SEO Werkt!

We’ve already seen a number of ways to connect physical objects to the digital world, by attaching QR code stickers or assigning items a unique digital identity. Now Finnish app Grafetee aims to provide a platform to bookmark real-world locations for later reference and share them with friends.

The free app is available to both iOS and Android smartphone users, who can build their own social feed of locations they have tagged with information – whether a good spot for food or drink, a potential house on the market or a place which holds special memories. This feed can only be seen by users’ contacts, although separate public feeds can also be created, which share location information with the entire Grafetee community. The app also offers feeds from business, which can act as a store locator or a recommended locations list. For users worried about their likes being monitored by third parties, registration is not necessary and the app can be used anonymously. For those who want to share their information, Grafetee activity can be reposted onto a linked Facebook account.

Although marketed as a social network revolving around real-world locations, it is possible that Grafetee could be used to post crime eyewitnesses, encourage citizen journalism or quickly get across information to emergency services on the ground. One to keep an eye on?

Website: www.grafetee.com
Contact: bizdev@grafetee.com

Spotted by: John Greene

Pocket, the bookmarking app for web, Android, and iOs formerly known as “Read it Later”, has raised a $5 million second funding round led by Foundation Capital with participation from Baseline Ventures and Google Ventures.

Pocket’s founder, Nate Weiner, told me that millions of people are emailing and ‘favoriting’ content to read later. He views this population — myself included — as the startup’s primary competition, as these users don’t realize there’s a better way. Pocket makes it easy for anyone to bookmark content, including tweets, videos, news articles, recipes, and things to buy, without having to send an email or open dozens of browser tabs.

Eventually, the startup hopes to make money by gleaning insights from the data it is collecting about content discovery and user behavior.”The type of content that you view at night on your iPad is ultimately very different from what you view on your phone during a commute,” Weiner explained. “We think we can do a lot with that knowledge.”

Today, users are saving nearly one million items per day using Pocket. Adoption has skyrocketed since the founders made the decision not to integrate with paid mobile apps several months ago. Pocket is integrated in more than 350 of the most popular free apps on Android and iOs, including Flipboard, Twitter, and Zite.

Weiner told me that the first iteration of the app, Read it Later, was just a “boring old list” that did not reflect the web, “a bright, colorful, imagery-filled place.” The funding will be used to continue the app’s redesign, expand to more devices and platforms, and double down on relationships with content partners.

“We wanted to make an experience that lets content visually shine,” Weiner said. Pocket brings us the funding news shortly after announcing its redesign and makeover this spring.

Filed under: VentureBeat

• Does any one know a good bookmark manager for Chrome?
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More »

Readability, one of our favorite bookmark and read later apps, just updated with a big speed boost, some tweaks to the UI, and new tools to discover interesting articles. More »

When was the last time you compiled a resource list for your readers?

Tom Ewer recently wrote up his own ultimate resource list for readers of his blog, titled 100 Blogs You Need in Your Life. (And ProBlogger came in at number 2! Thanks, Tom!)

If you look at the response from his readers, you’ll note the sense of excitement that this post generated. Words like love, awesome, absolutely amazing, and cool come up again and again in the comments. Readers are bookmarking the list and immediately (it seems) going to check out the recommended sites.

Resource lists like this really are valuable for readers. But if you’re putting together a resource list, you’ll want to think hard about how you do it. To my mind, there are five key factors that make or break a resource list.

1. Size

This post is a whopper—100 resources is a lot. It does make the list epic, and link-worthy, but it also works because the links aren’t time-limited. These resources will be as good in eight months as they are today, so readers can bookmark the list and come back to it again and again.

A list of 100 daily deals, for example, is probably less bookmarkable, since it’ll be useless by tomorrow. In deciding on a length for your resource list, look at the longevity of the content as well as its sharability. The greater the longevity of your resource, the more repeat traffic it’ll generate from those who do bookmark it.

