Most relevant news, techniques and tools for authors looking to promote their books inexpensively off and online. We refer to and utilize many of the Guerrilla Marketing techniques and have created some of our own geared specifically to book promotion and marketing. Our website is the ground where we put into practice our marketing efforts. Membership is FREE.
Thursday, April 12, 2007
A Strategy for Relationship Linking
A Strategy for Relationship Linking The following post has been contributed by Liz Strauss from Successful Blog. Blogging is more than writing and sharing information with the masses. Publishing a post only starts the heartbeat of growing blog. Yaro Starak says Don’t Be An Insular Blogger, never linking to or talking about other bloggers. Mike Sansone can be heard repeating [...]
What Bloggers Can Learn From Focused Blogs Today’s guest post is from Chris Garrett from chrisg.com. My last two posts at ProBlogger focused on two successful individual bloggers, Darren Rowse and Robert Scoble. While we can learn a great deal from observing individual people, for this post I am going to look at examples of a particular type of blog; the Focused Niche [...]
The Importance of Letting A Good Post Wait This article was written by Glen Stansberry of LifeDev (feed). Check out LifeDev if you want more ways to be creative and efficient with your writing. Growing a readership is something that takes hard work and a little luck. Sure, sites like Digg and Reddit can greatly expand your readership overnight, but it’s really [...]
Finding Advertisers for Your Blog Alistair asks - ‘Having a niche blog means that I will never have the same amount of visitors as some of the larger technology/media blogs. This means that advertisers such as blog ads will not allow me to use their ads as they see me as having lower visitor numbers. Traditionally manufacturers in my niche [...]
ProBlogger Meetup NYC - Recap Last night was the first ever ProBlogger Readers Meet Up here in New York City. V and I arrived just after 6.30pm and walked into a room which at first impression didn’t seem to be the right one - there were just way too many people there. I am not sure what I was expecting but [...]
Wall Street expectations destroying news organizations.
Audiences switching rapidly to new media for which there is insufficient revenue to support real journalism.
The line between amateurs and professional journalists is blurred and it is likely the public largely doesn't care.
News is entertainment and needs to compete on the basis of what the audience wants—not what is good journalism or what should be covered.
"Public relations professionals need to understand that these desperate days for traditional media are dangerous days for corporate and organizational reputations," says Bacon. "They need to be able to respond fast, to be aggressive in attacking misinformation and bad reporting and most importantly, they need to grab onto the incredible opportunities they have to talk directly to the people whose opinion about the organization matters most to their future. Talk quick, talk with complete honestly and talk directly."
How does a web content strategy figure in all this?
"Today's Internet tools including virtual communication centers, blogs, and communicator-controlled websites all make that possible. The desperate media environment makes it essential," advises Bacon. And he is 100% correct..
How do you do it?
If you do not yet have a section of your website that can be controlled by the communication department this should be a priority. The tools available today make this a no-brainer.
RSS enable this section of the site, so that your content can be syndicated across the Net. Feeds also allow you to reach subcribers fast...
Use RSS feeds and other tools to monitor the blogs and conversations so you have your finger on the pulse and can pick up and respond to any comments or issues right away.
White Papers: 5 Reasons to Write Them by Michael A. Stelzner While I am on vacation this week, we are fortunate to have some excellent guest authors. The first guest, Michael Stelzner, is author of the bestselling book Writing White Papers and has written more than 100 white papers for recognized...
A new experiment in citizen journalism plans to some crowdsourcing and include readers and their sources in the network that journalists can tap into for stories.
Assignment Zero, a collaboration between Wired magazine and NewAssignment.Net, the experimental journalism site established by Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, intends to use not only the wisdom of the crowd, but their combined reporting efforts—an approach that has come to be called "crowdsourcing," reports The NY Times
Citizens with a variety of expertise—the "people formerly known as the audience," as Professor Rosen describes them—will produce work to be iterated and edited by experienced journalists.
This is an experiment to watch. It could turn out to be a place where your experts can contribute content. Some of the content might even make it into Wired, says Chris Anderson, the editor. .
Moms are increasingly turning to the Internet for answers to everything from problems with teething babies to financing college. Based on research into their online audience Disney is launching a new website aimed at providing these answers the AP reports.
Web-savvy and 32-million strong, U.S. mothers spend almost as much time online as women as a group, according to eMarketer's new report, "Moms Online: Parenting With Web 2.0."
And they're not just on children and parenting sites. The biggest opportunity for marketers targeting moms online is social networking sites, says the report.
Disney has plunged right in to this space with their new website Family.com
Family intends to be a one-stop site for parents, especially mothers, providing everything from Internet search to user-generated articles on key topics such as education and food, and, eventually, a 'ParentPedia,' a compilation of information on 1,000 topics that can be expanded by users.
Parents have become a larger part of Disney's online audience, accounting for nearly half of the 25 million unique visits per month to the Disney.com site, the company said. Most of those are moms.
Disney surveyed 30,000 mothers over the past year to find out what they are looking for online. The openness of the new site along with trusted content vouched for by Disney is what moms say they want..
The site will be in beta till the summer.
Writing for the Web: No More Gatekeepers Anne Marie Nichols is author of a freelance writing blog about The Write Stuff and contributes this post about the demise of gatekeepers, the web, and some famous self-publishers that will surprise you. Goodbye to the Gatekeepers?by Anne Marie Nichols,...
Social Media: Why You Should Pay Attention to This Here's our weekly heads up for the Blogging and Beyond Internet radio show over at VoiceAmerica. If the term Social Media and Web 2.0 has you scratching your head, then don't miss this show. Click here to listen to the...
On Saturday I gave a presentation at Northern Voice (a Vancouver-based blogging conference) about blogging software and how it can and should be used for building Web sites are more than just a blog, or perhaps look nothing like a blog.
The session was podcasted here, and I’ve pasted in my talk outline below. The site we built during the session is here: http://bloggingworkshop.com/. Enjoy!
Not Just for Blogs
I think blogging is revolutionary. I think this because it is capable of building community and relationships, of informing, of entertaining… but when it comes right down to it, the thing that I think is so mind-blowing about blogging is the software. That, and the price of that software.
I started making Web sites in 1994. At that point, and for a long, long time, the vast majority of Web sites were built by making HTML files, potentially hundreds and hundreds of HTML files.� My first job was with the L.A. Times Web site, and when we wanted to change the design in any way - from the wording of something in the navigation to the color of the links - you did it on a file by file basis. Every single page had to be opened, changed, saved, and then put onto the Web server again. Needless to say we didn’t do a lot of little changes.
As the Web evolved, so did the software solutions. If you were a big Web site company with a lot of money, you hired people to build you something better: a database-driven Web site. With a databased site you could build pages as they were needed. At the L.A. Times that meant that when someone clicked on a link for a news story, the database found that story, pulled it out, and plunked it into a template. The ground-breaking thing for the worker bees was that there weren’t individual files sitting around anymore: if you wanted to make a change to the site design you made it to the template and the next time someone looked at a story, boom, they got the new template. It made things easier for the developers and that in turn made things easier for the site’s visitors, because the developers could then spend time on other stuff, like content. It made other good stuff possible, too, like search, like archives, like content sorting by category.
That was what you did if you were a big company. If you were a little buy, or an individual, and you didn’t have the big bucks to spend, you still had masses of HTML files sitting around, and things like search were really out of your reach.
Then along comes blogging software.
What is blogging software? Well, at heart, it’s a database. You put the content in, it goes into a database. When it gets displayed, that content is dropped into a template. Sound familiar? This is why so many blog sites look the same from page to page - the home page looks just like a permalink page, except for the content of the actual blog posts. The templates are the same.
And most blogging software came with bells and whistles: search, archives, RSS feeds… it was all built in. You didn’t need any special expertise to set it up, and with a lot of blogging software you could get started in minutes. Best of all was the price. What the big companies spent hundreds of thousands on, you could get for free with Blogger. Even the blog software that did cost money was relatively inexpensive. For $200 or so, you had everything you needed.
As long as what you needed was a blog, you were set.
Well, my big message today is that if you invest some time and learning, you can make a blog software work for more than a blog. You can build any Web site using blog software, and if you do it right, no one will be the wiser.
Let’s look at some examples of what I mean. (A little caveat, I’m going to show you mostly business Web sites because those are the kinds of Web sites I’m hired to create, but the principles are the same whether you have a “brand” or not.)
Blog software can really revolutionize the maintenance issues for a web site, and make it easier to redesign (a reality we can’t ignore) as well, but that doesn’t mean every web site needs to run off of blog software. Small web sites with mostly unique page layout won’t be able to make easy use of blog software.
But any site that needs to be easy to update (perhaps by multiple people), has some standardization of presentation, and can work with a template approach.
Is it easy? Well, yes and no. Get the right blog software, and have the right know-how and it’s not a big deal. But if you aren’t willing to learn some code and invest some time… it’s hard. There are people you can hire to set up a site for you, that’s for sure.
Now, the components of blog software: usually you have:
publishing interface
admin and setup stuff
templates
I’m showing you pMachine’s Expression Engine, but many different kinds of blog software can be adapted for this kind of site. It’s important to choose blog software that gives you access to the templates! Wordpress.com isn’t going to do, and only the Typepad Pro level will work for you. If you can find software that can handle multiple blogs, so much the better. The reason I really love EE is that each “blog” can be customized, and because of all the extra components—mailing list, poll, photo gallery, forum module.
For this demo, I’ve chosen one of the templates that EE provides and I’m going to customize it. First, let’s deal with the Admin side and set up our publishing interface:
Edit the blog preferences
Set up custom fields
Put in a sample post
Set up categories
Next, let’s get rid of stuff in the template we don’t want.
And finally, let’s substitute a few things in the blog software code.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that, when it comes right down to it, “Web 2.0” ain’t all that. Succinctly put, the very ways in which Web 2.0 is typically defined—user collaboration and contribution, photo sharing, etc.—aren’t really anything new to the Web, which has always partly been about user-generated content. (Read more about the report.)
From MediaPost: “It doesn’t really matter that this bright line has been so elusive, or that some savvy marketers simply use the label to distance themselves from the failures of Web 1.0 companies,” states the report.
What does Web 2.0 mean to you?
White Papers: Here's Why They Are Powerful Persuasders The Persuasive Power of White Papersby Michael Stelzner, Writing White Papers blog, guest author Information overload. Filters. Time constraints. Limited patience. Marketing excess makes the task of influencing a chore! Getting an audience with someone important and presenting vital points...
Content is king in this game. More often than not, the quality of viral content takes a backseat to the marketing mandate.
Foote gives examples of how to get it right and how to get it very wrong. Dove's Evolution video was a winner, but their recent Super Bowl Commercial effort sank like a stone under a deluge of negative comments.
The bottom line is that the message has to be exceptional, says Foote. I'd also add the importance of originality, authenticity and relevance. Don't force a viral marketing idea because it sounds cool—make sure it jives with the demographic you're trying to reach
For some reason when we are faced with a new medium we tend to throw all the PR basics out with the bathwater. Social media is very much like live communication - it's not a one-way, top down 'push' medium. You have to understand your sudience and deliver content that works for them.
Yes, it was much less threatening to deiver content in the 'old' ways - no-one was talking back. Social media tools make it possible for your audience to give you instant feedback - they'll let you (and the rest of the world) know, in no uncertain terms, if you get it wrong.
Here are Foote's tips for successul viral video online:
Don't force viral marketing concepts if they don't fit the brand essence.
Do your homework on what flies and what dies. Live the video sharing space.
Content is everything. Bring on producers who can push the buttons of buzz.
Take risks. Beware of corporate filters that will dilute the quality of the content.
Test it. If eight out of 10 people aren't cracking up, memorized or amazed, head back to the drawing board.
Cast a wide net. YouTube is center stage, but don't forget the other sites: Revver, iFilm, Myspace, etc.
It's stll about content strategy and delivering the right message to the right audience, via the right channels.
I’m in San Francisco for the first ever Dummies Authors Conference. There are about 50 Dummies authors here, and the day is packed with discussions about marketing books, the uses of agents, and general Dummies best practices. It’s going to be an interesting day! You can check out the agenda here.
There’s been a bunch of press already, but the most exciting news of the day is that the conference is up for being featured on the Evening News with Katie Couric. In fact, you can actually vote to send Steve Hartman to the conference tomorrow by going to http://www.cbsnews.com and clicking on Assignment America. We’re up against some guy who can talk really fast and a California prison program to send female juvenile delinquents to finish school ("Can etiquette, fashion and dance really set a girl straight?"). Wouldn’t you rather get the inside scoop on the For Dummies books? Of course you would. Go vote.
And, if I haven’t convinced you already, check out the other press coverage today:
The “dummies” label could be the weirdest aspect of the whole franchise, as the authors are not really supposed to assume their readers are dumb, just uninformed. The publisher, in an official statement on the matter, calls it a “term of endearment.”
Telcos Fail to Capitalize on Mobile Web 2.0 Telecoms companies are failing to make the most of the growing popularity of the online information-sharing services of "Web 2.0", according to new research 'Web re-loaded: Driving convergence in the real world.' by global consultancy Arthur D. Little.
This new report places users and user generated content in the spotlight yet again. Yet it seems US Telcos have not yet got the Web 2.0 message.
"In order to harness and monetize Web 2.0 the Telcos will have to rapidly address the needs of this community" says Martyn Roetter, Director of Arthur D. Little's US TIME. "Younger Europeans are already showing their readiness to interact on the move, with 38% of them accessing email from mobile devices, while Google launched Gmail for mobile in November last year. Telecommunications businesses now need to offer access to the established web 2.0 services, for both communication and for the fulfillment of their wider social needs while on the move."
The dilemma Telcos face is whether they should build their own Web 2.0 platforms or engage with established sites such as flickr etc, says the report.
One good example of collaboraiton is the Pontiac Underground site that partnered with Yahoo! and now offers access to all the Yahoo social media sites in one branded place.
Whatever they do, they should do it soon. the race goes to the swift and The Cluetrain is not waiting for the laggers.
This is one of the strangest things I've run across on the Web in a while.
Seducing Prospects with White Papers Luring Prospects With White Papersby Michael Stelzner, Writing White Papers blog, guest author Looking to drum up new business? Need to generate some leads? Finding new business is hard work! If you want to persuade, white papers are the hot...
Will you take The Blog Squad's Survey? Can you spare a few minutes of your time for The Blog Squad? We'd like to know more about you, and what your challenges are so we can better serve you and provide more relevant information and tools for your...
White Paper Details & Insider Secrets In the next few days, I'm featuring guest author Michael Stelzner of Writing White Papers blog to teach us about writing these important business marketing tools. I recently asked Mike questions in an email: Hi, Mike. Some questions arose for...
Looking for a fun widget to add to your site? I like the new site called “Twitter.”
On Twitter, you quickly share just a little one liner about what you’re currently up to.� Then it notifies your close friends about what you’re up to.� It’s a nice way to feel connected to someone without feeling like you’re intruding.
Susie has added a Twitter badge to this blog, but your twitter status also gets sent via AIM or GTalk, or can be see on twitter itself.
It’s quick to sign up and fun.� Let me know if you join!
I got an extra Christmas present in December from the makers of my laptop bag: Mobile Edge. Lewis Lustman, director of marketing for Mobile Edge, left a comment on an earlier post of mine and then followed up with an email to me.
I picked the Mobile Edge Chocolate Suede Tote because I wanted a laptop bag that looked like it belonged to a woman, and that didn’t involve black canvas or vinyl. It was a tough search, especially since my laptop—at 17”—was too large for many of the more fashionable bags. When I found a Mobile Edge bag at Fry’s, though, I discovered that I could fit my laptop into the bag, as long as I didn’t put it into the actual slot created for it. Since the bag was quite padded anyway, I’ve been merrily using it and putting file folders in the laptop slot since.
Recently, though, Lewis told me, Mobile Edge had started making an insert just for laptops like mine (huge) and he wanted to send me one. Naturally, I accepted.
Now, one of the things I really liked about the Mobile Edge tote I chose was that the interior piece that holds the laptop is just an insert; it can actually be removed completely from the bag (and get this, when you remove it, you don’t loose any interior pockets or features!). This means you could buy a couple of inserts and say, use the same bag for more than one laptop.
When my new insert arrived, I pulled out the old 15” insert, popped in the 17” and the laptop fits perfectly. I have had a chance to use the bag since putting in the new insert, and things do fit a bit better when you can put the laptop into the right place, so it actually feels like I have more space, not less.
I’m still a huge fan of this bag, which is well-made and durable, and I can now recommend it unreservedly for carriers of 17” laptops as well.
My one remaining complaint is that bag + laptop + peripherals + book + ... well, it’s all a little heavy. That’s more of a physics problem, though. I’ll let you know if Mobile Edge cracks the code on breaking that whole two bodies of mass attracting each other thing.
A Cymfony/Porter Novelli study reports that “the majority of companies surveyed (76%) indicated that they have noticed an increase in media attention and/or website traffic as a result of their blog(s).”
Blogging is still hot, and I’m still hot on blogging, but I’m pretty much tapped out when it comes to blogging about blogging. From this point on, I may update this blog periodically, but—officially—I’m retiring it.
Don’t get me wrong! My book, Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies, is still a great resource for blogging! I put a lot of time, energy and experience into that book, and I’m so pleased by how well it has remained current and useful. (I shouldn’t have done such a good job, since Wiley might have asked me to write a new edition if it hadn’t held up so well!) It’s not retiring! This is merely a reflection of my desire to make more blogs, and talk about them a little less.
Thanks for being such great readers. For now, hasta la vista, baby!
We had 70 attendees in Cape Town and 60 in Johannesburg at the Web PR + conference.
The Cape Town audience was more independents and bloggers and techie types, while the Joburg crowd was more agency and PR related. As one blogger who attended both sessions remarked the difference in the audience led to a very different conference - as it was a very interactive event.
Louise Marsland, editor of Biz Community, told me that it was one of the most emjoyable conferences she had attended -not just a platform to push services or products, but a genuine sharing of information and ideas.
The biggest drawback to adoption of Web 2.0 and Web PR in South Africa is the lack of connectivity and the cost of broadband. But when they finally get the second network operator and broadband becomes affordable, it will arrive in a rush.
Good to see both innovators like BMW and the staid old financial institutions attending.
How to Get Your Book Published: Windows Media Video Find out how Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors.
A new experiment in citizen journalism plans to some crowdsourcing and include readers and their sources in the network that journalists can tap into for stories.
Assignment Zero, a collaboration between Wired magazine and NewAssignment.Net, the experimental journalism site established by Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, intends to use not only the wisdom of the crowd, but their combined reporting efforts—an approach that has come to be called "crowdsourcing," reports The NY Times
Citizens with a variety of expertise—the "people formerly known as the audience," as Professor Rosen describes them—will produce work to be iterated and edited by experienced journalists.
This is an experiment to watch. It could turn out to be a place where your experts can contribute content. Some of the content might even make it into Wired, says Chris Anderson, the editor. .
Telcos Fail to Capitalize on Mobile Web 2.0 Telecoms companies are failing to make the most of the growing popularity of the online information-sharing services of "Web 2.0", according to new research 'Web re-loaded: Driving convergence in the real world.' by global consultancy Arthur D. Little.
This new report places users and user generated content in the spotlight yet again. Yet it seems US Telcos have not yet got the Web 2.0 message.
"In order to harness and monetize Web 2.0 the Telcos will have to rapidly address the needs of this community" says Martyn Roetter, Director of Arthur D. Little's US TIME. "Younger Europeans are already showing their readiness to interact on the move, with 38% of them accessing email from mobile devices, while Google launched Gmail for mobile in November last year. Telecommunications businesses now need to offer access to the established web 2.0 services, for both communication and for the fulfillment of their wider social needs while on the move."
The dilemma Telcos face is whether they should build their own Web 2.0 platforms or engage with established sites such as flickr etc, says the report.
One good example of collaboraiton is the Pontiac Underground site that partnered with Yahoo! and now offers access to all the Yahoo social media sites in one branded place.
Whatever they do, they should do it soon. the race goes to the swift and The Cluetrain is not waiting for the laggers.
