A cross-post and shameless plug for my photoblog.  Check out the view from our office, in particularly good light yesterday evening:

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Fun

OK well I only have two hacks actually, but i wanted to use this cool lasso dude image. Hence roundup. And notice how this text is wrapping around it? Well that’s hack #1. A client wanted to know if/how they could achieve this effect in their blog posts, and it actually took a little bit of doing. This Wordpress support page deals with the issue. From there I got the CSS code (see below) I needed to add to my theme’s style.css file in order to make it work. Newer themes might already have it.

In any case, once it’s there you can set the text wrapping in your blog’s web console. When editing your post there, click an image, then the little picture icon that shows up in the upper left, and set the alignment as desired. I draft and publish my posts via MacJournal, and unfortunately as far as I can tell I still have to go into the web console to set text wrapping for an image.

Here’s the CSS code needed to make text wrapping on images work:

img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em}

img.alignleft {float:left; margin:0 1em 1em 0}

img.aligncenter {display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto}

a img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em}

a img.alignleft {float:left; margin:0 1em 1em 0}

a img.aligncenter {display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto}

Now, hack #2. We run on Windows web servers, which for Wordpress is not entirely straightforward. But it seems to work just fine with a little tweaking. Still, I had a problem with auto upgrades and theme editing from the web console. And I put off looking into since it was just an annoyance. This support topic describes the problem’s symptoms and solution. Indeed, granting the Network group write permissions on the blog directory made auto upgrades and theme editing work.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Social Media, Technology, Web

I think it surprises most people to learn that Twitter (and Facebook for that matter) are not profitable enterprises. It takes more than extreme growth and steady usage to make money, as explained in this post urging us not to forget lessons learned from the dot-com bubble bursting. Personally I feel that there are opportunities to monetize Twitter than haven’t been full explored. There is money to be made in the spin-off apps such as Twitterrific, which syndicates ads from The Deck in order to provide a free version.

The problem is an antiquated method of procuring profit from eyeballs. Many of the tactics that used to work simply don’t fly in the social media world. I’m not against making money, trust me, but we need to get more creative about it. Word of mouth marketing exists on Twitter. I have purchased a few items that I can trace to friendly tweets. But no one from those companies knows it.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Social Media, Web

The point is well taken, if with a grain:

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Andy Swindler Categories: Fun, Social Media, Technology, Web

As I may have mentioned, I’m a fan of Andrew Sullivan, a prominent political blogger at The Atlantic. Though he usually sticks to politically charged topics, he posts daily “View from your Window” photos that are sent to him by his readers.

(view from Astek’s window)

Well apparently, this series is so popular that Andrew is going to offer a coffee book version of the “best” past pics. He is avoiding publishing houses (which he abhors) and is going straight for the print-on-demand. Though, we don’t know yet which service he is using, I will be curious to see.

My future mother-in-law is a children’s author, and I have, in the past, encouraged her to publish her stories that aren’t getting picked up through a publisher, in a similar DIY way. I’d love to see her work directly with an illistrator/animator to make animated online versions of her favorite stories and then, at the end of the online “reading,” have a link where parents can easily order a copy of a bound book (made through a print-on-demand service) for bedtime reading and long-term treasuring.

Similarly, a good friend of mine is an amazing commercial photographer and I recently passed on the idea of personalized, photography-based baby books that I saw on one of my favorite craft blogs. She’s going to try it out as a shower present for her on-the-way nephew and print it up using the services you can find through Flickr or Shutterfly.

This sort of micro-publishing gets me very excited, as do many DIY ideas. Personally, this sort of return to individual “making“ and ”crafting“ and ”creating“ strikes a potent chord. The fact that technology is making it easier for us to return to the ”simpler“ days for fun is a bit ironic, but also pretty fitting. The DIY movement may be a push-back against industrialization and technology, but it doesn’t mean we can’t utilize the tools we are pushing against to make the push. I guess what I’m trying to say is, I hope we continue to see a resurgence of entertainment that results in more than ”couch butt,“ Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and online gaming credits, because making is fun and makes more fun!

