, unable to remember anything of his life. All he has left are his diary entries recalling Clio, a perfect love who died under mysterious circumstances, and a house that may contain the secrets to Eric’s prior life. But there may be more to this story, or it may be a different story altogether. With the help of allies found on the fringes of society, Eric embarks on an edge-of-your-seat journey to uncover the truth about himself and to escape the predatory forces that threaten to consume him. 

I think 12 should be good for now! I certainly have more though, if you want them!! 

Bonus, Currently Reading: The Library at Mount Char - Scott HawkinsGenre: Contemporary Fantasy, Horror, Dark FantasyI don’t have a whole lot to say about this yet since I’m not very far into it, but so far it’s been extremely intriguing, and Hawkins’ writing is truly beautiful. 

A missing God. A library with the secrets to the universe. A woman too busy to notice her heart slipping away. Carolyn’s not so different from the other people around her. She likes guacamole and cigarettes and steak. She knows how to use a phone. Clothes are a bit tricky, but everyone says nice things about her outfit with the Christmas sweater over the gold bicycle shorts. After all, she was a normal American herself once. That was a long time ago, of course. Before her parents died. Before she and the others were taken in by the man they called Father. 

Bonus 2, Up Next to Read: Dark Matter: A Ghost Story - Michelle PaverGenre: Horror

January 1937. Clouds of war are gathering over a fogbound London. Twenty-eight year old Jack is poor, lonely, and desperate to change his life, so when he’s offered the chance to join an Arctic expedition, he jumps at it. Spirits are high as the ship leaves Norway: five men and eight huskies, crossing the Barents Sea by the light of the midnight sun. At last they reach the remote, uninhabited bay where they will camp for the next year, Gruhuken, but the Arctic summer is brief. As night returns to claim the land, Jack feels a creeping unease. One by one, his companions are forced to leave. He faces a stark choice: stay or go. Soon he will see the last of the sun, as the polar night engulfs the camp in months of darkness. Soon he will reach the point of no return–when the sea will freeze, making escape impossible. Gruhuken is not uninhabited. Jack is not alone. Something walks there in the dark… 

(also if any of y’all have read these, i’d love to hear YOUR thoughts on them too)

[charleshoskinsoncrypto]

Choosing a stake pool and delegating your ada

(Written by Elliot Hill of the Cardano Foundation)

When delegation and staking launched with the delivery of Shelley, we released a short ‘staking for beginners’ article to guide you through the process of delegating your ada to a stake pool. Now, a few epochs later, staking rewards are being paid out, and you should have a decent idea of the rewards percentage that you are receiving from your chosen stake pool.

However, delegation is a dynamic process. There is no need to delegate all of your ada to one stake pool forever and never explore other pools. At the same time, there are opportunities to delegate your ada to multiple stake pools from different Daedalus wallet addresses if you wish to experiment with pool allocation.

Here, we will explore some of the key concepts of delegating your stake, and discover the relationship between stake pool fees, staking rewards, and pool saturation. We will also discuss some of the trade-offs between delegating to one or multiple pools simultaneously.

What is the difference between staking and delegation?

Delegation and staking are two separate concepts. All ada holders have a right to participate in consensus on Cardano by running live nodes and staking ada to support the network. However, not all ada holders have the skills or desire to participate in the consensus mechanism actively.

As a regular ada holder who doesn’t run a stake pool, you will be taking part in stake delegation. Stake delegation is the process of allocating some or all of your ada holdings to one or more stake pools, who stake on your behalf. Therefore, you are not actually ‘staking’ in the real sense of the word, but rather delegating your right to stake.

Delegating stake pays rewards in ada, but there is no fixed reward. Instead, rewards are calculated according to several factors such as your amount of delegated ada tokens, the fees of your chosen stake pool, and network parameters. We will explore these concepts in detail below.

Slot leader elections

To understand how to choose a stake pool according to its size or desirability, we must first examine how slot leaders are chosen to validate blocks.

As we discovered in last week’s technical blog, in a proof of work (PoW) blockchain miners use hashing power to validate blocks. Therefore, the higher the hashing power a miner has, the greater the likelihood that they will be chosen to validate a new block.

In PoS systems, and more specifically Cardano, slot leader elections function more like a lottery. We can envisage each ada token as a ‘ticket’, and anyone participating in staking can ‘win’ the chance of becoming a slot leader — reaping block rewards paid in ada.

Stake pools that have a greater amount of ada delegated to them have a statistically higher chance of being elected as a slot leader and producing the next block, and therefore have a higher likelihood of reaping greater block rewards.

Naturally, this will usually result in more regular rewards for delegates, and potentially earn those delegating their stake to large pools more ada rewards. However, it’s not this simple in practice — let’s find out why below.

Small pools vs. large pools

As we discussed above, larger pools with more ada delegated to them are more likely to be chosen to validate new blocks. Therefore, if this were the only factor at play, it would logically follow that pools with more ada delegated to them will pay out greater rewards to delegates for an epoch.

However, there are many trade-offs to be made throughout the staking process. Each stake pool determines its fees, and it can be difficult to choose between a small stake pool which charges low pool fees, or a larger pool that charges greater fees.

Stake pools that become too large may encounter pool saturation, which is defined as the ‘K’ value, or saturation parameter. Pool saturation offers diminishing rewards to delegators once a pool has a sufficiently high amount of staked ada, preventing a small number of pools from exerting disproportionate influence over the protocol.

Pool saturation is designed to encourage delegators to explore different stake pools, rather than simply choosing the most popular pools. Exploring different stake pools will not only potentially yield maximum rewards, but it also helps keep the network sufficiently decentralized. So, you should ensure that the pool you are delegating to isn’t nearing its saturation point.

Similarly important are network parameters, such as transaction fees per epoch, daily stake pool running costs, and pool saturation. We will explore these concepts in more detail below.

What is pool desirability, and how is it measured?

We’ve examined pool saturation and running costs, but there is another important metric to consider — pool desirability. As there is a long list of available stake pools, pools are ranked according to how likely they are to produce more user rewards.

Desirability is decided by a combination of reliability, pool costs, profit margin, saturation, and the pledge amount. These concepts can be described as follows:

Reliability — Stake pools need to maintain 24/7 up-time to validate new blocks if it is chosen as a slot leader. Pools with the greatest up-time have the highest reliability.

Pool costs — Naturally, although much lower than PoW systems, stake pool operators have some costs associated with running a pool. These costs are declared in ada for each epoch.

Profit margin — As well as pool costs, which cover the stake pool operators outgoings and don’t necessarily represent profit, they may also charge a profit margin — an incentive pool operators take for maintaining and running the pool.

Pledge — The pledge represents the stake of the pool operator. While there is no minimum pledge, larger stake pool operator pledges result in greater rewards for every delegate in that pool. As a result, you should consider the pledge amount when choosing a pool.

As we can see, pool costs, the initial pledge, and profit margins, which are set entirely by stake pool operators, affect your rewards from delegation. If a stake pool changes its fees, they will take effect in the next epoch, and you will be notified of this change through your wallet.

It is worth noting that even though stake pool operators set pool fees, they are not responsible for paying out staking rewards. Instead, this is handled automatically by the protocol, so the stake pool operator themselves cannot disrupt reward distribution.

How can I delegate to multiple pools?

Currently, it is not possible to delegate to multiple pools from a single wallet address. However, it is possible to split your ada holdings over multiple addresses and delegate separately to different pools.

You may want to do this to compare rewards between stake pools, or altruistically to promote greater decentralization within the network or help a small pool grow.

Tactically choosing a stake pool

Hopefully, you should now see that choosing a pool to delegate to isn’t just a clear case of selecting the pools with the most ada delegated to them — as these may also have the highest pool costs and profit margin fees.

Instead, there are bound to be instances where choosing a pool with less ada delegated to it but with lower fees and a greater pledge is more profitable or a pool with lower fees that has been steadily increasing in desirability, and so forth.

We recommend comparing pools and their estimated pool rewards by using the Cardano staking calculator. You can learn more about stake pool desirability and how to choose a pool in this comprehensive video.

If you are still wondering how you can delegate your stake, read our step-by-step guide, or follow the simple info-graphic below!

Read more articles in our Shelley blog series below:

Staking and delegating for beginners — A step-by-step guide

Blockchains of today versus blockchains of tomorrow

Consensus on Cardano vs. other blockchains

Choosing a stake pool and delegating your ada was originally published in cardanorss on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

from Stories by Cardano Foundation on Medium https://medium.com/cardanorss/choosing-a-stake-pool-and-delegating-your-ada-113d71b0963f?source=rss-1ff55485eb1e------2 via IFTTT

[umbrellium]

Learning Nothing

How can we train a machine to recognise the difference between ‘something’ and ‘nothing’? Over the past few months, I have been working with Despina Papadopoulos on an R&D wearable project – Embodied Companionship, funded by Human Data Interaction. 

“Embodied Companionship seeks to create a discursive relationship between machine learning and humans, centered around nuance, curiosity and second order feedback loops. Using machine learning to not only train and “learn” the wearers behaviour but create a symbiotic relationship with a technological artifact that rests on a mutual progression of understanding, the project aims to embody and make legible the process and shed some light on the black box.” – Text by Despina Papadopoulos 

The project builds on the work we did last year in collaboration with Bless, where we created a prototype of a new form of wearable companion – Stylefree, a scarf that becomes ‘alive’ the more the wearer interacts with it. In Embodied Companionship, we wanted to further explore the theoretical, physical and cybernetic relationship between technology, the wearable (medium), and its wearer. 

*Stylefree – a collaboration between Despina Papadopoulos, Umbrellium and Bless.  

In this blog post, I wanted to share some of the interesting challenges I faced through experimentations using machine learning algorithms and wearable microcontrollers to recognise our body movements and gestures. There will be more questions raised than answers in this post as this is a work in progress, but I am hoping to share more insights at the end of the project.   

My research focuses on the use of the latest open-source machine learning library; Tensorflow Lite developed for Arduino Nano Ble Sense 33. Having designed, fabricated and programmed many wearable projects over the years (e.g Pollution Explorers – explore air quality with communities using wearables and machine learning algorithms), large scale performances (e.g SUPERGESTURES – each audience wore a gesture-sensing wearable to listen to geolocated audio stories and perform gestures created by young people) and platforms (e.g WearON – a platform for designers to quickly prototype connected IoT wearables), the board is a step up from any previous wearable-friendly controllers I have used. It contains many useful body-related sensors such as 9 axis inertial sensors, microphone, and a few other environmental sensors such as light and humidity sensors. With the type of sensors embedded, it becomes much easier to create smaller size wearables that can better sense the user’s position, movement and body gestures depending on where the board is placed on the body. And with its TinyML which allows the running of Edge Computing applications (AI), we can start to (finally!) play with more advanced gesture recognition. For the purpose of our project, the board is positioned on the arm of the wearer. 

*Image of the prototype wearable of Embodied Companionship 

Training a Machine

With the constraints, I started exploring a couple of fundamental questions – How does a machine understand a body gesture or a movement? How does it tell (or how can we tell it to tell…) one gesture apart from another? With any machine learning project, we require training data, it is used to provide examples of data patterns that correspond to user-defined categories of those patterns so that in future the machine can compare streams of data that are being captured to the examples and try to match them. However the algorithm doesn't simply match them, it returns a confidence level that the captured stream of data matches any particular pattern. Tensorflow offers a very good basic tutorial on gesture recognition using the arduino board, however, it is based on recognising simple and big gestures (e.g arm flexing and punching) which are easily recognisable. In order for the machine to learn a wearer’s gestural behaviour, it will involve learning many different types of movement patterns that a person might perform with their arm. So our first task is to check whether we can use this arduino and Tensorflow lite to recognise more than 2 types of gestures. 

I started with adjusting various parameters of the machine learning code, for e.g, training more than 2 sets of distinct gestures, training with more subtle gestures, increasing the training data set for each gesture, increasing the epochs. The results were not satisfactory, the board could not recognise any of the gestures with high confidence mainly because each gestural data was not distinct enough for the machine to distinguish and hence it spreads its confidence level to the few gestures that it was taught with. It also highlighted a key question for me, i.e. how would a machine ‘know’ when a gesture is happening and when it is not happening? Without having an explicit button press to signify the start and end of a gesture (which is synonymous to the Alexa or Siri wake-up call), I realised that it would also need to recognise when a gesture was not happening. 

*How a gesture/movement is read on the serial plotter through its 3-axis accelerometer data

The original code from the tutorial was based on detecting a gesture the moment a significant motion is detected which could be a problem if we are trying to recognise more subtle gestures such as a slow hand waving or lifting the arm up slowly. I started experimenting with a couple of other ways for the arduino board to recognise a gesture at the ‘right’ time. First, I programmed a button where the wearer presses it to instruct the board to start recognising the gesture while it's being performed – this is not ideal as the wearer will have to consciously instruct the wearable whenever he/she is performing a gesture, but it allows me to understand what constitute a ‘right’ starting time to recognise a gesture. Lastly I tried programming the board to capture buckets of data at multiple short milliseconds time instances and run multiple analysis at once to compare each bucket and determine which bucket’s gesture at any instance returns the highest confidence level. However that does not return any significantly better result, it’s memory intensive for the board and reinforces the challenge, i.e. the machine needs to know when a person is not performing any gesture. 

*Capturing buckets of data at multiple short milliseconds time 

While the arduino board might be good at distinguishing between 2 gestures, if you perform a 3rd gesture that is untrained for the board, it will return either one of the learnt gestures with very low confidence level. This is because it was not taught with examples of other gestures. However, if we want it to learn a wearer’s behaviour over time, not only do we need to teach the machine with a set of gestures just like any language that comes with a strict set of components e.g alphabets, but it is equally important to teach it to recognise when the wearer is not doing anything significant. And with that it poses a major challenge, i.e. how much training do we need to teach a machine when the wearer is doing nothing? 

