Category: Blogging

Managing for Excellence Presentation

Today I’m doing a presentation to the Managing for Excellence meeting at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. This is a meeting of all Jacksonville supervisors, and I get a chance to tell them about what Mayo is doing in social media.

On our internal blog I did a post with links to some of our projects (many of which I had previously highlighted here), but I’m closing my fast-paced presentation (I only get 15 minutes) with a little more “show” to go along with the “tell.”

I’m planning to show:

I will be updating this post during the meeting today, embedding a video, for instance.

 [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m3vfIgfTVI]

If you’re interested in learning more and getting information on topics from Flickr to Twitter to RSS to Wikis, check out the Enroll Now page for your continuing education options.

Blogging 304: Does Google Treat Hyphenated Domain Names as Spam?

A reader named Andy raises a point I hadn’t considered, and which I tend to doubt, but I’d like any feedback from someone who may know. And because Social Media University, Global is a research institution for social media higher education, in addition to offering practical, hands-on learning, I’ve devised a project in which we can all participate to test for ourselves whether what Andy said is correct. This post is added to the SMUG curriculum as Blogging 304: Hyphenated Domain Name Research Project.

Andy writes, in a comment in the About Me page:

I can say that domain names with dashes like your’s “social-media-university-global” treated by Google and others like spam domains…

The reason I doubt this is three-fold:

  1. When I Google social media university, this blog comes up in the first two positions in my search results, ahead of American University’s centerforsocialmedia.org.
  2. When I Google blue shirt nation, a post I wrote about Best Buy’s employee social networking site comes up #5 (see below), and if I search for best buy blue shirt nation it’s #3.
  3. What I know about Google bots is they can parse words in URLs better when you separate them with hyphens. So social-media-university-global.org is easier than socialmediauniversity.org, because you’re coaching the bot as to where one word stops and the other starts. A URL like mikeisnowhere.org could mean mike is now here, mike is nowhere, or perhaps mikei could be an adjective modifying snow. For more discussion of this, see Blogging 201: Google Loves Blogs.

The results I get when I search (and the fact that I get traffic based on search terms like blue shirt nation) doesn’t sound to me like I’m being penalized in Google’s search results.


But who knows? Maybe Google adjusts the results when I’m searching because it associates my computer with my blog, and therefore considers my blog more relevant to me.

So here’s your SMUG assignment:

  1. Open click here to do a Google search for blue shirt nation, followed by a search for best buy blue shirt nation (no quotes around either phrase.) Note the highest position at which you see a social-media-university-global.org search result.
  2. Enter your results in the comments on this post.

I’m looking forward to learning through this SMUG research project, and hope you’ll take a couple of minutes to participate.

Blogging 108: Starting Your WordPress.com Blog

Note: This post is part of the Blogging curriculum at Social Media University, Global (SMUG).

This may be a case in which our course sequence is out of order, since Blogging 109: Experimenting with WordPress.com should perhaps logically come before this one. In Blogging 109, I offer a chance for you to do practice posts on a Training Wheels Blog that isn’t your own. So you can feel free to experiment and make mistakes there, before starting your own blog.

But in another sense, it probably makes sense to at least start your blog here in Blogging 108, then go and experiment a bit in Training Wheels before coming back to start your own blogging in earnest.

As I describe on this page, which was my first effort to give a step-by-step intro to starting a blog on WordPress.com, the process is really simple. But I didn’t show exactly what it looks like as a first-time user, because the screen shots you see are from me starting a second blog, when I’m already logged in to my first one.

So now it’s time to update and enhance as part of the SMUG curriculum, and I’m making it a SMUG Podcast and putting it in the form of a Slideshare.net presentation.

Since everyone should have a blog, I’m going to start by creating a blog for my nine-year old son, John. Of course, I’ll need to start by getting a Gmail account for him. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Here’s the presentation:


Homework Assignments:

As indicated in the presentation, your homework assignments are as follows:

  1. Go to John’s blog and leave a comment on this post about what a great Dad he has. (And by the way, A Grand Start was really the title he chose for this post.)
  2. Start your own blog on WordPress.com.

It’s fine if you want to leave your blog in that initial condition for a few days. Send me an e-mail or a message through Facebook with the e-mail address you used in signing up for your WordPress.com blog, and I will add you as an author for the Training Wheels blog. Then you can experiment and learn how to do posts before you start doing it for real on your own blog.

High-Speed Blogging (In a Sense)

This is a REALLY cool new benefit of my daily commute on Rochester City Lines. We now have WiFi on the bus!

I took a little video of one of my bus buddies, Dave, asking him what he thinks about this new service, and tried uploading to YouTube while we were traveling. I will likely be posting that video likely when I get home, because with the speed of the connection I have my doubts as to whether it will be done by the time I get off the bus.

