Open Source Social Networking

Since it seems everyone these days wants to roll your own social network, I would like to present some open source social networking software to you.

Insoshi - open source social networking platform. Activity feed, Personal profiles with photo upload and comment walls, Internal messaging system with read/replied/trashed messages, Contacts list, Blogs with comments, Discussion forum, Search for profiles, forums, blogs, Admin panel with site preferences, option for email verification and activity notifications.

PhpIzabi - open source social networking platform: Internal messages system, Forums, Chatrooms, Files sharing, Customizable profile, Personal Gallery, Personal Blog, User settings panel, Contacts list, Contacts categorization, Contacts management, Newsletter, Horoscope, Profile / pictures rating, Users comments, Events calendar, Personal events, multilanguage, mass mail, tell a friend, invite a friend, advanced search, contact us system, bookmark link,..

Elgg - the open source social networking platform, started in 2004. Was designed to allow people to easily connect and share resources. Built on LAMP, aimed primarily at education. Features: Blogging, Social networking, File repositories for individuals, Podcast support, Full access controls, Supports tagging, User profiles, Full RSS support, RSS aggregator, Create communities, Collaborative community blogs, Create ''friends'' networks, Import content, Multilingual, Branding/customisation.

Pligg - (Digg-like) visitors can submit resources for ranking. Also, trackback support, automatic title discovery, RSS import functionality.

Akarru - is a social bookmarking engine, is used to build social bookmarkings sites. Users posts links and promote links using voting system.

User Generated Content And SEO

User Generated Content, especially, high-quality User Generated Content (UGC) is what we all need for successful organic SEO. UGC brings us healthy traffic, low level 'long tail' keywords, free promo. For that we can hire freelance copywriter, buy ready-to-fly articles on any theme, put our boat on water of 'dofollow' fashion, do anything just to invite hungry users to generate that holly USG. Recent study shows 58% of the users, 18-25 years old, browse to create their own content.

Well, you made very appealing nice site and users come to leave you its raw user content 2 tons everyday. From SEO point of view you can't ask them to write search engine optimized text with bold keywords, but you can rule them into right direction with a smart category listing. So, Topically Focused Content is our next hero.

Some say UGC will destroy SEO. I don't think so, because the connective filament from you to UGC is still Search Engine querie.

Viva La Open Source Music!

Music is over. Viva la Open Source Music!

Thats cool to watch the musical open source revolution. I have nothing to tell. Please, read impressive interviews about future of music business by Trent Reznor and David Byrne. Absolutely nice reading.

Social Bookmarking Statistics

What about Social Bookmarking Statistics (SBS) of your site? How popular is your site and can you tell how many times pages of your domain were bookmarked by visitors with a help of Social Bookmarking Services, such as del.icio.us, digg, reddit, simpy, furl or stumbleupon and others?

For my recent SEO project site with 20.000+ pages I wanted to get Social Bookmarking Statistics. I started with a simple queries, kind of http://digg.com/search?section=all&s=www.mysite.com just to see how many times site was digged. Besides I'm tired, that approach showed that the stats, which popular social boookmarking services generate, has dynamical unconsistent human behaviour and can't be used as the foundation of a solid practical analysis.

Soon I googled resources which try to be all-in-one SBS aggregators:

• popuri.us
• socialmeter
• xinureturns

Unfortunately no one delivers correct results.