Making Sense of the Nuances 

When it comes to making sense of body gestures, our recognition of any gesture is guided by our background, culture, history, experience and interaction with each other. It is something that in this day and age, an advanced machine is still incapable of doing, e.g recognising different skin colours. Therefore, as much as we can train a machine to learn a body gesture through its x,y, z coordinates, or its speed of movement, we cannot train it with the cultural knowledge, experience or teach it to detect the subtle nuances of the meaning of a gesture (e.g the difference between crossing your arm when you are tired vs when you are feeling defensive). 

Photo of one of the SUPERGESTURES workshops where young people design body gestures that can be detected by the wearable on their arm, and represent their story and vision of Manchester 

It is worthwhile to remember that while this R&D project explores the extent to which machine learning can help create a discursive interaction between the wearer and the machine, there are limitations to the capability of a machine and it is important for us as designers and developers to help define a set of parameters that ensure that the machine can understand the nuances in order to create interaction that is meaningful for people of all backgrounds and colours.   

While machine learning in other familiar fields such as camera vision do have some form of recognising “nothing” (e.g background subtraction), the concept of recognising “nothing” gestures (e.g should walking and standing up be considered ‘nothing’?) for wearable or body-based work is fairly new and has not been widely explored. A purely technological approach might say that ‘nothing’ simply requires adequate error-detection or filtering. But I would argue that the complexity of deciding what constitutes ‘nothing’ and the widely varying concept of what kinds of movement should be ‘ignored’ during training are absolutely vital to consider if we want to develop a wearable device that is trained for and useful for unique and different people. As this is work in progress, I will be experimenting more with this to gather more insights. 

A blogpost by Ling Tan

[milovanovic]

From the life of Wikidata

By Goran S. Milovanović, Wikimedia Germany January 29th, 2018

[originally published on the Wikimedia Foundation Blog]

With the Wikidata Concepts Monitor (WDCM) we can now begin to discover how our communities use knowledge across more than 800 Wikimedia projects.

The Blue Marble by NASA/Apollo 17, public domain.

Wikidata is the central knowledge repository in the Wikimedia universe that now encompasses more than 300 free, online encyclopedias, and more than 800 projects in total. Why would anyone devoted to the representation of the sum of knowledge—which by its complexity must encompass different perspectives, interpretations, points of view—need a central repository like that? Simply because knowledge demands grounding in both logical and empirical truths, a set of constraints that define the limits of its power and usage.

While we can find ourselves engaged in an elaborate debate on whether the theory of relativity provides an adequate description of the physical universe or not, we should not engage in the debate on whether it was or not created by Albert Einstein and published in Die Grundlage der allgemeinen Relativitaetstheorie in 1916 if we can claim these facts with a descent degree of certainty and under a broad consensus. Whatever language we use to express knowledge, in any culture, and to any audience, we should not question whether Berlin is a city, and a capital of Germany, while it is also a city in North Dakota, a fact of which Wikidata is well aware of, as well as a name of an American synthpop band who authored the famous “Take My Breath Away“.

Wikidata thus documents the things that exit, real or not, the facts about them, and the relations that connect them, in a huge network of over 40 million items: the elementary units referring to what claims an existence as meaningful, single entity. Wikidata then maps their presence across the pages in Wikipedia and its sister projects. Now, this fact has a rather significant consequence that we wish to draw your attention at.

If we keep track of things and ideas as items in Wikidata, and at the same time know how many times and where they were referred to, we can begin to understand the global pattern of how our common knowledge is distributed and used across the Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. We can begin to understand the similarities and differences in the ways we think and connect things, ideas, people, events, and whatever else there is, in our editor communities, languages, and cultures. We can begin to draw a map, a map of conceptual diversity and complexity, watch it evolve while thousands of minds read, write, and debate on truth and possibility on Wikipedia, and then provide a picture of the debate as whole. A single mind could not do it; the extent as well as the depth of information is simply overwhelming. Thus we’ve employed machines and algorithms and built the Wikidata Concepts Monitor (WDCM) system to do the job for us.

What if world countries were as large as their respective Wikidata items (i.e. instances of country(Q6256)) are used across the Wikipedia and related Wikimedia projects? The following map might be informative in that respect:

Figure 1. A cartogram of Wikidata usage across more than 800 Wikimedia projects.

This twisted map—a cartogram, more precisely—was generated by a smart GIS algorithm applied to theWikidata Concepts Monitor (WDCM) data sets. The area of each country is transformed until the areas of all countries became proportional to how many times the Wikidata items that represent them are used across more than 800 Wikimedia projects.

The WDCM system, developed by Wikimedia Deutschland in 2017, has a curious task to track, crack, and visualize the numbers on Wikidata items usage across all Wikimedia projects. It is a statistical machinery that currently tracks 14 semantic categories in Wikidata, currently encompassing 35,153,186 of Wikidata items. Its results are reported across four specialized dashboards: Overview,Usage, Semantics, and Geo, which provides interactive maps of the geolocalized items alongside their usage statistics.

What is the motivation behind the development of such system? Well, no one has probably ever brought a good decision on the direction of development of a large socio-technical system without relying on some appropriate data source of solid quality. Such decisions can be brought in the very beginning of the system’s development, when the matters of its design by definition outweigh the matters of its application. For successful systems like Wikidata, that epoch doesn’t last long, because they tend to grow fast. In order to understand what needs to happen in Wikidata, one needs to understand what are our editor communities doing with it. Beyond that, and even more important, the communities themselves need to understand the pattern of their own Wikidata usage: it is in itself so complicated even in a single project only, that no single individual could understand it easily without relying on a system like WDCM that assesses the relevant numbers in the background and does the math to reduce the system’s manifest complexity to a manageable proportion.

For example, we have millions of things in Wikidata, but do we use them all often? No, we don’t. The bar plot in Figure 2. shows the WDCM Wikidata usage statistics for 14 semantics categories that are currently tracked across the Wikimedia projects. An interesting fact considers the negligible usage of scientific articles (Q13442814) items in Wikipedia—negligible because scientific articles account about ¼ of all Wikidata items. The prevalence in usage of items from the categories of geographical object (Q618123) and human (Q5) says that, on the large scale, Wikipedias are primarily about who and where—the two essential information needed to understand the organization of the social world in general.

Figure 2. Total Wikidata item usage in 14 semantic categories in Wikipedia. The WDCM usage statistic (vertical axis) is based on the count of the number of pages that make use of a particular Wikidata item at least once. The plot is based on the 1. January 2018. WDCM update. The Wikimedia category encompasses categories, disambiguation pages and templates.

Next, the WDCM data sets are combined with the Wikistats to provide a glimpse of the global Wikidata usage picture for you.

Figure 3. Wikidata usage (vertical axis), number of articles in Wikipedia (horizontal axis), number of edits to number of articles ratio (color scale), and number of active users (marker size).

The measurements are represented on a logarithmic scale to avoid the overcrowding of data points and labels. Each data point represents a particular Wikipedia, while only the top 25 Wikipedias in respect to the volume of Wikidata usage are labeled. The horizontal axis represents the number of articles in the respective project, while the vertical axis stands for the corresponding Wikidata usage statistic. The size of the bubble is proportional to the number of active users in the project, and the color scale represents the edits per article ratio.

WDCM is designed to answer questions like the following:

How much are the particular classes of Wikidata items used across the Wikimedia projects?

What are the most frequently used Wikidata items in particular Wikimedia projects or in particular Wikidata classes?

How can we categorize the Wikimedia projects in respect to the characteristic patterns of Wikidata usage that we discover in them?

What Wikimedia projects are similar in respect to how they use Wikidata, overall and from the perspective of some particular sets of items?

How is the Wikidata usage of the geolocalized items (such as those relevant for the GLAM initiatives) spatially distributed?

Answering the first two questions might help you understand the nature of editors’ interests in particular Wikimedia projects or whole groups (Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikicite, etc) of projects. That means understanding the content of particular projects: what are they about? What items and broader sets of items do they frequently use? What items or sets of items do they use less frequently?

The third and the fourth question address the structural properties of Wikidata usage: what patterns of Wikidata usage can we recognize in particular projects, and how similar they are in respect to the ways they use of Wikidata? This is where machine learning comes into play. Its results can help us figure out, for example, what well developed projects that use Wikidata a lot are similar to smaller projects that are just beginning to use Wikidata. By knowing that, we already know who can learn from whom, and—the most important thing—who do we need to connect. Essentially, this aspect of WDCM functions as a recommender engine for any community manager who is interested in connecting different communities of editors to improve the usage of Wikidata in Wikipedia and other projects.

Figure 4. Each node in this directed graph represents one of the top 100 Wikipedias in respect to how much they use Wikidata, and point towards the Wikipedia that uses Wikidata in the way most similar to it (black arrows) and then to the next most similar one (grey arrows).

The graph in Figure 4. groups together the top 100 Wikipedias (top 100 in respect to how much use of Wikidata they make) in clusters that were determined from the statistical patterns of their Wikidata usage. In the 29 January edition of the WDCM Journal—a place where we intend to inform you on the WDCM findings—we will show you how can you discover what projects have a more dynamic, more unpredictable course of development in terms of Wikidata usage, and what projects are currently settled down in some more or less constant strategy of using Wikidata. Also, from the WDCM Journal you can learn more about the methodology used to produce Figure 4.

The solution to the fifth above exemplified problem can help you discover biases in item usage, like the North-South divide in the cartogram in the very beginning of this blog post. GLAM people can observe a similar problem: your galleries, libraries, archives, and museums, shining blue and bright in proportion to their Wikidata usage.

Figure 5. Galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. The color scale as well as the size of the marker represent the Wikidata usage across more than 800 Wikimedia websites.

It does get a bit dark under the Earth’s Equator, don’t you think? The noticeable item in the Southern Hemisphere (lower right corner of the map) is the National Library of Australia (Q623578), which is at the same time the third most frequently used Architectural Structure Wikidata item (following two other libraries, namely the Library of Congress (Q131454) and Bibliothèque nationale de France (Q193563); you can check this fact on the WDCM Usage Dashboard, by selecting the Architectural Structure category in the Category Report section under the Usage tab, and then scrolling down to the top 30 Wikidata items chart). Of course that the argument is that there are not that much GLAM institutions in the Southern as there are in the Northern Hemisphere, but why don’t make more use of them then in Wikipedia and other projects? Because if that is a fact, then people will not easily get to learn about such institutions in the South if we don’t make that knowledge accessible.

WDCM will go beyond these questions in the near future: an index of gender divide in Wikidata usage, i.e. tracking the item usage of the Human (Q5) items in respect to gender and across many Wikimedia projects, is already under development, and will help us quantify this bias and learn where we need to address it more urgently. These and other future WDCM based indicators of Wikidata usage biases are planned as the Knowledge equity components of the system; the rest of the system is designed having in mind the development and promotion of the Knowledge as a service component of the agreed 2030 Wikimedia movement direction.

All WDCM Wikidata usage data sets are publicly available from https://analytics.wikimedia.org/datasets/wdcm/. Many aggregated data sets, including user customized ones, can be downloaded from the WDCM Usage Dashboard.

Goran S. Milovanović, Data Scientist Wikimedia Germany (Deutschland)

[krestmarketinggroup-blog]

Learning to Re-Share: 4 Strategies to Renew, Refresh, and Recycle Content for Bigger Reach

Posted by  jcar7   In the nearly three years the MeetEdgar blog went live, we’ve published more than 250 posts, written over 300,000 words, searched for hundreds of .gifs, and used our own tool to share our content 2,600 times to over 70,000 fans on social media.

  After all that work, it seems silly to share a post just once. Nobody crumples up an oil painting and chucks it in the trash after it’s been seen one time — and the same goes for your content.

  You’ve already created an “art gallery” for your posts.  Resharing  your content just lets the masses know what you’ve got on display. Even if hundreds or thousands of people have seen it all before, there’s always someone new to your content.

  In a social media landscape that’s constantly changing, building a solid foundation of evergreen content that can be shared and shared again should be a key part of your social media strategy.

  Otherwise, your art gallery is just another building in the city.

  But wait… aren’t we supposed to be writing fresh content?   Yes! One of the biggest misconceptions about resharing is that it’s a spammy tactic. This is just not true — provided that you’re resharing responsibly. We’ll explain how to do that in just a moment.

  Resharing actually does double-duty for your brand. It not only gets the content that you spent your valuable time creating in front of more eyeballs (and  at optimal times , if you want to get fancy), it also frees you up to have more authentic, real-time social interactions that drive people to your site from social media — since you’ve got content going out no matter what.

  Did we mention that  resharing is good for SEO ? Moz Blog readers know that the more people engage with a post, the better your blog or site looks to search engines. And that’s only one facet of the overall SEO boost (and traffic boost!) resharers can see.

  How resharing impacts SEO   Big brands are probably the most prolific content resharers. Heck, they don’t even  think twice  about it:

     BuzzFeed is a perfect example of the value of repeating social updates, because they don’t necessarily NEED to.

  So why do they do it anyway? Because it gets results.

   Social sharing  alone has an impact on SEO, but   social engagement   is really where it’s at. Quality content is totally worth the up-front time and cost, but only if it gets engagement!  You up your chances of engagement with your content if you simply up your content’s exposure. That’s what resharing does awesomely. 

  With literally zero tweaks to the content itself, BuzzFeed made each of those social posts above double in value. Chances are, the people who saw these posts the first time they were shared are not the same people who saw them when they were reshared.