This is a combination that show both how cool the Flip video camera is, and what you can do with bus WiFi.

I will say that the speed of the WiFi is slow (at least today.) So when I call this high-speed blogging, it’s referring to my velocity through space (about 60 mph), not the bandwidth. I’m just going to publish now, and will embed the video from home.

Video blogging may not be the best commuting application, but I’m thinking Twittering would be great.

Thanks to Rochester City Lines for providing this new service!

Updated: Here’s the video referenced above. Not likely to become a viral sensation, but an example of what you can do really quickly with the Flip (and with mobile WiFi on the bus.) Considering that I started this post about 90 minutes ago, it’s not too bad. You get to see what this bus-WiFi unit looks like, and I get to embarrass my buddy Dave.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xSejq54bRk]

Blogging Platforms Compared

Note: This post is Blogging 105, part of the Blogging curriculum at Social Media University, Global.

In developing the curriculum for Social Media University, Global I had originally planned to have Blogging 105 be about the pros and cons of WordPress.com and WordPress, with Blogging 106 and 107 providing the same analysis for Blogger and Typepad/Movable Type, respectively.

If someone wants to write those posts (106 and 107), I would be glad to have you join the SMUG faculty as a visiting professor. But given limited time (and my increasing satisfaction with WordPress.com and WordPress), I will focus on why this platform is both a great way to get started with blogging, and also why it provides flexibility for growth as you become more serious about it.

I have limited experience with both Blogger and Typepad. They’re both fine, and their major advantages from my perspective is that you can embed flash-based widgets, which is something you can’t do, for security reasons, on WordPress.com. That lets you put all those sharing icons like this:

…at the bottom of your posts. I had a friend describe WordPress.com as “Digg-proof,” which is a limitation, I suppose. You can overcome it by moving to a WordPress installation on a rented server, however, so it’s not a crucial deficiency in WordPress.com, from my perspective. And I guess it helps with security, so some malicious Flash application can’t bring down thousands of WordPress.com blogs

WordPress.com Benefits

  • It’s free, and comes with 3 gigs of storage for photos and documents. No credit card needed to get going. No 14-day free trial. You can start now in about 30 seconds, and could quite possibly blog long-term without spending a penny.
  • If you’re nervous about starting, you can make your blog private and get hands-on experience without anyone seeing. (Or if you want to get experience in a blogging playground, check out the Training Wheels blog, where I would be happy to make you an Author.)
  • It’s Open Source, so lots of unpaid programmers are adding cool features really rapidly.
  • You can embed YouTube or Google videos (and some other types), as well as Slideshare.net slide shows.
  • If you want to use WordPress.com as a podcast server, you can pay another $20 a year to upgrade your storage to 8 gigs, and to enable you to upload mp3 or video files. (More on this soon.)
  • Bandwidth is unlimited and free. If you can upload it to WordPress.com, your blog visitors can download it. It doesn’t matter how many of them visit.
  • You can create workflows for an editorial process. You have a hierarchy that runs from Contributor (can write posts but can’t publish) to Author (can publish and edit own posts) to Editor (can edit anyone’s posts) to Administrator (can do all of the above plus add or delete users and change blog design.) So if you want people to be able to write posts but want a quality check before they go live, you can have that process built into your publishing tool.
  • URLs are in plain English, and you can edit them for search engine benefits. For example, I have given this post a URL that ends …global/blogging-platforms-compared/. Google looks at that URL and deduces that this post might just be about comparing blogging platforms. So if anyone searches on those terms, I’ll be likely to come up higher in the rankings than if I had a Typepad URL like …/blogging-platfo.html
  • Upgrade costs are minimal. For $15 a year you can customize the look and feel of your blog, as we did here and here and here. For $10 a year you can map your blog to another domain or subdomain (see the same examples, as well as the domain name you see in your browser right now), although it may cost you another $10 to register a domain name (like social-media-university-global.org). I already mentioned the $20 a year fee for 5 gigs of extra storage, and for $30 you can have an unlimited number of private users. Add it all up and you’d have a hard time finding a way to spend over $100 a year on a fully featured WordPress.com blog. A comparably equipped TypePad blog would be at least $300 a year, and more likely $900.
  • If your blog becomes wildly successful and you want to start offering Google Adwords or Flash-based applications, you can transfer your blog from wordpress.com to a server you control (and that you can rent for maybe $10 a month.) Just update your server’s IP address with your registrar, and you can make the move without losing any links.

As I said earlier, I would welcome as a visiting professor anyone who would want to explore the pros and cons of either Blogger or Typepad in a guest post. Or if you have experiences with any of these platforms that you would like to share in the comments, please do!

Otherwise, what are you waiting for? Get started with WordPress.com now.