Link popularity and tools for link building

Link popularity and tools for link building
Link popularity and link quality are important because all search engines consider them as a part of their ranking algorithms, says Puneet Mehrotra ..

Downloadable Material from Writing for the Web 3.0
If you use a PC, the CD that comes with Writing for the Web 3.0 contains the items below. But Mac users can't use the CD; so the links below will give you access to the CD materials in the form of a long Word file and a PowerPoint slide show. Whether or not you own the book, I hope you find them useful. Download W4WCDItems.doc Download webwriting_intro.ppt

If you use a PC, the CD that comes with Writing for the Web 3.0 contains the items below. But Mac users can't use the CD; so the links below will give you access to the CD materials in the form of a long Word file and a PowerPoint slide show. Whether or not you own the book, I hope you find them useful.

Download W4WCDItems.doc

Download webwriting_intro.ppt

Content is King on a Website
Content can make or break a website. The power of the written word has been witnessed many a time. Products have become success stories, resumes trans ..

When governments don't understand the web
Between school and a book and other blogging, I've been neglecting this site. But this afternoon I posted an item on my H5N1 blog that has a lot to do with webwriters' problems: When governments don't understand the web.

Between school and a book and other blogging, I've been neglecting this site. But this afternoon I posted an item on my H5N1 blog that has a lot to do with webwriters' problems: When governments don't understand the web.

Housekeeping
Spam has become such a nuisance that I've had to require TypeKey authentication for comments. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Spam has become such a nuisance that I've had to require TypeKey authentication for comments. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Tips for a New Website
It\'s not easy not easy to promote your website or get sales initially. Following the tips given in this column can at least give your Web site ..

links for 2008-01-09
Six Creative Uses for RSS « eMarketing & New Media (tags: rss PR Marketing) GotVoice - Get the Message "GotVoice converts your cell, home and work voicemail to text messages and sends them to your phone and email" (tags: voice...

Hazards of Online Writing
Via the New York Times: E-Mail Is Easy to Write (and to Misread). Much of the article applies, I suspect, to web text as well. Excerpt (but read the whole article and follow the links): The advantage of a phone call or a drop-by over e-mail is clearly greatest when there is trouble at hand. But there are ways in which e-mail may subtly encourage such trouble in the first...

Via the New York Times: E-Mail Is Easy to Write (and to Misread). Much of the article applies, I suspect, to web text as well. Excerpt (but read the whole article and follow the links):

The advantage of a phone call or a drop-by over e-mail is clearly greatest when there is trouble at hand. But there are ways in which e-mail may subtly encourage such trouble in the first place.

This is becoming more apparent with the emergence of social neuroscience, the study of what happens in the brains of people as they interact. New findings have uncovered a design flaw at the interface where the brain encounters a computer screen: there are no online channels for the multiple signals the brain uses to calibrate emotions.

Face-to-face interaction, by contrast, is information-rich. We interpret what people say to us not only from their tone and facial expressions, but also from their body language and pacing, as well as their synchronization with what we do and say.

Most crucially, the brain’s social circuitry mimics in our neurons what’s happening in the other person’s brain, keeping us on the same wavelength emotionally. This neural dance creates an instant rapport that arises from an enormous number of parallel information processors, all working instantaneously and out of our awareness.

In contrast to a phone call or talking in person, e-mail can be emotionally impoverished when it comes to nonverbal messages that add nuance and valence to our words. The typed words are denuded of the rich emotional context we convey in person or over the phone.

The Revolution is Being Blogged
The upheaval in Burma is setting off tremors on the web as well. An online magazine run by Burmese exiles in Thailand, The Irrawaddy, is covering the protests and the junta's crackdown: High tech gets the truth out. Excerpt: Despite efforts by the reclusive regime to seal off its cowed people from the outside world, pictorial evidence of the crimes now being committed in the junta’s name is getting out,...

The upheaval in Burma is setting off tremors on the web as well. An online magazine run by Burmese exiles in Thailand, The Irrawaddy, is covering the protests and the junta's crackdown: High tech gets the truth out. Excerpt:

Despite efforts by the reclusive regime to seal off its cowed people from the outside world, pictorial evidence of the crimes now being committed in the junta’s name is getting out, thanks in large measure to the ingenuity of young people with the high-tech know-how to sidestep official attempts to gag them.

Worldwide news services such as the BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera are illustrating news reports with clandestine pictures and video footage that confirm the extent of the tragedy now unfolding in Burma.

The Irrawaddy is supplying a wide range of TV stations and publications with material obtained by its own sources.

“We are getting e-mailed pictures taken by mobile phones and digital cameras,” said The Irrawaddy’s Managing Editor, Kyaw Zwa Moe. “They are being sent in by people who hold private e-mail accounts, usually with Skype or Gmail. They don’t worry about the risk they are running—they just want the outside world to know what is happening.”

Many of Rangoon’s Internet shops remained closed on Thursday as the violent suppression of the peaceful demonstrations entered its second day. Traders Hotel in the city center, popular with foreign business people and journalists, was searched room by room for evidence of Internet use.

The worldwide demand for information about what is happening in Burma is so large that traffic on The Irrawaddy’s own Web site has more than doubled since the crackdown began.

More than 1 million hits were recorded on Wednesday, closing the site down for a while.

The Irrawaddy Web site has had 22 million hits so far this month, more than double recorded in a normal month.