   But simply resharing social posts isn’t the only way to get more engagement with your content.  This post covers how companies large and small do resharing right, and highlights some of the best time-saving content strategies you can implement for your brand right now.

  1 - Start at the source: Give old posts a new look  Lots has changed in five years — the world got three new  Fast & Furious  movies and LKR Social Media  transformed  from a consulting service into social media automation software.

  We’ve done the math: three months is one Internet year and five years is basically another Internet epoch. (This may be a slight exaggeration.) So when we transferred some of our founder’s older evergreen blog posts to the new MeetEdgar blog, we took stock of which of those posts had picked up the most organic traffic.

  One thing that hadn’t changed in five years? A blog post about how  Vin Diesel was winning the social media game  was still insanely popular with our readers:

      Writing blog posts with an eye toward making them as evergreen as possible is one of the smartest, most time-saving-est content marketing strategies out there.

  There weren’t a ton of tweaks to make, but we gave this popular post some love since so many people were finding it. We pepped up the headline, did a grammar and content rundown, refreshed links and images, updated social share buttons, and added more timely content. The whole process took less time than writing a brand new post, and we got to share it with tens of thousands of followers who hadn’t seen it when it was originally published.

  So... check your metrics! Which evergreen posts have performed the best over time? Which have lots of awesome organic traffic? Make a list,  do a content audit , and start updating!

  2 - Find your social sharing “sweet spot” by repackaging your content   When you read studies that say many social media users reshare social posts  without ever clicking through to the content itself … it can be a little disheartening.

  Okay, a LOT disheartening.

  You’ve probably spent tons of time creating your content, and the thought that it’s not getting read NEARLY as often as it could be is a recipe for content marketing burnout. (We’ve all been there.)

  But it’s not all for naught — you might just need to experiment until you find the “sweet spot” that gets people to read and share. One way to do that is to simply repackage content you’ve already written.

   The tried-and-true “best of” post offers a reprieve from the content-creation grind while still delivering tons of value to your fans and readers. 

  Repackaging is best when it  reframes your content  with a new focus — like rounding up similar posts based on a theme. (You can do this  in reverse , too, and turn one great post into a bunch of fresh content to then share and reshare!)

  If you can get people to your site, a “best of” post encourages readers to stay longer as they click links for the different articles you’ve gathered up, and engage with content they may never have thought to look up separately.

  Most fun of all, you can repackage your content to target new or different subsets of your audience on social media. (More on that in the next section.)

  3 - Social shake-up: Reaching and testing with different audiences  “What if the same person recognizes something that I’ve already posted in the past?” you might be asking right about now. “I don’t want to annoy my followers! I don’t want to be spammy!”

  Forget about people resharing social posts without reading the content behind the links —  most people  don’t see your social posts  at all in the first place. 

  This is just one of those uncomfortable facts about the Internet, like how comment sections are always a minefield of awful, and how everyone loves a good startled cat .gif.

  That doesn’t mean you should repeat yourself, word-for-word, all the time. Chances are, you have more than one type of reader or customer, so it’s important not just to vary your content, but also to vary  how you   share it on social media .

  Savvy marketers are all over this tactic, marketing two sides (or more) of the same coin. Here are a couple of examples of social sharing images from a  Mixpanel blog post :

     Option A

     Option B

  Both Option A and Option B go to the same content, but one highlights a particularly juicy stat (problem statement: “97% of users churn”) and the other hits the viewer with an intriguing subheader (solution statement: “behavior-based messaging”). In this way, Mixpanel can find out what pulls in the most readers and tweak and promote that message as needed.

  Pull a cool anecdote from your post or highlight a different stat that gets people excited. It can be as easy as changing up the descriptions of your posts or just using different images. There’s so much to test and try out — all using the same post.

  4 - Automate, automate, automate  Remember,  your best posts are only as good as the engagement they get.  That fact, however, doesn’t mean you have to keep manually resharing them on social media day in and day out.

  Unless, of course, you’re into that boring busywork thing.

  Automating the whole process of resharing evergreen content saves tons of time while keeping your brand personality intact. It also frees you up to have real-time interactions with your fans on social media, brainstorm new post ideas, or just go for a walk, and it  solves the time crunch  and the hassle of manually re-scheduling posts, while actually showcasing  more  of your posts across the massive social media landscape. Just by spacing out your updates, you’ll be able to hit a wider range of your followers.

  (This is probably a good time to check whether your social media scheduling tool offers automatic resharing of your content.)

  Now, social media automation isn’t a substitute for consistently creating great new content, of course, but it does give your existing evergreen content an even  better  opportunity to shine.

  Win with quality, get things DONE with resharing  It’s noisy out there. The law of diminishing returns — as well as declining social reach — means that a lot of what you do on social media can feel like shouting into the void.

  And there’s not a huge ROI for shouting into voids these days.

  Responsible resharing is an important part of your overall content marketing strategy. As long as you keep your content fresh, create new quality content regularly, and talk to your fans  where and when they’re most active , chances are people won’t see the same thing twice. The data shows you’ll get more clicks, more traffic, and better SEO results — not a bad bonus to that whole “saving lots of time” thing.

    Sign up for The Moz Top 10 , a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://bit.ly/2v1RsPQ

#smallbusinessmarketing #huntingtonbeachseo #lagunabeachseo #internetmarketing #linkbuilding #articlewriting #blogpower #socialmediamarketing #contentwriting #leadgeneration

[adahyf-blog]

ETH Dapp Game Raiders - 0xUniverse

- The following game guides come from GoDapp

Ether Star (0xUniverse) is an epoch-making game based on blockchain technology. Each planet in the interstellar has a unique look and collectible value. Players need to explore, colonize, exploit resources, build spaceships in the game, and conquer the vast stars of the sea.

Unlike Baidu's Universe and Netease's NetEase Planet, 0xUniverse is a true 3D interplanetary adventure game on the blockchain. Players can build spaceships to explore rare planets for free, and the legendary planet has sold for up to 12 ETH.

The following will take you to the quick start etheric star

device

First you need to install one of the following browsers: Google Chrome, or Firefox. Secondly install the MetaMask extension and create your wallet. Finally, you need to recharge a certain amount of Ethereum to purchase the first planet in your etheric star. You can purchase Ethereum on a cryptocurrency trading platform. (Coinbase, Indacoin, Changelly, and others). During the beta period, you don't need to buy any Ethereum – you will automatically receive 1 Ethereum in your wallet after a few minutes of logging in to the game.

Gameplay

Game settings

The 22nd century ushered in the discovery of the universe. Star Trek, this once-unreachable dream has become a reality that everyone can achieve. Even so, human expansion is still facing enormous challenges. In order to accelerate this process, the Earth Coalition Government decided to sell the planet of the existing inhabitants to the private sector. The government even enacted laws to ensure the discoverer’s absolute ownership of the planet.

These moves have spawned a large number of entrepreneurs trying to conquer the entire interstellar. And you are one of them. After gaining the first planet, you can use all your resources to grow your wealth, build a fleet and eventually become a star tycoon!

Not only can you gain economic benefits, but you can also explore the unique charm of the etheric star. The products found on the planet tell you about other races that lived here before humans. By working with other explorers, you can even uncover the secrets of the origin of life.

registered

To join Ether Star, you need to install one of the following browsers: Google Chrome, or Firefox.

Of course, just like other entrepreneurs, you need to create a wallet and deposit a certain amount of startup funds. In Ether Star, you need to install the MetaMask wallet. Once the extension is installed, create a wallet. Note: MetaMask wallet is independent of Ether Star. Only you can access the funds in your wallet. Be sure to keep your wallet password and you will not be able to retrieve it if you lose it.

After completing the above operations, you can start to register and join the ethereal journey of the etheric star. Start the game and open the user window. Then enter your email address and nickname. Next read and agree to the privacy policy in MetaMask's pop-up window and click on the registration button.

Buying a planet

After registering the game, the first thing you need to do is to have a planet (learn more about the planet and the differences between them). Open the auction house, click on the sale tab and pick the planet. In the window that opens, you will see the introduction of the planet and there will be a buy button at the bottom. Clicking will pop up the MetaMask order popup. Then click Submit to confirm the order. (If your Ethereum is not enough, you need to recharge your Ethercoin into your wallet). The transaction will be confirmed after a few minutes. (Learn more about blockchain trading).

Inventing spaceship

With the planet, you can start building a spaceship. But first you need to invent the spaceship. Open my spaceship page and you will see the cumulative progress of knowledge. Knowledge is created by the inhabitants of the planet and is a necessary condition for the invention of the spacecraft. (1 person can generate 1 point of knowledge per hour). In other words, the more stars there are, the more residents there are, the more spaceships you can invent. The more spaceships invented, the more likely you are to acquire a superior spaceship. (Learn more about the contents of the spacecraft and the differences between them).

When you accumulate enough knowledge, the invention of the spacecraft button will appear. Clicking this button will pop up the MetaMask order popup window and submit confirmation. After a few minutes of confirmation, you invented a spaceship. (Learn more about blockchain trading).

Discover new planet

After inventing the spacecraft, you can build and dispatch spaceships to search for new planets. Building a spaceship requires resources, population and colonizers. If you are lucky enough, there will be exactly the type of resources you need to build a spaceship on your planet. If not, you can choose to buy other planets in the auction house.

Resources can be quickly transported between planets. Suppose you need 70 units of iron to build a spacecraft. At this time, there are 30 units of iron on one planet and the other 50 on another. What should I do? Don't worry that these iron resources are automatically collected and delivered to the planet you need. However, this rule does not apply to colonists. The colonists needed must be on the planet where the spacecraft is launched.

You can then view the collection information of the resource colonizers in my spacecraft interface. When the progress is complete, the Create and Launch button will appear. Click this button, a star map will pop up, you need to choose a launching planet. The colonists will gather there and the spacecraft will depart from there. Open MetaMask to submit the order later. After a few minutes of confirmation, the expedition is complete and you can view the results. (Learn more about blockchain trading).

If the expedition is successful, then you will find a new planet. If it fails, you will lose the spaceship. Success depends on the performance of the spacecraft and the sector in which the Earth Star is launched. The fewer planets in the sector in which the launch is located, the greater the probability of finding a new planet.

Once a new planet is discovered, the spacecraft will land on the planet. And you will also be the owner of this planet. The colonists carried by the spacecraft will establish the first base and begin to exploit resources. Space travel and colonial expansion are not only complicated but also hidden, and only 60-90% of brave people can survive.

Always remember that the next time you build a similar spaceship you will need 1.5 times more resources. Therefore, it is more efficient to build a new type of spacecraft than to build a similar spacecraft.

Planet

In the etheric star, the planet is the most valuable asset. The more the planet, the more opportunities there are.

Each planet uses a unique look and nature: serial number, discovery day, name, owner, quality (ordinary, rare, epic or legend) and sector. (Learn more about StarCraft)

The population and resources on the planet will continue to grow. But the rate of population growth and the composition of resources vary. Like the classification of the planet, resources are also divided into ordinary, rare, epic and legendary levels. You need these resources to invent spaceships and build spaceships.

In addition, each legendary level of the planet has its own story. As long as the owner of the planet can see it. (Learn more about the etheric interstellar story).

interstellar

The entire interstellar is divided into 1,000 sectors (25 x 40). Each sector consists of a planet adjacent to each other. For display purposes, the control interface does not display the specific coordinates of the planet, but only the sectors. For example, the Earth is located in the 12,0 sector.

Each sector has an average of 1,000 suitable colonial planets. There are a maximum of 1,000,000 planets in the etheric space.

Planet ranking

The current law of cosmic expansion guarantees the free trading of new planets. Anyone can buy and sell the planet in the auction house. To sell a planet, simply click on the sale below the planet and set the auction time, initial price and final price. After the success of the shelves, the price of the planet will gradually drop from the initial price to the final price. For example, if there is an initial auction price of 8 ETH and a final price of 2 ETH for a 3-day planet auction, then the initial price for the purchase of the planet is 8 ETH, 6 ETH after one day, and 4 ETH after 2 days. At the end of the three days, the price will drop to 2 ETH. After setting the time and price, the MetaMask order submission window will pop up, click Submit. After a few minutes of confirmation, the planet will be successfully auctioned on the auction house. (Learn more about blockchain trading).

Resources on the planet will not be available during the auction. This means that if you want to use resources, you must cancel the auction. To cancel the auction, click on the Cancel button on the Planet interface and submit the MetaMask order. After a few minutes, the planet will be removed from the auction house. After that, you can use the resources of the planet.

Earth coalition government

The Earth Coalition Government is an organization that serves the interests of all mankind. At that time, the problems on the earth had been resolved, so the coalition government turned its attention to the new world in the universe.

In addition to maintaining order, the government also advocates auctions and will charge a 5% tax on each transaction.

In addition, the Earth Coalition Government is also responsible for maintaining market balance. If demand is much higher than supply, the government will consume the earth's resources to put a new planet into the auction house. Because of the limited resources of the earth, the number of new planets is also limited.

Not only that, but the government also has the power to donate up to 10,000 planets to dismissers in recognition of their contributions to the expansion of the human universe.

spaceship

The spacecraft has the following features:

1, etc. – This feature represents the advanced level of the spacecraft. (Class 2 spacecraft performs better than Class 1 spacecraft, but consumes more resources)

2. Engine – This feature determines the scope of the spacecraft's search and also determines the probability of discovering a new planet.