.
links for 2007-04-09 Creating My ToDo List Through Jott And Gmail (tags: GTD Mobile lifehacks voice Notetaking jott Gmail) BlogMailr - Publish from your email straight to your blog (tags: Blogs Email lifehacks) » Thoughts on the online/offiine apps controversy | Office Evolution...
Wall Street expectations destroying news organizations.
Audiences switching rapidly to new media for which there is insufficient revenue to support real journalism.
The line between amateurs and professional journalists is blurred and it is likely the public largely doesn't care.
News is entertainment and needs to compete on the basis of what the audience wants—not what is good journalism or what should be covered.
"Public relations professionals need to understand that these desperate days for traditional media are dangerous days for corporate and organizational reputations," says Bacon. "They need to be able to respond fast, to be aggressive in attacking misinformation and bad reporting and most importantly, they need to grab onto the incredible opportunities they have to talk directly to the people whose opinion about the organization matters most to their future. Talk quick, talk with complete honestly and talk directly."
How does a web content strategy figure in all this?
"Today's Internet tools including virtual communication centers, blogs, and communicator-controlled websites all make that possible. The desperate media environment makes it essential," advises Bacon. And he is 100% correct..
How do you do it?
If you do not yet have a section of your website that can be controlled by the communication department this should be a priority. The tools available today make this a no-brainer.
RSS enable this section of the site, so that your content can be syndicated across the Net. Feeds also allow you to reach subcribers fast...
Use RSS feeds and other tools to monitor the blogs and conversations so you have your finger on the pulse and can pick up and respond to any comments or issues right away.
links for 2007-04-07 Google Voice Local Search Google Voice Local Search (1-800-GOOG-411) is Google’s experimental service to make local-business search accessible over the phone. (tags: Google local locationbasedservices Mobile voice Search) It's the Conversation Economy, Stupid "As consumer markets fragment, marketers and designers...
links for 2007-04-08 NYTimes.com Most Popular Newspaper Site -- Here Is Top 30 List of the top newspaper sites with page views and, more importantly, time spent. (tags: Journalism newspapers Stats) Google Guide Quick Reference: Google Advanced Operators (Cheat Sheet) (tags: Google Search...
Moms are increasingly turning to the Internet for answers to everything from problems with teething babies to financing college. Based on research into their online audience Disney is launching a new website aimed at providing these answers the AP reports.
Web-savvy and 32-million strong, U.S. mothers spend almost as much time online as women as a group, according to eMarketer's new report, "Moms Online: Parenting With Web 2.0."
And they're not just on children and parenting sites. The biggest opportunity for marketers targeting moms online is social networking sites, says the report.
Disney has plunged right in to this space with their new website Family.com
Family intends to be a one-stop site for parents, especially mothers, providing everything from Internet search to user-generated articles on key topics such as education and food, and, eventually, a 'ParentPedia,' a compilation of information on 1,000 topics that can be expanded by users.
Parents have become a larger part of Disney's online audience, accounting for nearly half of the 25 million unique visits per month to the Disney.com site, the company said. Most of those are moms.
Disney surveyed 30,000 mothers over the past year to find out what they are looking for online. The openness of the new site along with trusted content vouched for by Disney is what moms say they want..
The site will be in beta till the summer.
Two New Ways to Mine for Twitter Gold Two new tools have launched that make it easy to search and mine Twitter for conversation data. The first, called Twittermittent, pulls geo-tagged data and charts from the last few days. You can also compare terms. Here's a chart I...
Content is king in this game. More often than not, the quality of viral content takes a backseat to the marketing mandate.
Foote gives examples of how to get it right and how to get it very wrong. Dove's Evolution video was a winner, but their recent Super Bowl Commercial effort sank like a stone under a deluge of negative comments.
The bottom line is that the message has to be exceptional, says Foote. I'd also add the importance of originality, authenticity and relevance. Don't force a viral marketing idea because it sounds cool—make sure it jives with the demographic you're trying to reach
For some reason when we are faced with a new medium we tend to throw all the PR basics out with the bathwater. Social media is very much like live communication - it's not a one-way, top down 'push' medium. You have to understand your sudience and deliver content that works for them.
Yes, it was much less threatening to deiver content in the 'old' ways - no-one was talking back. Social media tools make it possible for your audience to give you instant feedback - they'll let you (and the rest of the world) know, in no uncertain terms, if you get it wrong.
Here are Foote's tips for successul viral video online:
Don't force viral marketing concepts if they don't fit the brand essence.
Do your homework on what flies and what dies. Live the video sharing space.
Content is everything. Bring on producers who can push the buttons of buzz.
Take risks. Beware of corporate filters that will dilute the quality of the content.
Test it. If eight out of 10 people aren't cracking up, memorized or amazed, head back to the drawing board.
Cast a wide net. YouTube is center stage, but don't forget the other sites: Revver, iFilm, Myspace, etc.
It's stll about content strategy and delivering the right message to the right audience, via the right channels.
How to Use Gmail as a Business Diary and More Tips A few weeks back I wrote two posts (Part I, Part II) on how to transform Gmail into your personal nerve center (PNC). These and other similar how-to posts are consistently among your favorites, so I plan to keep at...
How to Launch Your Career as an Author, Get Your Book Published and Get Book Publicity: MP3 Audio Find out how Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors. Visit www.EverythingYouShouldKnow.com for more details
How to Get Your Book Published: Quicktime Video Find out how Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors.
What Bloggers Can Learn From Focused Blogs Today’s guest post is from Chris Garrett from chrisg.com. My last two posts at ProBlogger focused on two successful individual bloggers, Darren Rowse and Robert Scoble. While we can learn a great deal from observing individual people, for this post I am going to look at examples of a particular type of blog; the Focused Niche [...]
Dealing with Affiliates Rhys asks - ‘I’ve been running a site with a few affiliates on it, I have enjoyed a healthy relationship with said affiliates, and likewise they’ve commented to me on a number of occasions that I have generated business for them from my site. Recently my site has experienced a huge upturn in visitors, and [...]
Social Bookmarking - Link Building And Search Engine Optimization
Social Bookmarking - Link Building And Search Engine Optimization Social Bookmarking could be the next big thing in web site marketing since the development of the personal blogs. Social Bookmarking web sites like http://Del.icio.us, Digg, Stumble Upon and Furl al... [Author: Steve Szasz - Site Promotion - December 12, 2006]
How to Optimize your Blog for Search Engines Blogs are naturally search engine friendly and optimizing your blog for search engines is really no different than optimizing your website. Here are some suggestions to get you started. Back Links:... [Author: Rose DesRochers - Site Promotion - December 11, 2006]
Ideagoras The Globe and Mail is running a series based on a forthcoming book, Wikinomics. Today they've published the second in the series, Ideagoras. Here's an excerpt: In addition to broadening and deepening its own proprietary networks, P&G searches for innovations in Web-enabled marketplaces such as InnoCentive, NineSigma, and yet2.com. These combined efforts led to hundreds of new products on the market, some of which turned out to be hits. In...
The Globe and Mail is running a series based on a forthcoming book, Wikinomics. Today they've published the second in the series, Ideagoras. Here's an excerpt:
In addition to broadening and deepening its own proprietary networks, P&G searches for innovations in Web-enabled marketplaces such as InnoCentive, NineSigma, and yet2.com. These combined efforts led to hundreds of new products on the market, some of which turned out to be hits.
In the process, Mr. Lafley and his managers like Mr. Huston transformed a lumbering consumer products company into a limber innovation machine. In fact, five years after the company's stock collapsed in 2000, P&G has doubled its share price and now boasts a portfolio of 22 billion-dollar brands.
Today P&G is a leader among thousands of companies that participate in what we call "ideagoras" where millions of ideas, innovations, and uniquely qualified minds change hands in something akin to an eBay for innovation.
Companies that move now can leverage a global pool of talent, ideas, and innovations that vastly exceeds what they could ever hope to marshal internally.
P&G figures that for every top-notch scientist inside its labs, there's another 200 outside who are just as good. That's a total of 1.8 million people whose talents it could potentially tap into.
The article is interesting not just for its content (which may be good stuff or routine corporate hyperventilation) but for the Globe's own awkward use of the online medium.
The paragraphing of the online article was identical to that of the print version I read over breakfast. I broke up one over-long paragraph to make it more readable.
The resources mentioned like InnoCentive and NineSigma are given without links to their sites. (Don't get me going about companies still using StudlyCaps.)
The story does offer a link to the Wikinomics home page, and to an earlier article in the series. But like so much material that the print media dump online, this is really just shovelware. Its value online would be far greater if only it had been turned into real hypertext.
That said, I'm posting a link to Wikinomics in Webwriting Resources, and I'd welcome your comments about that site.
Beyond Wikipedia: Citizendium Via The Tyee, an article webwriters should read: Beyond Wikipedia. Excerpt: Larry Sanger doesn't trust the wisdom of the crowd, so he's no big fan of Wikipedia. But he's not like the others who get their kicks pooh-poohing the all-powerful (but flawed) wiki: Sanger had a huge hand in creating it. These days, however, he's doing his best to make it something future generations remember only as the troubled little...
Via The Tyee, an article webwriters should read: Beyond Wikipedia. Excerpt:
Larry Sanger doesn't trust the wisdom of the crowd, so he's no big fan of Wikipedia. But he's not like the others who get their kicks pooh-poohing the all-powerful (but flawed) wiki: Sanger had a huge hand in creating it. These days, however, he's doing his best to make it something future generations remember only as the troubled little brat of online encyclopedias.
Sanger is staging an electronic coup d'état with a new wiki called Citizendium, to be launched early in the new year. But there's a twist: the site will start out as a mirror image of the English version of Wikipedia through a process called "forking."
By making a replica of Wikipedia, Sanger hopes to attract a bevy of experts to the project, who will then refine the wobbly content pulled from Wikipedia's infinite pages to create a resource that is authoritative and reliable. ("We descend upon their content, red pens in hand and start our own new community," he recently wrote.)
"On the day of launch, we have over 1,000 people ready to get to work, and a large portion of them are professors, graduate students, research scientists, legal scholars, technical thinkers and assorted other intellectuals."
Question is, how far will his highfalutin model go in the unruly hurly-burly of cyberspace, where the wisdom of the crowds rules the day?
I've put a link to Citizendium in the Webwriting Resources list, and the article itself has a link as well.
A Freelance Job in Vancouver This just arrived via the mail list of the Canadian Association of Journalists, and I hasten to pass it along. If you're a freelance writer in the Vancouver area, this could be of interest: The Conference Publishers is seeking freelance writers to cover the 2006 National Forum on Emergency Preparedness and Response in Vancouver. Writers are needed to produce 1800 word summaries of a pandemic flu exercise scheduled for December...
This just arrived via the mail list of the Canadian Association of Journalists, and I hasten to pass it along. If you're a freelance writer in the Vancouver area, this could be of interest:
The Conference Publishers is seeking freelance writers to cover the 2006 National Forum on Emergency Preparedness and Response in Vancouver. Writers are needed to produce 1800 word summaries of a pandemic flu exercise scheduled for December 14, 2006 (9 a.m. to 3 p.m.); turn-around time for reports is three working days.
If you are available and interested, please contact Biljana Zelenovic at biljana@theconferencepublishers.com or 1-800-265-3973 x226.
How To Make Your Web Site And Affiliate Marketing Compatible People who look for income opportunities, do often come across the idea of affiliate marketing. At first sight, it looks like it's just to have a banner posted on their web site to generate income. ... [Author: Ove Nordkvist - Site Promotion - December 11, 2006]
SEO: Gaining Top Placement In The Warm Markets Search engines become smarter by the minute. It is no longer the sheer placement of numerous keywords on a single page. There is the correct placement of anchored text, the specific Meta tags, the wa... [Author: Jeffrey Greer - Site Promotion - December 11, 2006]
White Papers: Here's Why They Are Powerful Persuasders The Persuasive Power of White Papersby Michael Stelzner, Writing White Papers blog, guest author Information overload. Filters. Time constraints. Limited patience. Marketing excess makes the task of influencing a chore! Getting an audience with someone important and presenting vital points...
Writing for the Web: No More Gatekeepers Anne Marie Nichols is author of a freelance writing blog about The Write Stuff and contributes this post about the demise of gatekeepers, the web, and some famous self-publishers that will surprise you. Goodbye to the Gatekeepers?by Anne Marie Nichols,...
How Google Video Search Engine can Solve 2 Major Website Owner's Problems What is the solution to #1. Getting your site indexed in Google, and #2. Generating quality traffic to your website? Answer: Use the awesome power of video. When Google bought out YouTube for 1.67 ... [Author: Jeff Davis - Site Promotion - December 12, 2006]
Social Media: Why You Should Pay Attention to This Here's our weekly heads up for the Blogging and Beyond Internet radio show over at VoiceAmerica. If the term Social Media and Web 2.0 has you scratching your head, then don't miss this show. Click here to listen to the...
Becoming a Book Blog After weeks of work, the third edition of Writing for the Web is nearly completed. It's a far more extensive revision than I'd expected, but I'm pretty happy with the result. Not only is much of the print content changed, expanded, and updated, but the book will contain a CD with scores of links—a kind of electronic index, with added links on relevant topics. In addition, this site will become...
After weeks of work, the third edition of Writing for the Web is nearly completed. It's a far more extensive revision than I'd expected, but I'm pretty happy with the result. Not only is much of the print content changed, expanded, and updated, but the book will contain a CD with scores of links—a kind of electronic index, with added links on relevant topics.
In addition, this site will become a kind of book blog, providing still more updates and links. So if you find something in the book that you don't understand or like, you can fire off an email or a comment, and I'll try to explain myself.
Most textbooks now include websites created by the publisher to supply extra materials. Those sites, however, tend to be permanent and unchanging. As the blog for Writing for the Web 3.0, this site will change almost daily.
White Paper Details & Insider Secrets In the next few days, I'm featuring guest author Michael Stelzner of Writing White Papers blog to teach us about writing these important business marketing tools. I recently asked Mike questions in an email: Hi, Mike. Some questions arose for...
Seducing Prospects with White Papers Luring Prospects With White Papersby Michael Stelzner, Writing White Papers blog, guest author Looking to drum up new business? Need to generate some leads? Finding new business is hard work! If you want to persuade, white papers are the hot...
Do You Know the Fastest Way to Get a High Page Ranking? There are millions upon millions of websites on the internet. The majority of these site's have poor page rankings. Is your site one of them? Would you like to increase your page ranking? Silly quest... [Author: Terry Morris - Site Promotion - December 11, 2006]
How to Launch Your Career as an Author, Get Your Book Published and Get Book Publicity: MP3 Audio
How to Launch Your Career as an Author, Get Your Book Published and Get Book Publicity: MP3 Audio Find out how Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors. Visit www.EverythingYouShouldKnow.com for more details
How to Get Your Book Published: Quicktime Video Find out how Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors.
Three Reasons Why Twitter Will Be Sold Soon Who will buy Twitter? That should be on every user's mind because it's going to happen fast. Let's look at the facts first. Fact #1: According to Technology Review, Twitter had 100,000 users at the end of March. More important,...
How to Use Gmail as a Business Diary and More Tips A few weeks back I wrote two posts (Part I, Part II) on how to transform Gmail into your personal nerve center (PNC). These and other similar how-to posts are consistently among your favorites, so I plan to keep at...
As Daily Postings Slide, Blogging Peaks Technorati is out with their latest report, which they are re-branding the State of the Live Web. However, at least in my view, that is not what it is. The reality is that no one can scale to capture the...
Four Marketing Tips for Self-Publishers You may have already noticed that self-publishing is very time consuming. Most of your time is spent on marketing and publicity and very little time on writing.
HD Video Podcasts Arrive Webware reports that the Washington Post is now offering a video podcast in high definiton for consumption on TVs. The video podcast was shot in 720p resolution. Webware found the experience less than ideal. Still, as bandwidth and storage increase...
Google Turns Maps Into a Community O'Reilly Radar has the rundown on big changes at Google Maps. It's becoming a full-fledged community where people can annotate places with photos and videos and share them with the world. Very smart idea and further evidence that builds on...
links for 2007-04-08 NYTimes.com Most Popular Newspaper Site -- Here Is Top 30 List of the top newspaper sites with page views and, more importantly, time spent. (tags: Journalism newspapers Stats) Google Guide Quick Reference: Google Advanced Operators (Cheat Sheet) (tags: Google Search...
links for 2007-04-05 Writing Apps for Bloggers - lifehack.org There is a plethora of options in the blog editing/word processing field (tags: Blogs lifehacks Writing Microsoft OSX) Afrigator Aggregator of content about Africa. (tags: africa aggregation Blogs Web2.0) Best Buy offers help in...
links for 2007-04-07 Google Voice Local Search Google Voice Local Search (1-800-GOOG-411) is Google’s experimental service to make local-business search accessible over the phone. (tags: Google local locationbasedservices Mobile voice Search) It's the Conversation Economy, Stupid "As consumer markets fragment, marketers and designers...
Discounted Tickets for WOMMA Conference The Word of Mouth Marketing Association is hosting their Basic Training conference in New Orleans April 17-18. If you'd like to go, use the code guestofedelman and you will get a $75 discount. David Weinberger is keynoting and there are...
links for 2007-04-06 AMATOMU :: Pulse of the SA blogosphere An overview of blogging in South Africa. (tags: Blogs Africa Web2.0 Stats SouthAfrica) SL Brand Map Map of brands in Second Life (tags: Marketing virtualworlds SecondLife avatarmarketing) 'Getting Things Done' In 60 Seconds...
The Battle Between All-You-Can-Eat and A-La-Carte TV Cory Bergman from Lost Remote is a brave man. He ditched cable and went with an Apple TV a-la-carte solution for a week. The result: he was quite fine, thank you. He found most of what he was looking for,...
Blogging is Publishing I wish I could say that "blogging is publishing" was something that I came up with on my own, but that is not the case. However, I have been pondering on this phrase for a while and decided to write an entry on my thoughts.
links for 2007-04-09 Creating My ToDo List Through Jott And Gmail (tags: GTD Mobile lifehacks voice Notetaking jott Gmail) BlogMailr - Publish from your email straight to your blog (tags: Blogs Email lifehacks) » Thoughts on the online/offiine apps controversy | Office Evolution...
The Corporate Blogging Book Stop what you are doing and run out to your local Barnes and Noble bookstore. Why? Because you need to have in your hand at this very moment The Corporate Blogging Book by Debbie Weil.
links for 2007-04-04 Your Guide to Online TV Guides: 10 Services Compared (tags: TV) Live Search Maps Adds New Features And Firefox 3D Support (tags: Microsoft Maps Search windowslive Firefox)...
Town Hall Meetings 2.0 JD Lasica asked US presidential candidate Joe Biden a question via a YouTube video. That's not news, but what is news is that Biden responded with his own vid. The use of technology by the campaigns - almost all of...
American Zeitgeist The Tyee has published my review of American Zeitgeist, a documentary about the origins of the Afghan and Iraqi wars....
The Tyee has published my review of American Zeitgeist, a documentary about the origins of the Afghan and Iraqi wars.
A Little Light Housekeeping Writing for the Web 3.0 will be published in a few days, so I've spent some time updating and reorganizing this site. Many of the links had rotted, and the site was overdue for some new resources. So if you explore a little, you'll find several new links in Webwriting Resources and Web Writers and Editors. If you know of good sites, let me know and I'll be glad to...
Writing for the Web 3.0 will be published in a few days, so I've spent some time updating and reorganizing this site. Many of the links had rotted, and the site was overdue for some new resources.
So if you explore a little, you'll find several new links in Webwriting Resources and Web Writers and Editors. If you know of good sites, let me know and I'll be glad to add them.
Once the third edition is available online from Self-Counsel Press, I'll create a link to the publisher's site. I'll also add a number of new resources available on the book's CD—but the CD works only with PCs. So Mac users will have to download those items here.
Where to Put the Links? Milton Rhodes has sent me some questions about webwriting issues, and while I've dealt with some of them in the book, they deserve continuing discussion and debate. Here's his first question: Should you strip your copy of all links? One school of thought says yes, because links in the middle of the text ive the page that cluttered Wikipedia look and are off-putting. Much better to place all the relevant...