Meanwhile, The Independent in the UK is quoting Burma's bloggers bearing witness to the unfolding revolution. For a link to some of those blogs ( mostly in Burmese, but the photos are eloquent), go to Rule of Lords.

Holiday Wishes
Christmas Eve is not yet here in North America, and when it arrives I'm going to be very busy. We have family and friends coming for dinner, so I won't have much chance to blog. But the first thing I'll do in the morning is to start a batch of pulla, a Finnish coffee bread that for decades has been our Christmas breakfast. You're welcome to make it yourself: Download...

Christmas Eve is not yet here in North America, and when it arrives I'm going to be very busy. We have family and friends coming for dinner, so I won't have much chance to blog.

But the first thing I'll do in the morning is to start a batch of pulla, a Finnish coffee bread that for decades has been our Christmas breakfast. You're welcome to make it yourself:

Download recipe_for_pulla.pdf

My old friend Merlin and I take this opportunity to wish you a very happy holiday and a new year full of surprises that make you laugh.

Naming Your Blog
Michael Weiss at Slate has an entertaining item: Don't drink the balloon juice: Good, bad, and ugly things to name your blog. He discusses mostly American political blogs, but it's actually a pretty serious question: What's the best thing to name your site? As a compulsive multiple blogger, I have to answer the question more often than I care to admit. Most of my sites have fairly flat-footed self-descriptive titles,...

Michael Weiss at Slate has an entertaining item: Don't drink the balloon juice: Good, bad, and ugly things to name your blog.

He discusses mostly American political blogs, but it's actually a pretty serious question: What's the best thing to name your site? As a compulsive multiple blogger, I have to answer the question more often than I care to admit.

Most of my sites have fairly flat-footed self-descriptive titles, like this one and Writing Fiction. When I started blogging avian flu, H5N1 was also pretty self-descriptive, but set slightly apart from other blogs that played variations on "bird flu," "avian influenza," and so on.

Without realizing what I was doing, I picked names that people tend to Google. Type "writing fiction" into Google Advanced search and my site comes up first out of a million hits. "Writing for the Web" is #7 out of 634,000. And "h5n1" is #5 out of 7,870,000 hits.

In a course blog, where only my students are likely to visit, I may use a flat-footed name or a cute one—in a course on storytelling for media, the blog is Raconteur. But I'm just as comfortable with a course blog named for the room the class meets in, like Cedar 224.

For a blog that I co-author with a teacher in China, the name is English Corner, a reference most Chinese students will understand because every campus and town has an "English corner" where students gather to practice their English on one another—and any native English speakers who wander by.

Now I'm getting interested in climate change, and recently started Homage to Arrhenius, an allusion to the Swedish scientist who first developed the theory about CO² as a greenhouse gas, back in the 1890s. This may be a little too cute.

And for another blog, created as a journal for the second edition of one of my books, I've chosen the flat-footed name Pioneers...since the book is titled Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia.

I'd be curious to know how bloggers visiting here chose the names for their sites. And can you point to any blogs that are either very well named, or horribly misnamed?

A Small Commercial Spot
You may have noticed a new link at the top of the right-hand column. It's a modest effort to promote The Tyee, a very good online journal published here in Vancouver. Full disclosure: I've been writing for The Tyee since 2003, and I take some pride in being a contributor. You may not agree with its point of view on all topics (I certainly don't), but you'll find it offers...

You may have noticed a new link at the top of the right-hand column. It's a modest effort to promote The Tyee, a very good online journal published here in Vancouver.

Full disclosure: I've been writing for The Tyee since 2003, and I take some pride in being a contributor. You may not agree with its point of view on all topics (I certainly don't), but you'll find it offers some of the very best online writing anywhere.

If you can add to its readership by becoming a free weekly subscriber to its newsletter, I'd take it as your vote of support for what I'm doing here.

A glimpse of Cuban blogging
Via the Vancouver Sun, a Reuters report: Cubans go to unusual lengths to post blogs. Excerpt: For Cuba's freelance bloggers, the difficulties in getting online can mean days, weeks and even months between one post and the next. "My access to Internet is very irregular," said the anonymous author of a blog called My island at midday. "Like all things in Cuba, one has to resolve the problem of scarcity...

Via the Vancouver Sun, a Reuters report: Cubans go to unusual lengths to post blogs. Excerpt:

For Cuba's freelance bloggers, the difficulties in getting online can mean days, weeks and even months between one post and the next.

"My access to Internet is very irregular," said the anonymous author of a blog called My island at midday.

"Like all things in Cuba, one has to resolve the problem of scarcity by hook or by crook, be it Internet or toilet paper," he told Reuters by e-mail.

The Cuban government blames the limited Internet access on the U.S. sanctions that bar Cuba from hooking up to underwater fiber-optic cables that run just 12 miles offshore, a highway of broadband communication.

Instead Cuba must use expensive satellite uplinks to connect to the Internet via countries such as Canada, Chile and Brazil.

Critics say that is just a pretext to maintain control over the Internet, a powerful tool that some believe could play the same role in spreading information in Cuba as the fax machine played in the dismantling of the Soviet Union.

The story has links to three or four blogs—all in Spanish. In general, they're pretty well designed. I understand Spanish fairly well, and these blogs' layouts make the text readable. Any comments on them?