3. Radar – This feature determines the probability that the spacecraft will find a high-level planet.

4. Capacity – This feature determines the number of colonists the spacecraft can accommodate.

5. Create the necessary resources.

Wallet recharge

You can buy Ethereum on the cryptocurrency trading platform and transfer the Ethereum to your MetaMask wallet. Mainstream deals are all: Changelly, Coinbase, Indacoin, etc. The general steps are as follows: Select the purchase quantity, the platform calculates the amount of USD/EUR to be paid, enters the credit card information and confirms the transaction. If you are using these platforms for the first time, you will need a birth passport for authentication.

Worldview story

Players can find the etheric worldview story on the legendary planet. With the discovery of each part of the story, you can go further and uncover the entire interstellar story. The story tells about other races that settled in the Stars before humans. In addition, the explorer who persists in the end will be able to discover the secrets of the origin of life and the road to the most precious planet.

However, only the owners of the week can see these story clips. Therefore, to learn more, you need to have as many legendary planets as possible. Of course, this is not the only way. You can contact the owner of the planet and use your diplomatic means to exchange information. At the same time, we recommend that you subscribe to the Ether Star Information. The Earth Coalition Government will share the story information that players voluntarily share from time to time.

Blockchain

Unlike other games, Ether Star is fully operational on Ethereum. This means that no single server controlled by the developer is used to store player information. The game runs independently and is securely stored on the blockchain.

This mechanism guarantees the player's absolute ownership of the planet. Even if the developer's office is hit by a meteorite, the player will continue to have ownership. In addition, this also makes free trading possible. Players are free to trade the planet with others. As long as you make a smart investment, you will get rich and expected benefits. Remember that Ethereum is not a currency for in-game use, but a currency that can be exchanged for legal currency.

However, decentralization can lead to slower transactions. Each transaction takes a few minutes to ensure that data is written into the blockchain (eg, transactions that go to the planet to buy). And these operations require a certain transaction fee to reward the miners of the blockchain.

Each item that interacts with the blockchain will pop up the MetaMask order submission window. You need to submit and confirm the transaction. If you are interested, we can get a deeper understanding of the relevant content:

1. The first line is the address of the StarCraft Smart Contract, and all transactions will be sent to this address.

2. Amount – The total amount of the transfer transaction. If you are buying a planet, then the cost of the purchase is shown. That is the seller's credit amount. If not, the total will be displayed as 0.

3. Gas Limit – This value is calculated automatically and can be ignored.

4. Gas price – This value directly affects transaction costs. (Participate in the next line, "Maximum Transaction Cost"). The higher the price of Gas, the faster the transaction is confirmed and the higher the cost. When the Ethereum network is overloaded, the Gas price needs to be set higher. (You can check the recommended Gas price through this website: ethgasstation.info)

5. Maximum Total – The highest total cost of executing the transaction. That is, the amount + the highest transaction fee.

Once the order is submitted, the transaction is processed and the transaction results are saved in the blockchain. Usually this operation will take 3-5 minutes. You can check the order status in the trading interface. We recommend that you open a browser reminder in the settings to avoid receiving message prompts after closing the game window.

Game goal

After learning how to build a spaceship and discovering a new planet, you can freely conduct interstellar exploration and achieve the main goals of the game.

The first and most obvious goal is to get the Ethereum. When you have the first planet, you can mine resources and the population on the planet will grow. With this alone, the value of the planet you have is

[infiniteundo]

Software As Narrative: A Reading List

## A resource for post-information-age software engineers seeking to bring about tentacular devops and staying-with-the-trouble-as-a-service. SKIP INTRO ### INTRO Don't like to jump into the middle of a longread? Get caught up on previous chapters of "Software as Narrative" from the very beginning. ### Want to link to this post? Here is a short url you can use to refer to this post: ### http://bit.ly/devops_reading_list

Why yet another list of devops reading materials?

This reading list is intended as a primer for my students: seekers of the way of tentacular devops and staying-with-the-trouble-as-a-service in the dawning Chthulhucene Epoch or Post-Information Age.

My way of devops is demonstrably impactful you can learn about my success stories by asking members of the teams that used my automated systems to deliver Barnes & Noble Nook iPad and textbook eReader clients or you may ask anyone who has shipped code at Etsy since 2010 about the efficacy of my solutions.

If it's hard to take me seriously, that just shows you have been paying attention. There is an ROI to my madness. And it's an appreciable ROI not trivial in any sense.

If what I have to say about tentacular devops does not gel yet, then you are a student of my way. Welcome to the study, I am but a student as well: a student of the way of the universe, but mostly of technosocial and sociotechnical progress conflict and evolution. My way is a hard one but that is true of any way that is rewarding.

Join me on the road to success in devops and read on!

With the collection of resources below at your disposal you have a mightly library of proto-devopsian wisdom and theory to draw from in your own day-to-day praxis which is my goal here: to empower you the practitioner of Software Architecting and Team Guiding and Code Factoring and Facade Construction and Pipeline Delivery -- all you specific practitioners can be empowered by reading what is below. I hope you will be. It is my intention to empower you by providing a library such as will teach you to adventure on your own into the unevenly distributed (but already fully realized) realm of the future.

This post is constantly being updated

This post unlike others in the series will be update regularly for the foreseeable future. I will add new material AT THE TOP of the list to make it easier to read.

As a style guide for writing about this post (which I hope you will!):

PLEASE DO NOT REFER TO ITEMS IN THIS LIST BY NUMBER AS THE NUMBERS WILL CHANGE

This is a list of reading materials that I think are helpful in understanding my point of view. Note that contradictions between sources exist because I am helping you understand I do not care if you agree with me. Consensus is orthogonal to progress.

The reading list

How we use IRC at Last.fm (2009)

The Log: What every software engineer should know about real-time data's unifying abstraction Engineering

The Three Ways: The Principles Underpinning DevOps

Trunk Based Development

Agile Software Development Philosophy is simple and brief. Here it is in full: Principles behind the Agile Manifesto

Amazon case study #1: At Amazon, new code is deployed to production at a staggering rate of once every 11.6 seconds during a normal business day.

Amazon case study #2: That's 3,000 production deployments per day.

Amazon case study #3: They've invested an enormous amount of time and money into creating an architecture that facilitates small, orthogonal, frequent code pushes.

Architecture and its limitations as a functional allegory for software engineers: E.W. Dijkstra Archive: On the cruelty of really teaching computing science (EWD 1036).

Automation does not obviate the need for human operators: The Ironies of Automation.

Big Ball of Mud is the default design pattern implemented by software engineers: Software Systems As Big Balls of Mud.

Canonical book on failure by Sidney Dekker: The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'

Canonical book on Legacy Codebases and how to fix them: Working Effectively with Legacy Code

Canonical case studies on the Management of Software Projects: The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition).

Canonical case studies on the Management of Software Teams: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (3rd Edition).

Canonical case study Software methodologies: Characterizing people as non-linear, first-order components in software development.

Canonical explanation of why interruptions are detrimental to code delivery schedules: Human Task Switches Considered Harmful – Joel on Software

Canonical psychology paper on how no one will read the documentation. Ever. : Paradox of the Active User by John Carroll and Mary Beth Rosson

CAP Theorem explained in terms of Web operations: You Can’t Sacrifice Partition Tolerance | codahale.com

Context-Switching Examined From A Pyschological Perspective: Programmer Interrupted.

Dan Ariely is a recognized expert on the New View as it applies to marketing and to work: Dan Ariely: What makes us feel good about our work? (TED Talk).

Dan Pink studies the psychology of productive work: Dan Pink on Autonomy, Master and Purpose.

Definition of Continuous Delivery: Continuous Integration by Martin Fowler.

Definition of Meme: "Memes, The New Replicators" which explains what memes are in technical terms that a programmer can leverage (ie, beyond kitten pics and arial black).

Definition of Safety-I and of Safety-II: From Safety-I to Safety-II: A White Paper.

Definition of Safety-II from a "people perspective": Safe operation as a social construct.

Definition of Safety-II from a risk management perspective: How Complex Systems Fail.

Definition of Testing, where the definition is given by negative example: Classic Testing Mistakes.

Definition of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC): Software Development Life Cycle - Wikipedia.

Deming summed up the observation of his life's work on Toyota lean kanban in this slim volume: The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education - 2nd Edition

Devops is testing, testing is devops: "Devops == testing all the time".

Devops' relationship to Ontological Relativism and Post-Modernism explored by Dekker: "Ten Questions about Human Error" by Sidney Dekker.

Dijkstra proposed a postulational model of software design that could be applied to narrative (instead of to pure mathematics as Dijkstra attempted): E.W. Dijkstra Archive: "Real mathematicians don't prove" (EWD1012)

Donna Haraway's case for discarding 20th century paradigms of sociotechnical systems management: The Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway.

Etsy's Way Of Continuous Deployment: The Etsy Way - Code as Craft

Evolutionary Biology Applied To Software Systems: The Selfish Class.

Facebook case study #1: At Facebook, each of 5,000 engineers commits to trunk HEAD at least once a day and the code at trunk HEAD is pushed to production once daily.

Facebook case study #2: Facebook has no dedicated QA team. All responsibility for testing rests with the software engineers.

Facebook case study #3: They've invested heavily in infrastructure that provides zero-downtime deployment at Facebook scale.

Flaky Tests Are Useful Tests Exhibit A: Your test suite is trying to tell you something.

Flaky Tests etc., Exhibit B: Testing Problems Are Test Results.

Meritocracies and "flat hierarchies" thoroughly debunked: The Tyranny of Stuctureless

Google's manual on fast, clean Unit Testing: The Way Of Testivus.

Google case study #1: At Google, 15,000 engineers work from the HEAD revision of a single Perforce trunk.

Google case study #2: 50% of the code will be changed in any given month.

Google case study #3: Google's test infrastructure is legendary and they've written a comprehensive book about how they perform QA while continuously releasing.

Google case study #4: They've also put a lot of effort into scaling Perforce.

Metaphors about software as an architectural endeavor that requires "maintenance" were largely drawn from this volume by Stewart Brand, founder of The Well: How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built

Metaphors about software as architecture were largely drawn from this volume: The Timeless Way of Building

MIT vs. New Jersey or worse-is-better: The Rise of "Worse is Better".

Most articles on "productivity" partially recapitulate this one: Good and Bad Procrastination

Most management books are just partial recapitulations of this classic Chinese manual on conflict management: The Art of War

Most management books are just partial rewrites of this Chinese classic: Tao Te Ching

Most mangaement books crib heavily from this Classic Italian manual on leading a large hierarchical culture in a competetive environment: The Prince by Machiavelli

NASA white paper on code review tools: SCRUB: a tool for code reviews.

NASA white paper on coding standards: The Power of Ten – Rules for Developing Safety Critical Code, Gerard J. Holzmann, NASA/JPL Laboratory for Reliable Software.

NASA white paper on testing and debugging: Reliable Software Systems Design: Defect Prevention, Detection, and Containment by Gerard J. Holzmann.

Neither human nor computer have primacy in the feedback loop of a technosocial system. Read here about neurobiological models that acknowledge digital reality: Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness

Parallel Rollouts are a core competency of any engineering team practicing devops. But Martin Fowler found a cooler name for Parallel Rollouts: StranglerApplication

Parallel Rollouts are supported by the presence of Feature Toggles or Configuration Flags in the code: Feature Toggles

Parallel Rollouts can be continuously delivered by Dark Launching unfinished code to production: Agile Testing: Dark launching and other lessons from Facebook on massive deployments

Policing as a negative allegory for QA: Don't Become the Quality Police by Bret Pettichord.

Policing viewed from a systems thinking perspective: Intelligent Policing: How Systems Thinking Methods Eclipse Conventional Management Practice.

Programming as Theory Building: Peter Naur – Programming as Theory Building.

QA and Testing algorithms explained in granular computer science (CS) terms: Software Testing Techniques.

QA and Testing explained in pragmatic actionable language: Explore It!: Reduce Risk and Increase Confidence with Exploratory Testing.

Refactoring is a specific discipline not a synonym for "rewriting some code." Read about the practice here: Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code

Risk Management in Devops can be explained (and is explained in this book) as a balance struck between resilience and compliance: The ETTO Principle: Efficiency-Thoroughness Trade-Off: Why Things That Go Right Sometimes Go Wrong.

Risk modeling for Web applications and services: OmniTI ~ Online Application Deployment: Reducing Risk

Science As The Proto-History of Devops: "Deming to Devops: The Science Behind Devops", John Willis (Lightning Talk).

Sniff Test for a codebase: Code Smells by Jeff Atwood.

Sniff Test for a software organization: The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code – Joel on Software

Sniff Test for a test automation framework: Test Smells at XUnitPatterns.com

Software methodologies evaluated: Why don’t software development methodologies work?.

Software presented as a non-zero-sum game: Software development as a cooperative game by Alistair Cockburn

Software presented as a way of life --- a way of seeing.: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

Stage Magic (a narrative performance) as a functional allegory for programming: Magic and Software Design by Bruce Tognazzini

Staying with the Trouble: Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures) by Donna Haraway.

Systems Thinking case studies from life-critical applications such as health care: Systems Thinking in the Public Sector.

Systems Thinking explained with stick figures: Stick Child’s Guide to Systems Thinking | InspGuilfoyle

Testability: The Relationship Between Testability and Good Design.

Theory X and Theory Y: Theory X and Theory Y - Wikipedia.

Value Stream Analysis explained in terms of ROI: Theory of Constraints.

Visual Iconography explained for a general audience: Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

Visual Iconography for the Web: Envisioning Information

Web information architecture explained in plain english: Small Pieces Loosely Joined: A Unified Theory Of The Web

Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Zen in programming #0: The Tao Te Chip

Zen in programming #1: The Tao of Programming

Zen in programming #2: The Hacker Koans

Zen in programming #3: The Computer   Programming   Haiku

Zen in programming #4: The Stories of Master Foo

Devops Videos About QA And Testing

Further Further Meta-Reading

You may enjoy watching these videos which I have collected because I see them as related to the praxis of Tentacular Devops and staying-with-the-trouble-as-a-service in this dawning post-information age (or Cthulhucene Epoch if you prefer).