Milton Rhodes has sent me some questions about webwriting issues, and while I've dealt with some of them in the book, they deserve continuing discussion and debate. Here's his first question:
Should you strip your copy of all links? One school of thought says yes, because links in the middle of the text ive the page that cluttered Wikipedia look and are off-putting. Much better to place all the relevant links at the foot of the page or in the right-hand margin.
Another school of thought says no. You need to make it easy for readers to find the link as they read the main copy. If you place it anywhere else, many will miss it.
And here's my answer:
The blessing and curse of hypertext is that it can take you so many places.
In regular print-based text, we follow the writer's line of thought. That "line of thought" is a metaphor for a great deal of pre-writing: consulting sources, reflecting on them and on one's own preferences and principles, reacting to the actual ideas as they appear in the words the writer has drafted. The final version is like a good meal, with each course carefully prepared and served in the proper sequence.
In hypertext, we have scarcely sat down and opened our napkins before we're invited to jump up and visit the kitchen to confirm that oregano was indeed used in making the soup. Before we can enjoy the first bite of beefsteak, we're back in the slaughterhouse and from there to the feedlot.
This can be both informative and entertaining. We may learn a lot about what went into our meal, but we risk missing dessert, coffee, and liqueur...not to mention some good dinner-table conversation.
How Scholars Use Hypertext It's helpful to see what scholars do with such links. You could say they invented the first hypertext in their annotations to earlier documents and the footnotes by which they cite their sources. These break the narrative also, but scholars manage to ignore the disruptions. They absorb the information and then check the footnotes.
In the online medium, the "footnotes" are links—not to the original sources, but to citations at the bottom of the document, which in turn lead to the sources. A typical example is a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine. Go visit it and come back for my comments.
Welcome back. You've probably noticed that the NEJM article is not designed to be read online. The text sprawls across the whole screen. We have to scroll forever to follow the narrative. (We do have the option of clicking through to see the report's tables.) A sensible strategy would be to print it out, read it in our favourite armchair, and then return to the computer to check the links to the sources. We can click on a footnote number and "rappel" down the screen to the footnote, and then go on to the online source.
Serving Readers and Users This is a pretty good format for "readers"—those who use the Web as a convenient archive for print documents. For "users"—those looking for information to apply to their own documents, or just for entertainment—it can be a bit awkward. It's especially awkward for bloggers, as I've learned in running my own blogs.
Most bloggers are writing for users, "hit and run" visitors who arrive, grab a fact or comment, and surf on to somewhere else. Blog posts (and many other website texts) should therefore be fairly brief. If they do run long, like this one, it helps to put most of the post "below the fold" on its own page. The user can see two or three posts on one screen, and then decide which to follow onto the next page.
So on my own blogs, like H5N1, I'm quite happy to include the links to my sources within the text of the post, usually with an excerpt. Only the most dedicated visitors need to visit the original source, so the link to that source won't instantly distract them. They can read the gist of the post at a glance (or with a little scrolling). And then they can visit the source for the full story.
Other Options? Links on the side are another option. A good service of any website is to supply links to related sites, and blogs usually provide them. This is a convenience, but it may be necessary to supply blurbs with those links as well—many surfers are hesitant to click through to a different site unless encouraged to do so. But these links tend to be "stand-alone," unrelated to the main posts: They stay put in a side column, while the main posts gradually move down the page and disappear.
No doubt you might design a page so that links stayed to one side of the main text, but it doesn't seem worth it. Readers will still print out the text and then return to the computer to check the sources. Users will still want to grasp the main points of the post and then (perhaps) click through to the links, whether they're in the text itself or off to one side.
So designing the links of a post depends on knowing the kinds of readers you're writing for, and then providing what those readers are most comfortable with.
This post itself is a compromise. I expect people to read it online, not as a printout, so I've included a number of subheads to break up the text and help navigation. And of course I've included my links in the text, not at the bottom.
Of course I'd love to hear other opinions, whether you agree or disagree. This is an interactive medium, after all.
Sir Tim Warns Us About Online Fraud Via the Guardian Unlimited: Creator of web warns of fraudsters and cheats. Excerpt: The creator of the world wide web told the Guardian last night that the internet is in danger of being corrupted by fraudsters, liars and cheats. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who founded the web in the early 1990s, says that if the internet is left to develop unchecked, "bad phenomena" will erode its usefulness. His creation...
The creator of the world wide web told the Guardian last night that the internet is in danger of being corrupted by fraudsters, liars and cheats.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who founded the web in the early 1990s, says that if the internet is left to develop unchecked, "bad phenomena" will erode its usefulness.
His creation has transformed the way millions of people work, do business, and entertain themselves.
But he warns that "there is a great danger that it becomes a place where untruths start to spread more than truths, or it becomes a place which becomes increasingly unfair in some way".
He singles out the rise of blogging as one of the most difficult areas for the continuing development of the web, because of the risks associated with inaccurate, defamatory and uncheckable information.
Sir Tim believes devotees of blogging sites take too much information on trust: "The blogging world works by people reading blogs and linking to them. You're taking suggestions of what you read from people you trust. That, if you like, is a very simple system, but in fact the technology must help us express much more complicated feelings about who we'll trust with what."
The next generation of the internet needs to be able to reassure users that they can establish the original source of the information they digest.
Links to the New Edition Writing for the Web 3.0 is now officially available. I've placed links to Self-Counsel Press in the right-hand column. If you're in the US, you can buy the book through the lower link; if you're in Canada or elsewhere in the world, the upper link is the one you want. If you're in the UK, you can also order the book through the Roundhouse Group. In the next few days...
Writing for the Web 3.0 is now officially available. I've placed links to Self-Counsel Press in the right-hand column. If you're in the US, you can buy the book through the lower link; if you're in Canada or elsewhere in the world, the upper link is the one you want. If you're in the UK, you can also order the book through the Roundhouse Group.
In the next few days I'll add some resources here that are available as a CD in the book...but only for PC users. So Mac users can download those resources here.
This is one of the strangest things I've run across on the Web in a while.
A Freelance Job in Vancouver This just arrived via the mail list of the Canadian Association of Journalists, and I hasten to pass it along. If you're a freelance writer in the Vancouver area, this could be of interest: The Conference Publishers is seeking freelance writers to cover the 2006 National Forum on Emergency Preparedness and Response in Vancouver. Writers are needed to produce 1800 word summaries of a pandemic flu exercise scheduled for December...
This just arrived via the mail list of the Canadian Association of Journalists, and I hasten to pass it along. If you're a freelance writer in the Vancouver area, this could be of interest:
The Conference Publishers is seeking freelance writers to cover the 2006 National Forum on Emergency Preparedness and Response in Vancouver. Writers are needed to produce 1800 word summaries of a pandemic flu exercise scheduled for December 14, 2006 (9 a.m. to 3 p.m.); turn-around time for reports is three working days.
If you are available and interested, please contact Biljana Zelenovic at biljana@theconferencepublishers.com or 1-800-265-3973 x226.
The Future of Text Online At Poynter Online, Guillermo E. Franco has an interesting interview with Chris Nodder of the Nielsen Norman Group: What is the Future of Text Online?. The story also has a link to Jakob Nielsen's own useit.com page, which looks increasingly old-fashioned. The content is great, but the layout and typography need a makeover....
At Poynter Online, Guillermo E. Franco has an interesting interview with Chris Nodder of the Nielsen Norman Group: What is the Future of Text Online?.
The story also has a link to Jakob Nielsen's own useit.com page, which looks increasingly old-fashioned. The content is great, but the layout and typography need a makeover.
Arielle Ford, Publicist biography Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors.
Blogging is still hot, and I’m still hot on blogging, but I’m pretty much tapped out when it comes to blogging about blogging. From this point on, I may update this blog periodically, but—officially—I’m retiring it.
Don’t get me wrong! My book, Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies, is still a great resource for blogging! I put a lot of time, energy and experience into that book, and I’m so pleased by how well it has remained current and useful. (I shouldn’t have done such a good job, since Wiley might have asked me to write a new edition if it hadn’t held up so well!) It’s not retiring! This is merely a reflection of my desire to make more blogs, and talk about them a little less.
Thanks for being such great readers. For now, hasta la vista, baby!
How to Launch Your Career as an Author, Get Your Book Published and Get Book Publicity: MP3 Audio Find out how Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors. Visit www.EverythingYouShouldKnow.com for more details
100 million sites CNN.com reports that the Web now has 100 million sites. The report is based on a story in Netcraft, a site I will include in the Webwriting Resources list. I suspect we will hit 250 million sites before we realize what a profound revolution Sir Tim Berners-Lee launched upon an unsuspecting world back in 1989....
CNN.com reports that the Web now has 100 million sites. The report is based on a story in Netcraft, a site I will include in the Webwriting Resources list.
I suspect we will hit 250 million sites before we realize what a profound revolution Sir Tim Berners-Lee launched upon an unsuspecting world back in 1989.
Online Writing Resources Matthew Ingram at the Globe and Mail has an interesting column: Google's spot is growing. And it's not just about Google's new online writing and spreadsheet tools. Ingram looks at several other services. I tend not to be an early adopter, and while I've heard of online wiki-style writing resources, I haven't done anything with them. If you have some experiences to share (and resources to recommend), I'd love to...
Matthew Ingram at the Globe and Mail has an interesting column: Google's spot is growing. And it's not just about Google's new online writing and spreadsheet tools. Ingram looks at several other services.
I tend not to be an early adopter, and while I've heard of online wiki-style writing resources, I haven't done anything with them. If you have some experiences to share (and resources to recommend), I'd love to hear about them.
Wikipedia's Watchdog The Tyee, an online magazine here in Vancouver, has an excellent article: Wikipedia's Watchdog. Excerpt: Andrew is a tall, skinny, 18-year-old college freshman who lives with his mom and dad on Burrard Inlet's North Shore. Early in the afternoon on July 31, he settled into the swivel chair in his parents' study, turned on his computer, and began combing through the bowels of Wikipedia, the world's most popular online encyclopedia....
The Tyee, an online magazine here in Vancouver, has an excellent article: Wikipedia's Watchdog. Excerpt:
Andrew is a tall, skinny, 18-year-old college freshman who lives with his mom and dad on Burrard Inlet's North Shore. Early in the afternoon on July 31, he settled into the swivel chair in his parents' study, turned on his computer, and began combing through the bowels of Wikipedia, the world's most popular online encyclopedia.
Andrew (when he isn't busy playing favourite games like Battlefield 2) performs an essential role in the ongoing struggle to defend Wikipedia from vandals of truth. Andrew is so committed to his mission, in fact, that he has invented digital 'robots' to help him patrol for enemy attacks. As one of more than a thousand Wikipedia administrators, he volunteers up to 20 hours a week. He and his trusty 'bots' find and zap inserted falsehoods that plague the pages of the huge, interactive site.
It's never easy preserving Wikipedia's credibility. But on that July afternoon, Andrew faced a truly formidable opponent, the godfather of "truthiness" himself, Stephen Colbert.
A new French-language resource I've belatedly discovered écrire pour le web, a blog produced, I believe, in Belgium. Even with my rudimentary French I can see it's a good site, and I've put a link to it in the Webwriting Resources list. (It's way down at the bottom of the list, thanks to its lower-case text.) This raises another point: staying up to date. If you're running a site that deals with webwriting (at...
I've belatedly discovered écrire pour le web, a blog produced, I believe, in Belgium. Even with my rudimentary French I can see it's a good site, and I've put a link to it in the Webwriting Resources list. (It's way down at the bottom of the list, thanks to its lower-case text.)
This raises another point: staying up to date. If you're running a site that deals with webwriting (at least in part), please get in touch. It's time to do a serious overhaul of the links and resources available here. Non-English sites especially welcome!
Was I Ahead of Myself? When my publisher asked for a third edition of my book, I suggested calling it "3.0" as if it were a piece of software. (Well, it's better than "Geeks' Edition," which was the second edition.) Now I seem to have anticipated the Next Big Thing, according to this story in the New York Times: Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense. Excerpt: From the billions of documents that form...
When my publisher asked for a third edition of my book, I suggested calling it "3.0" as if it were a piece of software. (Well, it's better than "Geeks' Edition," which was the second edition.)
From the billions of documents that form the World Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a growing collection of start-up companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence.
Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.
Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable vision. But the underlying technologies are rapidly gaining adherents, at big companies like I.B.M. and Google as well as small ones. Their projects often center on simple, practical uses, from producing vacation recommendations to predicting the next hit song.
But in the future, more powerful systems could act as personal advisers in areas as diverse as financial planning, with an intelligent system mapping out a retirement plan for a couple, for instance, or educational consulting, with the Web helping a high school student identify the right college.
The projects aimed at creating Web 3.0 all take advantage of increasingly powerful computers that can quickly and completely scour the Web.
“I call it the World Wide Database,” said Nova Spivack, the founder of a start-up firm whose technology detects relationships between nuggets of information by mining the World Wide Web. “We are going from a Web of connected documents to a Web of connected data.”
Well, connecting data is what writing itself is all about. But I don't know if my book is going to help people navigate the World Wide Database. Still, I totally agree with this pioneer of Web 3.0:
“The system will know that spotless is better than clean,” said Oren Etzioni, an artificial-intelligence researcher at the University of Washington who is a leader of the project. “There is the growing realization that text on the Web is a tremendous resource.”
Poynter Online's EyeTrack07 Attacks the Myth of Short Attention Spans I haven't had time to read it yet. But here's the story from Poynter Online - EyeTrack07: The Myth of Short Attention Spans. Excerpt: You can't get much more basic than the lead finding of Poynter's EyeTrack07 study, presented this morning to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, D.C. Readers select stories of particular interest and then read them thoroughly. And there's a twist: The reading-deep phenomenon is...
You can't get much more basic than the lead finding of Poynter's EyeTrack07 study, presented this morning to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Washington, D.C.
Readers select stories of particular interest and then read them thoroughly.
And there's a twist: The reading-deep phenomenon is even stronger online than in print.
At a time when readers are assumed to have short attention spans, especially those who read online, this qualifies as news.
That was the predominant behavior of roughly 600 test subjects -- 70 percent of whom said they read the news in print or online four times a week. Their eye movements were tracked in 15-minute reading sessions of broadsheet, tabloid and online publications. Evidence from these sessions revealed how long readers spend with the stories they pick, as well as a host of other details about reading patterns.
This should be a very interesting report.
An Intellectual Property Issue Judy Pokras (vegwriter@aol.com) has posted a letter to the Online Writing list, and she's given me permission to pass it along: I've been selling an e-book (of raw vegan Thanksgiving recipes) that clearly says on it that buyers don't have the right to distribute the information in the book. One of the buyers (a woman in New York, whose name and address I have) posted many of the book's recipes...
Judy Pokras (vegwriter@aol.com) has posted a letter to the Online Writing list, and she's given me permission to pass it along:
I've been selling an e-book (of raw vegan Thanksgiving recipes) that clearly says on it that buyers don't have the right to distribute the information in the book.
One of the buyers (a woman in New York, whose name and address I have) posted many of the book's recipes on a yahoo e-group website (and admitted to it), and sent links to those recipes in an e-mail to the 2,610 members of that group, thus depriving me of who knows how many sales. I only have until Thanksgiving to sell my book, after all.
I sent an e-mail to the group and the woman saying she was violating copyright law. She wrote back apologizing and saying she removed the files from the website. But for the period of time that they were up, who knows how many people downloaded those recipes and e-mailed them to others.
I went to the FBI's website, which has a division on internet crime. It said that not all of the complaints registered with them will be investigated, as they're sent to various agencies, and that if a matter is urgent, a complainant should contact local authorities. I then called the local sheriff's office and explained the situation. They sent a deputy over. Neither the phone person nor the in-person deputy had ever heard of the term "e-book." The deputy said this was a civil matter.
Do you know of any intellectual property lawyers who would take this case on contingency?
I told Judy I don't know of such lawyers, but perhaps some of the readers here will know of an affordable and effective way to estimate and recover damages.
In Judy's shoes, I'd join the e-group, explain the predicament my customer had put me in, and ask those who'd downloaded the recipes to send me something by way of compensation. But I wouldn't build my retirement plans around the anticipated revenue.
Beyond Wikipedia: Citizendium Via The Tyee, an article webwriters should read: Beyond Wikipedia. Excerpt: Larry Sanger doesn't trust the wisdom of the crowd, so he's no big fan of Wikipedia. But he's not like the others who get their kicks pooh-poohing the all-powerful (but flawed) wiki: Sanger had a huge hand in creating it. These days, however, he's doing his best to make it something future generations remember only as the troubled little...
Via The Tyee, an article webwriters should read: Beyond Wikipedia. Excerpt:
Larry Sanger doesn't trust the wisdom of the crowd, so he's no big fan of Wikipedia. But he's not like the others who get their kicks pooh-poohing the all-powerful (but flawed) wiki: Sanger had a huge hand in creating it. These days, however, he's doing his best to make it something future generations remember only as the troubled little brat of online encyclopedias.
Sanger is staging an electronic coup d'état with a new wiki called Citizendium, to be launched early in the new year. But there's a twist: the site will start out as a mirror image of the English version of Wikipedia through a process called "forking."
By making a replica of Wikipedia, Sanger hopes to attract a bevy of experts to the project, who will then refine the wobbly content pulled from Wikipedia's infinite pages to create a resource that is authoritative and reliable. ("We descend upon their content, red pens in hand and start our own new community," he recently wrote.)
"On the day of launch, we have over 1,000 people ready to get to work, and a large portion of them are professors, graduate students, research scientists, legal scholars, technical thinkers and assorted other intellectuals."
Question is, how far will his highfalutin model go in the unruly hurly-burly of cyberspace, where the wisdom of the crowds rules the day?
I've put a link to Citizendium in the Webwriting Resources list, and the article itself has a link as well.
Viral Buzz with White Papers By Michael Stelzner, Writing White Papers blog, guest author Trying to get everyone to beat your drum? Love the sound of others singing your praise? Word of mouth still reigns. A good white paper is like the Energizer Bunny. It...
I’m in San Francisco for the first ever Dummies Authors Conference. There are about 50 Dummies authors here, and the day is packed with discussions about marketing books, the uses of agents, and general Dummies best practices. It’s going to be an interesting day! You can check out the agenda here.
There’s been a bunch of press already, but the most exciting news of the day is that the conference is up for being featured on the Evening News with Katie Couric. In fact, you can actually vote to send Steve Hartman to the conference tomorrow by going to http://www.cbsnews.com and clicking on Assignment America. We’re up against some guy who can talk really fast and a California prison program to send female juvenile delinquents to finish school ("Can etiquette, fashion and dance really set a girl straight?"). Wouldn’t you rather get the inside scoop on the For Dummies books? Of course you would. Go vote.
And, if I haven’t convinced you already, check out the other press coverage today:
The “dummies” label could be the weirdest aspect of the whole franchise, as the authors are not really supposed to assume their readers are dumb, just uninformed. The publisher, in an official statement on the matter, calls it a “term of endearment.”
Social Media: Why You Should Pay Attention to This Here's our weekly heads up for the Blogging and Beyond Internet radio show over at VoiceAmerica. If the term Social Media and Web 2.0 has you scratching your head, then don't miss this show. Click here to listen to the...
Viral Buzz with White Papers By Michael Stelzner, Writing White Papers blog, guest author Trying to get everyone to beat your drum? Love the sound of others singing your praise? Word of mouth still reigns. A good white paper is like the Energizer Bunny. It...
Podcasting for Business Blogging and Beyond: Episode 11How to Use Podcasts and Webinars to Grow Your Businesswith guest expert Debra Simpson, Magic in Words Debra had some great ideas for using audio and podcasting in your business. With 65 million mp3 players out...
Your Writing Persona: Who Are You? Lorelle VanFossen asks a good question: Who are you when you blog? Lorelle is author of Lorelle on Wordpress and examines your writing persona. This is a long post, but good because it will make you think. Who is Your...
