Via my Twitter account today I ran across an article on Mashable about how you can ‘Measure’ a person’s influence online.  It was a good article, but what really stuck out to me was the comment the author, Micah Baldwin, said at the end:

…since Technorati’s Authority Rank stopped consistently updating (read: lost the trust of bloggers), there hasn’t been a single tool for measuring the potential online influence of an individual blogger. Until that happens, the best measure is getting recommendations from friends.  After all, there is nothing that will beat a simple recommendation for uncovering influential people both online and offline.

And I really couldn’t agree more with him. One of the things that I do anytime I need to know something is to reach out to others around me who I think might know the answer. If by chance they don’t, 9 out of 10 times they know someone who does. Plus contrary to what you might think, people really do like helping other people. Especially across the internet.

So in essence the measure of someone’s influence online or offline is dependent upon whether or not you ask them for help. So maybe you should take some time today to make someone influential.

SEO Plug-ins

• All-in-One SEO Pack – It seems like this is pretty much the industry standard for SEO plug-ins. It handles titles, meta, keywords, etc. And allows you to adjust them on each individual entry.
• Excerpt Editor – This will automatically create an excerpt from the post and/or page. This is important for any themes that use exceprts like Thesis. Excerpts help with SEO and minimizing duplicant content on archive pages.
• SEO Smart Links – This will automatically create contextual links within your content to either appropariate pages or to a list of keywords and pages that you create.

Social Networking Plug-ins

• Sociable – Best looking “share this” plug-in.
• Wordbook – post your blog updates onto your Facebook account.
• Twitter Tools – post a link to your recent blog post on your twitter account.

Content Plugins

• Post-Plugin Library and its accompanying plug-ins – This will allow you to post a list of recent posts, similar posts, and/ or popular posts at the end of your posts or pages. It also allows you to insert a list where you want it.
• Widget Logic – Controls which widgets show up where based on WP’s conditional tags.
• WP Greet Box – Show a message at the top of your page depending upon which site the user is coming from. Ask a Delicious user to add to their account, or a Google user to add to subscribe to your feed. This is similar to the “What would Seth Godin do” plug-in but better in my opinion.
• Zemanta – When you’re writing your posts, this plug-in sits next to the box and offers up images and links that you could link to. Drag and drop an image in or click to add links.

Administrative Plugins

• WP-CMS Post Control – This plugin allows you to hide unwanted items on your write pages for both posts and pages. Cleans things up a bit and keeps your writers, authors, etc. focused on the things you need them to fill out.  (Example: I hide everything except the SEO stuff they need to fill out.)
• Google XML Sitemaps – This will automaticaly build your sitemaps out for you and submit them to Google.

That’s my list of useful plug-ins. And I am always adding new ones and testing them out. They have to be easy to use, easy to set up and easy to understand.

What are some of the plug-ins that you’ve found most useful?

What is Twitter:

Directly from their home page, “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”

More About Twitter:

• It is referred to as micro-blogging and has a simple interface that allows you to answer that questions in 140 characters or less. – Keeps things short, sweet and to the point.
• You can follow people and be followed so that you can see the ‘updates’ of other people that you choose. – You see what you want to see.
• You can do your updates via cell phone, the website or other tools that the community has created. – Their open-source API has people creating great applications to work hand-in-hand with Twitter.

Why Should You Be on Twitter:

• Because it is a sesspool of information sharing.
• It is a way to share links to your sites and/or content.
• It is a way to get ideas and get feedback.
• It is a way to solve problems.
• It is a viral playground.

But don’t take my word for it. SearchEngineGuide.com author, Jennifer Laycock was asked, “If your goal is to grow a small business online, and you had time for only one social networking / social media site, which would you choose and why?”

And I am completely stoked about it. It looks like there are three people from three major US cities, New York, Austin and Portland, who are going to be blogging on NerdAbout.com about anything geeky. Their tag line on the site says, “Nerd News. Arts, Events & Community. Thinking locally, geek globally.” Do you see that? Geek globally. I believe my little dizzy geek self just developed a website crush.

Don’t even get me started about the ninja action in flash.

From what I can see right now there isn’t a ton of content or information on the site, but they do have a Twitter account that I started to follow: http://twitter.com/nerdabout

And the image above shows the beginning of a Robot Quiz that they have on their site too. Did you know that the “Wakamaru” robot was created in Japan by the Mitsubishi company for companionship? I sure as heck didn’t know that. Seems a little bit odd to me, but whatever floats your boat. It did say though that it hasn’t been for sale since 2005.

Overall NerdAbout.com looks like it will be something I check back in on. I really do wish that they had some widgets though that you could grab. Maybe I will shoot them an email or a comment and let them know. Because that would be a great gadget to include in the sidebar of the Random category over here on DizzyGeek.