Foot In Mouth Disease, Content Writing for the People

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?