White Papers: 5 Reasons to Write Them by Michael A. Stelzner While I am on vacation this week, we are fortunate to have some excellent guest authors. The first guest, Michael Stelzner, is author of the bestselling book Writing White Papers and has written more than 100 white papers for recognized...
On Saturday I gave a presentation at Northern Voice (a Vancouver-based blogging conference) about blogging software and how it can and should be used for building Web sites are more than just a blog, or perhaps look nothing like a blog.
The session was podcasted here, and I’ve pasted in my talk outline below. The site we built during the session is here: http://bloggingworkshop.com/. Enjoy!
Not Just for Blogs
I think blogging is revolutionary. I think this because it is capable of building community and relationships, of informing, of entertaining… but when it comes right down to it, the thing that I think is so mind-blowing about blogging is the software. That, and the price of that software.
I started making Web sites in 1994. At that point, and for a long, long time, the vast majority of Web sites were built by making HTML files, potentially hundreds and hundreds of HTML files.� My first job was with the L.A. Times Web site, and when we wanted to change the design in any way - from the wording of something in the navigation to the color of the links - you did it on a file by file basis. Every single page had to be opened, changed, saved, and then put onto the Web server again. Needless to say we didn’t do a lot of little changes.
As the Web evolved, so did the software solutions. If you were a big Web site company with a lot of money, you hired people to build you something better: a database-driven Web site. With a databased site you could build pages as they were needed. At the L.A. Times that meant that when someone clicked on a link for a news story, the database found that story, pulled it out, and plunked it into a template. The ground-breaking thing for the worker bees was that there weren’t individual files sitting around anymore: if you wanted to make a change to the site design you made it to the template and the next time someone looked at a story, boom, they got the new template. It made things easier for the developers and that in turn made things easier for the site’s visitors, because the developers could then spend time on other stuff, like content. It made other good stuff possible, too, like search, like archives, like content sorting by category.
That was what you did if you were a big company. If you were a little buy, or an individual, and you didn’t have the big bucks to spend, you still had masses of HTML files sitting around, and things like search were really out of your reach.
Then along comes blogging software.
What is blogging software? Well, at heart, it’s a database. You put the content in, it goes into a database. When it gets displayed, that content is dropped into a template. Sound familiar? This is why so many blog sites look the same from page to page - the home page looks just like a permalink page, except for the content of the actual blog posts. The templates are the same.
And most blogging software came with bells and whistles: search, archives, RSS feeds… it was all built in. You didn’t need any special expertise to set it up, and with a lot of blogging software you could get started in minutes. Best of all was the price. What the big companies spent hundreds of thousands on, you could get for free with Blogger. Even the blog software that did cost money was relatively inexpensive. For $200 or so, you had everything you needed.
As long as what you needed was a blog, you were set.
Well, my big message today is that if you invest some time and learning, you can make a blog software work for more than a blog. You can build any Web site using blog software, and if you do it right, no one will be the wiser.
Let’s look at some examples of what I mean. (A little caveat, I’m going to show you mostly business Web sites because those are the kinds of Web sites I’m hired to create, but the principles are the same whether you have a “brand” or not.)
Blog software can really revolutionize the maintenance issues for a web site, and make it easier to redesign (a reality we can’t ignore) as well, but that doesn’t mean every web site needs to run off of blog software. Small web sites with mostly unique page layout won’t be able to make easy use of blog software.
But any site that needs to be easy to update (perhaps by multiple people), has some standardization of presentation, and can work with a template approach.
Is it easy? Well, yes and no. Get the right blog software, and have the right know-how and it’s not a big deal. But if you aren’t willing to learn some code and invest some time… it’s hard. There are people you can hire to set up a site for you, that’s for sure.
Now, the components of blog software: usually you have:
publishing interface
admin and setup stuff
templates
I’m showing you pMachine’s Expression Engine, but many different kinds of blog software can be adapted for this kind of site. It’s important to choose blog software that gives you access to the templates! Wordpress.com isn’t going to do, and only the Typepad Pro level will work for you. If you can find software that can handle multiple blogs, so much the better. The reason I really love EE is that each “blog” can be customized, and because of all the extra components—mailing list, poll, photo gallery, forum module.
For this demo, I’ve chosen one of the templates that EE provides and I’m going to customize it. First, let’s deal with the Admin side and set up our publishing interface:
Edit the blog preferences
Set up custom fields
Put in a sample post
Set up categories
Next, let’s get rid of stuff in the template we don’t want.
And finally, let’s substitute a few things in the blog software code.
White Paper Details & Insider Secrets In the next few days, I'm featuring guest author Michael Stelzner of Writing White Papers blog to teach us about writing these important business marketing tools. I recently asked Mike questions in an email: Hi, Mike. Some questions arose for...
Readers Online Finish Content More Than Print Readers People actually do read content online, and new research is busting an old myth. This study is found on Editor and Publisher.com, by way of Bryan Eisenberg of Grokdotcom.com. In a surprise finding, online readers finish news stories more often...
Please Update RSS FEED! It’s here now, my new blog is ready. Please update your RSS feed to… http://feeds.feedburner.com/marketingsyndrome New blog is located at: http://www.marketingsyndrome.com/blog/ See you there!
The Corporate Blogging Book Stop what you are doing and run out to your local Barnes and Noble bookstore. Why? Because you need to have in your hand at this very moment The Corporate Blogging Book by Debbie Weil.
The Next Big Thing Embedded software, Wireless Net, P2P, Real time movies, and Medicare are some of the often heard phrases used to describe the next big thing on the ..
What Bloggers Can Learn From Indirect Earners Today’s guest post is from Chris Garrett from chrisg.com. For many bloggers their income focus is based on direct methods. Most bloggers have at least tried some advertising, particularly Adsense. There is a massive potential though for earning money indirectly from blogging. Direct methods would include Advertising - Adsense, Banners, Chitika Affiliates - Visitor buys through your link, you [...]
Nameplates - Industrial Utility Various industries depend upon nameplates for range of applications. The industrial nameplates have unique properties, which make them withstand harsher operating environments and these properties va... [Author: Navpreet Aujla - Site Promotion - December 11, 2006]
Do You Know the Fastest Way to Get a High Page Ranking? There are millions upon millions of websites on the internet. The majority of these site's have poor page rankings. Is your site one of them? Would you like to increase your page ranking? Silly quest... [Author: Terry Morris - Site Promotion - December 11, 2006]
How To Make Your Web Site And Affiliate Marketing Compatible People who look for income opportunities, do often come across the idea of affiliate marketing. At first sight, it looks like it's just to have a banner posted on their web site to generate income. ... [Author: Ove Nordkvist - Site Promotion - December 11, 2006]
How Google Video Search Engine can Solve 2 Major Website Owner's Problems What is the solution to #1. Getting your site indexed in Google, and #2. Generating quality traffic to your website? Answer: Use the awesome power of video. When Google bought out YouTube for 1.67 ... [Author: Jeff Davis - Site Promotion - December 12, 2006]
New Blog Coming I’ve decided to start a new blog on niche marketing. It will be hosted on the same domain. I didn’t want to mess-up current search engine rankings and all, but my current blog is out-dated and most of the information shared here are also outdated. I need a platform where I can [...]
I’ve decided to start a new blog on niche marketing. It will be hosted on the same domain. I didn’t want to mess-up current search engine rankings and all, but my current blog is out-dated and most of the information shared here are also outdated. I need a platform where I can easily update old content as well. WordPress 2.1 will be my choice (again) and will use better category system so that you find information more easily.
Also, I’m going to be moving the current mailing system to aweber, a long delayed decision on this. So bear with me during the transition time.
Bo
Its Name is Zookoda Zookoda is the new leader in professional email marketing for bloggers. It gives you better control on the look and feel of how your feed is sent to your subscribers. The program is similar to what you see in newsletter...
Will E-Publishing Become the New Leader? Let the truth be told I am not a big supporter of e-books even though I wrote an entry earlier with regards to the advantages of them. Though I am not a fan, e-books are good for one thing, and that is establishing yourself as an expert.
Yahoo Launches Response to Google Co-op The Digital Inspiration blog reports that Yahoo is launching Yahoo! Alpha. Ironically, it's called Alpha (beta). You can try it here on their AU domain. It's unclear if this is only going to be an Australian product or if Yahoo...
Become an Online Influencer by Modeling Tiger Woods Photo by Craig Watson If you're a golf fan then you know that this week is The Masters tournament, one of the four big majors in the sport. I will be watching Tiger Woods closely. He's one of my biggest...
Your Writing Persona: Who Are You? Lorelle VanFossen asks a good question: Who are you when you blog? Lorelle is author of Lorelle on Wordpress and examines your writing persona. This is a long post, but good because it will make you think. Who is Your...
Social Media: Why You Should Pay Attention to This Here's our weekly heads up for the Blogging and Beyond Internet radio show over at VoiceAmerica. If the term Social Media and Web 2.0 has you scratching your head, then don't miss this show. Click here to listen to the...
White Papers: 5 Reasons to Write Them by Michael A. Stelzner While I am on vacation this week, we are fortunate to have some excellent guest authors. The first guest, Michael Stelzner, is author of the bestselling book Writing White Papers and has written more than 100 white papers for recognized...
Town Hall Meetings 2.0 JD Lasica asked US presidential candidate Joe Biden a question via a YouTube video. That's not news, but what is news is that Biden responded with his own vid. The use of technology by the campaigns - almost all of...
25 Simple Blog SEO and Traffic Tips This is a nice concise list of 25 ways to greatly increase your blog's traffic and search rankings. 1) Content is king! 2) Submit your site to as many search engines as possible. After the initial... [Author: Jeremy Steele - Site Promotion - December 11, 2006]
Andrew Keen: You're Wrong! Andrew Keen of ZDNet is all over Tim O'Reilly in this post. First of all, I'm as outraged as everyone else about the situation Kathy Sierra is in; nobody should be subjected to that sort of harassment, let alone someone...
Link Building Is One Of The Hardest Things To Do "In the time spent roaming the Internet jumping from website to website, it strikes me that links is the only real method of travel. With a rather large number of directories and link schemes that ... [Author: Paul Walton - Site Promotion - December 11, 2006]
Changing Revenue Model...#5: Outsourcing Four down, two to go... Here's a link to my original post summarizing the changing revenue model in publishing. I spoke earlier about customer touch points, risks, margins and communities. Item #5 was do what you do best and outsource...
SEO: Gaining Top Placement In The Warm Markets Search engines become smarter by the minute. It is no longer the sheer placement of numerous keywords on a single page. There is the correct placement of anchored text, the specific Meta tags, the wa... [Author: Jeffrey Greer - Site Promotion - December 11, 2006]
This is one of the strangest things I've run across on the Web in a while.
Write a Book and Get Your Book Published: Subscribe to America's Most Successful Book Publicist's Newsletter Today Sign up for the free HOW TO GET YOUR BOOK PUBLISHED and PUBLICIZED newsletter from Arielle Ford. In case you don't know Arielle by name, she's publicized hundreds of authors and books. 11 of which are #1 Bestsellers. Her clients include Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, Neale Donald Walsch, Dean Ornish, Jon Gordon, Debbie Ford, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. Arielle has compiled a list of nearly every question a first-time or experienced author wants to know about publishing, publicity, building a platform and the book business. Every issue is jam-packed with answers to the questions that get your book published and you booked on radio, television, newspapers and magazines.
How to Get Your Book Published: Windows Media Video Find out how Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that, when it comes right down to it, “Web 2.0” ain’t all that. Succinctly put, the very ways in which Web 2.0 is typically defined—user collaboration and contribution, photo sharing, etc.—aren’t really anything new to the Web, which has always partly been about user-generated content. (Read more about the report.)
From MediaPost: “It doesn’t really matter that this bright line has been so elusive, or that some savvy marketers simply use the label to distance themselves from the failures of Web 1.0 companies,” states the report.
A Cymfony/Porter Novelli study reports that “the majority of companies surveyed (76%) indicated that they have noticed an increase in media attention and/or website traffic as a result of their blog(s).”
How to Get Your Book Published: Quicktime Video Find out how Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors.
Has GoDaddy Started Hiding Whois Contact Information? I was checking information about a domain today, and noticed that GoDaddy seems to have changed their response to send people to their Web site. No longer can I get the information I need through a simple unix command, in text format with no advertising.
I was checking information about a domain today, and noticed that GoDaddy seems to have changed their response to send people to their Web site.� No longer can I get the information I need through a simple unix command, in text format with no advertising:
It’s only when I go to their Web site that I can get the contact information for Registrant, Administrative, Billing and Technical Contact.
While I’m sure they did this to “cut down on spam” or something like that, I find it an unacceptable tradeoff that makes it harder for me to administer domains.� And I think it might be a violation of their duties as a domain registrar.
I’m in San Francisco for the first ever Dummies Authors Conference. There are about 50 Dummies authors here, and the day is packed with discussions about marketing books, the uses of agents, and general Dummies best practices. It’s going to be an interesting day! You can check out the agenda here.
There’s been a bunch of press already, but the most exciting news of the day is that the conference is up for being featured on the Evening News with Katie Couric. In fact, you can actually vote to send Steve Hartman to the conference tomorrow by going to http://www.cbsnews.com and clicking on Assignment America. We’re up against some guy who can talk really fast and a California prison program to send female juvenile delinquents to finish school ("Can etiquette, fashion and dance really set a girl straight?"). Wouldn’t you rather get the inside scoop on the For Dummies books? Of course you would. Go vote.
And, if I haven’t convinced you already, check out the other press coverage today:
The “dummies” label could be the weirdest aspect of the whole franchise, as the authors are not really supposed to assume their readers are dumb, just uninformed. The publisher, in an official statement on the matter, calls it a “term of endearment.”
Blogging is still hot, and I’m still hot on blogging, but I’m pretty much tapped out when it comes to blogging about blogging. From this point on, I may update this blog periodically, but—officially—I’m retiring it.
Don’t get me wrong! My book, Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies, is still a great resource for blogging! I put a lot of time, energy and experience into that book, and I’m so pleased by how well it has remained current and useful. (I shouldn’t have done such a good job, since Wiley might have asked me to write a new edition if it hadn’t held up so well!) It’s not retiring! This is merely a reflection of my desire to make more blogs, and talk about them a little less.
Thanks for being such great readers. For now, hasta la vista, baby!
On Saturday I gave a presentation at Northern Voice (a Vancouver-based blogging conference) about blogging software and how it can and should be used for building Web sites are more than just a blog, or perhaps look nothing like a blog.
The session was podcasted here, and I’ve pasted in my talk outline below. The site we built during the session is here: http://bloggingworkshop.com/. Enjoy!
Not Just for Blogs
I think blogging is revolutionary. I think this because it is capable of building community and relationships, of informing, of entertaining… but when it comes right down to it, the thing that I think is so mind-blowing about blogging is the software. That, and the price of that software.
I started making Web sites in 1994. At that point, and for a long, long time, the vast majority of Web sites were built by making HTML files, potentially hundreds and hundreds of HTML files.� My first job was with the L.A. Times Web site, and when we wanted to change the design in any way - from the wording of something in the navigation to the color of the links - you did it on a file by file basis. Every single page had to be opened, changed, saved, and then put onto the Web server again. Needless to say we didn’t do a lot of little changes.
As the Web evolved, so did the software solutions. If you were a big Web site company with a lot of money, you hired people to build you something better: a database-driven Web site. With a databased site you could build pages as they were needed. At the L.A. Times that meant that when someone clicked on a link for a news story, the database found that story, pulled it out, and plunked it into a template. The ground-breaking thing for the worker bees was that there weren’t individual files sitting around anymore: if you wanted to make a change to the site design you made it to the template and the next time someone looked at a story, boom, they got the new template. It made things easier for the developers and that in turn made things easier for the site’s visitors, because the developers could then spend time on other stuff, like content. It made other good stuff possible, too, like search, like archives, like content sorting by category.
That was what you did if you were a big company. If you were a little buy, or an individual, and you didn’t have the big bucks to spend, you still had masses of HTML files sitting around, and things like search were really out of your reach.
Then along comes blogging software.
What is blogging software? Well, at heart, it’s a database. You put the content in, it goes into a database. When it gets displayed, that content is dropped into a template. Sound familiar? This is why so many blog sites look the same from page to page - the home page looks just like a permalink page, except for the content of the actual blog posts. The templates are the same.
And most blogging software came with bells and whistles: search, archives, RSS feeds… it was all built in. You didn’t need any special expertise to set it up, and with a lot of blogging software you could get started in minutes. Best of all was the price. What the big companies spent hundreds of thousands on, you could get for free with Blogger. Even the blog software that did cost money was relatively inexpensive. For $200 or so, you had everything you needed.
As long as what you needed was a blog, you were set.
Well, my big message today is that if you invest some time and learning, you can make a blog software work for more than a blog. You can build any Web site using blog software, and if you do it right, no one will be the wiser.
Let’s look at some examples of what I mean. (A little caveat, I’m going to show you mostly business Web sites because those are the kinds of Web sites I’m hired to create, but the principles are the same whether you have a “brand” or not.)
Blog software can really revolutionize the maintenance issues for a web site, and make it easier to redesign (a reality we can’t ignore) as well, but that doesn’t mean every web site needs to run off of blog software. Small web sites with mostly unique page layout won’t be able to make easy use of blog software.
But any site that needs to be easy to update (perhaps by multiple people), has some standardization of presentation, and can work with a template approach.
Is it easy? Well, yes and no. Get the right blog software, and have the right know-how and it’s not a big deal. But if you aren’t willing to learn some code and invest some time… it’s hard. There are people you can hire to set up a site for you, that’s for sure.
Now, the components of blog software: usually you have:
publishing interface
admin and setup stuff
templates
I’m showing you pMachine’s Expression Engine, but many different kinds of blog software can be adapted for this kind of site. It’s important to choose blog software that gives you access to the templates! Wordpress.com isn’t going to do, and only the Typepad Pro level will work for you. If you can find software that can handle multiple blogs, so much the better. The reason I really love EE is that each “blog” can be customized, and because of all the extra components—mailing list, poll, photo gallery, forum module.
For this demo, I’ve chosen one of the templates that EE provides and I’m going to customize it. First, let’s deal with the Admin side and set up our publishing interface:
Edit the blog preferences
Set up custom fields
Put in a sample post
Set up categories
Next, let’s get rid of stuff in the template we don’t want.
And finally, let’s substitute a few things in the blog software code.
I got an extra Christmas present in December from the makers of my laptop bag: Mobile Edge. Lewis Lustman, director of marketing for Mobile Edge, left a comment on an earlier post of mine and then followed up with an email to me.
I picked the Mobile Edge Chocolate Suede Tote because I wanted a laptop bag that looked like it belonged to a woman, and that didn’t involve black canvas or vinyl. It was a tough search, especially since my laptop—at 17”—was too large for many of the more fashionable bags. When I found a Mobile Edge bag at Fry’s, though, I discovered that I could fit my laptop into the bag, as long as I didn’t put it into the actual slot created for it. Since the bag was quite padded anyway, I’ve been merrily using it and putting file folders in the laptop slot since.
Recently, though, Lewis told me, Mobile Edge had started making an insert just for laptops like mine (huge) and he wanted to send me one. Naturally, I accepted.
Now, one of the things I really liked about the Mobile Edge tote I chose was that the interior piece that holds the laptop is just an insert; it can actually be removed completely from the bag (and get this, when you remove it, you don’t loose any interior pockets or features!). This means you could buy a couple of inserts and say, use the same bag for more than one laptop.
When my new insert arrived, I pulled out the old 15” insert, popped in the 17” and the laptop fits perfectly. I have had a chance to use the bag since putting in the new insert, and things do fit a bit better when you can put the laptop into the right place, so it actually feels like I have more space, not less.
I’m still a huge fan of this bag, which is well-made and durable, and I can now recommend it unreservedly for carriers of 17” laptops as well.
My one remaining complaint is that bag + laptop + peripherals + book + ... well, it’s all a little heavy. That’s more of a physics problem, though. I’ll let you know if Mobile Edge cracks the code on breaking that whole two bodies of mass attracting each other thing.
Looking for a fun widget to add to your site? I like the new site called “Twitter.”
