Websitetology

At geek tech conferences, there is almost always a “backchannel” going on these days over twitter. Audiences are sharing their thoughts in 140 characters or less, in real time about the speaker using a #hashtag.

In fact, almost every sporting event, television show, mass audience, now has a mass conversation tool. But, typically- its only for people “in the know.”

Now, we have teachers utilizing the hashtag to engage a classroom- with the conversation projected on screen in the classroom:

Teachers are always trying to combat student apathy and University of Texas at Dallas History Professor, Monica Rankin, has found an interesting way to do it using Twitter in the classroom.

Rankin uses a weekly hashtag to organize comments, questions and feedback posted by students to Twitter during class. Some of the students have downloaded Tweetdeck to their computers, others post by SMS or by writing questions on a piece of paper. Rankin then projects a giant image of live Tweets in the front of the class for discussion and suggests that students refer back to the messages later when studying.

via How One Teacher Uses Twitter in the Classroom.

I’ve started using twitter to take notes when at events, coming back to a tweet stream that captured in realtime not just what I was thinking- but feedback from my followers.

Watch as social media and  social networking in realtime and in real space becomes normalized behavior in more places over time.

Due to the fact that Worpress decided to get rid of the “Press It” function until 2.6, I have recently had the need to post the code that will allow you to use the “Press It” feature on your own.

As it turns out, it is supposedly very hard to post code in Wordpress. If you just copy and paste your code in, Wordpress will turn your quote marks into “Smart Quotes”. They look pretty, but do not work with code. So I set about finding a plugin or some other method to correct this.

Everywhere I looked people were recommending different methods. From using plugins and custom fields, to manually editing, and to online converters. I tried them all, but they either didn’t display the code correctly, or messed up my formatting site wide.

So here is my solution, it may have been suggested before, but I sure couldn’t find it with hours of searching and testing. Simply insert this code into your style sheet:

pre {
width: 95%;
overflow: auto;
padding: 10px;
margin: 1em auto;
font-family: "Courier New", Courier, mono;
background-color: #ddd;
color: #555;
border: 1px dotted #999;
}

Now, when you paste your code into the Wordpress editor, highlight it, and select the preformatted option from the “Format” drop down menu.

The pre tag will preserve your quote marks, spacing, indenting, and other elements.

And thats all you have to do. Your code will work when copied and pasted from the browser. If you have a long line of code, instead of running over everything, this will make a horizontal scroll bar to contain it.

Note: Wordpress may apply separate <pre> tags to each line when you select it from the drop-down menu. (I have no idea why, it defeats the whole purpose of <pre> tags) To get around this, either manually add <pre> and </pre> before and after the text under the HTML tab in the edit screen, or apply the formatting with the code all as one line, and add the line breaks in afterward.

It’s nice when the New York Times writes about blog superstars like Mark Cuban- who gets thousands of comments on a post, but, what about the rest of us?

Everyone knows something about something- at least that’s the premise of Wikipedia. But, when it comes to getting that Google love, the Times has a few good tips:

So You Want to Be a Blogging Star? – New York Times
More to the point, linking to other bloggers is the best way to get them to link to you. Links from other bloggers increase your readership two ways: they send readers directly from other sites, and they raise your ranking in search engine results. A blogger who posts about a hot topic like Eliot Spitzer’s secret life, but has no inbound links, will lose out to one who already has dozens of inbound links from other sites.

Plug yourself. That’s what all the name-brand bloggers do. It’s not bad form to send a short note to a prominent blogger drawing his or her attention to a really good blog you wrote. Some bloggers place links to their sites in comments they write on more established blogs. And some bloggers are on to the trick and refuse to allow it.

A more direct way to draw a crowd is to submit your blog posts to news aggregation sites like Digg, Fark and Boing Boing. Readers vote on how much they like the posts and new readers are drawn to the list of most popular posts. Granted, it helps if your blog post includes a home video of someone being attacked by a cat or really arrogant e-mail messages from a hedge-fund manager. Those get passed around virally in an instant.

You have to think about what you write, how useful it will be to your audience, and how to get connected with other sites. Finding your community and your voice can take a while, but once it’s there- lookout.

Of course, if you take the websitetology seminar, you’ll know a lot more about how all this works.

The next Websitetology seminars will be held, Monday January 21, 2008

8:30am to 5 pm

Location Nehemiah University, 750 S. Main Street Dayton OH 45410

If you are wondering if you should take this seminar: http://websitetology.com/?p=91

Sign up for it here: http://websitetology.com/?page_id=247

You are a small business, or a big business, you know you need a website, but developers are expensive, keeping the site updated can be a pain, and paying to get on the front page of Google sounds like another headache.

Well, never fear, Websitetology is here. We use Open Source (Free) software to run business websites for maximum payoff and low cost maintenance. Yes, the software is for blogging- but, it can do so much more. That’s where most people get hungup- even the New York Times keeps thinking that there is a difference between a blog and a website (both can do the same thing for your business- and are available online).