2. Quality

At the beginning of the post, Tom explains that the list is “a labor of love”. Your resource list should reflect the same degree of care for your readers.

Many lists are put together simply for the sake of links, but they’ll gain fewer initial links—and less repeat visits—if the quality isn’t up to scratch. I often find the best resource lists are those that list “plugins that have saved my site” or “sites that helped me make my first online paycheque”—tools and services that the author has used herself, and can speak intelligently on.

Don’t just jam well-regarded resources together into a post. If you can give your own personal take on the resources you’re listing, your readers will relate, and appreciate the list all the more.

3. Layout

Tom’s presented his list in an easy-to-use, completely sortable table. This makes it really easy for readers to use the content, and undoubtedly encourages readers to use the post more than if he’d just provided an unsortable bullet list.

It’s the little things like this that really make your resource extra-valuable for readers. Think about the usability of your list, from the perspective of your readers, as you’re preparing it for publication.

4. Extras

You’ll notice that Tom asks readers to mention any other sites they feel he should have added. This tactic helps to make the resource even more valuable. Once dedicated readers have checked out every link in the table, they can start scouring the comments for good resources that didn’t make the cut.

This technique also ensures Tom has additional resources to consider for next year, gives him insight into the other information his readers access and value on a regular basis, and may help him to shape things like his content strategy or brand position going forward. Asking readers to contribute their own links is a great way to provide—and gain—extra value from your resource post.

5. Iteration

This post is a repeat of a resource list that was compiled almost six months before. This is a great advantage to these kinds of posts—especially if they’re as epic as Tom’s list.

We do the same thing with Jade Craven’s Bloggers to Watch posts, which she compiles every year for ProBlogger. Run your updated resource post regularly—at an appropriate interval—and your readers will likely refer to the previous ones as well as bookmarking the most recent one. They may even come to look forward to your new resource post each quarter, six months, or year.

Have you created resource posts for your blog’s readers? What’s worked for you—and what hasn’t? Add tips from your own experience in the comments—we’d love to learn how you make resource posts work.

Originally at: Blog Tips at ProBlogger

Build a Quality Resource List for Your Blog

It was run close by John Willshire’s excellent post but in the end, the winner of Post Of The Month for May 2012 was Heidi Hackemer’s deck for the Swedish APG on Planning, Creativity & Planning For Creative Campaigns. So well done Heidi. You get the props of your blogging peers and are entered into the Hall Of Fame. Thanks everyone for your nominations and votes this month, and don’t forget to bookmark your good reads for nominating next month.

The popular coupon site RetailMeNot launched its mobile site earlier this year and today, the company is launching its first native app for iOS. The new app allows users who don’t like to pay full price to find online and in-store coupons. Users get access to curated lists of popular coupons and “hot deals.” They can also bookmark coupons for what the company calls “time-shift shopping.” According to the company’s own data, its site already gets about 17% of its traffic from mobile users. Its mobile channel, says the company’s CEO Cotter Cunnigham, is growing “by 200% every month year-over-year.”

Despite the company’s renewed emphasis on mobile, the app doesn’t allow you to discover coupons around you. Maybe that will come in a later version, but given that RetailMeNot itself argues that 35% of adults report that they are more inclined to make a purchase in a brick-and-mortar store when they have a coupon in hand, this feels like an odd omission. The app itself, though, is very well designed and makes it easy to find coupons thanks to its predictive search feature.

The company stresses that this is just its first foray into native mobile apps and that it plans to significantly improve its app with new features in the near future. Earlier this year, as our own Josh Constine reported, RetailMeNot announced that it would soon allow users to integrate their credit card information with their coupons. Instead of having to use offline coupons, users who choose to opt in to this feature will soon be able to simply select the coupons they want to use online or on the go and head to a store without having to print anything or show their virtual coupon. The coupon will then be applied silently at checkout. To offer this service, RetailMeNot partnered with CardSpring. For the time being, though, this service remains in beta and isn’t integrated into the mobile app yet.

