Where have I been?
This changing networks discombobulates me. I’m not doing it anymore.
There’s a Carnival of Marketing at Home Office Voice this Week. Each article was personally read and selected by our own Martin Neumann, journalist extraordinaire and Successful-Blog SOB. He’s featuring some great information by some fine writers there. I happen to know one of the writers fairly well.
Sorry Martin. Next time throw some water on me.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Professional writer, Indie, combines found photos with one-minute short stories inspired by the photos. The idea is based on John Cage’s Indeterminacy recordings, coupling stories with sound. The stories show elements of avant garde, surrealism, dada, horror, humor, satire, fantasy, etc.
Notes from Liz: Indie’s blog has that fabulous combination of quality content and interaction that makes it a unique and unforgetttable experience. This is not just well-written fiction for your entertainment. This is downright stress relief offered to you in perfect measure.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Has your SOB Blog Been Introduced to US?
Blog Promotion: May I Introduce You?
Successful bloggers write well. As a professional writer, I have a few tips, tricks, techniques, strategies, and of course, checklists that I use to keep me on the right path. It’s time I started sharing them.
Almost everyone uses personal narratives. They’re the stories we tell to our families and friends. They’re the incidents we relate at work about meetings we attended. A personal narrative is any story you might tell about something that really happened to you. Bloggers do that all of the time.
Use this short checklist to review your next personal narrative to add value and polish to it.
Taking a minute to review the narratives you tell will kick them up a notch. Your writing will be just that bit more entertaining. It might be the difference that makes readers bookmark your blog to come back again.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Related articles:
Editing for Quality and a Content Editorââ¬â¢s Checklist
What Is Content that Keeps Readers?
SEOââ¬âFive Traits of Relevant Content
Turning Reluctant Readers into Loyal Fans
The word Zeitgeist refers to the intellectual, cultural and moral climate of an era. It’s the taste, the outlook, the spirit of the times, so to speak. I think you can have a personal Zeitgeist as well. My own has been suffering from karma-skew all through 2005. I hope to master it in 2006, and I’m looking for every tool to do so. I think Google Zeitgeist might do the trick.
Every month Google interprets the latest search data it has collected for trends, bits of information, and patterns in user searches to make a statistical snapshot in the form of a report called Zeitgeist Watch. You can find it on the Google Blog. The information gathered by Google Zeitgeist isn’t particularly new, but where they take it is. The way they’ve thought-through Zeitgeist makes it a pleasure to behold and a joy to use. Despite my wariness of big conglomerates getting bigger, I just can’t turn up my nose at this one. It’s too much fun for a strategy fanatic like me.
Basically Google Zeitgeist lets you into the minds of Google searchers–our readers. Others attempt to do that, but Google performs it in a visually-friendly, intuitive fashion. They didn’t get to be Google, after all, by making things harder, now did they? Rather than just stopping with an alphabetical list of tags, they’ve analyzed the list into patterns of like-minded choices. This makes the bigger picture stand out.
As shown above, the Zeitgeist categories for October 2005 include
The popular search term categories for October 2005 include
The popular Image search categoriess for October 2005 include
Just by checking those three lists, we have a sense of what our readers might be thinking, and what topics might be hot. Look a little further, and find that Zeitgeist covers no less than 23 other countries beyond the US. As a person who is curious and fascinated by human behavior, this is like a major Christmas toy. It’s been out for a while now. So if you’ve not played with it yet, it’s time you give Zeitgeist a try. I can see posts in the lists for almost any blog.
But first I’m going to use Google Zeitgeist to invent a Television Game Show. It will have a 20-second song for the final round question like the one that Merv Griffin did for Jeopardy. That’s how I’m going to make millions.
Heck I bet after that the famousblog read by royalty, tycoons, and the rich and famous–Blogebrity–will move me from the C List up to the prestigious A List. Then it will be Veuvre Champagne for everyone in the Signature Room at the top of the John Hancock in Chicago. I’ll be buying and flying you all in. Which might be too nice and thereby force Blogebrity to push me back to the C List again. Oh well, I was only getting 15 minutes of fame to start with.
It’s the money I need desperately. I’ve got a kid in college you know. So the millions will come in handy. My son will use them to graduate from Georgetown. One day he will be a famous CEO of a mega corporation and maybe take of his mom in her doting old age and deterioration.
Thanks for these things will be due to Google and their Zeitgeist Watch lists–the little analysis program that made all of my dreams come true. 🙂
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Collaboration Link 6: Media Events
Two or more bloggers specialize on their coverage of an ongoing media event
In the time of a serious media event or tragedy, it seems that too many bloggers are blogging the same things from the same sources. Whatever the newsworthy cause how much more useful and interesting for readers if a group of blogs worked together to collaborate on posting. Each blog might report on a specific aspect of the event to avoid the pervasive problems of redundancy. Anyone who surfed for news during Katrina knows how redundant redundant can be.
Quality needs to be top-notch as always. So it becomes the main criteria for choosing collaborators. Still, if you choose with care, you might find that you develop a news team that has some expertise. What a service you would be performing actually offering some depth and planning to what people could be reading. It’s sure to get your team noticed and gain readers for the blogs in your collaborative group.
All collaborations are a great way of building community, but they can’t be your only form of linking–and you shouldn’t collaborate only with the same people continuously. Finding new people to collaborate with is a relationship-building activity. Besides everyone should have the experience of collaborating with me.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Collaboration Link 1: Image and Text
Collaboration Link 2: Topical
Collaboration Link 3: An Event
Collaboration Link 4: Movable Posts
Collaboration Link 5: An Interview
Collaboration Link 5: Begs the Question
So I’ll ask them.
If you could meet anyone in the blogosphere world–living or dead–and ask one question . . .
and
What’s the question?
Oh and . . .
Do you suppose you’d get a complete and totally truthful answer?
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Collaboration Link 1: Image and Text
Collaboration Link 2: Topical
Collaboration Link 3: An Event
Collaboration Link 4: Movable Posts
Collaboration Link 5: An Interview
Collaboration Link 6: Media Events