The reality is, we average over 9000 unique visitors at www.thenextwave.biz/tnw  and it helps position us as leading edge thinkers in our field. It’s also a lot easier to maintain than our old style main part of our site.

It’s the reason why we teach the seminar, and help others learn how to position themselves as the leader in their field— but, look at what the NYT has to say too:

Blogging’s a Low-Cost, High Return Marketing ToolTO its true believers at small businesses, it is a low-cost, high-return tool that can handle marketing and public relations, raise the company profile and build the brand.

That tool is blogging, though small businesses with blogs are still a distinct minority. A recent American Express survey found that only 5 percent of businesses with fewer than 100 employees have blogs. Other experts put the number slightly higher…

Blogging requires a large time commitment and some writing skills, which not every small business has on hand.

But some companies are suited to blogging. The most obvious candidates, said Aliza Sherman Risdahl, author of “The Everything Blogging Book” (Adams Media 2006), are consultants. “They are experts in their fields and are in the business of telling people what to do.”

For other companies, Ms. Risdahl said, it can be challenging to find a legitimate reason for blogging unless the sector served has a steep learning curve (like wine), a lifestyle associated with certain products or service (like camping gear or pet products) or a social mission (like improving the environment or donating a portion of revenues to charity).

Even in those niches, Ms. Risdahl said that companies need to focus on a strategy for their blogging and figure out if they have enough to say.

“As a consultant, blogging clearly helps you get hired,” she said. “If you are selling a product, you have to be much more creative because people don’t want to read a commercial.”

Sarah E. Endline, chief executive of sweetriot, which makes organic chocolate snacks, said she started blogging a few months before starting her company in 2005 to give people a behind-the-scenes look at the business.

The kind of transparency is a popular reason for blogging, particularly for companies that want to be identified as mission-oriented or socially responsible.

A typical post on sweetriot’s blog described the arrival of the company’s first cacao shipment from South America and how Ms. Endline met the truck on Labor Day weekend after it passed through customs at Kennedy International Airport.

She wrote about climbing aboard to inspect the goods and then praised the owner of Gateway trucking company, who helped her sort through the boxes so that she could examine the product.

“At sweetriot we don’t use the word ‘vendors’ as we believe it is about partnership with anyone with whom we work,” she wrote….

He added: “I’m trying to create a community of help for small Internet businesses like mine. My blogging philosophy is like the open source model in software. It’s sort of a hippie concept. If I can help other people, it’s personally rewarding. And those people will likely pay it back in some ways.”

Mr. Stubblebine said he gets new customers largely by word of mouth, and he uses the blog as a way to share news with friends and people who wield influence in his industry as well as a reference check for customers. “That’s why I cover the growth of the company.”

David Harlow, a lawyer and health care consultant in Boston, said he started his blog, HealthBlawg, as a way of marketing himself after he left a large law firm and opened his own practice. Besides, he said, blogging was easy to get started and the technology was straightforward.

Now, after about two years of blogging, Mr. Harlow said he was pleased with the results. He gets about 200 to 300 visits a day, he said. He has also become a source for publications looking for commentary on regulatory issues in the health care field and has even gained a few clients because of the blog. In addition, he has formed relationships with other legal bloggers (who call themselves blawgers) and consultants around the country.

Many small business bloggers achieve their goals even if only a handful or a few hundred people read their blogs….

If you don’t think a few hundred people are important, there are many small businesses who have websites that don’t get a few hundred visits a year. We’ve found that using the blogging tools properly, can help you get to the top of search for many more terms than your company name or the name of the founder.

It won’t be long when all websites have bloglike components, including comments, RSS and easy maintenance. If you can’t wait, come take the seminar and get ahead of the curve.

One of the things that shocks people in Dayton Ohio- is my willingness to let my competition come take the Websitetology seminar and learn our “trade secrets” to web optimization. I also share my ideas for making Dayton a better place on my personal website, www.esrati.com all without worrying about people stealing my ideas. In fact, if they steal them, all the better, although I’d like to be rewarded somehow for them. In todays “expert economy” that reward can be as simple as proper attribution, That’s what the Creative Commons license is all about.

My online “friend”- D’Arcy Norman writes an eloquent essay on why he uses the CC license- and it’s well worth reading in it’s entirety- but here is a brief excerpt:

on creative commons licensing – D’Arcy Norman dot net
I don’t publish things online for fame, nor fortune. I started doing this primarily as an outboard, searchable brain. Over time, the network effects kicked in, and I’ve kept doing it for the additional reasons of sharing thoughts, experiences, and information with the rest of the class. The conversations that take place across the various bits of the social web have become far more important to me than simply publishing content. In order to honour the spirit of the network, attribution for use of content is required – a simple hyperlink – which then teaches Google, Technorati, and the rest of The Machine about the semantic connection between pages (and people).

As always, his insight makes me think about things I may not have thought about in depth- and it’s made me want to share it with you. The CC license isn’t hard to add to your site, and the principle of it is good common sense and a stand for good karma. Both of which are a very good thing these days.

