Category: Blogging

Blogging Vacation

No, I’m not taking a vacation from blogging…I’ll be blogging about vacation…to the extent I can. We’re in Atlanta at the Marriott Marquis for Bible Bowl 2008, where my daughter Ruth and son Joe are competing in this national competition. I blogged about the Bible Bowl experience last year; it was pretty amazing. I’ll have some highlights and dispatches from the competition over the next couple of days.

Another amazing feature about our Atlanta trip is this hotel. Here’s a taste of the elevator trip to the 41st floor, where we’re staying.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV_DCHngUJg]

Some of my family members get a little nervous about the heights, but the view from our window (at the top of this post) is pretty sweet.

The sweetest part is having all of our remaining kids together (the ones who aren’t married and/or college graduates) together for this week, and to have my parents along for the trip. We wish Jacob and Rachel (and Kyle and Evelyn) were along too, but we’re thankful for this nice getaway week.

The only downside for frequent blogging is that the daily charge for Internet access is $12.95, which is a bit pricey for family vacation. But in the food court across the street at Peachtree Center there is free wireless, so I’m just coming over here a couple of times a day to sync my computer and post updates. Probably good on vacation to not be doing too much computer activity, but this does make it nice to capture some of the moments, so that when we do our Christmas letter (as we did last year and the year before), we have some photos and videos to which we can link to tell the story of the year.

So some of the coming posts will be of a more personal nature, but for SMUG students they are:

A) A way to get to know the Chancellor and his family a little better, and

B) An illustration of how you can use your blog for multimedia family updates instead of sending photocopied Christmas letters. Not only will this method save you money (at First Class postage rates of 41 cents or whatever it is now…it’s probably been a year since I’ve purchased stamps), but the product is much richer and more interactive.

Four Words For Free

I’ve been following the controversy about the Associated Press and its attempt to charge bloggers for excerpting content. Jeff Jarvis has had an extended discussion here and here, and many bloggers are just boycotting AP and declaring its content off limits, including some of the big ones like TechCrunch.

So it was interesting today to read from Nick O’Neill that apparently AP considers quoting anything more than four words a copyright infringement.

I agree with Jarvis that AP needs to seriously re-think this strategy. I’m not a lawyer, but there is such a thing as “fair use,” and as Jarvis says, you can’t assign a specific word count to it.

The link ethic in the blogging community strikes me as much more genuine than the rewrites AP does, generally boiling down the writing of its member organizations and removing the credit from the original article’s author.

What do you think? Will you join Jarvis and Arrington in bypassing AP, and just quoting and linking to original sources?

ALI Social Media Summit Highlights

Today I attended the Advanced Learning Institute’s Social Media Summit at the Hyatt Regency in Chicago, and presented a case study on our social media efforts at Mayo Clinic.

Chairman Michael Rudnick gave a good overview, Andy Sernovitz of GasPedal did his usual great presentation, and we also heard from Patty Crowley of Johnson & Johnson on the new intranet portal J&J has launched for its IT employees, and from Jeremy Lasich, the Deputy Director for Communications Fairfax County, Virginia. I will have a follow-up post about Jeremy’s experience, since it will be highly relevant for the group for which I am presenting a workshop tomorrow.

I had lunch with a few of the ALI participants, and Jorge from HEB said my demonstration of the Flip video camera was his most important take-away so far:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kpZ8HWh3RY]

And just after he said that, one of our lunchmates shared her family’s Mayo Clinic story. I won’t use her name, since this story is about her Mom’s experience with Mayo Clinic (and she corrected herself afterward that the problem was carbon monoxide, not dioxide):

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZEMRPrV28s]

This all just goes to show both the power of sharing personal stories and how quick and convenient the Flip video camera is. Editing the clips was really simple, and took just a couple of minutes.

As Andy Sernovitz says, in word of mouth marketing you first need to give people something to talk about, and then make it easy for them to share. Clearly the Flip camera and YouTube are tools that make sharing easier.

Mass Media, Social Media and an Elf Who Got Too Jolly

When I spoke to the Ragan workshop with Shel Holtz yesterday, one of my points was how blogs and social media sites like YouTube work together with the mainstream media. Many times the fact that a story is mentioned in the mass media is what leads to it getting lots of hits on the Web. This message I got Thursday from Cindy at LifeSource, where I recently did a SMUG extension class, is a case in point:

Thank you for coming to LifeSource last week! Your talk was very interesting. I wanted to share with you something that happened to my husband this week regarding “social media” Curt is a sergeant with the MN State Patrol. A few years ago he arrested an elf…yes an elf….and the arrest made it on “You Tube” (you can find it under elf arrest). Two nights ago our phone started ringing off the hook at 11 p.m. and our friends and family said turn Jay Leno on, Curt is on the show! Well we missed it but Jay played his video! We were able to see the Leno show last night on the website and also looked at the You Tube video which went from a couple of hundred hits to over 58,000! Anyways…I thought you would appreciate that story. Have a great week! – Cindy

Here’s the “elf arrest” video that caught Jay Leno’s attention:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3yhiXlNRjU]

This is one of the points I often stress, but perhaps not as frequently as I should. Social media and mass media work together, and often the biggest impact from social media comes when it is noticed by someone in the mainstream media.

islamicyearwaxeddonetimedeclared and SEO

The results are in from my SMUG survey in Blogging 304, in which I asked readers to search for two terms and see where SMUG shows up in the rankings to test whether Google treats hyphenated domain names as “spam” domains, as a previous commenter had alleged

Of the five comments so far, it seems that on a search for blue shirt nation this blog typically shows up #4 in the rankings (#8 was the lowest) and for best buy blue shirt nation it’s typically #3.

So the fact that this blog has a URL of social-media-university-global.org instead of socialmediauniversityglobal.org doesn’t seem to be causing problems with my posts showing up in Google.

In fact, I think it’s likely the opposite, as this blog shows up at the top in searches for social media university, and even is on the first page for university social media. It appears to me I even do fairly well on global social media and social media global.

Again, some of this might be that Google knows I’m doing the searching and is serving my blog preferentially in the results, so if you’d want to search for some of the italicized terms above and let me know in the comments below how SMUG shows up, I’d appreciate knowing.

This led me to test a post on my son’s new blog (where he’s excited that he’s #1 in Google when you search for his name.) I’ve done an optimized post on his blog to see how long and whether that moves to #1 in the John Aase search. We’ll see what happens, and I’ll update later with the reslts.

Meanwhile, I got thinking some more about how failure to hyphenate, either in a domain name or in post, could make it more difficult for the Google robots to determine what a site or a post is about.

This post, for example, could mean at least one of two things, depending on how the bots parsed the URL.

islamicyearwaxeddonetimedeclared could mean that a major national news magazine had reached the judgment that Muslim ascendancy had ended: Islamic year waxed done, Time declared. Or, in a nonsensical nod to one of the Cartoon Network shows we try to not let John watch (see graphic above), it could be “I slam icy ear wax,” Edd one time declared.

The application for you is that you should hyphenate your URLs and make it easier for Google to understand what your post is about. In this case, particularly with the tags, it might get the picture that this post is about SEO.

This is another good reason to choose WordPress or WordPress.com as your blogging platform, because the default URL for your post comes from its title and because you can edit your URL before posting.