Entries from February 2007 ↓

My friend Aidan (mappingtheweb.com) and I were talking about Search Engine Optimization this weekend, and he pointed me to some resources that would improve my blog’s Google rankings. I’m always one for a quick fix, so here are some quick and easy ways that, in 5 minutes or less, will improve your blog’s SEO.

1. The Head Meta Description is often overlooked on Wordpress blogs, even though Google really likes it when each page has a different description. How can you remedy this? Download this plugin. It automatically takes the first 25 words of your post and creates a meta description with it.
2. Neil Patel suggests using only your post’s heading as a title for your blog entry. His fix? On wordpress, go into your header file and make the following modification:
   <title><?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo('name'); } elseif ( is_category() ) { single_cat_title(); echo " - "; bloginfo('name'); } elseif (is_single() || is_page() ) { single_post_title(); } elseif (is_search() ) { bloginfo('name'); echo " search results: "; echo wp_specialchars($s); } else { wp_title('',true); } ?> </title>
3. Use a Related Posts plugin. Not only will this showcase some of your other great content to your readers, but search engine crawlers will be exposed to more links! Always a plus.

If you have more than 5 minutes, consider reading these articles.

Search Engine Optimization for Blogs
Optimizing your blog for search engines

• Colds and flu’s are caused by viruses
• Antibiotics do not affect viruses
• Cold and flu germs outside a host body usually die in three to seven days
• Most colds and flu’s are caught by placing your infected hands to your eyes or nose
• Most cold and flu medications only mask symptoms; you remain infectious to others
• The only cure for colds and flu’s is your body’s immune system
• We can either aid or inhibit the body’s immune system by things we eat, drink or do [source]

I am very, very sick right now. I’ve spent the last 36 hours in bed. I have a fever and an incredible headache. It’s awful. So I decided to Google the flu and find out what I can do about it. To start off, here is a list of possible symptoms.

• Shivers
• Aching muscles and joints
• Exhaustion
• Loss of appetite
• Fever
• Headache
• Dry Cough
• Nasal Congestion
• Sore Throat

Hmmm. It looks like I have the flu (since I have all of those symptoms except for a sore throat). But I am more interested in knowing what I can do to get better. Stayinginshape.com gave me these suggestions:

• stay in bed and drink plenty of fluids
• breathing in hot vapors from a shower may help you feel better
• elevate your head at night to help nasal passages drain
• use medication for specific symptoms when appropriate

The only thing on that list I havn’t done yet is have a shower, so I shall. Let’s hope it works. Here is an interesting article I found on Beating Colds and Flu’s the natural way, if you are interested in that.

At Northern Voice I had the opportunity to meet A-List blogger Robert Scoble. I was admittedly a bit awestruck in his presence, but he was very down to earth and approachable. He actually stopped everything he was doing and gave me his complete attention during our conversation, which made me feel that he was interested in what I had to say. I was impressed, and realized that these big name bloggers are people too. Good people. But it was really exciting to speak to him nonetheless.

We talked about the success of his blog and how gaining popularity has made it more challenging to him to be a blogger, and I was intrigued. He told me his blog has shifted from him playing around with techy stuff to him talking about other people’s usage and development of technology. I asked him “doesn’t it become easier to blog as more and more people become interested in what you have to say? You certainly would have a lot more influence.” And he corrected me.

“No. This is not CNN.” He reminded me that blogging is not a top down delivery of information. It is a conversation. As more and more people read a blog, it becomes increasingly challenging to have one-on-one relationships with them all. It’s actually impossible.

At the conference Darren Barefoot led a session titled “why do you blog?” My honest answer to that question was “I blog because I want people to read my blog” and my logic there was obviously backwards, flawed, and insane. I came to a very important realization:

Blogging is not about me, and it’s not about you either. Blogging is about engaging with each other.

The evolving web is a continuous learning experience and blogging has given me the opportunity to learn many things - experientially. This real life, real time application is the common thread that ties all of my blogs together. It doesn’t matter how many people read my blog. It matters that I’m doing something productive, engaging people, and being a part of the community.

The Internet gets a lot of criticism for isolating people. Technology is supposedly rifting society apart. I beg to differ. Blogging is bringing us together. At Northern Voice a team of volunteers organized a conference that gave me and 300 other people the opportunity to meet face to face. It’s a growing community, and I am very excited to be a part of it.

My good friend Trenton left these words in my comments:

I don’t really see the point in setting out to become an A-list blogger and I’m sure the Mark Cubans and Robert Scobles didn’t intend on this at all. They simply provided interesting content that proved to be worthwhile to a large body of people. If you do the same then I’m sure there will be people out there who will want to read it. However, if you simply get caught up in your own agenda of internet stardom then you’ll end up creating trivial content and losing sight of the entire purpose of blogging. Worst case scenario? Everyone stops reading your blog.

