Girl Talk and My Top 10 Mashups

I'm going to the Osheaga Music Festival in Montreal today and I'm really excited to see mashup artist Girl Talk, AKA Gregg Gillis. I learned about Girl Talk from the NFB production, R.I.P Remix Manifesto, a documentary on copyright and the digital mashup revolution. In a tribute to Girl Talk and mashup artists everywhere, here's a list of some of the great musical / video mashups that have caught my attention. Enjoy!

1. Girl Talk - Bounce That (Best Fan Video Ever)

2. Ernie and Bert - Gangsta Rap

3. Kutiman - Thru - YOU

4. Nirvana vs Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give Your Teen Spirit up  (WARNING: May include Rickrollling)

5. Say It's a Milli - Weezer vs. Lil' Wayne (Not Girl Talk Version)

6. Jay- Z and the Verve - Dirt Off Your Shoulder Bittersweet

7. JaydioHead - Minty Fresh Beats Album

8. David After Dentist After REMIX

9. Gnarls Barkley Crazy Theremin Jam (OK...so this isn't a mashup, but the theramin is too cool, so it's on the list)

10. B.U.D.D.Y. - Tripp vs. Weezer vs. Justice

Digg Dialogg: Marissa Mayer

As part of the Digg Dialogg series of interviews in which the questions are defined by the Digg user base, Digg founder Kevin Rose spoke to Google's Vice President, Search Products & User Experience,  Marissa Myer , covering questions ranging from how Google uses your data, to what she thinks about Microsoft's Bing search engine, and how it is impacting product development at Google.

View the complete list of questions and comments at Digg Dialogg: Marissa Myer

25 Words of Social Media Wisdom

Liz Strauss over at Successful Blog has created an awesome meme called The 25 Words of Social Media Wisdom Project. 

Here's my contribution:

Authenticity is the key to building trust and meaningful relationships between people and brands.  To quote Brogan, "Sell ideas. Sell relationships. Sell love." Pretty simple.

Image courtesy of Niall Crotty on Flickr

How To Get Awesome Links

Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz does a great job of describing how to build high quality links in this video, part of the Whiteboard Friday series:

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - How to Get Awesome Links from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

Why Do You Use Twitter?

TNS and The Conference Board just released the “Consumer Internet Barometer”, in which they try to answeer the question that I am so often asked, "Why do you tweet?".

According to their data, the primary reason Internet users use Twitter is to keep in touch with friends.

There was one other interesting nugget in the numbers. The second most popular reason for using Twitter among male users was to find news and keep updated, while females indicated that updating their status was the second most popular reason to use Twitter.

Check out the eMarketer article, Why People Use Twitter.

How to Start a Dance Party

The "unstoppable" power of one to move many. Thanks Mario for the link.

SearchEngineWatch: Link Building Tactics 101

Ron Jones, of Symetri Internet Marketing, posted a great article on SearchEngineWatch.com outlining the fundamentals of an effective link building campaign for search engine optimization.

In the first of a two part series, Ron Jones outlines some core tenets of link building for SEO:

1. Focus on link quality, over quantity. The context and source of a link defines the value of its impact on your ranking.
2. PR and digital press releases are great vehicles for generating high-quality inbound links.
3. Provide value to humans first.

This last point is something I've focused on for years as the nucleus of any successful SEO campaign.   It is humans, not bots or spiders, that will propel your site to the top of search engine rankings for a given keyword - because they are linking to your content, sharing it within their networks, and ultimately, clicking on your link in the search engine result pages because of the inherent value it offers to them.

Check out Part 1 of Link Building Tactics 101 to read Ron's article at SearchEngineWatch.com.

TEDTalks - Gordon Brown: Wiring a web for global good

TED Global 2009 happened last week in Oxford, London and Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of the UK, gave a pretty powerful keynote speech about the our responsibility in overcoming the challenges faced by a global society.

In one excerpt, he mentions the importance of the role that the web and emerging technologies will play in this:

"I believe there is a moral sense and a global ethic that commands attention from people of every religion and every faith, and people of no faith. But I think what's new is that we now have the capacity to communicate instantaneously across frontiers right across the world. We now have the capacity to find common ground with people we will never meet but who we will meet through the Internet and through all the modern means of communication, that we now have the capacity to organize and take collective action together to deal with the problem or an injustice that we want to deal with, and I believe that this makes this a unique age in human history, and it is the start of what I would call the creation of a truly global society. "

Powerful stuff.

It's OK to Cheat Sometimes

Mitch Joel over at Six Pixels of Separation posted a great reference today, pointing to a collection of cheat sheets and checklists for a myriad of different web marketing purposes, from design and coding references, to usability and SEO best practices: The Ultimate Digital Marketer's Reference.

Geeks everywhere should check out 30 Handy Cheat Sheets and Reference Guides for Web Professionals.

Thanks, Mitch.