Foot In Mouth Disease, Content Writing for the People

Vintage handmade Envelope

Originally uploaded by contentwritingadvice

I know this is a bit off topic, but my fiance made these handmade hand crafted envelopes from old books. I was so impressed I just had to post about it!
Here’s here etsy store for more
handcrafted envelopes

Dead Twitter Whale

Originally uploaded by contentwritingadvice

Twitter Is Over Capacity!
Too Many Tweets!

Unfortunately, this has become more than just an annoyance. Twitter is a microblogging platform that has really transformed the game for social sites, and it has raised the Ante in peoples level of participation online.
This type of lifestreaming site takes a lot of monitoring by it’s community to keep up with the current trend setters and tweeters. With the constant disruptions nearly every single day for the past weeks, to the tweeter this seems like an eternity.
Viable Twitter Alternatives:
Just in the past 3 weeks Plurk.com has gone from obscurity to a rapidly developing platform with a growing community. It remains to be seen if the “noise” of the random plurks will discourage more serious users, but already there are many large SEO names in the game. It may already be too late for Twitter…

Thoughts on the strength of DMOZ? If you can get a DMOZ link it’s helpful, but there’s no special “DMOZ boost” or anything like that. - Matt Cutts

Google’s Webmaster chat is a blitz of information from Google. The web ex interface is displaying different demonstrations, while the Question and Answer section is wit with several hundred rapid fire questions that are answered by a variety of Googlers. You should keep your eyes and ears out for the next one as there are OODLES of information given out in the course of an hour.

I think a very helpful presentation came from Jonathan Simon a Googler from Webmaster Chat: He was talking about different items that can cause you to drop in rankings

• Duplicate content: rule of thumb - 1 url and only 1 url for each page
• syndication without credits back to you
• Having your site scraped and your content showing on spam sites
• Server issues can impact site, if the server is down when Google bot rolls round, you can have trouble
  
• Major configuration changes
• Competition Improved their site or linking
• Change in search trends
• Any changes that violate guidelines by you or your marketers

He was of course kind enough to recommend some courses of action to take when your rankings dip.

1. File a Reconsideration
2. Post to Webmaster help Chat
3. Add fresh unique content
4. Develop Tools, mashups, gadgets, subscribed links
5. Make sure your site is Geo- targeted * Go to your webmaster tools, then go to the tools section. Then add your business to Local business center

Again, if you can get into the next webmaster chat- it is really worth your time!

Yahoo’s Secret Weapon

Originally uploaded by contentwritingadvice

Yahoo! is using every possible weapon available to keep it’s independance from Microsoft. Recently, at their Search Monkey Development Party they launched a new offensive with a NEW STRATEGY!!!

BEER!

I personally commend Yahoo! on their innovation…now if they could just vend them to me when I search Yahoo! ….

Back to basics:

It’s been a while since I went back to the fundamentals on my blog and talked about certain principles of content writing that I find to be fundamental advice for every site builder to follow.

Be Centered:

Kung Fu is about finding your center…I just have very large center- Sammo Hung

Like kung fu, your website is something that should be built over time, with patience and dedication. Find that central theme to keep your site tied together and keep practicing the fundamentals. Use your header tags properly, create proper meta titles and descriptions, and actually use your keywords correctly in context on the page.

I checked on my twtter this morning to find that Rae Hoffman and Lisa Barone were going at it tooth and nail over the concept of “Live Blogging” and it’s impact on conference attendance and value. If you aren’t clear, live bloggin is done by conference attendees who have their laptops going and are transcribing and interpretting the panel into a blog post. They also link up mentioned resources the speakers throw out.

Sugar Rae came out in full force against Live blogging conferences for several reasons.

I don’t think live bloggers should be allowed - why pay for a conf if you can get me transcribed for free? It also hurts quality of information - earlier days, speakers gave away more goods because it was shared with less people they give away less now, because you’re blogging it to the world… - Rae Hoffman

On the other hand, Lisa Barone wonders what the fuss is about, it’s just extended coverage.