To celebrate today’s release, RetailMeNot also commissioned a study that looked at how U.S. consumers use their mobile phones to shop. Judging from the results of this study, there is still quite some room left for mobile coupons to grow. Only about one in five respondents, for example, said that they have used a coupon they found using their mobile device while shopping in-store. One in seven, however, said that they have made an online purchase from their mobile device while shopping in a physical store because they found a better price online.

Web-clipping and bookmarking tool Clipboard is dressing up in its best new features and making a grand public debut today. The site, which has been invite-only since it launched in October, is finally open to anyone who wants to sign up. It is also introducing a new Boards feature, which lumps items into collections by tags, as well as a few other new tweaks.

Clipboard lets you bookmark, collect, organize, and share web-clippings. It’s not limited to images — it clips text, audio, animations, and fully formatted sections of webpages with links intact. You can keep your clippings private and use it as a self-organization tool, Evernote and Delicious style, or share them with a select group or the world. You can also follow other users and checkout their public clips.

A Pinterest Board (left) and a Clipboard Board (right).

Though Clipboard founder Gary Flake bristles at the comparison, his baby obviously has a lot in common with visual bookmarking juggernaut Pinterest. There’s the basic clipping concept, the image-heavy irregular-grid layout, and the buttons to like or re-share a bookmark. Even the star new feature, Boards, begs a comparison to Pinterest’s Boards, what with the exact same name and almost identical design (pictured right).

But comparisons are beside the point. Clipboard takes what Pinterest does well and expands on it, improves it, and I think infuses it with a new level of usefulness that is missing from the shallow, all-social site.

Computer scientist Flake has thought extensively about what he calls the “sharing landscape,” coming at it from the uniquely cerebral background you’d expect from a former technical fellow at Microsoft. He’s carefully considered the other major players and the different motivations of their user bases.

“What you put on Facebook is to a great extent what you want other people to think about you. What you put on Pinterest is more about your aspirations,” said Flake. “Clipboard is much more about getting stuff done. The focus of our DNA is first and foremost to be good for one user, and then be social, and then be aspirational.”

Clipboard accomplishes this by having more useful content than Pinterest. Where a Pin might show a pretty image of a cake recipe, you still have to click through to get that list of ingredients. Clipboard displays the full recipe along with any relevant in-text links. It also shifts the focus from exhibitionism to useful tool by being private-by-default with social options instead of the other way around.

“We respect users’ privacy more than anything else,” said Flake. “You own the data and you are lending it to us. It’s your stuff, not ours.”

Click to enlarge

Flake was kind enough to sketch up this awesome chart (right) showing where Clipboard falls in the ecosystem of sharing and clipping tools (we love it when founders draw diagrams for us). It is ambitious, able to collect complex data instead of just images, and works as a solo or a social sharing tool.

Currently, Clipboard is just focused on wooing new users and getting established, but Flake has something rare in Silicon Valley: a plan to monetize his product that isn’t based on selling the company. One option is to take “the intent and the context and how that’s presented and turn that into a similar alignment of interest.” That means Clipboard could one day use your data to serve you with offers, products, or ads that are right up your alley. Other possibilities Flake is considering are an enterprise product and revenue sharing.

The young company has already rolled up a couple of competitors, Amplify and Clipmarks, but faces stiff competition from the revived Delicious and Snip.it. Clipboard has received funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Betaworks, Index Ventures, CrunchFund, SV Angel, First Round Capital, and others.

Filed under: social, VentureBeat

For those who want the old style of Bitly, this javascrpt still works for me. Copy it and past it into a toolbar bookmark in Firefox, or the equivalent in other browsers.

javascript:var%20e=document.createElement('script');e.setAttribute('language','javascript');e.setAttribute('src','//bitly.com/bookmarklet/load.js');document.body.appendChild(e);void(0);

When you click this while on a page, you’ll get a pop-up window with a shortened URL, like this:

Hitting the share button leads to saving the Bitly and posting the text and short URL to Twitter.