Archive for February, 2007
The easiest way to lower the word count in your copy is to eliminate the words that aren’t doing any work. Non-working words are easy to spot but you actually have to look for them. Wait a minute, one just slipped in. See it back there? Hiding between ‘you’ and ‘have’? Yep, that’s it, ‘actually’ isn’t doing any work.
Words like actually, suddenly, basically and shortly rarely do any work. They simply don’t help you move your story forward. Oh, there’s another one. ‘Simply’.
Watch for those lazy verbs too. Was, are, have been– slackers all. Want to know something else? Lazy words breed more words. For example,
“How can you tell if your words are working or not”?
Or
“Do your words move the story”?
11 words in the first sentence, 6 in the second. Now we’re getting somewhere.
But what about the first sentence in this post? .
“The easiest way to lower the word count in your copy is to eliminate the words that aren’t doing any work”. 21 words
Not too bad, but how about,
“The easiest way to lower the word count in your copy is to eliminate non-working words”. 16 words.
Better, but still cluttered.
“Lower your word count by eliminating non-working words”. 8 words.
Even better, but I think I can make it shorter.
“Improve your copy. Eliminate unnecessary words”. 6 words
It’s difficult to remember to inspect your copy for non-working words. I forget frequently. But remembering will improve your writing.
GF 4.8
You’ll notice a new link in the top navigation for ‘Mobile Marketing’. I’ve got hundreds of links bookmarked to some good sites, and I started receiving emails last week from people with lots of questions about mobile marketing, terminology, how to get started, etc.
Currently, the page doesn’t contain a whole lot, but I promise to add links every week to try to make the page useful. Adding links bores me to tears though, so don’t expect hundreds of links in a week. ; )
First, I’d like to apologize if you arrived at this entry assuming you were going to learn anything about SEO or marketing. If that’s the case, best click away to something else so you won’t feel the urge to complain about my bit of self-indulgence.
I had dinner with a very intelligent man and his equally intelligent wife this evening and the discussion ranged from politics, to religion, to evolution to global warming. All volatile subjects to be sure, often divisive even among the restrained.
While no violent arguments broke out at the table, on two separate occasions I voiced my difference of opinion on two separate subjects and was promptly told that, “I simply must read the book’. One of those books was An Inconvenient Truth and the other was The Development of Darwin’s Theory by Dov Ospovat.
I told him I had read the first but not the latter and was astonished when I was told, ‘Well then, you must not have understood it’. My rejoinder was that I certainly understood what the author meant for me to believe, but that I lacked the scholarship necessary to make determinations about the truth of what the author was saying.
Again, to my astonishment, I was told that, ‘They are scientists, at some point you have to trust someone’. At which point I promptly pissed him off because I replied, ‘Indeed I do, but that point, for me, requires more than reading a single book on the subject’.
He wasn’t angry enough to walk out on his drink and his crab legs but he was angry enough to begin an interrogation on the other subject, evolution. Not satisfied with my replies, he simply asked if I was a Creationist. When I said no he looked surprised and asked if I was just being difficult. I told him that I preferred Abrupt Appearance over evolution and creationism. He had no idea what that meant, so I supplied the essence of Abrupt Appearance with a single sentence.
The fossil record shows that separate and distinct species appear in their entirety, enjoy a period of stasis, and then vanish.
This served to confuse and anger him, and he nearly shouted,
‘What about those damn lizards that have lived in caves so long that they’ve gone blind’?
When I told him that he was now confusing adaptation with evolution the vein in his forehead began to throb and he excused himself and wife rather abruptly.
He didn’t stay around long enough to learn that I don’t disagree that global warming is occurring, just that I don’t believe scientists are as sure about the cause as they would have us believe, and that some of the ‘solutions’ to global warming simply don’t seem feasible.
He didn’t stay long enough to learn that even Darwin had some difficulty with parts of his theory, the ‘evolution’ of the eye being particularly difficult and symbiosis quite troubling.
He didn’t stay long enough to learn that I have an open mind on both subjects, but that I feel my knowledge is incomplete so I typically have more questions than answers.