Matt Cutts is the guy at Google who figures out how to deliver better search results- what gets to the first results page. Officially he’s the Head of Web Spam at Google- which makes sense once you realize a big part of his job is making sure that you aren’t trying to “game” Google. All those SEO tricks that may work for a minute- aren’t near as useful as new helpful content on a fairly regular basis. We’re in an “Expert Economy” and those with the newest, best answers to solve searchers problems- will be the people who get to the front page.The days of the static brochure type site are long over.Watch the video- and realize, everything that Matt is talking about is what we teach in the Websitetology seminar. He even praises WordPress, our content manager of choice right at the beginning of the video. And if you need further proof that Wordpress is the bomb, it’s the tool he uses for his blog (see link above)Some tips Matt makes are some of the things we emphasize- like make sure you add descriptions of your audio or video content as text, because Google can’t index audio. (That’s what we’re doing here!) He talks about Googles other tools, like Google base, Google Maps, Google local, as well as tips on video- Google video longer for videos longer than 10 minutes, YouTube for 10 minutes or less (although we’ve got “Directors Status” and have loaded up 30 minute videos to YouTube). He also reminds smart web content creators to use Google ad words to generate alternate key words for your posts.Matt’s best advice to a budding site builder- use a really old browser, or a text only browser to see how a bot sees your site. Flash and Javascript make your site much harder or impossible to crawl. If you do insist on using Flash, use it as decoration, but leave the navigation in HTML.If you are in Dayton OH, and want to learn all the ins and outs of building the best site for Google rank, or, if you want a seminar on how to build an easy to use, effective website that can get you to the front page of Google, you can read up on Matt Cutts or you can take the Websitetology seminar which will give you the insight to get to the top, without having to buy ad words.

plasq.com – Skitch – Snap, Draw, ShareYour friends are global… you can send them links… but what if the action is on your screen? … Point out a quick suggestion to a colleague or pass on that funny moment from an IM chat, post images to MySpace, eBay, forums or via email..Skitch is the Internet age’s Camera and it Rocks!There are many ways to take screen shots of your desktop, from a quick series of keystrokes, to 3rd party tools of varying levels of ability and complexity. But even with advanced tools, any editing beyond cropping and resizing will require another program, and then another will be needed to share it.The developers at Plasq saw the need for a better tool, and the result is Skitch, a veritable Swiss Army knife of functionality – from capturing, to editing, and finally, uploading or embedding. Take a screen shot, crop the picture, resize it by dragging the corners of the window, draw on the picture, add some text, drag and drop it to your desktop, upload it to Flickr, insert it in your LiveJournal/MySpace/WordPress post, share it through the Skitch website, drag and drop it into an email, share it through almost any social networking site, save it as a PNG, JPG, SVG, PDF, TIF, or the native Skitch format, then view all your other screen captures in the History window – all from Skitch. Skitch can also upload to an FTP server, or share via WebDav. It’s freakin’ sweet!Like many sweet things, it’s only available for the Mac. Try out Skitch, and let us know what you think.

The next Websitetology seminars will be held, Tuesday Dec 11, 2007

8:30am to 5 pm

Location Nehemiah University, 750 S. Main Street Dayton OH 45410

If you are wondering if you should take this seminar: http://websitetology.com/?p=91

Sign up for it here: http://websitetology.com/?page_id=247

Having problems posting often enough? Always on the go when you see something that you want to share? Have a cell phone? Utterz might be the answer.

Although you’ve always had the ability to post via e-mail- without some serious pluginage, you would have a hard time adding cell phone multi-media to a post. Enter Utterz. Snap a pic, record a podcast, or a quick camera video and post it to your WordPress blog (even though they left WP off their FAQ-but use it for their own blog) with a simple call to their number (and yes- you pay for the call).

Utterz – Frequently Asked Questions
Utterz is the first way you can instantly blog your experiences, thoughts and ideas, anywhere, using all the capabilities of your mobile phone. Utterz mashes together the voice, video, pictures, and text you call or send in and creates an ‘Utter’ that can immediately update your existing web pages on sites like Blogger, Facebook, LiveJournal, MySpace and more. [See FAQ how do I grab a widget, how do I use auto-posting and how do I embed my Utter?]

Just remember, if you are posting (utterz) of audio or video- remember to add text to make your post searchable- or you’ll just be uttering to yourself and your subscribers.

Not quite sure what the revenue model is- maybe they’ll make you listen to an ad before you post, or because the site aggregates public “utterz” they will be a high value site and end up with revenue from Google ads etc. Read what Robert Scoble has to say about it here: http://scobleizer.com/2007/09/17/utterz-like-twitter-but-with-audiovideo/

There is a lot of buzz about Twitter as the dawn of instant mobjournalism- instant “Twitterquakes” when something relevant happens to a large group of people who are connected. An earthquake or terrorist attack would instantly fill the twitter-ether with reports.

You don’t have to use Utterz as a social media tool- just a way to post- but, the options are out there.