B(abble)log - Archives
Over the weekend, I made a bit of a difficult decision: This blog is going on sabbatical until at least September. Over the last few months, I’ve struggled privately… my mother passed away and one of my dearest friends who was like a brother to me died suddenly. I’ve done my best to keep up a ‘business as usual’ appearance, but something’s got to give. I need to recharge my batteries. To let the emptiness inside of me fill up again.
There’s not a week goes by that the kidlette doesn’t do something cute and I pick up the phone to give Mum a shout, only to put it back down. And, dear sweet Len, to think that I will never hear your voice again, or laugh and laugh until it hurts, is inconceivable and truly inconsolable.
While there might be the occasional post, for the most part I’ll be taking a blog holiday throughout August.
Thank you all so much for reading/stopping by. I’ll see you all in September when hopefully I feel more like me again.
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1) This week Google rolled out Knol, a Wikipedia-like collaborative online encyclopedia, and Danny Sullivan has very nicely put together an extensive comparison of the two and also comments that a link from Knol might give your page some authority.
2) This next item is technically not from this week, but it’s new to me this week, so I hope that counts. A huge thank you to Twitter pal Tommy Vallier for this astonishing Derren Brown video that turns the tables on two unsuspecting ad men.
3) Hey dotcomrades, don’t tell me you’re info snacking?! Marketing Prof’s Ted Mininni gathers 10 newly coined words compiled by Cramer-Krasselt.
4) In beta release, Google Maps is a great new tool for those of you who get around on foot – walking directions.
5) Who doesn’t love a guy that writes posts like “Sign-Up Forms Must Die”?? Wroblewski picks up the thread and shows how removing registration improves participation.
6) Mmmm...cookies. OK, maybe not the edible kind. Avinash Kaushik has a great primer on understanding visitor tracking cookies through your analytics.
7) B.L. Ochman asks "Typography? What's That? Aesthetics? Who Cares? Graphic Designers? Who Needs Em!" For those who love type, check out the very funny "Font Conference" video.
8) Does the home page still matter? Chief Marketer offers an updated perspective on the content in your site.
9) South Carolina is not so gay, or so a Republican Senator would have you believe. Elaine Fogel at Marketing Profs has the details on how a tourism campaign is coming under scrutiny.
10) Twitter friend Dave Fleet's blog celebrates its first anniversary this week. To commemorate the occasion, he's sharing 13 tips that he learned from his first year of blogging.
Friday Fun
The legendary, astonishing Grace Jones is a one-woman force of performance art. See the new Corporate Cannibal video that wowed everyone at Massive Attack’s Meltdown Festival. Thanks to Dabitch at Adland for the tip.
Thanks to medium & the message for the heads-up on Wordle. Wordle is an online tool that allows you to submit any text or blog feed and get a word cloud that provides greater prominence to words that are used more frequently.
This is from the B(abble)log feed. What a fun way to start the week!
1) Is the future of search Digg? TechCrunch looks at how Google and Tatango are looking at users voting up and down search results.
2) Gary Busey is the new face of crazy. Well, at least that's what over 200,000 results on Google say. According to AdWeek, Busey's capitalizing on that with 40 insane ads for GotVMail.
3) Tim Hortons is a Canadian mainstay and continues to grow and prosper. Sean Moffitt at Buzz Canuck tells us how their Word of Mouth creates evangelists and AdAge says Starbucks could learn a thing or two from Tim Hortons.
4) Social Media Today has a great article that asks "Do you 'need' a social media campaign?" to help companies wade through what they want vs. what they need and choose the tools for the job.
5) Measurement can be tricky, but when it comes to blog metrics, Rohit Bhargava tells us about 4 big problems and how to solve them.
6) According to a recent study 76% of respondents judged individuals solely based on their online material. This and other stats from the study remind us that online image is everything.
7) Vanessa Fox does an outstanding job of taking an in-depth look at search-friendly Flash, noting that a few problems still exist with Flash sites.
8) This is why everyone loves Ann Smarty – she always delivers above and beyond the call of duty. This week she rounded up a whole whack of FREE online tools for anyone interested in optimizing their site.
