Why Twitter makes life on the Internet easier

It goes without saying that the Internet is an invaluable resource, and Twitter is one of the most influential Internet companies (along with meta-brands like Google and Facebook) that are defining how we all relate to one another on this vastly interconnected global network. Twitter is one of these companies. It’s been at the epicenter of major political uprisings for more than two years now (Arab Spring and other movements), and rivals both YouTube and Facebook as the number one source for cultural content on the web.

That being said, Twitter is not without its faults. One issue is how hard it can be for someone to navigate their list of followers and people they follow, what groups they are a part of, what they’re friends are doing, etc. This can lead to a lot of anxiety, and as a 20-something trying to navigate myself through this crazy world, I’m not an exception.

Here are a couple reasons why you should embrace Twitter and not fear it.

It makes contacting people easier

• Communication is brief (140 characters or less).
• It forces you to come up with something quickly, if not concisely.
• Twitter is compatible with essentially all other social apps.

It broadens your social network

• On your Twitter stream, what your friends say can be directly followed by what your favorite artist, humanitarian cause, or blog has to say about their day or upcoming events.
• It’s very easy to connect from one article to another.

You can appeal to different parts of your audience

• Everybody relates to the Internet differently.
• Those who do not like long articles may appreciate brief synopses, short jokes, poetry, aphorisms, etc.
• Those who do not like its brevity will appreciate the rapid generation of new content.
• It’s easy to adjust your friend network without fear of repercussions (most twitter accounts are public and thus viewable to anyone on the internet).

This is just a rough outline of why Twitter is such a good resource. I’ll get into a more specific analysis in my next article, where I discuss Twitter’s efficacy in aiding social transformation. But for now, if you have a Twitter account and you’re wondering how to make more use of it I would suggest doing at least one of these things.

If you have a cause you’re passionate about, follow it online and read through what they have to say. Odds are you’ll learn something you didn’t know before. After all, isn’t that what the Internet is all about?

- Alex Curtis

How to write newsletter and blog articles using a few basic templates

Writing articles for a newsletter or a blog is easy if you are really motivated and enthusiastic about the subject. But even the most motivated and knowledgeable person on a subject can use some guidelines to make the process of writing the article a little smoother.

One way to do that is to use a template to give you a basic structure for writing your article. Just as you can use the format of a recipe to describe how to make thousands of different dishes, a template can give you a basic structure that will make it easier to create many different kinds of articles. To take the recipe example a bit further, you don't need to use a recipe to bake a cake, but if you don't use one, you have a greater chance of missing a step and messing up the final result.

The blog for the site Ezinearticles.com provides several different templates for making different types of articles, including how-to articles, year in review articles, and articles with a holiday themes. If you write articles on a regular basis and you want to avoid making basic mistakes that may make your article less useful for our audience, take the time to check it out.

Learn from good examples
In addition to checking out some of the templates offered by Ezinearticles.com, you can visit their main site and check out their archive of thousands of articles in dozens of subject areas. If you come across an article in an area that interests you, and the article seems to be very well writing, then use that article, in addition to an appropriate template, to guide your own writing.

How I used Google translation tools to find a Chinese spam comment

As many of you know, I run several sites and blogs, including the Parenting and the Internet blog. I have all the blogs set up so that I have to approve every comment, in part to keep spam comments out of the blog. This morning, I got a somewhat long comment in Chinese:

免費日本成人圖片 -
天馬流行音樂網 -
哈啦免費視訊網 -
洪爺自拍貼圖網 -
UOUO成人影音聊天室 -
成人交友聊天室 -
辛辣聊天室(限制級聊天室) -
小高聊天室 -
免費影音聊天 -
免費影音聊天室 -
成人影音下載 -
淫娃免費視訊聊天室 -
免費影音播放軟體下載 -
日本美女成人AV免費 -
OL絲襪美腿圖庫 -
下載免費防毒軟體 -
免費中文防毒軟體 -
免費線上掃毒 -
中壢電音急診室 -
080-6K聊天室 -
視訊相親館 -
東部網友聊天坊 -
同志交友俱樂部 -
愛情廣場聊天聯盟總站 -
拉子女同志聊天室 -
酷兒男同志聊天室 -
柔情聊天網 -
柔情聊天室 -
有間遊戲網 -
天馬音樂網 -
真情夢工廠聊天室 -
戀愛天堂聊天室 -
080北部人聊天聯盟 -
Kiss聊天聯盟 -
摯愛中年同志聊天室 -
080台中聊天室UT -
豆豆6K聊天室 -
6K小高聊天室 -
6K南台灣聊天室 -
天馬080聊天室6K -