DEVOPS BACKGROUNDER PLEASE WATCH

Devops As Scientific Inquiry (5 minutes)

Sufficiently Advanced Monitoring Is Indistinguishable From Testing (7 minutes)

Jamy Ian Swiss on Empathy's importance in systems design

Look At Your Data: A Devops Case Study

A beautiful story of solving a severe degradation that affected a small percentage of users.

Dr. Nancy Leveson explains the New View of safety to an SEC panel

Nancy Leveson, SEC Technology Rountable 10/2/2012 from jspaw on Vimeo.

Dr. Nancy Leveson speaks on the "Technology and Trading Roundtable: Promoting Stability in Today's Markets" panel on the intersection of Systems Safety and

War Stories Of Scaling Etsy

Continuous Testing at Etsy

Continuous Testing At Google

Continuous Delivery At Amazon

Continuous Delivery At Facebook

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Post by Facebook Engineering (FLASH IS REQUIRED TO PLAY THIS VIDEO).

Autonomy, mastery and purpose evangelized with a cool cartoon

Chad Dickerson's Way Of Engineering Mangement

Lunivore on cynefin, frogs and bycicles

Powers Of Ten

It is informative to reflect that the "zooming in" and "zooming out" we do as programmers while understanding our systems, is comparable in the number-of-levels to the zooming-in-and-out shown in this film. The average program contains orders of magnitudes more "levels of detail" than any object in the universe with the exception of the universe itself!

Russian Rhapsody

An allegory about the origins of "bugs."

Gremlins was the name given to bugs in complex systems back in the early 20th century. We can learn a lot from our own legends!

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

An allegory on attempting to remove humans from the automation loop.

After reading all that it would not be surprising if you felt curious about "Software as Narrative."

You may have skipped the intro. CLICK HERE TO READ INTRO NOW

Want to link to this post?

Here is a short url you can use to refer to this post rather than looking up the tumblr URL every time!

http://bit.ly/devops_reading_list

[av7groups]

5 Tools to Understand Facebook’s Privacy Violations and Defeat It

Facebook is waging a crusade on many figureheads today. It is misleading users into thinking their information is more secure than it is. It is using potent political vestibules to influence government policies. And you can’t be anywhere on the internet without being moved by Facebook.

If you don’t know how bad developments in the situation is, you need to find out before it’s too late. These websites and apps interpret why Facebook is a security and privacy nightmare, and indicate ways to take back control over your data.

1. Stop Using Facebook( Web ): Why You Should Quit FB

Digital privileges activist Joel Hernandez missed a single residence where people could understand, in simple statements, what Facebook was doing wrong. Stop Using Facebook is the weekend project he put together.

Go through the series of 15 bullet details. You’ll learn about the different ways in which Facebook is being sinful or unethical. Too, you will realize how poorly it deals with the responsibility of being the world’s largest social network. These revealings include how Facebook is manipulating your ardours by demonstrating specific material, to how some of its employees frankly say they care more about money than ethics.

Each point is ably backed up by a link to a reputed informant like news media, psychoanalysts, or fact-checkers. Then, Hernandez registers “how” you can quit Facebook, accommodating alternatives to favourite Facebook apps as recommended by Ethical.net.

2. Pretty Zucky( Web ): Timeline of Facebook’s Privacy Misdeeds

If you thought that the problems with Facebook are cropping up just now, you couldn’t be further from the truth. Facebook has always been questionable, as you can see with this timeline of its misdeeds with privacy-related matters.

Pretty Zucky trails word about the social network from the time Zuckerberg left Harvard to work on it full-time. You’ll see that even back in 2006, users determined the News Feed creepy, that Wired pointed out private profiles aren’t private, that it faced a class action suit in 2008, and that it firstly hired lobbyists back in 2009 to push its privacy agenda.

Each item on the timeline is a placard with a headline, a brief description or extract of the relevant information, and a link to the original beginning. From November 2005 to June 2019, you’ll identify the growth of Facebook and how it pushed the border of privacy.

3. Block FB( Chrome ): Simple Extension to Block Facebook

There are some excellent websites and apps to find out what Facebook knows about you and block it. Firefox users can grab Mozilla’s own Facebook Container to frustrate the social network, but there isn’t a Google Chrome version of it. For now, Block FB is one of the simplest behaviors for Chrome customers to stop Facebook in its tracks.

The extension launches a two-pronged attack on Facebook. First, it blocks common Facebook URLs, such as the homepage, apps, developer pages, and so on. If you try to visit it, it simply won’t work.

Next, the committee is also stops all Facebook tracking through points like the Share button on a web page. By stopping a Facebook pixel from firing on a third-party’s sheet, the social network cannot make the recording of your shop activity.

Download: Block FB for Chrome( Free)

4. Replace Facebook by SaaSHub( Web ): Alternatives for Every Facebook App

It’s great if you’ve decided to end your dependence on Facebook. But formerly you ensure Facebook owns several different works that you will vary depending on, you might wonder if it’s possible to quit Facebook. SaaSHub procreated a handy page of all major Facebook concoctions and its alternatives.

Each app has at least three alternatives, with their salient features. While the four big ones( Facebook, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram) deserve dedicated sections on them, it’s the smaller Facebook apps that matter.

This isn’t a list of privacy-centric apps alone. You knows where to find apps from other companionships which aren’t squeaky scavenge and even some that are as notorious as Facebook. The doctrine is to give you the possibilities and let you choose.

5. SocialVault( Web ): Store and Re-Browse Your Facebook Data

If you remove your Facebook account, all the data you uploaded on it is going to be gone forever. Facebook gives you download all that data to your computer, but it’s likely going to be a large file and you can’t really browse it readily. SocialVault is a quick-fix solution to these problems.

SocialVault is built on Blockstack, the decentralized internet ecosystem, so you’ll need a Blockstack account to use it. Once you download all your Facebook information, follow SocialVault’s educations to upload it all to the decentralized Gaia server, “whos also” automatically encrypted so that the app make can’t see your data, while you get a backup.

Once the upload is finished, you’ll find an easy interface to browse the history of your Facebook data, such as announces, photos, and so on. There are currently some issues with big records and sends, but the developer intends to fix those soon.

Should You Deactivate or Delete Facebook?

These informs and admonition about Facebook make it clear that using the social network is detrimental to anyone who cares about their privacy and digital activity. If you think you can do away with Facebook only, it might be better to cut the line for good.

But there’s a difference between deactivating and deleting Facebook. Deactivating your report still gives Facebook store your personal data on its servers. If you remove your history, that data will be obliterated after 30 epoches. But your privacy is still not entirely protected, as the commodity suggests.

Read the full article: 5 Tools to Understand Facebook’s Privacy Violations and Defeat It

Read more: makeuseof.com

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[tglstory]

Baby’s first steps on a Kafka Streams app - Part 1

A few months ago I started working on a new project at work. Its business logic is basically obtaining data from a source, apply some calculations, and write them out to a database. Sounds simple enough. Although the source data is provided at a specified time in a batch fashion, there will be a future requirement of an hourly feed so it seemed like a fairly reasonable idea to try and work with this in a streaming computation model. Given the rise of Confluent Platform, our engineering organization thought we should give Kafka Streams a try- this was an adventure because we were traditionally running spark batch jobs and had limited usage of Kafka itself.

I was inclined to use Kafka Streams for the following reasons:

I never used Kafka Streams before so I was curious

After using Azkaban after Luigi, I had a strong sentiment that tasks should be organized in an event-triggered fashion

I personally did not enjoy using the existing tech stack and wanted to use something completely new

I think I feel comfortable enough with the framework itself to give a meaningful insight, and I want to provide a retrospective for myself about the above three points.

Takeaway: Don’t underestimate the effort of doing something you haven’t done before.

All the business requirements were laid out in a user story, and all of them were fairly simple stories because they were broken down quite a lot. Read in this data source, convert it into avro objects. Ok cool. Seems simple enough. Based on my previous experience with MapReduce and Thrift, it’s a fairly trivial task. I’m sure there’s some things I need to learn about Kafka Connect but it should still be a trivial task. <- This is what I thought, but experience has proven otherwise.

Avro doesn’t have a native notion of an optional field, so you need to search for the best way to have optional fields. Now, why does the schema registry keep denying my messages? Ah, my schema change is non-backward compatible, that took a while to google. Hmm, Avro doesn’t have a concept of datetime? It’s actually an int/long epoch time? Uhh, and I’m supposed to use this Kafka Connect library to convert from java Dates to Avro dates? And I have to use java.util.Dates? Oh crap, and java.util.Date isn’t threadsafe?

The above questions were all answered and the correct implementation took a few weeks to write, because there were numerous unexpected differences from my experience to a new one. In planning for tasks where you haven’t worked with the tech stack, you should aggressively overestimate and consider all unturned stones to be landmines.

Takeaway: Read the fucking documentations

I had a left join that was basically combining two avro objects into one. And since joins are always key-based in the Kafka Streams DSL, this join just has to work. However, I noticed that only some keys are producing the right values and some aren’t. What the heck? Source topic A and B are easily verifiable, I literally see the data there, but why isn’t the join triggering?

Turns out, joins require co-partitioning of the data and that is outlined in great detail in the documentations. Kafka Streams actually is one of the best documented projects I’ve ever used, and I would suggest it as the #1 resource that every Kafka Streams user should know from start to end. 

Lurking around the Github Kafka project and the Google group for Confluent platform taught me a lot about the platform as well. I feel fortunate that I got to work with frameworks that have a great community.

In the next article I will write about why I think KS is pretty cool.

[tainghekhongdaycomvn]

Learning to Re-Share: 4 Strategies to Renew, Refresh, and Recycle Content for Bigger Reach

Learning to Re-Share: 4 Strategies to Renew, Refresh, and Recycle Content for Bigger Reach

Posted by jcar7

In the nearly three years the MeetEdgar blog went live, we’ve published more than 250 posts, written over 300,000 words, searched for hundreds of .gifs, and used our own tool to share our content 2,600 times to over 70,000 fans on social media.

After all that work, it seems silly to share a post just once. Nobody crumples up an oil painting and chucks it in the trash after it’s been seen one time — and the same goes for your content.

You’ve already created an "art gallery" for your posts. Resharing your content just lets the masses know what you've got on display. Even if hundreds or thousands of people have seen it all before, there’s always someone new to your content.

In a social media landscape that’s constantly changing, building a solid foundation of evergreen content that can be shared and shared again should be a key part of your social media strategy.

Otherwise, your art gallery is just another building in the city.

But wait… aren’t we supposed to be writing fresh content?

Yes! One of the biggest misconceptions about resharing is that it's a spammy tactic. This is just not true — provided that you’re resharing responsibly. We’ll explain how to do that in just a moment.

Resharing actually does double-duty for your brand. It not only gets the content that you spent your valuable time creating in front of more eyeballs (and at optimal times, if you want to get fancy), it also frees you up to have more authentic, real-time social interactions that drive people to your site from social media — since you’ve got content going out no matter what.

Did we mention that resharing is good for SEO? Moz Blog readers know that the more people engage with a post, the better your blog or site looks to search engines. And that’s only one facet of the overall SEO boost (and traffic boost!) resharers can see.

How resharing impacts SEO

Big brands are probably the most prolific content resharers. Heck, they don’t even think twice about it:

BuzzFeed is a perfect example of the value of repeating social updates, because they don’t necessarily NEED to.

So why do they do it anyway? Because it gets results.

Social sharing alone has an impact on SEO, but social engagement is really where it’s at. Quality content is totally worth the up-front time and cost, but only if it gets engagement! You up your chances of engagement with your content if you simply up your content’s exposure. That’s what resharing does awesomely.

With literally zero tweaks to the content itself, BuzzFeed made each of those social posts above double in value. Chances are, the people who saw these posts the first time they were shared are not the same people who saw them when they were reshared.

But simply resharing social posts isn’t the only way to get more engagement with your content. This post covers how companies large and small do resharing right, and highlights some of the best time-saving content strategies you can implement for your brand right now.

1 - Start at the source: Give old posts a new look

Lots has changed in five years — the world got three new Fast & Furious movies and LKR Social Media transformed from a consulting service into social media automation software.

We’ve done the math: three months is one Internet year and five years is basically another Internet epoch. (This may be a slight exaggeration.) So when we transferred some of our founder’s older evergreen blog posts to the new MeetEdgar blog, we took stock of which of those posts had picked up the most organic traffic.

One thing that hadn’t changed in five years? A blog post about how Vin Diesel was winning the social media game was still insanely popular with our readers:

Writing blog posts with an eye toward making them as evergreen as possible is one of the smartest, most time-saving-est content marketing strategies out there.

There weren’t a ton of tweaks to make, but we gave this popular post some love since so many people were finding it. We pepped up the headline, did a grammar and content rundown, refreshed links and images, updated social share buttons, and added more timely content. The whole process took less time than writing a brand new post, and we got to share it with tens of thousands of followers who hadn’t seen it when it was originally published.

So... check your metrics! Which evergreen posts have performed the best over time? Which have lots of awesome organic traffic? Make a list, do a content audit, and start updating!

2 - Find your social sharing "sweet spot" by repackaging your content

When you read studies that say many social media users reshare social posts without ever clicking through to the content itself… it can be a little disheartening.

Okay, a LOT disheartening.