9) Sick of Facebook ads calling you fat? Well, imagine David Berkwitz’s surprise when he was met with an ad that called out “Hey Jew”! Sigh. Apparently no neurons fired up to trigger a “This might not be a good idea” thought...
10) Some jingles are iconic. They slither into your head and never really come out. (Don’t get me started on that “Everyone Loves Marineland” song!) This week it was announce that McDonalds is putting a contemporary twist on the popular 1974 ditty “Two all-beef patties” by turning the lyrics into a contest on MySpace.
Friday Fun
Oh so good… indie darling Feist on Sesame Street.
If you’ve ever owned a cat, this video is pretty accurate. (Thanks kp!)
I tweeted about this ad last week, but thought I should share it here too. Created for Aviva Insurance by Taxi Toronto and Untitled Films, the “Shark” piece is obviously a fabulous team effort. The copywriting is outstanding, as humour is very difficult indeed. But here it works; the ad is funny but also underscores the core message – most people don’t think highly of insurance folks and Aviva is here to change that.
Ever sang the lyrics to your favourite song only to have someone remark, “What on Earth are you singing?” as if you were completely gormless and the extent of your idiocy was glaringly apparent to everyone but you.
Okay, maybe that’s just me.
But if you have, you’ve just had a “mondegreen” moment. According to the 2008 edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate® Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, a mondegreen is "a word or phrase that results from a mishearing of something said or sung."
Merriam-Webster reports that author Sylvia Wright first coined the word mondegreen in 1954 in Atlantic magazine, when she confessed to a childhood misinterpretation of the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Moray." When she first heard the lyric "they had slain the Earl of Moray and had laid him on the green," she felt terribly sorry for the "poor Lady Mondegreen."
And, thanks to Merriam -Webster you can take the object of your friends’ amusement and turn it into your 15 minutes of fame.
As a copywriter, words are extremely important to me. So, you’d think I wouldn’t goof up lyrics too much, eh? As hinted above, I’m probably guiltier than most.
Yes, that was me singing, “If I had a rocket lawn chair” without questioning why Bruce Cockburn would ever want a rocket lawn chair and why some son of a bitch would die if in fact he did own such a spiffy devise.
And yes, that was also me happily singing, ”She had an aura of prunes. She was trying to cut my boot.” to David Bowie’s Scary Monsters. (Correct lyric: "She had a horror of rooms. She was tired, you can’t hide beat.”)
Equally, I had no idea why Roger “Chuckles” Waters would pen, “Meet me in the garden. I’ve got salmon in my ear.” (Correct lyric: "Meet me in the garden of Gethsemane, my dear.”)
What are your favourite mondegreens?
1) We've been using them, but do meta descriptions help you rank higher in Google? Search Engine Roundtable takes a look.
2) Joyful Marketing (Really!) is all about the power of community and making people happy.
3) I read somewhere that metrics are often like Hotel California; data goes in and never leaves. Avinash Kaushik has put together a great post on how to get the most out of your analytics: Google Analytics Help: Questions, Answers, Tips, Ideas, Suggestions.
4) Jared Spool very astutely tells us why producing great search results is harder than it looks.
5) The friendly folks at Bloom Search Marketing are over the moon that Google's keyword tool now includes search volume data. (And, if you are thinking of a PPC campaign - Bloom is your company. They rock.)
6) David Griner poses the question, "Are blogs still good places for conversation?" and ignites some passionate responses.
7) Every week there's something new and shiny in the social media space. Matt Balara says, "Hello new app. Why should I use you?"
8) Daniel McGuigan has some good tips to optimize your copy for skimming and scanning.
9) Marketing Profs explains blended search and tells us how to maximize our search potential and the need for diversified content.
10) Student and blogger DoshDosh gives us A Lesson in Writing, inspired by the essay, How to Say Nothing in 500 Words, a humourous reminder of how to create compelling content.
FRIDAY FUN
Let's end the week with two videos sure to crack a smile.
A huge thanks to Cartoon Barry for finding this gem last Friday. I've been giggling ever since.
And a tip-of-the-hat to Steve Hall of Adgabber for this clever campaign for How Stuff Works.
Late last week I was tagged by Jacki Hollywood Brown to write a six-word bio. Well, I was in a bit of a quandary because I’ve already done that…
I thought to myself, “Self, how can I turn this around?”