On Twitter, you quickly share just a little one liner about what you’re currently up to.� Then it notifies your close friends about what you’re up to.� It’s a nice way to feel connected to someone without feeling like you’re intruding.
Susie has added a Twitter badge to this blog, but your twitter status also gets sent via AIM or GTalk, or can be see on twitter itself.
It’s quick to sign up and fun.� Let me know if you join!
Viral Marketing Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others... Published in HindustanTimes.com 13th S ..
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 ..
Write a Book and Get Your Book Published: Subscribe to America's Most Successful Book Publicist's Newsletter Today
Write a Book and Get Your Book Published: Subscribe to America's Most Successful Book Publicist's Newsletter Today Sign up for the free HOW TO GET YOUR BOOK PUBLISHED and PUBLICIZED newsletter from Arielle Ford. In case you don't know Arielle by name, she's publicized hundreds of authors and books. 11 of which are #1 Bestsellers. Her clients include Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, Neale Donald Walsch, Dean Ornish, Jon Gordon, Debbie Ford, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. Arielle has compiled a list of nearly every question a first-time or experienced author wants to know about publishing, publicity, building a platform and the book business. Every issue is jam-packed with answers to the questions that get your book published and you booked on radio, television, newspapers and magazines.
Arielle Ford, Publicist biography Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors.
How to Get Your Book Published: Windows Media Video Find out how Arielle Ford has helped launch the careers and create bestselling books for Deepak Chopra; Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, Chicken Soup for the Soul series; Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations With God; Debbie Ford, The Dark Side of the Light Chasers; and Dean Ornish, Love and Survival and many, many other notable authors.
The Importance of Letting A Good Post Wait This article was written by Glen Stansberry of LifeDev (feed). Check out LifeDev if you want more ways to be creative and efficient with your writing. Growing a readership is something that takes hard work and a little luck. Sure, sites like Digg and Reddit can greatly expand your readership overnight, but it’s really [...]
Long Posts vs Series of Posts Ah Pek asks - ‘I have started a new blog, and I will be doing a series of articles that are quite lengthy. I have divided it into a few parts. Is it advisable to post it as a regular entry with titles that says XXX Part 1 and so on or would it be [...]
Favorite Basic Computer Tips As small business owners, none of us can afford to lose time dealing with computer issues. Arming ourselves with knowledge about our computers and operating systems can go a long way in preventing issues from happening to begin with. A great place to start learning the basics about your computer and operating system is to sit [...]
Know Your Target Audience Equally important with knowing your target audience is finding ways to let your target audience know you as a person. Many times when we run an online business, we forget the power of talking with our target audience. Handing people a business card in casual conversation is a common courtesy, but it is unlikely [...]
Best Web Development Tips One of the best teachers that any of us can have is the voice of experience. Over the years, the tips that I have learned from others has been invaluable to me. When it comes to learning web development skills, the little bits of information we pick up here and there can make all the [...]
Shopping Carts and SEO True shopping carts (those that are added to your already existing website) do not need to be SEO friendly. Other than the buy now or add to cart buttons, which lead to the actual payment page, they only come into effect once your customer decides to make a purchase. Unless a store is selling literally thousands [...]
Five Things About Cricket Okay, bear with me for an odd ball post here … John Scott tagged me, so I am supposed to come up with five things that y’all don’t know about me and post it here on my blog. I will find a way to pay you back for this someday John! Considering the fact that [...]
Small Town Redneck Country Girl There was a small town country girl who had a passion for making gifts and giving them to anyone who wanted them. She didn’t do it for the attention. She handed out the gifts in a private area, outside of the public eye. She did not give the gifts to hear words of thanks or [...]
Expression Web Designer Beta I had been anxious to check out Microsoft’s new Expression Web Designer, not because I had any issues with FrontPage 2003, but because I like playing with new programs. I was thrilled when I received the download notice for the initial private beta, which they have since offered to the general public. I am probably not [...]
Keeping Group Email Straight People often ask me is how I go about keeping group email straight. The truth is that I really do organize email using the same methods that I teach the members of my online groups and classes to use. By setting rules to make sure that every email goes straight to the folder it belongs in, [...]
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 ..
Split Run Testing If you are a webpreneur, split testing is a definite recommendation. Not only it increases sales but also lets go of unnecessary graphics and copy. A ..
Viral Marketing Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others... Published in HindustanTimes.com 13th S ..
Make It Easy to Order Right Now! Why is it that online business owners spend countless hours following every possible search engine optimization and marketing technique to get me to visit their website, and yet make it so difficult for me to actually make a purchase? Haven’t they realized that if they don’t make it easy to order right now, the odds are [...]
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 ..
Using Testimonials Effectively People seem to have a need to know what others think before they place an order for a product or service. They tend to ask everyone they know, both offline and in forums. They will often even research the net for reviews and testimonials. Unfortunately, testimonial letters have gotten a bad rap because of all [...]
The Risk of AdSense Revenue Generic advertisements such as Google AdSense absolutely do not belong on a professional business website. No matter how you look at it, it will not help improve your business and may very well have a devastating impact. Is it really worth the risk? Those people who have no clue what Google AdSense is, will likely become [...]
How to write an effective copy Finding just the right words to describe your product or service isn\'t as easy as it looks, says Puneet Mehrotra. Published on 12th October ..
Let's take a look at my inbox. Today I received ...
A transactional e-mail "from PayPal"
A transactional e-mail "from eBay"
A transactional e-mail "from Amazon"
And some other brand names as well
Of course, none of these e-mails were actually from PayPal, eBay or Amazon. Simply spam, as every other day, intended to capture my private data.
Even if PayPal really sent me an e-mail, I would never read it or respond to it, simply because I would consider it spam and would never believe that it's actually from PayPal.
As I'm sure you've noticed as well, transactional e-mail messages have become a horror story for the big brands, with spammers constantly trying to take advantage of their well-known brand names.
But here's the catch ...
There is no SPAM with RSS, at least not in this form
When you receive content from an RSS feed that you proactively subscribed to, you can be 100% certain that the message is legitimate and from the publisher to whom you subscribed
RSS is perfectly capable of delivering personalized transactional information
RSS is perfectly capable of delivering protected personalized transactional information, granting access only to those with the required username/password combination
RSS transactional capabilities are easy to implement, if your user database is in order
So why aren't any of these guys using RSS to deliver transactional information?
PayPal, eBay, Amazon ... I really want my transactional messages from you. But when I receive them, I don't believe them. Please start delivering them via RSS and make me a happy customer ... a happy customer that actually trusts messages from PayPal, eBay and Amazon.
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 ..
This is one of the strangest things I've run across on the Web in a while.
How to write an effective copy Finding just the right words to describe your product or service isn\'t as easy as it looks, says Puneet Mehrotra. Published on 12th October ..
The Next Big Thing Embedded software, Wireless Net, P2P, Real time movies, and Medicare are some of the often heard phrases used to describe the next big thing on the ..
All About GPRS Dickens once said, \"never close your lips to those to whom you have opened your heart.\" Perhaps we can now say, \"never close your ..
After a rather painful week, MarketingStudies.net is back with its full functionality, including comments.
As already noted, we started the move to a new hosting provider about a week ago, when the comments on this blog were again turned off by the old hosting provider without notice.
The move went relatively smoothly, thanks to the great MovableType architecture and excellent cooperation from both the old and the new hosting providers. Plus, we're now running on MovableType 3.3, which really is light years ahead from the old 2.x versions.
The only thing that really went wrong with the move were the sub-domains. Everything else was smooth.
Quick Steps for Changing Your Hosting Provider and Installing a New MovableType Version
If you're thinking of doing the same, here are the quick steps:
a) Sign-up for your new hosting package and contact your new hosting provider. Contact them in person and explain to them what you're doing and that you might need a little more assistance from them to finalize the transfer.
b) Make a replica of all of your files from the old hosting provider and upload the exact folder structure with all the files to the new hosting provider.
c) Export the SQL database with your MovableType data, directly from the SQL interface. You want a full copy of your database with practically everything.
d) Install your current MovableType version on the new server. Do not just copy the files from the old MovableType installation, rather do the installation again on the new server.
e) Import your old SQL database from the old server into the new SQL database on the new server. Make sure you import it into the new database created by MovableType.
You should now have all of the data and settings from MovableType on the old server in MovableType on the new server.
f) Log-in to MovableType on the new server. You will probably need to modify the server paths for storing files, so open the settings for each blog and change the server paths if needed.
g) Rebuild your files on the new server.
h) Install a new MovableType version on top of the current one, of course on the new server.
i) Once everything is working, ask your domain host to point your domains to your new server IPs.
The essential idea of course is good --> use RSS to get your latest and most important content to your prospects and customers. Train schedules certainly seem relevant enough for someone in NYC to subscribe to them.
But again, someone is missing the point.
If I want to know about traing schedules and changes, I don't care about all schedules and changes. I just care about the routes I take.
If I'm only taking the Queens-bound route, don't talk to me about Manhattan-bound trains.
F Trains, great idea, but now makes this a little more usable and allow people to select which routes they're interested in and then give them an RSS feed just for those.
I Can t Find a Niche Topic that I m Passionate About!
I Can t Find a Niche Topic that I m Passionate About! This is one of the most asked questions from niche marketers. “Should I make a website that I’m passionate about?” or “Should I go where the money is made?” Personally, I’d go where the money is. If you can find a topic that you are passionate about and also where great money is being [...]
Monetizing Video Search I think Aaron Goldman has it right in this MediaPost article. Pre/post-roll ads probably aren't the right vehicle to monetize online video. It's like applying the previous generation's solution to today's technology. The scrolling ticker approach he mentions is a...
This Blog Has Been Nominated for a Litty Award! How fun! I got an e-mail message over the weekend letting me know that my blog has been nominated for a Litty Award by the Book Chronicle blog. Regardless of whether I wind up winning one of the categories, I...
Good Marketing vs. Great Marketing Thanks to Stacey Miller for pointing to this great marketing article by Dan Tudor. It's an excellent example of how important it is to think about taking the task at hand to the next level. In this case, Dan notes...
New Blog Coming I’ve decided to start a new blog on niche marketing. It will be hosted on the same domain. I didn’t want to mess-up current search engine rankings and all, but my current blog is out-dated and most of the information shared here are also outdated. I need a platform where I can [...]
Favorite Basic Computer Tips As small business owners, none of us can afford to lose time dealing with computer issues. Arming ourselves with knowledge about our computers and operating systems can go a long way in preventing issues from happening to begin with. A great place to start learning the basics about your computer and operating system is to sit [...]
Throwing In The Towel I believe that the number one way to find financial success is to first find what you love doing, and then find a way to get paid for doing it. I see people that spend weeks asking everyone they talk to for online business opportunities that they can make money at. It never crosses their [...]
How To Analyze Your Search Engine Competition Analyzing a competitor�s web site may seem like a big job. You should have the mindset that you are going to do this as a learning experience though. This will help you along your way when you may fe... [Author: Chris Taylor - Site Promotion - December 11, 2006]
How to Optimize your Blog for Search Engines Blogs are naturally search engine friendly and optimizing your blog for search engines is really no different than optimizing your website. Here are some suggestions to get you started. Back Links:... [Author: Rose DesRochers - Site Promotion - December 11, 2006]
Generating Traffic To Your Myspace Website MySpace is an exciting online community where members can make new friends, reconnect with old friends, network or even find potential romantic partners. While there are some MySpace members who join... [Author: David Riewe - Site Promotion - December 12, 2006]
How To Make Your Web Site And Affiliate Marketing Compatible People who look for income opportunities, do often come across the idea of affiliate marketing. At first sight, it looks like it's just to have a banner posted on their web site to generate income. ... [Author: Ove Nordkvist - Site Promotion - December 11, 2006]
The Next Google Update I would venture to guess that one of the most common questions on any webmaster forum involves someone asking, “When is the next Google update?” Although they are probably asking about visible PageRank updates in the Google toolbar, the answer involves a bit more than that. Visible PageRank is what you see in your Google toolbar. [...]
While RSS has certainly become well-established with most marketers, few are using it to its full advantage.
Now, while the original Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS e-book focused on explaining RSS marketing in a world where RSS was just starting out, the 2007 edition will focus on optimizing your RSS marketing and getting as much as possible from it.
The 10-step plan is one of the tools we will be introducing in the 2007 edition, once it's launched (getting there:).
Going through this plan will help you get as much as possible from RSS, on all levels. It will help you bring your RSS marketing to the same level as your e-mail marketing, and more.
But for now, here's a very quick summary of the steps from the process view point.
1. Develop your RSS marketing strategy It all starts with a strategy that defines all the other elements of your RSS marketing plan. Developing your RSS marketing strategy consists of planning your RSS usage for each marketing function and integrating it with the rest of your marketing mix, and setting the goals for each of the marketing functions.
2. Start using RSS for business intelligence Conducting business intelligence using RSS is the first step to improving your marketing overall. You will start by finding the right RSS Reader for you, define your business intelligence needs, find the relevant information sources, and implementing the right RSS business intelligence tools.
3. Plan your overall outbound RSS content strategy Outbound communications using RSS are the most complex part of RSS marketing, with numerous choices available to you. During this step you will define your outbound communications target audiences, define your goals for each of them, decide on your RSS feed publishing model, define your RSS feed content and define your RSS feed content sources.
4. Define your RSS marketing requirements & select your RSS marketing vendor Defining your RSS marketing technology requirements and selecting the appropriate vendor to supply you with all the features you need to support your strategy.
5. Plan your RSS content strategy on the content-item level Once you have prepared your overall RSS content strategy you need to plan your RSS content-item level strategy, which essentially means getting the right content in place within the feed to meet your objectives. This consists of defining your writing style, defining the content item structure and defining your calls-to-action.
6. Promote your RSS feeds internally Simply publishing RSS feeds on your website is not enough to generate subscribers. In this section you will define your RSS feed subscription process, define the RSS feed promotion locations for your feeds, develop the subscription offer and implement the other neccessary technical items to increase your subscription growth.
7. Promote your RSS feeds externally After setting everything correctly through your own channels, it is neccesary to promote the RSS feeds using external websites as well. This process includes optimizing your RSS feed for the search engines, submitting the feed to the search engines and performing periodic pinging.
8. Measure and optimize your RSS feeds Measurement and optimization are the two areas that can have the most profound impact on your RSS success. This consists of defining the required metrics, establishing the technical capacities for measurement, measuring and optimizing your content strategy and measuring and optimizing your subscription generation tactics.
9. Use RSS to syndicate your content to other online media Use RSS to get your content published on other relevant media. The neccessary steps for syndication are defining your target media, defining your RSS feed content, preparing the right syndication tools and promoting your syndication offerings.
10. Use RSS to enhance your website and brand Enhancing your website is about adding third-party content to enrich the user experience, while enhancing your brand is about providing your own branded RSS Reader.
The Next Big Thing Embedded software, Wireless Net, P2P, Real time movies, and Medicare are some of the often heard phrases used to describe the next big thing on the ..
Split Run Testing If you are a webpreneur, split testing is a definite recommendation. Not only it increases sales but also lets go of unnecessary graphics and copy. A ..
Viral Marketing Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others... Published in HindustanTimes.com 13th S ..
How to write an effective copy Finding just the right words to describe your product or service isn\'t as easy as it looks, says Puneet Mehrotra. Published on 12th October ..
Link Building Is One Of The Hardest Things To Do "In the time spent roaming the Internet jumping from website to website, it strikes me that links is the only real method of travel. With a rather large number of directories and link schemes that ... [Author: Paul Walton - Site Promotion - December 11, 2006]
SEO: Gaining Top Placement In The Warm Markets Search engines become smarter by the minute. It is no longer the sheer placement of numerous keywords on a single page. There is the correct placement of anchored text, the specific Meta tags, the wa... [Author: Jeffrey Greer - Site Promotion - December 11, 2006]
GMOOT and the Folly of Crowds Several people have told me over the last few years: Steve, you never met a technology you didn't like. That's fair. There have been a few. But for the most part, they're right. Nick Denton is one of those people....
The Advantages of Creating Your Own E-Book E-books have become more and more popular in the recent years. Although some people prefer a printed book in their hand, e-books are still in demand.
The Long and the Short of Media Poynter is out with their latest Eye Tracking study. In a nutshell, they track how people interact with news in different formats. They found that people read farther into into online stories (77%) more than they do when perusing print...
How Apple TV Can Change the Economics of TV The following is also my column in next week's Advertising Age. This week, like thousands of early adopters, I picked up an Apple TV. It lead me to believe that as Internet-connected set-top boxes take off, Apple and others will...
Four Marketing Tips for Self-Publishers You may have already noticed that self-publishing is very time consuming. Most of your time is spent on marketing and publicity and very little time on writing.
links for 2007-03-30 Escape from Cubicle Nation: Resource for new and experienced bloggers: Clear Blogging Great new book on blogging. (tags: Blogs Books) Only 5 million US citizens use mobile internet: study (tags: Mobile Stats) twitterfeed.com : feed your blog to twitter feed...
Will E-Publishing Become the New Leader? Let the truth be told I am not a big supporter of e-books even though I wrote an entry earlier with regards to the advantages of them. Though I am not a fan, e-books are good for one thing, and that is establishing yourself as an expert.
Writing...When You Don't Think You Are By Angela Hoy
Writing...When You Don't Think You Are By Angela Hoy A couple of years ago, I decided that releasing books every single year just wasn't working for me. I thought that maybe planning and taking notes during odd years, and writing, editing and publishing during even years, might make more sense for me. If I hadn't written any new books for an entire year, I knew I'd be chomping at the bit to get some done the following year.
"Press Release Must Die" Panel at BlogHer Wants New Parameters for Social Media Formatting Press releases are getting major overhauls these days, turning the traditional PR format into more user-friendly versions that facilitate journalists' jobs of finding information faster. Julie Crabill from SHIFT Communications participated on a panel at BlogHer called The Press Release...
TrackBacks Are Dying For awhile, the TrackBack was a popular tool that let one blogger let another know they are linking to them. Further, it let bloggers embed snippets of posts on the posts they mentioned. CNET even for awhile adopted the technology...
links for 2007-04-02 Sunday News Watch Funny Fool from Foremsky. (tags: Blogs fun) About Gmail Paper Best April Fool of the weekend. (tags: gmail fun Google) Official Google Drive Blog Psych! But it sure looks real don't it. (tags: Blogs fun Google) »...
links for 2007-04-01 Google Earth Blog: Traditional Advertising Gets Boost in 3D Google Earth "If your business has already made an investment in marketing via its building signage, you could reap some unexpected marketing rewards thanks to Google Earth." (tags: Google GoogleEarth Advertising)...
Audio Articles: Great Idea for Greater Online Reach Today Denise and I interviewed Debra Simpson, MagicInWords.com about podcasts and other media to reach and pull visitors to your online business. (I'll post notes about our Blogging and Beyond radio show on podcasting and multi-media marketing over on our...
On Writing: Stephen King's Advice Extended for the Web Here's a nugget gleaned from 37 Signals' Signal vs Noise blog about writing advice given by master story teller Stephen King in his book On Writing: Formula for success: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%... I'm one of those...
Beyond Writing: Use Your Voice with Podcasts Sometimes writing isn't enough. As a writer, you probably like to read information. But here's a clue: not everyone's a reader. There is a huge audience of people out there who like listening to podcasts. In fact, there's 65 million...
Social Media: Why You Should Pay Attention to This Here's our weekly heads up for the Blogging and Beyond Internet radio show over at VoiceAmerica. If the term Social Media and Web 2.0 has you scratching your head, then don't miss this show. Click here to listen to the...
Podcasting for Business Blogging and Beyond: Episode 11How to Use Podcasts and Webinars to Grow Your Businesswith guest expert Debra Simpson, Magic in Words Debra had some great ideas for using audio and podcasting in your business. With 65 million mp3 players out...
Become an Online Influencer by Modeling Tiger Woods Photo by Craig Watson If you're a golf fan then you know that this week is The Masters tournament, one of the four big majors in the sport. I will be watching Tiger Woods closely. He's one of my biggest...