He didn’t stay, because he read a couple of books and felt secure in his knowledge. Not to say that I don’t feel that you can’t learn from a book, but if you’ve run out of questions, you haven’t read enough of them.
I always have to question the mental integrity, not the acuity, of someone that is swayed by reading a single book. If an opinion is that easily swayed it must have been loosely held and what does that say about the value of the original opinion? It is so easy for our reach to exceed our grasp that we sometimes forget how much we don’t know.
About half an hour after I arrived home, he called to apologize about his abrupt disappearance, told me he had a trying day and that he was ordering some material on Abrupt Appearance. I promised to read The Development of Darwin’s Theory …
Gunning-Fog 12.2 What’s this? Just an experiment, move along now…
If you’ve ever tried to type a website address into a cell phone you know that it can be a challenging and time-consuming task. The technology exists to eliminate a lot of that typing. In Japan, a simple point and click with a cell phone is often all that is need to navigate to a site, and there’s no mouse involved either.
She pulls out her cellphone, snaps a picture of a corner of the movie poster on the other side of the tracks and, a few seconds later, she has a list of show times at neighborhood theaters on her handset as well as a review of the film. With one more click, she can watch the trailer and buy tickets.
QR, or quick response, codes are a similar to bar codes except they are square, look a bit like an ink blot and contain much more information. In Japan and South Korea, QR codes are used to link directly to a Web site, as in the case of the subway poster, saving the user the need to type an address on the tiny keypad of the phone. As marketers seek an edge on competitors, QR codes are appearing practically everywhere in Japan.
The codes can be embedded in almost anything, posters, business cards, even fast food product containers. So why hasn’t this technology made it to America and Europe? Likely because carriers can’t agree on a single technology, much like the VHS and Beta war.
Typing on tiny keypads in one of the main obstacles in the mobile marketing front, quite possibly a bigger obstacle than tiny screens. QR code technology can turn the world into an interactive point and click experience. Source
I was offered a test drive of Fastlink2′ s Website Popularity Checker so I’ve been playing with it for the last few days or so.
As with all popularity checkers, it’s all about the links and this tool searches for quite a few reports. After you install it you will be presented with a screen showing a few test sites. Look for the Remove button to clear them out. Click ‘Add Website’ to add the sites you wish to check. You’ll be presented with a screen that looks like the following:
From there you can click individual sites to check backlinks or select ‘Update All’. It will check for backlinks in AllTheWeb, AltaVista, Google,/Earthlink, Inktomi/Hotbot, MSN, Technorati, Yahoo and Alexa and provide totals for you. You can export that chart to a text file.
All the charts export to a simple text file except for the ‘Statistics’ chart which exports to a nice PNG. Unfortunately, You lose the headings and formatting so exporting anything but the Statistics chart is a little aggravating.
After you’ve determined your inbound links you can move on to rank with a click of the button. Rank includes Alexa, Yahoo, Google PageRank and Netcraft rank.
The Indexed Pages button serves up reports from Google, Yahoo, MSN, Gigablast and Exalead. The social tagging button covers Del.icio.us, Digg and Reddit. What about directories? Those are included as well. DMOZ, Yahoo and Google Groups are all there, as well as .EDU, .GOV and Wikipedia.
The Press and Media button shows reports for Google News, Yahoo News, Google Blog Search and IceRocket. The SEO Button shows visibility, the date the domain was created and the IP address.
Which brings us to the last report. Statistics. That’s the one that can be exported via PNG format. You can also choose the criteria you want to include and pick your date range which would prove useful to clients if they need visual proof of say, a link campaign’s trend over time.
What about Proxies? Yes, they are supported, you can add, delete and check them. You can also decide on the number of connections you’d like. You can even import proxies.
Drawbacks? There are two that stick out immediately, losing the headers for the text reports, and not being able to click on individual reports to view or verify them. For example, if I run the ‘Social Tagging’ reports, I can’t click on ‘Digg’ to see the number of mentions at Digg itself.