What’s the difference between liveblogging and what WebProNews does? Press has always been allowed into shows - Lisa Barone

Having been to SES New York, I beleive that anyone worth their SEO salt will attend conferences regardless of live blogging because of the following reasons:

1. The face to face time and opportunity to participate in the Q&A portion of the conference
2. Live blogging is not totally accurate, as it is from one perspective and they may interpret something differently
3. Live bloggers don’t cover all panels
4. Live bloggers add the links to the resources and people mentioned by the speaker- As an attendee, my notes were sparse in comparison
5. I posted a blog article based off a SES panel a few days later…so since Bloggers post articles after hearing conferences, so should all bloggers be banned from conferences too?
6. You’re at the conference to speak to the public, if you didn’t want that info to go out into the world, then why would you go speak in the first place?

“You add value to the freeloaders at home - NOT paying conference attendees or speakers - Rae Hoffman

As a “freeloader” and as a conference attendee, I say Freedom of the press! The better the flow of information from cnferences to a broader audience, the more interested they are in getting into those conferences!

What do you say, free loaders? Should live blogging be banned or should the information flow?

I saw an article that was Twittered by oilman this morning, about the BBC creating a facebook application that stole information from other users accounts. I know that it may be a good idea to get this issue fixed, but this information could EASILY be abused very rapidly,

We wrote an evil data mining application called Miner, which, if we wanted, could masquerade as a game, a test, or a joke of the day. It took us less than three hours.

This just reminds me of local TV stunts where they say “Look how easily we gained access to this nuclear silo. At 3:00 am the guard changes, and someone with 1.4 lbs. of c4 could kill 1 million people.”

I think it’s pretty irresponsible, but I don’t know…Am I over Reacting?

charter fails copy

Originally uploaded by contentwritingadvice

All today and yesterday my modem has been restting, and it’s been cutting me off. Well once it got back in play, I went to get some help from Charter… Here is what happened.

I asked if there were any service issues in my area and… my connection was closed due to network problems.

Myspace has become known by popular culture as one of the fore runners of the Social Media website, and here they are again breaking ground. Video technology and profliferation is getting bigger as bandwidth becomes more readily available and video technology becomes heaper, and more accessible. SightSPeed is bringing Video Mail to Myspace.
Myspace is also known as one of the more glitchy websites in popular use. Regular errors are almost completely expected…The question is…Will video mail make Myspace even more glitchy and slow?

read more | digg story

In the recent Google Webmaster Help Chat session, they presented a very thorough discussion of how to optimize your images.

We all know that Google’s Universal search is altering the way that users interct with Google’s search interface. Instead of just links to websites, media clips, images, audio clips, new articles, maps, book reviews, restaurant reviews and more are showing up in the search results. The question at hand is whether or not those results will supplement the traditional sites, or actually replace those in the rankings.

I had the opportunity to pose this question directly to Google, at both the SES conference in New York in March, and the Google Webmaster Help Chat session.

At the SES conference in New York Jack Menzel director of the universal search program stated that currently Universal searches are only showing up for a limited number of searches, and while there are several versions out it has not been decided. This seems to be the company line, as you can see how Susan Moskwa fielded my concern.

Q: Will Universal Image search results REPLACE links to sites? I.e. Instead of 10 sites plus images, will we see 1 image, 1 video and 8 sites?

Susan Moskwa - 9:43 am

A: We’re constantly testing what works well in our search results, including whether differenty types of universal results are “additive” or will replace one of the 10 web results. For now I’d say, stay tuned.

Why does that relate to image optimization? Because images and multimedia will be showing up in the organic search results more often, so it is critical that you optimize your pictures as best as possible. Use these Guidlines for your images to make sure gets them placed according to their relevant topics.

• Add Alt Text to your Images
• Don’t Stuff the keywords with anything other than an accurate description of your picture. Around 80-100 characters is a good rule of thumb
• Have relevant text surrounding your image
• provide quality photos, Google does pay attention to image quality when possible
• name the file something that relates to it’s subject matter

For Example if I were optimizing this image here of a Domo Kun Penguin, then I would place it close to the text that talks about the Domo Kun Penguin and apply the tips above.

Listen to the Domo Kun Penguin and your images will be optimized!

Update: I am please to say that Google sees my blog as #1 for Domo kun Penguin Now just waiting to see if the image gets picked up in image search as well. (for editoral purposes it should be noted that the picture and page were added to mixx.com and stumble upon).

This also reinforces my previous post about how quickly blogs are ranking for new keywords, since that post was made less than 24 hours and already is #1 for that keyword.