IMHO, if you want to be a good blogger you should blog for the sake of blogging and b/c you really love it. Write about whatever you’re passionate about. Forget about the celebrity (at least for now) and try and write the best, most interesting stuff for the people that do read your blog.

Thank you Trenton for that stark description of what I unintentionally had become. And thank you, Robert. You catalyzed my acceptance of that and have enabled me to move on.

(I pre-wrote this post as I am currently at Northern Voice: a blogging conference in Vancouver, BC, Canada).

Every Friday I am going to talk about a website that I think is revolutionary and provides great value to the Internet. In this first edition of the Jeremy David Review, I am going to highlight CouchSurfing.com. In one sentence: eBay meets MySpace in a travel-centric social networking community.

People from around the world create profiles where they advertise their vacant couch on the Internet. Travelers can look up couches, find a free place to stay, and meet some interesting people. The eBay aspect of the site comes in when users leave feedback on each other’s profiles post-surf. This helps make the project safe. Best of all, it’s free.

How is this site revolutionary?

“The friendships made through CouchSurfing enhance members’ lives and contribute greatly to making the world a better, safer, more peaceful place.” Sounds pretty impressive to me. This August I am going traveling around the world (well, to Europe, Australia, and New Zealand) and I intend to use this site to its fullest. I will have the opportunity to meet cool people and go on adventures that are not easily found in a travel book. This community project is funded by generous donations by its members, and so far there have been 92,362 positive experiences. Outstanding.

This open sourced and collaborative project to bring the world together is certainly deserving of its nomination. Congratulations! And as always, if you have any comments, ideas, or experiences relating to this post, please leave them in the comments section!

It seems that everyone is jumping aboard the fat blogging bandwagon. Which is good! I think this showcases that members of blogging community can (an do) help eachother. It is very exciting to see a movement on the Internet that is focused on being healthy… so I thought I would take it to the extreme.

I would not describe myself as fat: I’m 6′2 and 170 pounds. To be honest, if I called myself fat I am pretty sure that many people would be offended. However, I used to be 225 pounds. A few days ago I was reading the new Vanity Fair and it contained a little insert titled “The Oscar Diet”. The magazine told its readers that if they wanted to fit into their Oscar Dress, they had to:

1. Limit caloric intake to 1200 calories per day
2. Do 40 minutes of cardio every morning
3. Weight train three times a week

Sounds like anorexia / bulimia to me, and I would not suggest that anyone follow those rules. But what the heck. Let’s see how I feel when I starve myself like mainstream popular culture is telling me to.

I have been following the story of Second Life - a 3-D virtual world entirely built and owned by its residents - and am confused.

I do not understand why people would want to play around in a virtual world that mimics their own. Video games make sense to me: in “real life” one cannot fight aliens in space or demons and monsters in a dungeon. I’ve never been a fan of sports games - but I understand that not many people have the opportunity to play in a professional Basketball or Hockey game. Even the SIMS (which I love) is different. In Second Life, someone built an Apple Store. Why?

What is the purpose of this game? How do you win? When does it end? Why would people spend real money on a house and clothes in a virtual world when they can do the same in the real world? Wouldn’t it be more fun to make dinner and watch a movie with some friends? Obviously I am missing something: there are currently 3,804,013 players, err, inhabitans. I don’t get it.

Or is this the new web? The future of the Internet? A taste of things to come? Instead of just visiting websites, are we going to interact with them in an online role playing game? Sounds pretty Matrix-esque to me.

Does someone out there feel like enlightening me? I would be interested to hear what you have to say.

Open ID is making headlines all over the blogosphere, but what exactly is it and how will it help you? If you check out openid.net, you’ll see their definition: OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. In English, Open ID is a free, cross-platform way to authenticate a person’s online identity. Cross platform? Yeah - the same ID for all services that support it. In Plain English, Open ID will make signing up for services on the Internet easier because you will only have one name to remember.

I am really excited about this idea because I have multiple user names and logins, and unless I rely on Firefox’s password memory functions, I tend to forget which is which. Is my del.icio.us user name jeremydavid or wowjeremydaivd? Or is that my reddit account? I often forget. What irritates me even more is when I try to sign up for a new service only to find out jeremydavid is already taken, and I have to think of yet another login name. Open ID has the potential to solve all of these dilemmas. Fantastic.

Another positive aspect of this services is that there is no central company governing the IDs; there is no corporate gatekeeper of a super secret database that companies have to buy licenses for. It is open sourced and decentralized, meaning anyone from anywhere can use Open ID for free. Many companies are adopting this (AOL and Digg to name a few), and I am really excited to see how this evolves. I have a feeling this will be the next big thing on the Internet. Lets see if I am correct.

I just noticed that I was linked on Liz Strauss’ list of successful and outstanding bloggers! Ha ha, maybe I am being a little too hard on myself. Oh well, this is a useful exercise so I will continue. Thanks for the self confidence boost Liz! It means a lot to me that you would put me in same category as the other blogs in your hall of fame. Thanks!