So, elevator pitch be damned! What six-word sentence would you use to describe your company? Dig deep and boil your company’s essence down to six words.
Six words.
Why bother? To be able to really focus on your strengths and differentiators in such a brutally edited way means there is no excess dross. I think it forces you to really simplify your company’s mission and strip out the self-promotional hoopla.
I’ve got a few I’m rolling around in my mind:
Crafting compelling copy that engages people.
Quality SEO copy that reads naturally.
I tell your stories. Simply. Authentically.
If you think you’ve got a great six-word company description/pitch, please post it in the comments section here with a link back to your website.
A lot of people are video blogging this year, and back some time ago I mentioned I might want to try it too.
Well, it’s harder than it looks.
Here is my first attempt. You can use your imagination to insert the cartoon bubble above my head that says “Oh boy, I feel awkward. Stop looking around! Don’t look at the screen, look at the camera!” And as you will see, I ran into some ….er, technical problems.
When I say I work remotely, it’s really quite literal. I finally joined the world of high speed Internet, which was a wonderful feeling. Ooooh, YouTube, podcasts and music – oh boy!! When I would let my (previously) guilty secret be known, it was as if I was operating from the moon. “You’re on what? Did you say dial-up? Really? How can you work?”
So, a couple of months ago I was naturally drawn to the MESH seminar Does Location Matter? with Bill Buxton in search of answers. (View it here.) The seminar takeaway was that technological design had to preserve accepted social conventions, and reflect and respect the social mores of the groups it serves.
I believe that virtual teams are possible. It’s how I’ve built my business. Proximity has never mattered. But still, there are softer, relationship issues that make it more difficult when people occupy separate spaces that must be addressed. Even with periodic videoconferences, it doesn’t always capture those reflex-fast human nuances. Or the day-to-day experience of being in the same physical space with a person.
What’s your take? Does location matter?
1) Just in time for the 4th of July comes 10 Independence Day Wines.
2) Do you know the difference between i.e. and e.g.? Todd Defren gives us a little lesson in Latin.
3) Smashing Magazine has hit a nerve with designers and the article "Should Links Open in New Windows?" has 182 comments of the "Yes, they should.", "No, they shouldn't" persuasion. Read it and decide for yourself.
4) Is the copy on your Web site bland and uninspired? Paul Boag says that it's time to add some personality!
5) Did you know that Google can't have more than 28 words on it's home page? SearchEngineLand explains that it's only one of the reasons why adding a privacy link to its home page was a big deal.
6) A month ago I told you about Plurk launching. This week, identi.ca entered the world of Twitter rivals. This Montreal-based service is the first open source application in the micro-blogging category, and according to ReadWriteWeb, may cause the Fail Whale some waves.
7) Ten Golden Rules reminds us to focus on the Web site before getting distracted by all of the other marketing tools at your disposal.
8) Oh Santa! Say it ain't so. AdRants tells us about Santa's social media efforts through a Ning site, blog and email spam.
9) Remember Hall and Oates? Well, John Oates' big mustache, J-Stache, is central to a new cartoon that features him as a "man who finds himself enticed back to the rock-star life by his superhero facial hair." AdAge explains that it's all about selling the back catalogue to a new generation. Uh, good luck with that.
10) And keeping in the '80's music theme, Devo is suing McDonald's over an American Idol-branded Happy Meal toy wearing their signature "energy dome" hat. Bassist Gerald Casale says "We don't like McDonald's, and we don't like American Idol, so we're doubly offended."
FRIDAY FUN
A big thank you to Twitter pal CoffeeCupKat for giving me a huge laugh yesterday with this very interesting Craigslist post.
For years I’ve advised clients against a Flash site, but rather to incorporate Flash sections as part of an html site, as search engines could not read the information embedded in the SWF files. Things might very well change. It looks like Adobe has found a way to make website both pretty and findable.
I just read on Search Engine Land that Google has teamed up with Adobe to "read" Flash files and extract text and links from it for better indexing and ranking.
Google’s Webmaster Central Blog answers some questions about how it works. Any caveats? Google does point out that its Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
Keep in mind that Adobe still needs to make it easier for your average blogger/digital content producer to link to files within Flash as well. Those incoming links can mean the difference between just being visible and ranking.
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