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Entrepreneurship, Fun, Green, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

Now THIS is the future I dreamed about when I was a kid. It’s still in development, but we’re seeing functional technology that can direct light in such a way as to offer true invisibility. The stuff of fantasy for years, it’s crazy to think that in my lifetime I could see something like an invisibility cloak become a reality. Surely they’ll also develop the special goggle we’ll all need to make sure no one is hanging out unbeknownst in our living room.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Fun, Gadget, Technology

And it’s a good thing. Since the newspaper industry, much like the music industry, resisted the Internet rather than embracing it, they shot themselves in the foot. Rather than proactively identifying opportunities they missed the boat entirely and are now suffering badly. Reminds me a bit of how Kodak could have OWNED digital photography if they had a bit of vision a few years ago. Instead they are playing catch-up, too.

In the newspaper’s race to play catch-up, they started giving it all away for free since that was the culture. We all grew up on a free Internet (I even remember when we used to think there would be no ads. HA) and that is being threatened in various ways.

The opportunity now is for newspaper’s to collectively demonstrate their worth by asking people to pay for the content they provide. Everything business has to do this, they have just been around so long they took their status and distribution model for granted.

I’ve been a little hard on mainstream media and probably sound like I want social media (blogs, etc.) to replace it. That’s not quite right. I believe they are complementary and both necessary. We need in-depth reporting and someone who can afford to put a correspondent in Iraq. We also need citizen journalists who are not influenced as directly by big business.

Here is a good explanation of why media must charge for web content. I think the key to pricing lies in micropayments, which use new technology to charge a very small amount of money (cents not dollars) for each piece of material you consume rather than paying full price for a newspaper you only read part of anyway. We just need to find a way to make it work on a small, local level.

Read this great article describing some real world ramifications of a future without mainstream journalism from The Atlantic. Kinda scary.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Entrepreneurship, General, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

With billions of web pages out there, the web would be utterly useless without search engines and tools that help us label and categorize content to make it easier to find. This taxonomy breaks down into “meta data,” which is extra information that you attach to a piece of content to help describe it, and the content itself. A good example is a digital photograph. It’s likely that you usually only look at the photo itself, but your camera automatically attaches meta information such as date/time and perhaps location. New face recognition software makes it even easier to find that particular photo you’re looking for in your library of thousands.

What do categories, tags, and keywords all have in common? These are all tools we use to organize and classify information in order to make it easier for people to find when they need it. I’ll describe each below using this blog post as the consistent example to illustrate the differences.

I’m going to start with categories since they are the most intuitive. Categories are used to define general topics of interest related to a subject. You can see the Astek Blog categories listed to the right of this post. Categories serve two very useful functions when applied to blogs. 1) It helps the readers know at a quick glance the general topics being covered by the blog. 2) It helps the author(s) stay focused. Blogs are best when they are focused around a certain set of topics and this is an easy check to make sure the blog post is still on track. It is common to see something generic like “General” as the only category. While this can be applicable in some cases, it’s typically not an effective way to label your posts.

Categories are common in blogging software. You can typically define the categories you want to write about, and each time you write a post simply select the categories that apply to that post. If you find yourself commonly wanting to write about a category that isn’t in your list, go ahead and add it. Just remember to keep your list relatively short (fewer than ten) to make it easy on the reader. In this case, I used the following categories for this post:

Categories: ePiphany Featured Story, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

As it becomes easier and easier for anyone to create and distribute content of all types on the Internet, categories quickly start to become a fairly limited way to organize information. Enter tags, which have become popular in the past few years. While I recommend putting a limit on the number of categories you use, there is no practical limit the number of tags you can attach to your content. Any significant concept word that is related to your text is worth putting in as a tag.

Tags are single-word labels that you can add to as you go. A tag “word” might actually contain more than one word, but it’s important that the tag have no spaces for consistency. Whereas I felt limited to five related categories for this post, I assigned ALL of the following tags to describe the article I’m writing:

Tags: apple, astek, blog, bookmarking, categories, community, content, design, distribution, how-to, information, internet, keywords, Marketing, media, publishing, search, seo, sharing, social, socialmedia, tags, Technology, tip, tool, Web, web2.0, writing

To get an idea of all the specific areas we cover in the Astek Blog, check out our tag cloud:

Okay, that looks cool, but what does it mean? Notice how some of the words in the tag cloud are larger and bolder than others? Technology, Web, socialmedia, Entrepreneurship, etc. The more a single tag is used to describe each post on this blog, the larger and bolder that tag will become in the tag cloud. This makes it easy to see at a glance which topics are covered more than others, which gives readers a more detailed topical view of the blog content. Click on a tag to see all the posts related to that word or concept.