You’ve probably spent tons of time creating your content, and the thought that it’s not getting read NEARLY as often as it could be is a recipe for content marketing burnout. (We’ve all been there.)

But it’s not all for naught — you might just need to experiment until you find the “sweet spot” that gets people to read and share. One way to do that is to simply repackage content you’ve already written.

The tried-and-true “best of” post offers a reprieve from the content-creation grind while still delivering tons of value to your fans and readers.

Repackaging is best when it reframes your content with a new focus — like rounding up similar posts based on a theme. (You can do this in reverse, too, and turn one great post into a bunch of fresh content to then share and reshare!)

If you can get people to your site, a "best of" post encourages readers to stay longer as they click links for the different articles you’ve gathered up, and engage with content they may never have thought to look up separately.

Most fun of all, you can repackage your content to target new or different subsets of your audience on social media. (More on that in the next section.)

3 - Social shake-up: Reaching and testing with different audiences

“What if the same person recognizes something that I’ve already posted in the past?” you might be asking right about now. “I don’t want to annoy my followers! I don’t want to be spammy!”

Forget about people resharing social posts without reading the content behind the links — most people don’t see your social posts at all in the first place.

This is just one of those uncomfortable facts about the Internet, like how comment sections are always a minefield of awful, and how everyone loves a good startled cat .gif.

That doesn’t mean you should repeat yourself, word-for-word, all the time. Chances are, you have more than one type of reader or customer, so it’s important not just to vary your content, but also to vary how you share it on social media.

Savvy marketers are all over this tactic, marketing two sides (or more) of the same coin. Here are a couple of examples of social sharing images from a Mixpanel blog post:

Option A

Option B

Both Option A and Option B go to the same content, but one highlights a particularly juicy stat (problem statement: “97% of users churn”) and the other hits the viewer with an intriguing subheader (solution statement: “behavior-based messaging”). In this way, Mixpanel can find out what pulls in the most readers and tweak and promote that message as needed.

Pull a cool anecdote from your post or highlight a different stat that gets people excited. It can be as easy as changing up the descriptions of your posts or just using different images. There’s so much to test and try out — all using the same post.

4 - Automate, automate, automate

Remember, your best posts are only as good as the engagement they get. That fact, however, doesn’t mean you have to keep manually resharing them on social media day in and day out.

Unless, of course, you’re into that boring busywork thing.

Automating the whole process of resharing evergreen content saves tons of time while keeping your brand personality intact. It also frees you up to have real-time interactions with your fans on social media, brainstorm new post ideas, or just go for a walk, and it solves the time crunch and the hassle of manually re-scheduling posts, while actually showcasing more of your posts across the massive social media landscape. Just by spacing out your updates, you’ll be able to hit a wider range of your followers.

(This is probably a good time to check whether your social media scheduling tool offers automatic resharing of your content.)

Now, social media automation isn’t a substitute for consistently creating great new content, of course, but it does give your existing evergreen content an even better opportunity to shine.

Win with quality, get things DONE with resharing

It’s noisy out there. The law of diminishing returns — as well as declining social reach — means that a lot of what you do on social media can feel like shouting into the void.

And there’s not a huge ROI for shouting into voids these days.

Responsible resharing is an important part of your overall content marketing strategy. As long as you keep your content fresh, create new quality content regularly, and talk to your fans where and when they’re most active, chances are people won’t see the same thing twice. The data shows you’ll get more clicks, more traffic, and better SEO results — not a bad bonus to that whole “saving lots of time” thing.

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xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Learning to Re-Share: 4 Strategies to Renew, Refresh, and Recycle Content for Bigger Reach http://ift.tt/2hmzoLx xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Learning to Re-Share: 4 Strategies to Renew, Refresh, and Recycle Content for Bigger Reach http://ift.tt/2hmzoLx xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Learning to Re-Share: 4 Strategies to Renew, Refresh, and Recycle Content for Bigger Reach http://ift.tt/2hmzoLx xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Learning to Re-Share: 4 Strategies to Renew, Refresh, and Recycle Content for Bigger Reach http://ift.tt/2hmzoLx xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Learning to Re-Share: 4 Strategies to Renew, Refresh, and Recycle Content for Bigger Reach 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Strategies to Renew, Refresh, and Recycle Content for Bigger Reach http://ift.tt/2hmzoLx xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Learning to Re-Share: 4 Strategies to Renew, Refresh, and Recycle Content for Bigger Reach http://ift.tt/2hmzoLx xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Learning to Re-Share: 4 Strategies to Renew, Refresh, and Recycle Content for Bigger Reach http://ift.tt/2hmzoLx xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Learning to Re-Share: 4 Strategies to Renew, Refresh, and Recycle Content for Bigger Reach http://ift.tt/2hmzoLx xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Learning to Re-Share: 4 Strategies to Renew, Refresh, and Recycle Content for Bigger Reach http://ift.tt/2hmzoLx xem thêm tại: http://ift.tt/2mb4VST để biết thêm về địa chỉ bán tai nghe không dây giá rẻ Learning 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[lawrenceseitz22]

Learning to Re-Share: 4 Strategies to Renew, Refresh, and Recycle Content for Bigger Reach

Posted by jcar7

In the nearly three years the MeetEdgar blog went live, we’ve published more than 250 posts, written over 300,000 words, searched for hundreds of .gifs, and used our own tool to share our content 2,600 times to over 70,000 fans on social media.

After all that work, it seems silly to share a post just once. Nobody crumples up an oil painting and chucks it in the trash after it’s been seen one time — and the same goes for your content.

You’ve already created an "art gallery" for your posts. Resharing your content just lets the masses know what you've got on display. Even if hundreds or thousands of people have seen it all before, there’s always someone new to your content.

In a social media landscape that’s constantly changing, building a solid foundation of evergreen content that can be shared and shared again should be a key part of your social media strategy.

Otherwise, your art gallery is just another building in the city.

But wait… aren’t we supposed to be writing fresh content?

Yes! One of the biggest misconceptions about resharing is that it's a spammy tactic. This is just not true — provided that you’re resharing responsibly. We’ll explain how to do that in just a moment.

Resharing actually does double-duty for your brand. It not only gets the content that you spent your valuable time creating in front of more eyeballs (and at optimal times, if you want to get fancy), it also frees you up to have more authentic, real-time social interactions that drive people to your site from social media — since you’ve got content going out no matter what.

Did we mention that resharing is good for SEO? Moz Blog readers know that the more people engage with a post, the better your blog or site looks to search engines. And that’s only one facet of the overall SEO boost (and traffic boost!) resharers can see.

How resharing impacts SEO

Big brands are probably the most prolific content resharers. Heck, they don’t even think twice about it:

BuzzFeed is a perfect example of the value of repeating social updates, because they don’t necessarily NEED to.

So why do they do it anyway? Because it gets results.

Social sharing alone has an impact on SEO, but social engagement is really where it’s at. Quality content is totally worth the up-front time and cost, but only if it gets engagement! You up your chances of engagement with your content if you simply up your content’s exposure. That’s what resharing does awesomely.

With literally zero tweaks to the content itself, BuzzFeed made each of those social posts above double in value. Chances are, the people who saw these posts the first time they were shared are not the same people who saw them when they were reshared.

But simply resharing social posts isn’t the only way to get more engagement with your content. This post covers how companies large and small do resharing right, and highlights some of the best time-saving content strategies you can implement for your brand right now.

1 - Start at the source: Give old posts a new look

Lots has changed in five years — the world got three new Fast & Furious movies and LKR Social Media transformed from a consulting service into social media automation software.

We’ve done the math: three months is one Internet year and five years is basically another Internet epoch. (This may be a slight exaggeration.) So when we transferred some of our founder’s older evergreen blog posts to the new MeetEdgar blog, we took stock of which of those posts had picked up the most organic traffic.

One thing that hadn’t changed in five years? A blog post about how Vin Diesel was winning the social media game was still insanely popular with our readers:

Writing blog posts with an eye toward making them as evergreen as possible is one of the smartest, most time-saving-est content marketing strategies out there.

There weren’t a ton of tweaks to make, but we gave this popular post some love since so many people were finding it. We pepped up the headline, did a grammar and content rundown, refreshed links and images, updated social share buttons, and added more timely content. The whole process took less time than writing a brand new post, and we got to share it with tens of thousands of followers who hadn’t seen it when it was originally published.

So... check your metrics! Which evergreen posts have performed the best over time? Which have lots of awesome organic traffic? Make a list, do a content audit, and start updating!

2 - Find your social sharing "sweet spot" by repackaging your content

When you read studies that say many social media users reshare social posts without ever clicking through to the content itself… it can be a little disheartening.

Okay, a LOT disheartening.

You’ve probably spent tons of time creating your content, and the thought that it’s not getting read NEARLY as often as it could be is a recipe for content marketing burnout. (We’ve all been there.)

But it’s not all for naught — you might just need to experiment until you find the “sweet spot” that gets people to read and share. One way to do that is to simply repackage content you’ve already written.

The tried-and-true “best of” post offers a reprieve from the content-creation grind while still delivering tons of value to your fans and readers.

Repackaging is best when it reframes your content with a new focus — like rounding up similar posts based on a theme. (You can do this in reverse, too, and turn one great post into a bunch of fresh content to then share and reshare!)

If you can get people to your site, a "best of" post encourages readers to stay longer as they click links for the different articles you’ve gathered up, and engage with content they may never have thought to look up separately.

Most fun of all, you can repackage your content to target new or different subsets of your audience on social media. (More on that in the next section.)

3 - Social shake-up: Reaching and testing with different audiences

“What if the same person recognizes something that I’ve already posted in the past?” you might be asking right about now. “I don’t want to annoy my followers! I don’t want to be spammy!”

Forget about people resharing social posts without reading the content behind the links — most people don’t see your social posts at all in the first place.

This is just one of those uncomfortable facts about the Internet, like how comment sections are always a minefield of awful, and how everyone loves a good startled cat .gif.

That doesn’t mean you should repeat yourself, word-for-word, all the time. Chances are, you have more than one type of reader or customer, so it’s important not just to vary your content, but also to vary how you share it on social media.

Savvy marketers are all over this tactic, marketing two sides (or more) of the same coin. Here are a couple of examples of social sharing images from a Mixpanel blog post:

Option A

Option B

Both Option A and Option B go to the same content, but one highlights a particularly juicy stat (problem statement: “97% of users churn”) and the other hits the viewer with an intriguing subheader (solution statement: “behavior-based messaging”). In this way, Mixpanel can find out what pulls in the most readers and tweak and promote that message as needed.

Pull a cool anecdote from your post or highlight a different stat that gets people excited. It can be as easy as changing up the descriptions of your posts or just using different images. There’s so much to test and try out — all using the same post.

4 - Automate, automate, automate

Remember, your best posts are only as good as the engagement they get. That fact, however, doesn’t mean you have to keep manually resharing them on social media day in and day out.

Unless, of course, you’re into that boring busywork thing.

Automating the whole process of resharing evergreen content saves tons of time while keeping your brand personality intact. It also frees you up to have real-time interactions with your fans on social media, brainstorm new post ideas, or just go for a walk, and it solves the time crunch and the hassle of manually re-scheduling posts, while actually showcasing more of your posts across the massive social media landscape. Just by spacing out your updates, you’ll be able to hit a wider range of your followers.

(This is probably a good time to check whether your social media scheduling tool offers automatic resharing of your content.)

Now, social media automation isn’t a substitute for consistently creating great new content, of course, but it does give your existing evergreen content an even better opportunity to shine.

Win with quality, get things DONE with resharing

It’s noisy out there. The law of diminishing returns — as well as declining social reach — means that a lot of what you do on social media can feel like shouting into the void.

And there’s not a huge ROI for shouting into voids these days.

Responsible resharing is an important part of your overall content marketing strategy. As long as you keep your content fresh, create new quality content regularly, and talk to your fans where and when they’re most active, chances are people won’t see the same thing twice. The data shows you’ll get more clicks, more traffic, and better SEO results — not a bad bonus to that whole “saving lots of time” thing.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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[byronheeutgm]

Learning to Re-Share: 4 Strategies to Renew, Refresh, and Recycle Content for Bigger Reach

Posted by jcar7

In the nearly three years the MeetEdgar blog went live, we’ve published more than 250 posts, written over 300,000 words, searched for hundreds of .gifs, and used our own tool to share our content 2,600 times to over 70,000 fans on social media.

After all that work, it seems silly to share a post just once. Nobody crumples up an oil painting and chucks it in the trash after it’s been seen one time — and the same goes for your content.

You’ve already created an "art gallery" for your posts. Resharing your content just lets the masses know what you've got on display. Even if hundreds or thousands of people have seen it all before, there’s always someone new to your content.

In a social media landscape that’s constantly changing, building a solid foundation of evergreen content that can be shared and shared again should be a key part of your social media strategy.

Otherwise, your art gallery is just another building in the city.

But wait… aren’t we supposed to be writing fresh content?

Yes! One of the biggest misconceptions about resharing is that it's a spammy tactic. This is just not true — provided that you’re resharing responsibly. We’ll explain how to do that in just a moment.

Resharing actually does double-duty for your brand. It not only gets the content that you spent your valuable time creating in front of more eyeballs (and at optimal times, if you want to get fancy), it also frees you up to have more authentic, real-time social interactions that drive people to your site from social media — since you’ve got content going out no matter what.

Did we mention that resharing is good for SEO? Moz Blog readers know that the more people engage with a post, the better your blog or site looks to search engines. And that’s only one facet of the overall SEO boost (and traffic boost!) resharers can see.

How resharing impacts SEO

Big brands are probably the most prolific content resharers. Heck, they don’t even think twice about it:

BuzzFeed is a perfect example of the value of repeating social updates, because they don’t necessarily NEED to.