How Apple TV Can Change the Economics of TV The following is also my column in next week's Advertising Age. This week, like thousands of early adopters, I picked up an Apple TV. It lead me to believe that as Internet-connected set-top boxes take off, Apple and others will...
Readers Online Finish Content More Than Print Readers People actually do read content online, and new research is busting an old myth. This study is found on Editor and Publisher.com, by way of Bryan Eisenberg of Grokdotcom.com. In a surprise finding, online readers finish news stories more often...
links for 2007-03-29 ToonDoo - The Cartoon Strip Creator - Create, Publish, Share, Discuss! "ToonDoo is a wacky way to get creative with comics." (tags: comics fun) New Gmail Filter Hacks - lifehack.org More outstanding tips that help me master the nerve center....
The Long and the Short of Media Poynter is out with their latest Eye Tracking study. In a nutshell, they track how people interact with news in different formats. They found that people read farther into into online stories (77%) more than they do when perusing print...
Things To Do In NYC After a Conference There is a bronze mural on the side wall of the fire station at Ground Zero dedicated to the fallen heroes and those left standing. I couldn't help but shed a few tears; it's an eery feeling to remember the...
Teleseminars with Ellen Britt: Audio File Posted If you missed the Blogging and Beyond show last Thursday, Denise has just posted it on the site. We interviewed Ellen Britt of Marketing Qi about her tremendous success with teleseminars and how you can use this low cost tool...
Bienvenu, S bastien Bailly! I've created a link in Web Writers and Editors to S bastien Bailly, who blogs in French. His site also has a link to the Medieval Tech Support video that was pulled from YouTube....
A Freelance Job in Vancouver This just arrived via the mail list of the Canadian Association of Journalists, and I hasten to pass it along. If you're a freelance writer in the Vancouver area, this could be of interest: The Conference Publishers is seeking freelance writers to cover the 2006 National Forum on Emergency Preparedness and Response in Vancouver. Writers are needed to produce 1800 word summaries of a pandemic flu exercise scheduled for December...
Social Media: Why You Should Pay Attention to This Here's our weekly heads up for the Blogging and Beyond Internet radio show over at VoiceAmerica. If the term Social Media and Web 2.0 has you scratching your head, then don't miss this show. Click here to listen to the...
Was I Ahead of Myself? When my publisher asked for a third edition of my book, I suggested calling it "3.0" as if it were a piece of software. (Well, it's better than "Geeks' Edition," which was the second edition.) Now I seem to have anticipated the Next Big Thing, according to this story in the New York Times: Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense. Excerpt: From the billions of documents that form...
Previewing EyeTrack 07 At Poynter Online, Sara Quinn has an article worth reading: Looking back at EyeTrack is actually a look ahead at the latest of these Poynter studies. Obviously webwriters should understand how people read online, and EyeTrack 07 will therefore be of importance to us all. Excerpt: A systematic look -- that's what Poynter EyeTrack07 is all about. It's the largest of four eye-tracking studies conducted by Poynter and the first...
1-2-All Email Marketing by Active Campaign One of the tools that a self-publishing author must have is good email marketing software. I highly recommend 1-2-All which was developed by Active Campaign.
Teleseminars with Ellen Britt: Audio File Posted If you missed the Blogging and Beyond show last Thursday, Denise has just posted it on the site. We interviewed Ellen Britt of Marketing Qi about her tremendous success with teleseminars and how you can use this low cost tool...
The Advantages of Creating Your Own E-Book E-books have become more and more popular in the recent years. Although some people prefer a printed book in their hand, e-books are still in demand.
Its Name is Zookoda Zookoda is the new leader in professional email marketing for bloggers. It gives you better control on the look and feel of how your feed is sent to your subscribers. The program is similar to what you see in newsletter...
Readers Online Finish Content More Than Print Readers People actually do read content online, and new research is busting an old myth. This study is found on Editor and Publisher.com, by way of Bryan Eisenberg of Grokdotcom.com. In a surprise finding, online readers finish news stories more often...
Things To Do In NYC After a Conference There is a bronze mural on the side wall of the fire station at Ground Zero dedicated to the fallen heroes and those left standing. I couldn't help but shed a few tears; it's an eery feeling to remember the...
Podcasting for Business Blogging and Beyond: Episode 11How to Use Podcasts and Webinars to Grow Your Businesswith guest expert Debra Simpson, Magic in Words Debra had some great ideas for using audio and podcasting in your business. With 65 million mp3 players out...
Has GoDaddy Started Hiding Whois Contact Information? I was checking information about a domain today, and noticed that GoDaddy seems to have changed their response to send people to their Web site. No longer can I get the information I need through a simple unix command, in text format with no advertising.
I was checking information about a domain today, and noticed that GoDaddy seems to have changed their response to send people to their Web site.� No longer can I get the information I need through a simple unix command, in text format with no advertising:
It’s only when I go to their Web site that I can get the contact information for Registrant, Administrative, Billing and Technical Contact.
While I’m sure they did this to “cut down on spam” or something like that, I find it an unacceptable tradeoff that makes it harder for me to administer domains.� And I think it might be a violation of their duties as a domain registrar.
Four Marketing Tips for Self-Publishers You may have already noticed that self-publishing is very time consuming. Most of your time is spent on marketing and publicity and very little time on writing.
On Writing: Stephen King's Advice Extended for the Web Here's a nugget gleaned from 37 Signals' Signal vs Noise blog about writing advice given by master story teller Stephen King in his book On Writing: Formula for success: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%... I'm one of those...
Will E-Publishing Become the New Leader? Let the truth be told I am not a big supporter of e-books even though I wrote an entry earlier with regards to the advantages of them. Though I am not a fan, e-books are good for one thing, and that is establishing yourself as an expert.
Beyond Writing: Use Your Voice with Podcasts Sometimes writing isn't enough. As a writer, you probably like to read information. But here's a clue: not everyone's a reader. There is a huge audience of people out there who like listening to podcasts. In fact, there's 65 million...
I got an extra Christmas present in December from the makers of my laptop bag: Mobile Edge. Lewis Lustman, director of marketing for Mobile Edge, left a comment on an earlier post of mine and then followed up with an email to me.
I picked the Mobile Edge Chocolate Suede Tote because I wanted a laptop bag that looked like it belonged to a woman, and that didn’t involve black canvas or vinyl. It was a tough search, especially since my laptop—at 17”—was too large for many of the more fashionable bags. When I found a Mobile Edge bag at Fry’s, though, I discovered that I could fit my laptop into the bag, as long as I didn’t put it into the actual slot created for it. Since the bag was quite padded anyway, I’ve been merrily using it and putting file folders in the laptop slot since.
Recently, though, Lewis told me, Mobile Edge had started making an insert just for laptops like mine (huge) and he wanted to send me one. Naturally, I accepted.
Now, one of the things I really liked about the Mobile Edge tote I chose was that the interior piece that holds the laptop is just an insert; it can actually be removed completely from the bag (and get this, when you remove it, you don’t loose any interior pockets or features!). This means you could buy a couple of inserts and say, use the same bag for more than one laptop.
When my new insert arrived, I pulled out the old 15” insert, popped in the 17” and the laptop fits perfectly. I have had a chance to use the bag since putting in the new insert, and things do fit a bit better when you can put the laptop into the right place, so it actually feels like I have more space, not less.
I’m still a huge fan of this bag, which is well-made and durable, and I can now recommend it unreservedly for carriers of 17” laptops as well.
My one remaining complaint is that bag + laptop + peripherals + book + ... well, it’s all a little heavy. That’s more of a physics problem, though. I’ll let you know if Mobile Edge cracks the code on breaking that whole two bodies of mass attracting each other thing.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project reports that, when it comes right down to it, “Web 2.0” ain’t all that. Succinctly put, the very ways in which Web 2.0 is typically defined—user collaboration and contribution, photo sharing, etc.—aren’t really anything new to the Web, which has always partly been about user-generated content. (Read more about the report.)
From MediaPost: “It doesn’t really matter that this bright line has been so elusive, or that some savvy marketers simply use the label to distance themselves from the failures of Web 1.0 companies,” states the report.
This is one of the strangest things I've run across on the Web in a while.
Social Media: Why You Should Pay Attention to This Here's our weekly heads up for the Blogging and Beyond Internet radio show over at VoiceAmerica. If the term Social Media and Web 2.0 has you scratching your head, then don't miss this show. Click here to listen to the...
Blogging is still hot, and I’m still hot on blogging, but I’m pretty much tapped out when it comes to blogging about blogging. From this point on, I may update this blog periodically, but—officially—I’m retiring it.
Don’t get me wrong! My book, Buzz Marketing with Blogs for Dummies, is still a great resource for blogging! I put a lot of time, energy and experience into that book, and I’m so pleased by how well it has remained current and useful. (I shouldn’t have done such a good job, since Wiley might have asked me to write a new edition if it hadn’t held up so well!) It’s not retiring! This is merely a reflection of my desire to make more blogs, and talk about them a little less.
Thanks for being such great readers. For now, hasta la vista, baby!
On Saturday I gave a presentation at Northern Voice (a Vancouver-based blogging conference) about blogging software and how it can and should be used for building Web sites are more than just a blog, or perhaps look nothing like a blog.
The session was podcasted here, and I’ve pasted in my talk outline below. The site we built during the session is here: http://bloggingworkshop.com/. Enjoy!
Not Just for Blogs
I think blogging is revolutionary. I think this because it is capable of building community and relationships, of informing, of entertaining… but when it comes right down to it, the thing that I think is so mind-blowing about blogging is the software. That, and the price of that software.
I started making Web sites in 1994. At that point, and for a long, long time, the vast majority of Web sites were built by making HTML files, potentially hundreds and hundreds of HTML files.� My first job was with the L.A. Times Web site, and when we wanted to change the design in any way - from the wording of something in the navigation to the color of the links - you did it on a file by file basis. Every single page had to be opened, changed, saved, and then put onto the Web server again. Needless to say we didn’t do a lot of little changes.
As the Web evolved, so did the software solutions. If you were a big Web site company with a lot of money, you hired people to build you something better: a database-driven Web site. With a databased site you could build pages as they were needed. At the L.A. Times that meant that when someone clicked on a link for a news story, the database found that story, pulled it out, and plunked it into a template. The ground-breaking thing for the worker bees was that there weren’t individual files sitting around anymore: if you wanted to make a change to the site design you made it to the template and the next time someone looked at a story, boom, they got the new template. It made things easier for the developers and that in turn made things easier for the site’s visitors, because the developers could then spend time on other stuff, like content. It made other good stuff possible, too, like search, like archives, like content sorting by category.
That was what you did if you were a big company. If you were a little buy, or an individual, and you didn’t have the big bucks to spend, you still had masses of HTML files sitting around, and things like search were really out of your reach.
Then along comes blogging software.
What is blogging software? Well, at heart, it’s a database. You put the content in, it goes into a database. When it gets displayed, that content is dropped into a template. Sound familiar? This is why so many blog sites look the same from page to page - the home page looks just like a permalink page, except for the content of the actual blog posts. The templates are the same.
And most blogging software came with bells and whistles: search, archives, RSS feeds… it was all built in. You didn’t need any special expertise to set it up, and with a lot of blogging software you could get started in minutes. Best of all was the price. What the big companies spent hundreds of thousands on, you could get for free with Blogger. Even the blog software that did cost money was relatively inexpensive. For $200 or so, you had everything you needed.
As long as what you needed was a blog, you were set.
Well, my big message today is that if you invest some time and learning, you can make a blog software work for more than a blog. You can build any Web site using blog software, and if you do it right, no one will be the wiser.
Let’s look at some examples of what I mean. (A little caveat, I’m going to show you mostly business Web sites because those are the kinds of Web sites I’m hired to create, but the principles are the same whether you have a “brand” or not.)
Blog software can really revolutionize the maintenance issues for a web site, and make it easier to redesign (a reality we can’t ignore) as well, but that doesn’t mean every web site needs to run off of blog software. Small web sites with mostly unique page layout won’t be able to make easy use of blog software.
But any site that needs to be easy to update (perhaps by multiple people), has some standardization of presentation, and can work with a template approach.
Is it easy? Well, yes and no. Get the right blog software, and have the right know-how and it’s not a big deal. But if you aren’t willing to learn some code and invest some time… it’s hard. There are people you can hire to set up a site for you, that’s for sure.
Now, the components of blog software: usually you have:
publishing interface
admin and setup stuff
templates
I’m showing you pMachine’s Expression Engine, but many different kinds of blog software can be adapted for this kind of site. It’s important to choose blog software that gives you access to the templates! Wordpress.com isn’t going to do, and only the Typepad Pro level will work for you. If you can find software that can handle multiple blogs, so much the better. The reason I really love EE is that each “blog” can be customized, and because of all the extra components—mailing list, poll, photo gallery, forum module.
For this demo, I’ve chosen one of the templates that EE provides and I’m going to customize it. First, let’s deal with the Admin side and set up our publishing interface:
Edit the blog preferences
Set up custom fields
Put in a sample post
Set up categories
Next, let’s get rid of stuff in the template we don’t want.
And finally, let’s substitute a few things in the blog software code.
Voila!
The Corporate Blogging Book Stop what you are doing and run out to your local Barnes and Noble bookstore. Why? Because you need to have in your hand at this very moment The Corporate Blogging Book by Debbie Weil.
A Cymfony/Porter Novelli study reports that “the majority of companies surveyed (76%) indicated that they have noticed an increase in media attention and/or website traffic as a result of their blog(s).”
"Press Release Must Die" Panel at BlogHer Wants New Parameters for Social Media Formatting Press releases are getting major overhauls these days, turning the traditional PR format into more user-friendly versions that facilitate journalists' jobs of finding information faster. Julie Crabill from SHIFT Communications participated on a panel at BlogHer called The Press Release...
Audio Articles: Great Idea for Greater Online Reach Today Denise and I interviewed Debra Simpson, MagicInWords.com about podcasts and other media to reach and pull visitors to your online business. (I'll post notes about our Blogging and Beyond radio show on podcasting and multi-media marketing over on our...
Blog Squad on Leading Experts TV Last December The Blog Squad was invited to be on the Leading Experts talk show. We headed to Palm Springs to the CBS studios where host Dr. Jeff Hockings shoots the 28 minute show. It's taken awhile, but we finally...
"Press Release Must Die" Panel at BlogHer Wants New Parameters for Social Media Formatting
"Press Release Must Die" Panel at BlogHer Wants New Parameters for Social Media Formatting Press releases are getting major overhauls these days, turning the traditional PR format into more user-friendly versions that facilitate journalists' jobs of finding information faster. Julie Crabill from SHIFT Communications participated on a panel at BlogHer called The Press Release...
100 million sites CNN.com reports that the Web now has 100 million sites. The report is based on a story in Netcraft, a site I will include in the Webwriting Resources list. I suspect we will hit 250 million sites before we realize what a profound revolution Sir Tim Berners-Lee launched upon an unsuspecting world back in 1989....
CNN.com reports that the Web now has 100 million sites. The report is based on a story in Netcraft, a site I will include in the Webwriting Resources list.
I suspect we will hit 250 million sites before we realize what a profound revolution Sir Tim Berners-Lee launched upon an unsuspecting world back in 1989.
Wharton Economic Summit Promises Business Discussions on '07 Challenges For all you executive coaches and consultants, here's a conference which sounds interesting for top quality business information: The Wharton Economic Summit in Philadelphia April 12 13 will feature 70 Speakers to discuss Economic Challenges in ‘07. If you're interested,...
A Little Light Housekeeping Writing for the Web 3.0 will be published in a few days, so I've spent some time updating and reorganizing this site. Many of the links had rotted, and the site was overdue for some new resources. So if you explore a little, you'll find several new links in Webwriting Resources and Web Writers and Editors. If you know of good sites, let me know and I'll be glad to...
Writing for the Web 3.0 will be published in a few days, so I've spent some time updating and reorganizing this site. Many of the links had rotted, and the site was overdue for some new resources.
So if you explore a little, you'll find several new links in Webwriting Resources and Web Writers and Editors. If you know of good sites, let me know and I'll be glad to add them.
Once the third edition is available online from Self-Counsel Press, I'll create a link to the publisher's site. I'll also add a number of new resources available on the book's CD—but the CD works only with PCs. So Mac users will have to download those items here.
On Writing: Stephen King's Advice Extended for the Web Here's a nugget gleaned from 37 Signals' Signal vs Noise blog about writing advice given by master story teller Stephen King in his book On Writing: Formula for success: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%... I'm one of those...
A Freelance Job in Vancouver This just arrived via the mail list of the Canadian Association of Journalists, and I hasten to pass it along. If you're a freelance writer in the Vancouver area, this could be of interest: The Conference Publishers is seeking freelance writers to cover the 2006 National Forum on Emergency Preparedness and Response in Vancouver. Writers are needed to produce 1800 word summaries of a pandemic flu exercise scheduled for December...
This just arrived via the mail list of the Canadian Association of Journalists, and I hasten to pass it along. If you're a freelance writer in the Vancouver area, this could be of interest:
The Conference Publishers is seeking freelance writers to cover the 2006 National Forum on Emergency Preparedness and Response in Vancouver. Writers are needed to produce 1800 word summaries of a pandemic flu exercise scheduled for December 14, 2006 (9 a.m. to 3 p.m.); turn-around time for reports is three working days.
If you are available and interested, please contact Biljana Zelenovic at biljana@theconferencepublishers.com or 1-800-265-3973 x226.
Where to Put the Links? Milton Rhodes has sent me some questions about webwriting issues, and while I've dealt with some of them in the book, they deserve continuing discussion and debate. Here's his first question: Should you strip your copy of all links? One school of thought says yes, because links in the middle of the text ive the page that cluttered Wikipedia look and are off-putting. Much better to place all the relevant...
Milton Rhodes has sent me some questions about webwriting issues, and while I've dealt with some of them in the book, they deserve continuing discussion and debate. Here's his first question:
Should you strip your copy of all links? One school of thought says yes, because links in the middle of the text ive the page that cluttered Wikipedia look and are off-putting. Much better to place all the relevant links at the foot of the page or in the right-hand margin.
Another school of thought says no. You need to make it easy for readers to find the link as they read the main copy. If you place it anywhere else, many will miss it.
And here's my answer:
The blessing and curse of hypertext is that it can take you so many places.
In regular print-based text, we follow the writer's line of thought. That "line of thought" is a metaphor for a great deal of pre-writing: consulting sources, reflecting on them and on one's own preferences and principles, reacting to the actual ideas as they appear in the words the writer has drafted. The final version is like a good meal, with each course carefully prepared and served in the proper sequence.
In hypertext, we have scarcely sat down and opened our napkins before we're invited to jump up and visit the kitchen to confirm that oregano was indeed used in making the soup. Before we can enjoy the first bite of beefsteak, we're back in the slaughterhouse and from there to the feedlot.
This can be both informative and entertaining. We may learn a lot about what went into our meal, but we risk missing dessert, coffee, and liqueur...not to mention some good dinner-table conversation.
How Scholars Use Hypertext It's helpful to see what scholars do with such links. You could say they invented the first hypertext in their annotations to earlier documents and the footnotes by which they cite their sources. These break the narrative also, but scholars manage to ignore the disruptions. They absorb the information and then check the footnotes.
In the online medium, the "footnotes" are links—not to the original sources, but to citations at the bottom of the document, which in turn lead to the sources. A typical example is a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine. Go visit it and come back for my comments.
Welcome back. You've probably noticed that the NEJM article is not designed to be read online. The text sprawls across the whole screen. We have to scroll forever to follow the narrative. (We do have the option of clicking through to see the report's tables.) A sensible strategy would be to print it out, read it in our favourite armchair, and then return to the computer to check the links to the sources. We can click on a footnote number and "rappel" down the screen to the footnote, and then go on to the online source.
Serving Readers and Users This is a pretty good format for "readers"—those who use the Web as a convenient archive for print documents. For "users"—those looking for information to apply to their own documents, or just for entertainment—it can be a bit awkward. It's especially awkward for bloggers, as I've learned in running my own blogs.