All in all, it’s a handy application for checking various information. I didn’t notice a limit on the number of sites you can add but I added 50 to check and it worked pretty quickly.
You can check a site’s popularity against another site with a glance as they’ve color-coded the inbound links report. The price? $47.00 US.
No need for a widget or Javascript. If you’re on a WordPress hosted domain, (like this blog) just add digg= http://digg.com/url_to/story_on_digg (surrounded by brackets) [like this] and it will turn into a Digg button. Source
You can see the story at Digg here: Just a side note, there’s some discussion there about Digg crushing a WordPress domain. My experience with Digg and WordPress was certainly crash free. WordPress held up quite well under the strain of over 75,000 visitors in just 24 hours.
It’s no secret that teens are influenced by trend setters, now they can become the trend setter, at least online, by participating in the multiplayer online game Trendetta.
In Trendetta, users are completely in control of the fads and fashions they choose to battle for — today’s hotlist topper may be at the bottom of the heap tomorrow. Players square off against each other to control the whims of public opinion and promote their favorite trends, fashions, musicians and celebs using word of mouth, television, the internet and the much coveted celebrity endorsement. Online players challenge up to three others to challenge for trend supremacy in a turn-based strategy game, while chatting with one another about “What’s Hot” and “What’s Not.” The top players vie to have their trend land a coveted slot on “50 Hottest Trends” list, and to earn a place in the “Trendetta Hall of Fame.”
Why would marketers care? If you want to know what the hot teen trends are, why not let the teens show you firsthand? Since it’s a competition, you might be able to pick out the top teen marketers as well. Source
I’m still pushing for a mobile marketing forum but it’s nice to see WebmasterWorld get onboard with a Social forum. For now though, enjoy the newly launched Social Media Tagging and Bookmarking Optimization Forum. Wow, that’s a mouthful.
Ads are coming your way, and soon. The medium is just too lucrative for advertisers to ignore. So get your mobile marketing hat on and join in the fray.
Already, ads are creeping onto cell phones around the globe. At this rate, experts say, it won’t be long before the world’s 2.2 billion mobile phone users think it natural to tune into a 15-second spot before watching a video, sending a message or listening to a downloaded song in between phone conversations.
“This is the year that advertising Email Marketing Software – Free Demo breaks out worldwide,” said Laura Marriott, the executive director of the Mobile Marketing Association, based in Boulder, Colo., which represents more than 400 advertisers, phone manufacturers, operators and market research firms. “Previously, there were not enough of the right phones and fast networks to support good advertising.”
Who is leading the way? Yahoo! Don’t think for a minute that it is a small time play either. Far from it, the usual suspects have signed with Yahoo. Pepsi, Procter & Gamble, Hilton, Nissan and Intel. And that’s just for starters.
This time they’re playing it smart too,
“The mobile phone is a pristine media and we have to be sure not to ruin that,” Parodi said.
Is it time for you to begin thinking about mobile marketing?
First, I’d just like to be clear about how I feel about librarians seeking to censor books, any books. Librarians that take any action to censor a book should be fired, immediately, as soon as proof is offered that they tried to censor a book. The last thing I want is for librarians to decide what can be read by whom.
The book at the root of this current controversy? The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, a Newberry Medal winner. The book is about a girl coming to terms with herself, life and growing up. I read it and there’s absolutely no reason to ban it. So why are librarians so upset? Here in all its shameful glory is the offending passage:
Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.
“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much. It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”
Oh no! Not scrotum! How dare the author put such an offensive word in a child’s book? Well maybe because the author doesn’t have the sensibilities of a neutered Puritan looking for a witch to drown.
Can ten year-old children handle the word scrotum? Of course, so why can’t the librarians? How did the world become so twisted that a mere word describing a body part can be considered offensive? Dangerous even? Read the full story in the NY Times.
Now please excuse me while I storm about my office then contact some more people that have the sack to stand up to those folks that can’t stomach a perfectly good word like ‘scrotum’.
Oh, if you’re wondering what that word is that describes something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much, it’s sputum.
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