So why do they do it anyway? Because it gets results.

Social sharing alone has an impact on SEO, but social engagement is really where it’s at. Quality content is totally worth the up-front time and cost, but only if it gets engagement! You up your chances of engagement with your content if you simply up your content’s exposure. That’s what resharing does awesomely.

With literally zero tweaks to the content itself, BuzzFeed made each of those social posts above double in value. Chances are, the people who saw these posts the first time they were shared are not the same people who saw them when they were reshared.

But simply resharing social posts isn’t the only way to get more engagement with your content. This post covers how companies large and small do resharing right, and highlights some of the best time-saving content strategies you can implement for your brand right now.

1 - Start at the source: Give old posts a new look

Lots has changed in five years — the world got three new Fast & Furious movies and LKR Social Media transformed from a consulting service into social media automation software.

We’ve done the math: three months is one Internet year and five years is basically another Internet epoch. (This may be a slight exaggeration.) So when we transferred some of our founder’s older evergreen blog posts to the new MeetEdgar blog, we took stock of which of those posts had picked up the most organic traffic.

One thing that hadn’t changed in five years? A blog post about how Vin Diesel was winning the social media game was still insanely popular with our readers:

Writing blog posts with an eye toward making them as evergreen as possible is one of the smartest, most time-saving-est content marketing strategies out there.

There weren’t a ton of tweaks to make, but we gave this popular post some love since so many people were finding it. We pepped up the headline, did a grammar and content rundown, refreshed links and images, updated social share buttons, and added more timely content. The whole process took less time than writing a brand new post, and we got to share it with tens of thousands of followers who hadn’t seen it when it was originally published.

So... check your metrics! Which evergreen posts have performed the best over time? Which have lots of awesome organic traffic? Make a list, do a content audit, and start updating!

2 - Find your social sharing "sweet spot" by repackaging your content

When you read studies that say many social media users reshare social posts without ever clicking through to the content itself… it can be a little disheartening.

Okay, a LOT disheartening.

You’ve probably spent tons of time creating your content, and the thought that it’s not getting read NEARLY as often as it could be is a recipe for content marketing burnout. (We’ve all been there.)

But it’s not all for naught — you might just need to experiment until you find the “sweet spot” that gets people to read and share. One way to do that is to simply repackage content you’ve already written.

The tried-and-true “best of” post offers a reprieve from the content-creation grind while still delivering tons of value to your fans and readers.

Repackaging is best when it reframes your content with a new focus — like rounding up similar posts based on a theme. (You can do this in reverse, too, and turn one great post into a bunch of fresh content to then share and reshare!)

If you can get people to your site, a "best of" post encourages readers to stay longer as they click links for the different articles you’ve gathered up, and engage with content they may never have thought to look up separately.

Most fun of all, you can repackage your content to target new or different subsets of your audience on social media. (More on that in the next section.)

3 - Social shake-up: Reaching and testing with different audiences

“What if the same person recognizes something that I’ve already posted in the past?” you might be asking right about now. “I don’t want to annoy my followers! I don’t want to be spammy!”

Forget about people resharing social posts without reading the content behind the links — most people don’t see your social posts at all in the first place.

This is just one of those uncomfortable facts about the Internet, like how comment sections are always a minefield of awful, and how everyone loves a good startled cat .gif.

That doesn’t mean you should repeat yourself, word-for-word, all the time. Chances are, you have more than one type of reader or customer, so it’s important not just to vary your content, but also to vary how you share it on social media.

Savvy marketers are all over this tactic, marketing two sides (or more) of the same coin. Here are a couple of examples of social sharing images from a Mixpanel blog post:

Option A

Option B

Both Option A and Option B go to the same content, but one highlights a particularly juicy stat (problem statement: “97% of users churn”) and the other hits the viewer with an intriguing subheader (solution statement: “behavior-based messaging”). In this way, Mixpanel can find out what pulls in the most readers and tweak and promote that message as needed.

Pull a cool anecdote from your post or highlight a different stat that gets people excited. It can be as easy as changing up the descriptions of your posts or just using different images. There’s so much to test and try out — all using the same post.

4 - Automate, automate, automate

Remember, your best posts are only as good as the engagement they get. That fact, however, doesn’t mean you have to keep manually resharing them on social media day in and day out.

Unless, of course, you’re into that boring busywork thing.

Automating the whole process of resharing evergreen content saves tons of time while keeping your brand personality intact. It also frees you up to have real-time interactions with your fans on social media, brainstorm new post ideas, or just go for a walk, and it solves the time crunch and the hassle of manually re-scheduling posts, while actually showcasing more of your posts across the massive social media landscape. Just by spacing out your updates, you’ll be able to hit a wider range of your followers.

(This is probably a good time to check whether your social media scheduling tool offers automatic resharing of your content.)

Now, social media automation isn’t a substitute for consistently creating great new content, of course, but it does give your existing evergreen content an even better opportunity to shine.

Win with quality, get things DONE with resharing

It’s noisy out there. The law of diminishing returns — as well as declining social reach — means that a lot of what you do on social media can feel like shouting into the void.

And there’s not a huge ROI for shouting into voids these days.

Responsible resharing is an important part of your overall content marketing strategy. As long as you keep your content fresh, create new quality content regularly, and talk to your fans where and when they’re most active, chances are people won’t see the same thing twice. The data shows you’ll get more clicks, more traffic, and better SEO results — not a bad bonus to that whole “saving lots of time” thing.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://ift.tt/2vhJYJD

[conniecogeie]

Learning to Re-Share: 4 Strategies to Renew, Refresh, and Recycle Content for Bigger Reach

Posted by jcar7

In the nearly three years the MeetEdgar blog went live, we’ve published more than 250 posts, written over 300,000 words, searched for hundreds of .gifs, and used our own tool to share our content 2,600 times to over 70,000 fans on social media.

After all that work, it seems silly to share a post just once. Nobody crumples up an oil painting and chucks it in the trash after it’s been seen one time — and the same goes for your content.

You’ve already created an "art gallery" for your posts. Resharing your content just lets the masses know what you've got on display. Even if hundreds or thousands of people have seen it all before, there’s always someone new to your content.

In a social media landscape that’s constantly changing, building a solid foundation of evergreen content that can be shared and shared again should be a key part of your social media strategy.

Otherwise, your art gallery is just another building in the city.

But wait… aren’t we supposed to be writing fresh content?

Yes! One of the biggest misconceptions about resharing is that it's a spammy tactic. This is just not true — provided that you’re resharing responsibly. We’ll explain how to do that in just a moment.

Resharing actually does double-duty for your brand. It not only gets the content that you spent your valuable time creating in front of more eyeballs (and at optimal times, if you want to get fancy), it also frees you up to have more authentic, real-time social interactions that drive people to your site from social media — since you’ve got content going out no matter what.

Did we mention that resharing is good for SEO? Moz Blog readers know that the more people engage with a post, the better your blog or site looks to search engines. And that’s only one facet of the overall SEO boost (and traffic boost!) resharers can see.

How resharing impacts SEO

Big brands are probably the most prolific content resharers. Heck, they don’t even think twice about it:

BuzzFeed is a perfect example of the value of repeating social updates, because they don’t necessarily NEED to.

So why do they do it anyway? Because it gets results.

Social sharing alone has an impact on SEO, but social engagement is really where it’s at. Quality content is totally worth the up-front time and cost, but only if it gets engagement! You up your chances of engagement with your content if you simply up your content’s exposure. That’s what resharing does awesomely.

With literally zero tweaks to the content itself, BuzzFeed made each of those social posts above double in value. Chances are, the people who saw these posts the first time they were shared are not the same people who saw them when they were reshared.

But simply resharing social posts isn’t the only way to get more engagement with your content. This post covers how companies large and small do resharing right, and highlights some of the best time-saving content strategies you can implement for your brand right now.

1 - Start at the source: Give old posts a new look

Lots has changed in five years — the world got three new Fast & Furious movies and LKR Social Media transformed from a consulting service into social media automation software.

We’ve done the math: three months is one Internet year and five years is basically another Internet epoch. (This may be a slight exaggeration.) So when we transferred some of our founder’s older evergreen blog posts to the new MeetEdgar blog, we took stock of which of those posts had picked up the most organic traffic.

One thing that hadn’t changed in five years? A blog post about how Vin Diesel was winning the social media game was still insanely popular with our readers:

Writing blog posts with an eye toward making them as evergreen as possible is one of the smartest, most time-saving-est content marketing strategies out there.

There weren’t a ton of tweaks to make, but we gave this popular post some love since so many people were finding it. We pepped up the headline, did a grammar and content rundown, refreshed links and images, updated social share buttons, and added more timely content. The whole process took less time than writing a brand new post, and we got to share it with tens of thousands of followers who hadn’t seen it when it was originally published.

So... check your metrics! Which evergreen posts have performed the best over time? Which have lots of awesome organic traffic? Make a list, do a content audit, and start updating!

2 - Find your social sharing "sweet spot" by repackaging your content

When you read studies that say many social media users reshare social posts without ever clicking through to the content itself… it can be a little disheartening.

Okay, a LOT disheartening.

You’ve probably spent tons of time creating your content, and the thought that it’s not getting read NEARLY as often as it could be is a recipe for content marketing burnout. (We’ve all been there.)

But it’s not all for naught — you might just need to experiment until you find the “sweet spot” that gets people to read and share. One way to do that is to simply repackage content you’ve already written.

The tried-and-true “best of” post offers a reprieve from the content-creation grind while still delivering tons of value to your fans and readers.

Repackaging is best when it reframes your content with a new focus — like rounding up similar posts based on a theme. (You can do this in reverse, too, and turn one great post into a bunch of fresh content to then share and reshare!)

If you can get people to your site, a "best of" post encourages readers to stay longer as they click links for the different articles you’ve gathered up, and engage with content they may never have thought to look up separately.

Most fun of all, you can repackage your content to target new or different subsets of your audience on social media. (More on that in the next section.)

3 - Social shake-up: Reaching and testing with different audiences

“What if the same person recognizes something that I’ve already posted in the past?” you might be asking right about now. “I don’t want to annoy my followers! I don’t want to be spammy!”

Forget about people resharing social posts without reading the content behind the links — most people don’t see your social posts at all in the first place.

This is just one of those uncomfortable facts about the Internet, like how comment sections are always a minefield of awful, and how everyone loves a good startled cat .gif.

That doesn’t mean you should repeat yourself, word-for-word, all the time. Chances are, you have more than one type of reader or customer, so it’s important not just to vary your content, but also to vary how you share it on social media.

Savvy marketers are all over this tactic, marketing two sides (or more) of the same coin. Here are a couple of examples of social sharing images from a Mixpanel blog post:

Option A

Option B

Both Option A and Option B go to the same content, but one highlights a particularly juicy stat (problem statement: “97% of users churn”) and the other hits the viewer with an intriguing subheader (solution statement: “behavior-based messaging”). In this way, Mixpanel can find out what pulls in the most readers and tweak and promote that message as needed.

Pull a cool anecdote from your post or highlight a different stat that gets people excited. It can be as easy as changing up the descriptions of your posts or just using different images. There’s so much to test and try out — all using the same post.

4 - Automate, automate, automate

Remember, your best posts are only as good as the engagement they get. That fact, however, doesn’t mean you have to keep manually resharing them on social media day in and day out.

Unless, of course, you’re into that boring busywork thing.

Automating the whole process of resharing evergreen content saves tons of time while keeping your brand personality intact. It also frees you up to have real-time interactions with your fans on social media, brainstorm new post ideas, or just go for a walk, and it solves the time crunch and the hassle of manually re-scheduling posts, while actually showcasing more of your posts across the massive social media landscape. Just by spacing out your updates, you’ll be able to hit a wider range of your followers.

(This is probably a good time to check whether your social media scheduling tool offers automatic resharing of your content.)

Now, social media automation isn’t a substitute for consistently creating great new content, of course, but it does give your existing evergreen content an even better opportunity to shine.

Win with quality, get things DONE with resharing

It’s noisy out there. The law of diminishing returns — as well as declining social reach — means that a lot of what you do on social media can feel like shouting into the void.

And there’s not a huge ROI for shouting into voids these days.

Responsible resharing is an important part of your overall content marketing strategy. As long as you keep your content fresh, create new quality content regularly, and talk to your fans where and when they’re most active, chances are people won’t see the same thing twice. The data shows you’ll get more clicks, more traffic, and better SEO results — not a bad bonus to that whole “saving lots of time” thing.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://ift.tt/2vhJYJD

[krestmarketinggroup-blog]

Learning to Re-Share: 4 Strategies to Renew, Refresh, and Recycle Content for Bigger Reach

Posted by  jcar7   In the nearly three years the MeetEdgar blog went live, we’ve published more than 250 posts, written over 300,000 words, searched for hundreds of .gifs, and used our own tool to share our content 2,600 times to over 70,000 fans on social media.

  After all that work, it seems silly to share a post just once. Nobody crumples up an oil painting and chucks it in the trash after it’s been seen one time — and the same goes for your content.

  You’ve already created an “art gallery” for your posts.  Resharing  your content just lets the masses know what you’ve got on display. Even if hundreds or thousands of people have seen it all before, there’s always someone new to your content.

  In a social media landscape that’s constantly changing, building a solid foundation of evergreen content that can be shared and shared again should be a key part of your social media strategy.

  Otherwise, your art gallery is just another building in the city.

  But wait… aren’t we supposed to be writing fresh content?   Yes! One of the biggest misconceptions about resharing is that it’s a spammy tactic. This is just not true — provided that you’re resharing responsibly. We’ll explain how to do that in just a moment.