Most bloggers are writing for users, "hit and run" visitors who arrive, grab a fact or comment, and surf on to somewhere else. Blog posts (and many other website texts) should therefore be fairly brief. If they do run long, like this one, it helps to put most of the post "below the fold" on its own page. The user can see two or three posts on one screen, and then decide which to follow onto the next page.
So on my own blogs, like H5N1, I'm quite happy to include the links to my sources within the text of the post, usually with an excerpt. Only the most dedicated visitors need to visit the original source, so the link to that source won't instantly distract them. They can read the gist of the post at a glance (or with a little scrolling). And then they can visit the source for the full story.
Other Options? Links on the side are another option. A good service of any website is to supply links to related sites, and blogs usually provide them. This is a convenience, but it may be necessary to supply blurbs with those links as well—many surfers are hesitant to click through to a different site unless encouraged to do so. But these links tend to be "stand-alone," unrelated to the main posts: They stay put in a side column, while the main posts gradually move down the page and disappear.
No doubt you might design a page so that links stayed to one side of the main text, but it doesn't seem worth it. Readers will still print out the text and then return to the computer to check the sources. Users will still want to grasp the main points of the post and then (perhaps) click through to the links, whether they're in the text itself or off to one side.
So designing the links of a post depends on knowing the kinds of readers you're writing for, and then providing what those readers are most comfortable with.
This post itself is a compromise. I expect people to read it online, not as a printout, so I've included a number of subheads to break up the text and help navigation. And of course I've included my links in the text, not at the bottom.
Of course I'd love to hear other opinions, whether you agree or disagree. This is an interactive medium, after all.
Websites that changed the world The Guardian Unlimited has celebrated the 15th anniversary of the World Wide Web with an article that also lists 15 Websites that changed the world. You'll probably disagree with many of the sites on the list, but the Web has indeed changed the world....
The Guardian Unlimited has celebrated the 15th anniversary of the World Wide Web with an article that also lists 15 Websites that changed the world.
You'll probably disagree with many of the sites on the list, but the Web has indeed changed the world.
From Web 1.0 to Web 3.0? Via the International Herald Tribune, a long and interesting article about where Sir Tim Berners-Lee wants the Web to go: A 'more revolutionary' Web. Excerpt: Just when the ideas behind "Web 2.0" are starting to enter into the mainstream, the mass of brains behind the World Wide Web is introducing pieces of what may end up being called Web 3.0. "Twenty years from now, we'll look back and say this...
Via the International Herald Tribune, a long and interesting article about where Sir Tim Berners-Lee wants the Web to go: A 'more revolutionary' Web. Excerpt:
Just when the ideas behind "Web 2.0" are starting to enter into the mainstream, the mass of brains behind the World Wide Web is introducing pieces of what may end up being called Web 3.0.
"Twenty years from now, we'll look back and say this was the embryonic period," said Tim Berners-Lee, 50, who established the programming language of the Web in 1989 with colleagues at CERN, the European science institute.
Bienvenu, Sébastien Bailly! I've created a link in Web Writers and Editors to Sébastien Bailly, who blogs in French. His site also has a link to the Medieval Tech Support video that was pulled from YouTube....
I've created a link in Web Writers and Editors to Sébastien Bailly, who blogs in French. His site also has a link to the Medieval Tech Support video that was pulled from YouTube.
Blog Squad on Leading Experts TV Last December The Blog Squad was invited to be on the Leading Experts talk show. We headed to Palm Springs to the CBS studios where host Dr. Jeff Hockings shoots the 28 minute show. It's taken awhile, but we finally...
"Press Release Must Die" Panel at BlogHer Wants New Parameters for Social Media Formatting Press releases are getting major overhauls these days, turning the traditional PR format into more user-friendly versions that facilitate journalists' jobs of finding information faster. Julie Crabill from SHIFT Communications participated on a panel at BlogHer called The Press Release...
Copywriting Makeover: Facts Vs. Fantasy (Part 2 of 2) If your copy doesn't speak to your customers in language they want to hear, your sales will suffer. The same message presented in different ways brings different responses. Follow one website as they take their copy from fact-oriented to romantic and dreamy with exceptional results.
Copywriting Makeover: Facts Vs. Fantasy (Part 1 of 2) If your copy doesn't speak to your customers in language they want to hear, your sales will suffer. The same message presented in different ways brings different responses. Follow one website as they take their copy from fact-oriented to romantic and dreamy with exceptional results.
American Zeitgeist The Tyee has published my review of American Zeitgeist, a documentary about the origins of the Afghan and Iraqi wars....
The Tyee has published my review of American Zeitgeist, a documentary about the origins of the Afghan and Iraqi wars.
Mark Twain, Father of the Internet The Tyee has published my article Mark Twain, Father of the Internet. Excerpt: Mark Twain died in 1910, a lifetime before the founding of ARPANET, the precursor of the Internet and the web. So that you could read this on The Tyee, hundreds of brilliant scientists and engineers worked for years to get the clanking, room-sized computers of the 1960s to communicate with one another. You've probably never heard of...
Mark Twain died in 1910, a lifetime before the founding of ARPANET, the precursor of the Internet and the web. So that you could read this on The Tyee, hundreds of brilliant scientists and engineers worked for years to get the clanking, room-sized computers of the 1960s to communicate with one another. You've probably never heard of them: Vinton Cerf, J.C.R. Licklider, Robert Taylor, and Paul Baran, to name just a few. Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the web, was a latecomer.
Yet I contend that Mark Twain (one of the great science-fiction writers of all time) first conceived the Internet. Like the wizards of the 1960s and '70s, his contribution has been forgotten. But like Arthur C. Clarke, who conceived the earth satellite and could have patented it, Twain understood the idea of the Internet before the scientists did. If anything, he leaped beyond the text-based Internet to the just-dawning world of video chat and vlogging (video blogging).
A Little Light Housekeeping Writing for the Web 3.0 will be published in a few days, so I've spent some time updating and reorganizing this site. Many of the links had rotted, and the site was overdue for some new resources. So if you explore a little, you'll find several new links in Webwriting Resources and Web Writers and Editors. If you know of good sites, let me know and I'll be glad to...
Writing for the Web 3.0 will be published in a few days, so I've spent some time updating and reorganizing this site. Many of the links had rotted, and the site was overdue for some new resources.
So if you explore a little, you'll find several new links in Webwriting Resources and Web Writers and Editors. If you know of good sites, let me know and I'll be glad to add them.
Once the third edition is available online from Self-Counsel Press, I'll create a link to the publisher's site. I'll also add a number of new resources available on the book's CD—but the CD works only with PCs. So Mac users will have to download those items here.
BlogWrite for CEOs Debbie Weil is the author of BlogWrite for CEOs, which looks like a very useful resource—complete with a list of CEOs' blogs and some free downloadable resources. I'm putting a link to it in Webwriting Resources as well....
Debbie Weil is the author of BlogWrite for CEOs, which looks like a very useful resource—complete with a list of CEOs' blogs and some free downloadable resources. I'm putting a link to it in Webwriting Resources as well.
Was I Ahead of Myself? When my publisher asked for a third edition of my book, I suggested calling it "3.0" as if it were a piece of software. (Well, it's better than "Geeks' Edition," which was the second edition.) Now I seem to have anticipated the Next Big Thing, according to this story in the New York Times: Entrepreneurs See a Web Guided by Common Sense. Excerpt: From the billions of documents that form...
When my publisher asked for a third edition of my book, I suggested calling it "3.0" as if it were a piece of software. (Well, it's better than "Geeks' Edition," which was the second edition.)
From the billions of documents that form the World Wide Web and the links that weave them together, computer scientists and a growing collection of start-up companies are finding new ways to mine human intelligence.
Their goal is to add a layer of meaning on top of the existing Web that would make it less of a catalog and more of a guide — and even provide the foundation for systems that can reason in a human fashion. That level of artificial intelligence, with machines doing the thinking instead of simply following commands, has eluded researchers for more than half a century.
Referred to as Web 3.0, the effort is in its infancy, and the very idea has given rise to skeptics who have called it an unobtainable vision. But the underlying technologies are rapidly gaining adherents, at big companies like I.B.M. and Google as well as small ones. Their projects often center on simple, practical uses, from producing vacation recommendations to predicting the next hit song.
But in the future, more powerful systems could act as personal advisers in areas as diverse as financial planning, with an intelligent system mapping out a retirement plan for a couple, for instance, or educational consulting, with the Web helping a high school student identify the right college.
The projects aimed at creating Web 3.0 all take advantage of increasingly powerful computers that can quickly and completely scour the Web.
“I call it the World Wide Database,” said Nova Spivack, the founder of a start-up firm whose technology detects relationships between nuggets of information by mining the World Wide Web. “We are going from a Web of connected documents to a Web of connected data.”
Well, connecting data is what writing itself is all about. But I don't know if my book is going to help people navigate the World Wide Database. Still, I totally agree with this pioneer of Web 3.0:
“The system will know that spotless is better than clean,” said Oren Etzioni, an artificial-intelligence researcher at the University of Washington who is a leader of the project. “There is the growing realization that text on the Web is a tremendous resource.”
Beyond Wikipedia: Citizendium Via The Tyee, an article webwriters should read: Beyond Wikipedia. Excerpt: Larry Sanger doesn't trust the wisdom of the crowd, so he's no big fan of Wikipedia. But he's not like the others who get their kicks pooh-poohing the all-powerful (but flawed) wiki: Sanger had a huge hand in creating it. These days, however, he's doing his best to make it something future generations remember only as the troubled little...
Via The Tyee, an article webwriters should read: Beyond Wikipedia. Excerpt:
Larry Sanger doesn't trust the wisdom of the crowd, so he's no big fan of Wikipedia. But he's not like the others who get their kicks pooh-poohing the all-powerful (but flawed) wiki: Sanger had a huge hand in creating it. These days, however, he's doing his best to make it something future generations remember only as the troubled little brat of online encyclopedias.
Sanger is staging an electronic coup d'état with a new wiki called Citizendium, to be launched early in the new year. But there's a twist: the site will start out as a mirror image of the English version of Wikipedia through a process called "forking."
By making a replica of Wikipedia, Sanger hopes to attract a bevy of experts to the project, who will then refine the wobbly content pulled from Wikipedia's infinite pages to create a resource that is authoritative and reliable. ("We descend upon their content, red pens in hand and start our own new community," he recently wrote.)
"On the day of launch, we have over 1,000 people ready to get to work, and a large portion of them are professors, graduate students, research scientists, legal scholars, technical thinkers and assorted other intellectuals."
Question is, how far will his highfalutin model go in the unruly hurly-burly of cyberspace, where the wisdom of the crowds rules the day?
I've put a link to Citizendium in the Webwriting Resources list, and the article itself has a link as well.
Ideagoras The Globe and Mail is running a series based on a forthcoming book, Wikinomics. Today they've published the second in the series, Ideagoras. Here's an excerpt: In addition to broadening and deepening its own proprietary networks, P&G searches for innovations in Web-enabled marketplaces such as InnoCentive, NineSigma, and yet2.com. These combined efforts led to hundreds of new products on the market, some of which turned out to be hits. In...
The Globe and Mail is running a series based on a forthcoming book, Wikinomics. Today they've published the second in the series, Ideagoras. Here's an excerpt:
In addition to broadening and deepening its own proprietary networks, P&G searches for innovations in Web-enabled marketplaces such as InnoCentive, NineSigma, and yet2.com. These combined efforts led to hundreds of new products on the market, some of which turned out to be hits.
In the process, Mr. Lafley and his managers like Mr. Huston transformed a lumbering consumer products company into a limber innovation machine. In fact, five years after the company's stock collapsed in 2000, P&G has doubled its share price and now boasts a portfolio of 22 billion-dollar brands.
Today P&G is a leader among thousands of companies that participate in what we call "ideagoras" where millions of ideas, innovations, and uniquely qualified minds change hands in something akin to an eBay for innovation.
Companies that move now can leverage a global pool of talent, ideas, and innovations that vastly exceeds what they could ever hope to marshal internally.
P&G figures that for every top-notch scientist inside its labs, there's another 200 outside who are just as good. That's a total of 1.8 million people whose talents it could potentially tap into.
The article is interesting not just for its content (which may be good stuff or routine corporate hyperventilation) but for the Globe's own awkward use of the online medium.
The paragraphing of the online article was identical to that of the print version I read over breakfast. I broke up one over-long paragraph to make it more readable.
The resources mentioned like InnoCentive and NineSigma are given without links to their sites. (Don't get me going about companies still using StudlyCaps.)
The story does offer a link to the Wikinomics home page, and to an earlier article in the series. But like so much material that the print media dump online, this is really just shovelware. Its value online would be far greater if only it had been turned into real hypertext.
That said, I'm posting a link to Wikinomics in Webwriting Resources, and I'd welcome your comments about that site.
Previewing EyeTrack 07 At Poynter Online, Sara Quinn has an article worth reading: Looking back at EyeTrack is actually a look ahead at the latest of these Poynter studies. Obviously webwriters should understand how people read online, and EyeTrack 07 will therefore be of importance to us all. Excerpt: A systematic look -- that's what Poynter EyeTrack07 is all about. It's the largest of four eye-tracking studies conducted by Poynter and the first...
At Poynter Online, Sara Quinn has an article worth reading: Looking back at EyeTrack is actually a look ahead at the latest of these Poynter studies. Obviously webwriters should understand how people read online, and EyeTrack 07 will therefore be of importance to us all. Excerpt:
A systematic look -- that's what Poynter EyeTrack07 is all about. It's the largest of four eye-tracking studies conducted by Poynter and the first with the distinct focus of comparing print and online news reading.
We've almost finished analyzing the data. Key findings will be released at the American Society of Newspaper Editors conference in Washington, D.C., on March 28. The full debut of the findings will take place April 10 to 12 at a Poynter conference in St. Petersburg, Fla.
To give you a little background, this was a test of 600 regular readers of news. That's a large number in the research world, and it was necessary in order to get what we needed. We wanted to look through readers' eyes as they read live publications to see what attracted and held their attention. A second part of the study involved six versions of a prototype and an exit interview, which gave us insight into comprehension, and retention of information.
Using eye-tracking equipment we noted the number of times readers viewed more than 350 specific elements, such as headlines, photos, cutlines, stories, graphics, blogs, listings and ads.
The data totals more than 102,000 "eye-stopping events." That's research speak, but it means we've watched every eye movement of 600 readers over the course of about 9,000 minutes of reading 30 days' worth of news publication.
We conducted the study in four U.S. markets, working with the St. Petersburg Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune in Minnesota, the Philadelphia Daily News in Pennsylvania and the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, Colo. Each subject read the actual publication for 15 minutes, then read a prototype for another five minutes.
You may reserve a copy of the EyeTrack07 report and find more details about the upcoming conference at eyetrack.poynter.org. Go there to get a glimpse of the project in a video as well, while we continue to crunch the data.
Becoming a Book Blog After weeks of work, the third edition of Writing for the Web is nearly completed. It's a far more extensive revision than I'd expected, but I'm pretty happy with the result. Not only is much of the print content changed, expanded, and updated, but the book will contain a CD with scores of links—a kind of electronic index, with added links on relevant topics. In addition, this site will become...
After weeks of work, the third edition of Writing for the Web is nearly completed. It's a far more extensive revision than I'd expected, but I'm pretty happy with the result. Not only is much of the print content changed, expanded, and updated, but the book will contain a CD with scores of links—a kind of electronic index, with added links on relevant topics.
In addition, this site will become a kind of book blog, providing still more updates and links. So if you find something in the book that you don't understand or like, you can fire off an email or a comment, and I'll try to explain myself.
Most textbooks now include websites created by the publisher to supply extra materials. Those sites, however, tend to be permanent and unchanging. As the blog for Writing for the Web 3.0, this site will change almost daily.
The Future of Text Online At Poynter Online, Guillermo E. Franco has an interesting interview with Chris Nodder of the Nielsen Norman Group: What is the Future of Text Online?. The story also has a link to Jakob Nielsen's own useit.com page, which looks increasingly old-fashioned. The content is great, but the layout and typography need a makeover....
At Poynter Online, Guillermo E. Franco has an interesting interview with Chris Nodder of the Nielsen Norman Group: What is the Future of Text Online?.
The story also has a link to Jakob Nielsen's own useit.com page, which looks increasingly old-fashioned. The content is great, but the layout and typography need a makeover.
I Can’t Find a Niche Topic that I’m Passionate About! This is one of the most asked questions from niche marketers. “Should I make a website that I’m passionate about?” or “Should I go where the money is made?” Personally, I’d go where the money is. If you can find a topic that you are passionate about and also where great money is being [...]
This is one of the most asked questions from niche marketers.
“Should I make a website that I’m passionate about?” or
“Should I go where the money is made?”
Personally, I’d go where the money is. If you can find a topic that you are passionate about and also where great money is being exchanged in that market, that would be wonderful. But it is not common to find one like that.
I’ve been marketing in the niche markets where I have absolutely no idea nor interest in. But I successfully pulled it and made great passive income from them. Because I was willing to sacrifice my comfort zone, I’m now able to go after what I’m passionate about. I no longer have to worry about if my new sites will be making money or not. I have sites that makes me absolutely no money. I made them just because I wanted to share my knowledge and interest with others.
So my answer to this commonly asked question is to go after the money, then you will be able to do what you are passionate about eventually.
Any other opinions welcomed. Please use the comment section.
WordPress 2.1 is Ready Just read from Teli’s WordPress Niche Blog that WordPress 2.1 is out for download. One of the important changes is in this version is that now it requires MySQL 4. Which means I have to upgrade my servers in order to test drive it. Download WordPress 2.1.
Just read from Teli’s WordPress Niche Blog that WordPress 2.1 is out for download. One of the important changes is in this version is that now it requires MySQL 4. Which means I have to upgrade my servers in order to test drive it.
Sir Tim Warns Us About Online Fraud Via the Guardian Unlimited: Creator of web warns of fraudsters and cheats. Excerpt: The creator of the world wide web told the Guardian last night that the internet is in danger of being corrupted by fraudsters, liars and cheats. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who founded the web in the early 1990s, says that if the internet is left to develop unchecked, "bad phenomena" will erode its usefulness. His creation...
The creator of the world wide web told the Guardian last night that the internet is in danger of being corrupted by fraudsters, liars and cheats.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Briton who founded the web in the early 1990s, says that if the internet is left to develop unchecked, "bad phenomena" will erode its usefulness.
His creation has transformed the way millions of people work, do business, and entertain themselves.
But he warns that "there is a great danger that it becomes a place where untruths start to spread more than truths, or it becomes a place which becomes increasingly unfair in some way".
He singles out the rise of blogging as one of the most difficult areas for the continuing development of the web, because of the risks associated with inaccurate, defamatory and uncheckable information.
Sir Tim believes devotees of blogging sites take too much information on trust: "The blogging world works by people reading blogs and linking to them. You're taking suggestions of what you read from people you trust. That, if you like, is a very simple system, but in fact the technology must help us express much more complicated feelings about who we'll trust with what."
The next generation of the internet needs to be able to reassure users that they can establish the original source of the information they digest.
Links to the New Edition Writing for the Web 3.0 is now officially available. I've placed links to Self-Counsel Press in the right-hand column. If you're in the US, you can buy the book through the lower link; if you're in Canada or elsewhere in the world, the upper link is the one you want. If you're in the UK, you can also order the book through the Roundhouse Group. In the next few days...
Writing for the Web 3.0 is now officially available. I've placed links to Self-Counsel Press in the right-hand column. If you're in the US, you can buy the book through the lower link; if you're in Canada or elsewhere in the world, the upper link is the one you want. If you're in the UK, you can also order the book through the Roundhouse Group.
In the next few days I'll add some resources here that are available as a CD in the book...but only for PC users. So Mac users can download those resources here.
A Freelance Job in Vancouver This just arrived via the mail list of the Canadian Association of Journalists, and I hasten to pass it along. If you're a freelance writer in the Vancouver area, this could be of interest: The Conference Publishers is seeking freelance writers to cover the 2006 National Forum on Emergency Preparedness and Response in Vancouver. Writers are needed to produce 1800 word summaries of a pandemic flu exercise scheduled for December...