Tags emerged from social media. Delicious.com and Flickr.com were at the forefront of developing this technology a few years ago. Since then, tags have become the commonplace method of assigning labels to vast amounts of information to make it easy to find later. I recommend you sign up for a free account at Delicious.com to store all your web bookmarks in one location (great for accessing from various locations). There is also no better way to demonstrate how tags depend on the community to make sure people are using them consistently. When you bookmark a site in Delicious.com, the community suggests several tags that other people have used to describe that web site. Typically the community gets it right, which means you have to think less about what tags to use. It makes everything quicker and more reliable.

In the following example, I tried to bookmark Apple’s web site in Delicious. Since I had already bookmarked it, Delicious shows me all the tags I had already used (highlighted in gray boxes). However, since that was awhile ago, the community has applied many new tags to describe the site. All I have to do is click on the new tags I want to assign to the bookmark.

Then, when I want to find a particular web site, I can use tags to filter my bookmarks. In order to find Apple on my Delicious.com account, I might type the following tags:

Tags: computer hardware ipod

In that example Apple is the only site that has all three of those tags attached to it. If I remove the “ipod” tag, I get six results (including Apple) that are related to “computer hardware.” Go ahead and try it yourself.

In the blogosphere, prominent blog search engines like Technorati and blog authoring tools like Wordpress collect tags from all the people who use these services. When you write a post on Wordpress, it suggests tags that others have used based on the content you are writing. The more people consistently use tags to describe content, the easier it becomes to discover content that relates to other web sites. We’re moving away from meticulously crafting the taxonomy, and instead tossing it all in the bag. The trick is if we put a tag on everything on the way in, we’ll know where to grab it on the way out.

Last, but certainly not least, we have keywords. I’m going to save an in-depth discussion of search engines for another ePiphany, but keywords are used most heavily when using sites like Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista, etc. to find specific content on the web. Search engine optimization (SEO) is also called search engine marketing.

If you’ve stuck with me so far, you might be asking yourself what the difference between a keyword and a tag is. The key difference between the two is that tags are attached to content and keywords are IN the content itself. It’s a special combination of art and science to properly optimize a page on a web site. First we find the keywords that people are using to find that type of content, which is not always intuitive and requires research. Then we integrate these keywords directly into your content through strategic copy writing to allow search engines to find them contextually. The trick here is preserving the integrity of the authored material while making it searchable.

Gone are the days of loading up meta keywords behind the scenes and being done with it. A good SEO strategy requires consistent monitoring and tweaking.

A Few Things To Keep In Mind:

Pluralization and alternate forms are always a bit weird with tags. I usually just put both forms in. You never know if someone will search for “finance” or “financial” or “finances.”

Spelling is something common to all of these. A misspelled tag or keyword will result in the content potentially not coming up. Some people optimize for misspellings to grab some low hanging fruit (e.g., micorsoft).

There is common confusion about the “rules” of tagging. Particularly when you get into the semantics of multi-word phrases like “social media.” My advice is to use any variation of the tag you think is appropriate. In that case I would use “socialmedia,” “social,” and “media” as separate tags.

Feel free to post questions in the comments.

 This post was featured in ePiphany, Astek’s Monthly Newsletter |  Other ePiphany Articles 

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Andy Swindler Categories: Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web, ePiphany Featured Story

“Especially if you’re say, a journalist, who’s paid to be informed.” Check out this pretty great sendup of how the Twitter hubbub has rippled through the media recently:

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Fun, Social Media, Technology, Web

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The other day I was attempting to tweet via the Twitter website (rather than Twitterific on my desktop or iPhone), and I got this error screen. What could that image possibly be meant to connote? I think it’s supposed to imply that each tweet is like a bird that tugs on a little string attached to a whale, which represents Twitter’s servers. Too many tweets at once and the whale is actually lifted out of the ocean, which of course represents the internet itself. The whale here seems strangely at peace with that though, as if it is getting a much-needed little break.

In any case, I think Twitter has been struggling a bit to handle the spike in traffic it must be receiving after all the recent attention. There have also been sporadic errors in my desktop Twitterific, although markedly less cute:

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Social Media, Technology, Web