  Resharing actually does double-duty for your brand. It not only gets the content that you spent your valuable time creating in front of more eyeballs (and  at optimal times , if you want to get fancy), it also frees you up to have more authentic, real-time social interactions that drive people to your site from social media — since you’ve got content going out no matter what.

  Did we mention that  resharing is good for SEO ? Moz Blog readers know that the more people engage with a post, the better your blog or site looks to search engines. And that’s only one facet of the overall SEO boost (and traffic boost!) resharers can see.

  How resharing impacts SEO   Big brands are probably the most prolific content resharers. Heck, they don’t even  think twice  about it:

     BuzzFeed is a perfect example of the value of repeating social updates, because they don’t necessarily NEED to.

  So why do they do it anyway? Because it gets results.

   Social sharing  alone has an impact on SEO, but   social engagement   is really where it’s at. Quality content is totally worth the up-front time and cost, but only if it gets engagement!  You up your chances of engagement with your content if you simply up your content’s exposure. That’s what resharing does awesomely. 

  With literally zero tweaks to the content itself, BuzzFeed made each of those social posts above double in value. Chances are, the people who saw these posts the first time they were shared are not the same people who saw them when they were reshared.

   But simply resharing social posts isn’t the only way to get more engagement with your content.  This post covers how companies large and small do resharing right, and highlights some of the best time-saving content strategies you can implement for your brand right now.

  1 - Start at the source: Give old posts a new look  Lots has changed in five years — the world got three new  Fast & Furious  movies and LKR Social Media  transformed  from a consulting service into social media automation software.

  We’ve done the math: three months is one Internet year and five years is basically another Internet epoch. (This may be a slight exaggeration.) So when we transferred some of our founder’s older evergreen blog posts to the new MeetEdgar blog, we took stock of which of those posts had picked up the most organic traffic.

  One thing that hadn’t changed in five years? A blog post about how  Vin Diesel was winning the social media game  was still insanely popular with our readers:

      Writing blog posts with an eye toward making them as evergreen as possible is one of the smartest, most time-saving-est content marketing strategies out there.

  There weren’t a ton of tweaks to make, but we gave this popular post some love since so many people were finding it. We pepped up the headline, did a grammar and content rundown, refreshed links and images, updated social share buttons, and added more timely content. The whole process took less time than writing a brand new post, and we got to share it with tens of thousands of followers who hadn’t seen it when it was originally published.

  So... check your metrics! Which evergreen posts have performed the best over time? Which have lots of awesome organic traffic? Make a list,  do a content audit , and start updating!

  2 - Find your social sharing “sweet spot” by repackaging your content   When you read studies that say many social media users reshare social posts  without ever clicking through to the content itself … it can be a little disheartening.

  Okay, a LOT disheartening.

  You’ve probably spent tons of time creating your content, and the thought that it’s not getting read NEARLY as often as it could be is a recipe for content marketing burnout. (We’ve all been there.)

  But it’s not all for naught — you might just need to experiment until you find the “sweet spot” that gets people to read and share. One way to do that is to simply repackage content you’ve already written.

   The tried-and-true “best of” post offers a reprieve from the content-creation grind while still delivering tons of value to your fans and readers. 

  Repackaging is best when it  reframes your content  with a new focus — like rounding up similar posts based on a theme. (You can do this  in reverse , too, and turn one great post into a bunch of fresh content to then share and reshare!)

  If you can get people to your site, a “best of” post encourages readers to stay longer as they click links for the different articles you’ve gathered up, and engage with content they may never have thought to look up separately.

  Most fun of all, you can repackage your content to target new or different subsets of your audience on social media. (More on that in the next section.)

  3 - Social shake-up: Reaching and testing with different audiences  “What if the same person recognizes something that I’ve already posted in the past?” you might be asking right about now. “I don’t want to annoy my followers! I don’t want to be spammy!”

  Forget about people resharing social posts without reading the content behind the links —  most people  don’t see your social posts  at all in the first place. 

  This is just one of those uncomfortable facts about the Internet, like how comment sections are always a minefield of awful, and how everyone loves a good startled cat .gif.

  That doesn’t mean you should repeat yourself, word-for-word, all the time. Chances are, you have more than one type of reader or customer, so it’s important not just to vary your content, but also to vary  how you   share it on social media .

  Savvy marketers are all over this tactic, marketing two sides (or more) of the same coin. Here are a couple of examples of social sharing images from a  Mixpanel blog post :

     Option A

     Option B

  Both Option A and Option B go to the same content, but one highlights a particularly juicy stat (problem statement: “97% of users churn”) and the other hits the viewer with an intriguing subheader (solution statement: “behavior-based messaging”). In this way, Mixpanel can find out what pulls in the most readers and tweak and promote that message as needed.

  Pull a cool anecdote from your post or highlight a different stat that gets people excited. It can be as easy as changing up the descriptions of your posts or just using different images. There’s so much to test and try out — all using the same post.

  4 - Automate, automate, automate  Remember,  your best posts are only as good as the engagement they get.  That fact, however, doesn’t mean you have to keep manually resharing them on social media day in and day out.

  Unless, of course, you’re into that boring busywork thing.

  Automating the whole process of resharing evergreen content saves tons of time while keeping your brand personality intact. It also frees you up to have real-time interactions with your fans on social media, brainstorm new post ideas, or just go for a walk, and it  solves the time crunch  and the hassle of manually re-scheduling posts, while actually showcasing  more  of your posts across the massive social media landscape. Just by spacing out your updates, you’ll be able to hit a wider range of your followers.

  (This is probably a good time to check whether your social media scheduling tool offers automatic resharing of your content.)

  Now, social media automation isn’t a substitute for consistently creating great new content, of course, but it does give your existing evergreen content an even  better  opportunity to shine.

  Win with quality, get things DONE with resharing  It’s noisy out there. The law of diminishing returns — as well as declining social reach — means that a lot of what you do on social media can feel like shouting into the void.

  And there’s not a huge ROI for shouting into voids these days.

  Responsible resharing is an important part of your overall content marketing strategy. As long as you keep your content fresh, create new quality content regularly, and talk to your fans  where and when they’re most active , chances are people won’t see the same thing twice. The data shows you’ll get more clicks, more traffic, and better SEO results — not a bad bonus to that whole “saving lots of time” thing.

    Sign up for The Moz Top 10 , a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://bit.ly/2v1RsPQ

#blogpower #linkbuilding #lagunabeachseo #bestlocalseo #contentwriting #digitalmarketing #smallbusinessmarketing #internetmarketing #articlewriting #seo

[maryhare96]

Learning to Re-Share: 4 Strategies to Renew, Refresh, and Recycle Content for Bigger Reach

Posted by jcar7

In the nearly three years the MeetEdgar blog went live, we’ve published more than 250 posts, written over 300,000 words, searched for hundreds of .gifs, and used our own tool to share our content 2,600 times to over 70,000 fans on social media.

After all that work, it seems silly to share a post just once. Nobody crumples up an oil painting and chucks it in the trash after it’s been seen one time — and the same goes for your content.

You’ve already created an "art gallery" for your posts. Resharing your content just lets the masses know what you've got on display. Even if hundreds or thousands of people have seen it all before, there’s always someone new to your content.

In a social media landscape that’s constantly changing, building a solid foundation of evergreen content that can be shared and shared again should be a key part of your social media strategy.

Otherwise, your art gallery is just another building in the city.

But wait… aren’t we supposed to be writing fresh content?

Yes! One of the biggest misconceptions about resharing is that it's a spammy tactic. This is just not true — provided that you’re resharing responsibly. We’ll explain how to do that in just a moment.

Resharing actually does double-duty for your brand. It not only gets the content that you spent your valuable time creating in front of more eyeballs (and at optimal times, if you want to get fancy), it also frees you up to have more authentic, real-time social interactions that drive people to your site from social media — since you’ve got content going out no matter what.

Did we mention that resharing is good for SEO? Moz Blog readers know that the more people engage with a post, the better your blog or site looks to search engines. And that’s only one facet of the overall SEO boost (and traffic boost!) resharers can see.

How resharing impacts SEO

Big brands are probably the most prolific content resharers. Heck, they don’t even think twice about it:

BuzzFeed is a perfect example of the value of repeating social updates, because they don’t necessarily NEED to.

So why do they do it anyway? Because it gets results.

Social sharing alone has an impact on SEO, but social engagement is really where it’s at. Quality content is totally worth the up-front time and cost, but only if it gets engagement! You up your chances of engagement with your content if you simply up your content’s exposure. That’s what resharing does awesomely.

With literally zero tweaks to the content itself, BuzzFeed made each of those social posts above double in value. Chances are, the people who saw these posts the first time they were shared are not the same people who saw them when they were reshared.

But simply resharing social posts isn’t the only way to get more engagement with your content. This post covers how companies large and small do resharing right, and highlights some of the best time-saving content strategies you can implement for your brand right now.

1 - Start at the source: Give old posts a new look

Lots has changed in five years — the world got three new Fast & Furious movies and LKR Social Media transformed from a consulting service into social media automation software.

We’ve done the math: three months is one Internet year and five years is basically another Internet epoch. (This may be a slight exaggeration.) So when we transferred some of our founder’s older evergreen blog posts to the new MeetEdgar blog, we took stock of which of those posts had picked up the most organic traffic.

One thing that hadn’t changed in five years? A blog post about how Vin Diesel was winning the social media game was still insanely popular with our readers:

Writing blog posts with an eye toward making them as evergreen as possible is one of the smartest, most time-saving-est content marketing strategies out there.

There weren’t a ton of tweaks to make, but we gave this popular post some love since so many people were finding it. We pepped up the headline, did a grammar and content rundown, refreshed links and images, updated social share buttons, and added more timely content. The whole process took less time than writing a brand new post, and we got to share it with tens of thousands of followers who hadn’t seen it when it was originally published.

So... check your metrics! Which evergreen posts have performed the best over time? Which have lots of awesome organic traffic? Make a list, do a content audit, and start updating!

2 - Find your social sharing "sweet spot" by repackaging your content

When you read studies that say many social media users reshare social posts without ever clicking through to the content itself… it can be a little disheartening.

Okay, a LOT disheartening.

You’ve probably spent tons of time creating your content, and the thought that it’s not getting read NEARLY as often as it could be is a recipe for content marketing burnout. (We’ve all been there.)

But it’s not all for naught — you might just need to experiment until you find the “sweet spot” that gets people to read and share. One way to do that is to simply repackage content you’ve already written.

The tried-and-true “best of” post offers a reprieve from the content-creation grind while still delivering tons of value to your fans and readers.

Repackaging is best when it reframes your content with a new focus — like rounding up similar posts based on a theme. (You can do this in reverse, too, and turn one great post into a bunch of fresh content to then share and reshare!)

If you can get people to your site, a "best of" post encourages readers to stay longer as they click links for the different articles you’ve gathered up, and engage with content they may never have thought to look up separately.

Most fun of all, you can repackage your content to target new or different subsets of your audience on social media. (More on that in the next section.)

3 - Social shake-up: Reaching and testing with different audiences

“What if the same person recognizes something that I’ve already posted in the past?” you might be asking right about now. “I don’t want to annoy my followers! I don’t want to be spammy!”

Forget about people resharing social posts without reading the content behind the links — most people don’t see your social posts at all in the first place.

This is just one of those uncomfortable facts about the Internet, like how comment sections are always a minefield of awful, and how everyone loves a good startled cat .gif.

That doesn’t mean you should repeat yourself, word-for-word, all the time. Chances are, you have more than one type of reader or customer, so it’s important not just to vary your content, but also to vary how you share it on social media.

Savvy marketers are all over this tactic, marketing two sides (or more) of the same coin. Here are a couple of examples of social sharing images from a Mixpanel blog post:

Option A

Option B

Both Option A and Option B go to the same content, but one highlights a particularly juicy stat (problem statement: “97% of users churn”) and the other hits the viewer with an intriguing subheader (solution statement: “behavior-based messaging”). In this way, Mixpanel can find out what pulls in the most readers and tweak and promote that message as needed.

Pull a cool anecdote from your post or highlight a different stat that gets people excited. It can be as easy as changing up the descriptions of your posts or just using different images. There’s so much to test and try out — all using the same post.

4 - Automate, automate, automate

Remember, your best posts are only as good as the engagement they get. That fact, however, doesn’t mean you have to keep manually resharing them on social media day in and day out.

Unless, of course, you’re into that boring busywork thing.

Automating the whole process of resharing evergreen content saves tons of time while keeping your brand personality intact. It also frees you up to have real-time interactions with your fans on social media, brainstorm new post ideas, or just go for a walk, and it solves the time crunch and the hassle of manually re-scheduling posts, while actually showcasing more of your posts across the massive social media landscape. Just by spacing out your updates, you’ll be able to hit a wider range of your followers.

(This is probably a good time to check whether your social media scheduling tool offers automatic resharing of your content.)

Now, social media automation isn’t a substitute for consistently creating great new content, of course, but it does give your existing evergreen content an even better opportunity to shine.

Win with quality, get things DONE with resharing

It’s noisy out there. The law of diminishing returns — as well as declining social reach — means that a lot of what you do on social media can feel like shouting into the void.

And there’s not a huge ROI for shouting into voids these days.

Responsible resharing is an important part of your overall content marketing strategy. As long as you keep your content fresh, create new quality content regularly, and talk to your fans where and when they’re most active, chances are people won’t see the same thing twice. The data shows you’ll get more clicks, more traffic, and better SEO results — not a bad bonus to that whole “saving lots of time” thing.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

http://ift.tt/2vhJYJD