This just arrived via the mail list of the Canadian Association of Journalists, and I hasten to pass it along. If you're a freelance writer in the Vancouver area, this could be of interest:
The Conference Publishers is seeking freelance writers to cover the 2006 National Forum on Emergency Preparedness and Response in Vancouver. Writers are needed to produce 1800 word summaries of a pandemic flu exercise scheduled for December 14, 2006 (9 a.m. to 3 p.m.); turn-around time for reports is three working days.
If you are available and interested, please contact Biljana Zelenovic at biljana@theconferencepublishers.com or 1-800-265-3973 x226.
What Happened to the Adsense Template Page? I have a sad news today. I’ve decided to take down one of the most visited pages and high ranked page from my domain. I know many of you’ve been using it and recommending it at various forums around the world, but due to the recent change in Adsense’s policy, I’ve decided to [...]
I have a sad news today. I’ve decided to take down one of the most visited pages and high ranked page from my domain. I know many of you’ve been using it and recommending it at various forums around the world, but due to the recent change in Adsense’s policy, I’ve decided to take it down permanently.
I’ve put up some free downloads there for future visitors.
Thanks for your support for sharing the template with your list members and blog readers. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it :)
Bo
A new French-language resource I've belatedly discovered écrire pour le web, a blog produced, I believe, in Belgium. Even with my rudimentary French I can see it's a good site, and I've put a link to it in the Webwriting Resources list. (It's way down at the bottom of the list, thanks to its lower-case text.) This raises another point: staying up to date. If you're running a site that deals with webwriting (at...
I've belatedly discovered écrire pour le web, a blog produced, I believe, in Belgium. Even with my rudimentary French I can see it's a good site, and I've put a link to it in the Webwriting Resources list. (It's way down at the bottom of the list, thanks to its lower-case text.)
This raises another point: staying up to date. If you're running a site that deals with webwriting (at least in part), please get in touch. It's time to do a serious overhaul of the links and resources available here. Non-English sites especially welcome!
NYC ProBlogger Meetup Prizes As I mentioned in my last post - last night didn’t quite work out to be an appropriate place for a prize draw - so I’ve just drawn six winners. If you’ve won I’ll need to get a postal address from you - if you could shoot me an email via my contact form with your [...]
Blogging Is About Writing By Lorelle VanFossen of Lorelle on WordPress When you visit Google, do you click a picture to begin your search? Do you face a screen full of images like in a grocery store self-checkout? Click fruits, then apples, then scroll through pictures of apples before you find the Jonagold Apples you want to buy, and select [...]
What Does it Mean to Optimize a Blog Post? This post has been submitted by Aaron Wall - the author of the comprehensive Search Engine Optimization e-book SEO Book. He blogs at seobook.com With so many people writing online today, just appealing to the robots is a surefire way to never gain market-share. Keyword research is important for creating targeted content, but focusing on [...]
How to Get Backlinks GuruMonetizer asks - can you describe how did you get backlinks for problogger over the time? Thanks for the question GuruMonetizer. There’s no real secret to this one - I simply went about my business of blogging in a way that I felt would provide the most useful information and community for those exploring my topic [...]
Blog Squad on Leading Experts TV Last December The Blog Squad was invited to be on the Leading Experts talk show. We headed to Palm Springs to the CBS studios where host Dr. Jeff Hockings shoots the 28 minute show. It's taken awhile, but we finally...
Writers and Bloggers for Hire I've been researching ways to monetize your blog, in preparation for an Ask the Experts panel at Business BlogHer this week in NYC. And I'm discovering all these websites and lists where writers can find additional freelance work. Check out...
Beyond Writing: Use Your Voice with Podcasts Sometimes writing isn't enough. As a writer, you probably like to read information. But here's a clue: not everyone's a reader. There is a huge audience of people out there who like listening to podcasts. In fact, there's 65 million...
RSS Radars are not just a tool to help you enrich your website content and allow you to easily conduct business intelligence, but can also be used as a B2B Customer Relationship Management tool to help you maintain customer loyalty and provide your customers with some additional added value.
Just recently I received an e-mail from David Koopmans of Mokum Marketing, who gave me the idea for this post.
David's idea is simple:
Tag articles of interest to your customers using a service like Diigo or Del.icio.us
Provide them with an RSS feed to deliver them the articles as they are updated
This is how David sees the usefulness of such an application: "The idea is very attractive though; in B2B we often manage a relatively small number of relationships, but they are deep and we want to make them deeper."
But, there are two problems:
Tagging the articles using a public service like Diigo or Del.icio.us would make the feeds publicly available, making the service less value due to lack of uniqueness, as also noted by David
Tagging relevant articles every day takes time ... time that busy B2B marketers usually don't have, especially if you want to cater a tag-based RSS feed for each of your clients
This is where RSS Radars can come in, enabling you to aggregate dozens or hundreds of RSS feeds, filter them for the relevant keywords to get only the most relevant content for a specific client, and provide that client with his own customized RSS feed, using a service like MySyndicaat.com or pipes.yahoo.com.
Plus, using .htaccess you can easily password protect each feed for each individual client.
More details in the 2007 edition of the RSS e-book:)
Audio Articles: Great Idea for Greater Online Reach Today Denise and I interviewed Debra Simpson, MagicInWords.com about podcasts and other media to reach and pull visitors to your online business. (I'll post notes about our Blogging and Beyond radio show on podcasting and multi-media marketing over on our...
Split Run Testing If you are a webpreneur, split testing is a definite recommendation. Not only it increases sales but also lets go of unnecessary graphics and copy. A ..
... but someone certainly is, using a non-existant MarketingStudies.net e-mail address.
If you receive an e-mail with the subject "Got It, I Think" from tahaseggdzf@marketingstudies.net, or something simillar, it's spam. Not from us though ...
This is how it works:
(a) The spammer finds a number of open relay e-mail servers, which allow the spammer to send e-mail using an e-mail address that's not "hosted" on the e-mail server and often without even having a user account at the server provider.
(b) He or she then uses your e-mail address as the "Reply To" e-mail address in the spam messages and sends out the spam blast.
(c) Everyone receiving these e-mail messages will now think they are coming from your domain, unless of course they have enough knowledge about the subject to check the headers of the e-mail messages received. Those show that the e-mail is in fact not coming from MarketingStudies.net.
The funny thing about this spam is that the spammer didn't include any links in his spam e-mail.
Looking for ways to stop this, but I'm affraid it might be impossible ...
Wharton Economic Summit Promises Business Discussions on '07 Challenges For all you executive coaches and consultants, here's a conference which sounds interesting for top quality business information: The Wharton Economic Summit in Philadelphia April 12 13 will feature 70 Speakers to discuss Economic Challenges in ‘07. If you're interested,...
The Next Big Thing Embedded software, Wireless Net, P2P, Real time movies, and Medicare are some of the often heard phrases used to describe the next big thing on the ..
A new experiment in citizen journalism plans to some crowdsourcing and include readers and their sources in the network that journalists can tap into for stories.
Assignment Zero, a collaboration between Wired magazine and NewAssignment.Net, the experimental journalism site established by Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, intends to use not only the wisdom of the crowd, but their combined reporting efforts—an approach that has come to be called "crowdsourcing," reports The NY Times
Citizens with a variety of expertise—the "people formerly known as the audience," as Professor Rosen describes them—will produce work to be iterated and edited by experienced journalists.
This is an experiment to watch. It could turn out to be a place where your experts can contribute content. Some of the content might even make it into Wired, says Chris Anderson, the editor. .
Telcos Fail to Capitalize on Mobile Web 2.0 Telecoms companies are failing to make the most of the growing popularity of the online information-sharing services of "Web 2.0", according to new research 'Web re-loaded: Driving convergence in the real world.' by global consultancy Arthur D. Little.
This new report places users and user generated content in the spotlight yet again. Yet it seems US Telcos have not yet got the Web 2.0 message.
"In order to harness and monetize Web 2.0 the Telcos will have to rapidly address the needs of this community" says Martyn Roetter, Director of Arthur D. Little's US TIME. "Younger Europeans are already showing their readiness to interact on the move, with 38% of them accessing email from mobile devices, while Google launched Gmail for mobile in November last year. Telecommunications businesses now need to offer access to the established web 2.0 services, for both communication and for the fulfillment of their wider social needs while on the move."
The dilemma Telcos face is whether they should build their own Web 2.0 platforms or engage with established sites such as flickr etc, says the report.
One good example of collaboraiton is the Pontiac Underground site that partnered with Yahoo! and now offers access to all the Yahoo social media sites in one branded place.
Whatever they do, they should do it soon. the race goes to the swift and The Cluetrain is not waiting for the laggers.
Wall Street expectations destroying news organizations.
Audiences switching rapidly to new media for which there is insufficient revenue to support real journalism.
The line between amateurs and professional journalists is blurred and it is likely the public largely doesn't care.
News is entertainment and needs to compete on the basis of what the audience wants—not what is good journalism or what should be covered.
"Public relations professionals need to understand that these desperate days for traditional media are dangerous days for corporate and organizational reputations," says Bacon. "They need to be able to respond fast, to be aggressive in attacking misinformation and bad reporting and most importantly, they need to grab onto the incredible opportunities they have to talk directly to the people whose opinion about the organization matters most to their future. Talk quick, talk with complete honestly and talk directly."
How does a web content strategy figure in all this?
"Today's Internet tools including virtual communication centers, blogs, and communicator-controlled websites all make that possible. The desperate media environment makes it essential," advises Bacon. And he is 100% correct..
How do you do it?
If you do not yet have a section of your website that can be controlled by the communication department this should be a priority. The tools available today make this a no-brainer.
RSS enable this section of the site, so that your content can be syndicated across the Net. Feeds also allow you to reach subcribers fast...
Use RSS feeds and other tools to monitor the blogs and conversations so you have your finger on the pulse and can pick up and respond to any comments or issues right away.
TV: The Next Great Development Platform The personal computer was the first great development platform. The PC era ushered in giants like Microsoft, Apple, Sun and others. They all succeeded in creating great software that created operating system software that made computers far easier to use...
Adobe Launches a Colorful Social Network Adobe, which is an Edelman AR client, today launched the CS3 suite - a massive upgrade to all of its core design products. However, there was some other news too that I thought was cool. And I am not just...
The Advantages of Creating Your Own E-Book E-books have become more and more popular in the recent years. Although some people prefer a printed book in their hand, e-books are still in demand.
1-2-All Email Marketing by Active Campaign One of the tools that a self-publishing author must have is good email marketing software. I highly recommend 1-2-All which was developed by Active Campaign.
A new experiment in citizen journalism plans to some crowdsourcing and include readers and their sources in the network that journalists can tap into for stories.
Assignment Zero, a collaboration between Wired magazine and NewAssignment.Net, the experimental journalism site established by Jay Rosen, a professor of journalism at New York University, intends to use not only the wisdom of the crowd, but their combined reporting efforts—an approach that has come to be called "crowdsourcing," reports The NY Times
Citizens with a variety of expertise—the "people formerly known as the audience," as Professor Rosen describes them—will produce work to be iterated and edited by experienced journalists.
This is an experiment to watch. It could turn out to be a place where your experts can contribute content. Some of the content might even make it into Wired, says Chris Anderson, the editor. .
TV: The Next Great Development Platform The personal computer was the first great development platform. The PC era ushered in giants like Microsoft, Apple, Sun and others. They all succeeded in creating great software that created operating system software that made computers far easier to use...
Survey: 43% of Employees Web 2.0 at Work There's a common myth that the entire Web 2.0 movement doesn't have a big impact on B2B and their enterprise purchasing decisions. Nonsense. Workers are knee deep in these sites. According to a new survey by Clearswift, some 43% of...
Blog Squad on Leading Experts TV Last December The Blog Squad was invited to be on the Leading Experts talk show. We headed to Palm Springs to the CBS studios where host Dr. Jeff Hockings shoots the 28 minute show. It's taken awhile, but we finally...
GMOOT and the Folly of Crowds Several people have told me over the last few years: Steve, you never met a technology you didn't like. That's fair. There have been a few. But for the most part, they're right. Nick Denton is one of those people....
links for 2007-03-31 Top Irish Web Apps (tags: Web2.0 ireland Europe) A Thousand Words: A Kodak blog about photography Cool Kodak blog. (tags: Photography Blogs) rminder.com — quick and easy reminders Get reminders by voice on your cell phone. (tags: lifehacks Backpack calendar...
Wharton Economic Summit Promises Business Discussions on '07 Challenges For all you executive coaches and consultants, here's a conference which sounds interesting for top quality business information: The Wharton Economic Summit in Philadelphia April 12 13 will feature 70 Speakers to discuss Economic Challenges in ‘07. If you're interested,...
Wall Street expectations destroying news organizations.
Audiences switching rapidly to new media for which there is insufficient revenue to support real journalism.
The line between amateurs and professional journalists is blurred and it is likely the public largely doesn't care.
News is entertainment and needs to compete on the basis of what the audience wants—not what is good journalism or what should be covered.
"Public relations professionals need to understand that these desperate days for traditional media are dangerous days for corporate and organizational reputations," says Bacon. "They need to be able to respond fast, to be aggressive in attacking misinformation and bad reporting and most importantly, they need to grab onto the incredible opportunities they have to talk directly to the people whose opinion about the organization matters most to their future. Talk quick, talk with complete honestly and talk directly."
How does a web content strategy figure in all this?
"Today's Internet tools including virtual communication centers, blogs, and communicator-controlled websites all make that possible. The desperate media environment makes it essential," advises Bacon. And he is 100% correct..
How do you do it?
If you do not yet have a section of your website that can be controlled by the communication department this should be a priority. The tools available today make this a no-brainer.
RSS enable this section of the site, so that your content can be syndicated across the Net. Feeds also allow you to reach subcribers fast...
Use RSS feeds and other tools to monitor the blogs and conversations so you have your finger on the pulse and can pick up and respond to any comments or issues right away.
Telcos Fail to Capitalize on Mobile Web 2.0 Telecoms companies are failing to make the most of the growing popularity of the online information-sharing services of "Web 2.0", according to new research 'Web re-loaded: Driving convergence in the real world.' by global consultancy Arthur D. Little.
This new report places users and user generated content in the spotlight yet again. Yet it seems US Telcos have not yet got the Web 2.0 message.
"In order to harness and monetize Web 2.0 the Telcos will have to rapidly address the needs of this community" says Martyn Roetter, Director of Arthur D. Little's US TIME. "Younger Europeans are already showing their readiness to interact on the move, with 38% of them accessing email from mobile devices, while Google launched Gmail for mobile in November last year. Telecommunications businesses now need to offer access to the established web 2.0 services, for both communication and for the fulfillment of their wider social needs while on the move."
The dilemma Telcos face is whether they should build their own Web 2.0 platforms or engage with established sites such as flickr etc, says the report.
One good example of collaboraiton is the Pontiac Underground site that partnered with Yahoo! and now offers access to all the Yahoo social media sites in one branded place.
Whatever they do, they should do it soon. the race goes to the swift and The Cluetrain is not waiting for the laggers.
.
links for 2007-03-30 Escape from Cubicle Nation: Resource for new and experienced bloggers: Clear Blogging Great new book on blogging. (tags: Blogs Books) Only 5 million US citizens use mobile internet: study (tags: Mobile Stats) twitterfeed.com : feed your blog to twitter feed...
links for 2007-04-01 Google Earth Blog: Traditional Advertising Gets Boost in 3D Google Earth "If your business has already made an investment in marketing via its building signage, you could reap some unexpected marketing rewards thanks to Google Earth." (tags: Google GoogleEarth Advertising)...
Writers and Bloggers for Hire I've been researching ways to monetize your blog, in preparation for an Ask the Experts panel at Business BlogHer this week in NYC. And I'm discovering all these websites and lists where writers can find additional freelance work. Check out...
links for 2007-03-26 Blog Bar Update Google have updated the Blog Bar to include site restricted search. (tags: Blogs Google Search) WikiHome - JotSpot Wiki (continuouspartialattention) "Linda Stone's Thoughts on Attention and Specifically, Continuous Partial Attention" (tags: attention Media continuouspartialattention culture) Welcome ::...
Things To Do In NYC After a Conference There is a bronze mural on the side wall of the fire station at Ground Zero dedicated to the fallen heroes and those left standing. I couldn't help but shed a few tears; it's an eery feeling to remember the...
Do You Know the Fastest Way to Get a High Page Ranking?
Do You Know the Fastest Way to Get a High Page Ranking? There are millions upon millions of websites on the internet. The majority of these site's have poor page rankings. Is your site one of them? Would you like to increase your page ranking? Silly quest... [Author: Terry Morris - Site Promotion - December 11, 2006]
Things To Do In NYC After a Conference There is a bronze mural on the side wall of the fire station at Ground Zero dedicated to the fallen heroes and those left standing. I couldn't help but shed a few tears; it's an eery feeling to remember the...
Wharton Economic Summit Promises Business Discussions on '07 Challenges For all you executive coaches and consultants, here's a conference which sounds interesting for top quality business information: The Wharton Economic Summit in Philadelphia April 12 13 will feature 70 Speakers to discuss Economic Challenges in ‘07. If you're interested,...
Generating Traffic To Your Myspace Website MySpace is an exciting online community where members can make new friends, reconnect with old friends, network or even find potential romantic partners. While there are some MySpace members who join... [Author: David Riewe - Site Promotion - December 12, 2006]
Link Building Is One Of The Hardest Things To Do "In the time spent roaming the Internet jumping from website to website, it strikes me that links is the only real method of travel. With a rather large number of directories and link schemes that ... [Author: Paul Walton - Site Promotion - December 11, 2006]
Readers Online Finish Content More Than Print Readers People actually do read content online, and new research is busting an old myth. This study is found on Editor and Publisher.com, by way of Bryan Eisenberg of Grokdotcom.com. In a surprise finding, online readers finish news stories more often...
Blog Squad on Leading Experts TV Last December The Blog Squad was invited to be on the Leading Experts talk show. We headed to Palm Springs to the CBS studios where host Dr. Jeff Hockings shoots the 28 minute show. It's taken awhile, but we finally...
Google TrustRank and the Google Sandbox Google's TrustRank and Google's Sandbox filters are often discussed in forums. How to manipulate these filters is widely debated and since google still recently is consitently pulling over 45 percent... [Author: Joe Whyte - Site Promotion - December 11, 2006]
Podcasting for Business Blogging and Beyond: Episode 11How to Use Podcasts and Webinars to Grow Your Businesswith guest expert Debra Simpson, Magic in Words Debra had some great ideas for using audio and podcasting in your business. With 65 million mp3 players out...
Process on Optimizing your Site through Keywords There are a lot of things to analyze on your site before you start optimizing your site. Such things are your site overview, nature of business, home page, site dimension and number of pages, product... [Author: Kristine Joy Francisco - Site Promotion - December 12, 2006]
Where To Find Free Images For Your Web Marketing Campaign The Web is flooded with million images. Try Google image search or my favorite Picsearch.com and know what I mean. You are tempted to grab the best images and use it for your website. And of course y... [Author: Roz Volv - Site Promotion - December 12, 2006]
How To Analyze Your Search Engine Competition Analyzing a competitor�s web site may seem like a big job. You should have the mindset that you are going to do this as a learning experience though. This will help you along your way when you may fe... [Author: Chris Taylor - Site Promotion - December 11, 2006]
Submit Your Site to Google As soon as you register your domain name, submit it to Google! Even if you haven't built your site, or thought about your content, submit your domain name to Google. In fact, even if you haven't full... [Author: Montri Sitthichock - Site Promotion - December 11, 2006]
I'm the CEO/Founder of Guerrilla Marketers Cafe - Free Book Promotion Site, Where Authors and Readers Mingle. I'm passionate about helping others succeed.
A new experiment in citizen journalism plans to some crowdsourcing and include readers and their sources in the network that journalists can tap into for stories.
Moms are increasingly turning to the Internet for answers to everything from problems with teething babies to financing college. Based on research into their online audience Disney is launching a new website aimed at providing these answers the AP reports. 
I got an extra Christmas present in December from the makers of my laptop bag: Mobile Edge. Lewis Lustman, director of marketing for 
