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Course website for USC Online Communities (APOC) CMGT 538
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Search Engine Optimization Overview

Mar 29, 2010

Please find slides from our Search Engine Optimization class.

Are Social Networks Creeping in on Search Territories?

Mar 25, 2010

The concept of users adjusting their behavior, which results in an increase of traffic being driven from Social Networking sites (most notably through the “stream” on Facebook or Twitter) has recently been popping up all of the place.

Gigya recently released a case study to show some real life examples of companies who are seeing a lift in traffic from Social channels, some at the cost of Search Engines, like Google.

API’s, Mashups and Content

Mar 14, 2010

This class was focused on Content generation and focused in on the use of APIs and Mashups. We discussed types of content: professional content, semi-professional content, user generated content (user gen) and machine generated content (APIs were tossed into this last bucket). During the discussion on APIs we spoke about some of the early leaders like Ebay and Amazon and then went into current trends, authentication models (Facebook, Google OpenID, and more). Finally, the class broke out into groups and created their own Mashup / web service using a few APIs.

Additional readings:

Great  New York Times Article that discusses trends in Hyperlocal news and spends some time with Adrian Holovaty, the founder of Everyblock and Chicagocrime.org, which was an early example of a Mashup, looking at crime data by neighborhood in Chicago, you can read more about that here from a 2005 NY Times article.

ProgramableWeb’s directory for APIs – great starting place if you are considering creating your own Mashup.  List is at 1,600+ as of March, 2010.

Language Overview

Jan 24, 2010

Below is the peer presentation which covered RSS readers (example used was Google Reader) and RSS feeds (example used was Feed Burner and Twitter Feeds).


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Course Overview and History of the Internet

Jan 15, 2010

Please find the powerpoint deck from class one, 1/13/10 here:

Link to download the Class Presentation – Course Overview / History of the Internet

Video #1, History of the Internet

Video #2, Social Media Revolution