What value can I provide readers to this site?

I suffer from an inability to stick with one idea for longer than a few weeks. If you have been following my blog, you may have noticed that I regularly completely change everything on this site. I think this problem may stem from the fact that I am constantly struggling to deliver content that that I think users find compelling. My inability to describe what value I provide to users makes me re-evaluate what I am doing and start over. Frequently.

So then I asked myself why do I blog? I am certainly not here to make any money. I just want to make interesting content that will engage people, and have them come back for more. I want to interact with people from all over the world and make some sort of impact on their life. I also think it would be pretty satisfying knowing that people out there value my opinion and are interested to hear what I have to say about things.

What life experiences and knowledge do I posses that I can leverage into a useful blog?

I am a full time University Student in Victoria, British Columbia. I got myself elected to the Student Government and the University’s Senate. I lived in residence, and spent a year organizing activities and events for the students there. I’m graduating with a Business degree in a few months. I spend an excessive amount of time on the Internet reading blogs and trying to understand the web. I like meeting new people - I’m pretty outgoing… and I guess I would consider myself well known on campus (in a good sense). I like going on random adventures. And the list goes on. But how does that relate to you?

The newest incarnation of this site “un/popular web culture”

I was trying to think of a “niche” or “theme” that would encompass that entire last paragraph… and what I came up with was a blog about web culture: what’s popular on the Internet, and how it relates slash interacts with the “real world”. It’s pretty vague, but it gives the the opportunity to talk about many different things. Basically, the web filtered through me.

Everyone has to start off as a blog nobody. But how does one get past that? What sort of value are people looking for, and how do you get your face out there? I think this new blog will be an interesting experience for me and you. I got myself elected to student government… let’s see if I can get myself elected to the Internet. With over fifty million blogs, there ought to be a lot of people out there looking to do the same. I hope I can help them.

I spent this most recent weekend up at a cabin with some friends. Being away from the Internet for 3 days was actually a really good thing for me. No email, no RSS feeds to read (although I have 200+ articles to catch up on)… just good times with some friends and copious amounts of food.

Before I left on I trip I was planning on writing a post about how much it sucks writing a blog that doesn’t have a wide circle of influence. I found a graph from technorati showing the number of blogs they index over time, and I drew little arrows showing when some of the A-List bloggers started. The theme of the post was basically that since there are over 50,000,000 blogs now and the Internet is completely saturated with them, it is nearly impossible to be heard among the crowd… unless you are at the top.

But my little weekend away from the Internet gave me a little perspective. I asked myself “what makes an A-List blogger stand out?” and my answer was “the summation of their contributions to the blogging community.” The reason A-List bloggers are well known is because they have provided value and service to the community. They give people a reason to read their blogs. Then I went on to think about what I have contributed to the blogging community, and I did not have to think for long because I haven’t really provided any value to the blogging community.

Stuart, one of the ten friends that went to the cabin with me, has a fantastic wealth of knowledge about music. His stories about bands and the evolution of their music was fascinating. But it made me wonder what I am an expert on. Do I have a wealth of knowledge people would be interested in? I have been going to university for four years… there has to be something I know lots about.

What value can I provide readers to this site?

… more to follow …

You may have be wondering why I have no spellcheck. It’s because I just upgraded to Vista… and I hate it.

I had to install the program twice because I wanted to first wipe my hard drive. It was a hassle and a half… Make that two hassles. Second, to get my WiFi to work (my house has a wireless network) I had to install the the driver application (which caused an error on the operating sytem) extract the drivers from the installed program, uninstall it, and then reinstall the USB WiFi using just the drivers (not the who package). Again, I hated every minute of it.

Then I tried to install FireFox. It did not work - I got some sort of error.

I was so irritated that I started to look up ways to run XP and Vista and I asked myself why the hell would I want to do that? Why all the trouble?

Sure, the fluidity of the operating system is great. I love the fading in and out of the windows. I love the widgets. I love how things swoosh around and how I can look at multiple windows at the same time. I love how this operating system runs exactly like a Mac. Hmmmm. Why don’t I just switch?

If you are contemplating spending the $200 or $400 on the new operating system, don’t. My friend is in Computer Science and Microsoft gives them free copies for some reason (maybe that’s why it’s so expensive for the rest of us?). He refused to install it and gave it to me. Now I understand why.

Sorry for the short post. I have to re-install Windows XP.

If you are looking for something to do, here are some outrageous YouTube videos:

1. Love Me Tender
2. Bollywood Thriller
3. David Hasselhoff - Hooked on a Feeling

UPDATE:

Ok, so I never actually got around the deleting Vista… and now that I’ve used it for a while I have started to really like it. The way everything fades in and out is really nice, and I did notice some performance improvements. If the upgrade was, I don’t know, $49 I would recommend upgrading. Since I got mine for free (legally), I lucked out. All-in-all, I am now a fan.