Not having a clue about what it said, I went to Google's Language Tools page for help and got the following translation:

Free Japanese Adult Photos --
Pegasus Pop Music Network --
IMs as text Free Video Network --
Hung Shing Yeh Self-mapping network --
UOUO adult video chat rooms --
Adult Dating Chat --
Spicy chat rooms (adult-rated chat rooms) --
Small high-Chat Room --
Free video chat --
Free video chat rooms --
Adult Video Download --
Yinwa free video chat rooms --
Free audio and video player software to download --
Japanese AV beauty adult free --
OL Stocking Legs Gallery --
Download free antivirus software --
Free Chinese anti-virus software --
Free online anti-drug --
Chungli denon emergency room --
080-6K Chat Room --
Video deeply attached to each hall --
User chat Square East --
Comrade Dating Club --
Love chat Union Square Station --
Chat Room Latin Comrade children --
Queer gay male chat rooms --
Tenderness Chat Network --
Tenderness Chat Room --
There are games in net --
Tianma Music Network --
Truth DreamWorks Chat Room --
Love Paradise Chat Room --
080 Northern someone to talk to union --
Kiss Chat Alliance --
Comrade middle-aged love chat rooms --
080 Taichung Chat UT --
Peas 6K Chat Room --
6K small height Chat Room --
6K southern Taiwan Chat --
Tianma 080 Chat 6K --

It wasn't a perfect translation, but it was good enough for me to know that the comment had no place on a blog giving parents advice on how to manage their online children.

The lesson from this episode is to always approve comments before they go on your blog, and to translate the ones you can't understand before you approve or reject them.

Just for fun, I ran the following through the Google translator from English to Chinese and back to English:

Original- Keep your spam comments out of my blog

Chinese (Simplified) - 不要让你我的博客垃圾评论

Back to Eglish: Do not let you spam my blog

If You Don't Know What Gadgets May Work for You, Here Are Several You Can Try

There are many options out there for widgets that you can put on your web site or blog to enhance your other content. Sometimes the best way to figure out what works for you and your audience is to try a bunch of them to see what works. Below are a few widget sites you can try:

• Widgetbox – A variety of widgets
  
  
  
• LinkWithin – a blog widget that appears under each post, linking to related stories from your blog archive
  
  
• ShoutMix – Provides a chat widget for your site or blog
  
  
• Wowzio – Various blog related widgets
  
  
• SpringWidgets – Web site tools for blogs and social networks
  
  
• YourMinis – Widgets for your blog, website, start page, and desktop
  
  
• Monitter – Real time live Twitter watch and badge creator
  
  
• Widgipedia – A very extensive widget resource
  
  
• Widgiland – A social widget production social network
  
  
• FeedWind – A widget for RSS type feeds

If you know of other sites with online widgets or tools for your web site, please let us know in the comments section.

Learn How to Find or Create Google Gadgets to Improve Your Web Site or Blog

While your blog may be filled with original content that you or your group develops, it sometimes helps to have additional extras to improve your audience's satisfaction. One of the many things that you can do is add gadgets, or dynamically generated content, to improve a visitor's experience. These resources can provide a wide variety of information or content, for example news headlines, weather, or a calendar.

Google provides many free gadgets for your web site or blog, and all you have to do is search their gadget directory for one that you like, copy the code, and place it in your web site or blog. Some of the more popular gadgets were featured in this article from Quick Online Tips.

If you have a few programming skills, Google will even show you how you can build your own custom gadgets. Visit the Google gadget creation page and you will find detailed instructions for building gadgets that you can place on multiple sites and products including iGoogle, Google Maps, Orkut, or any web page. Once you write your gadget once, with minor changes it can run in multiple places.

To give you an idea of how it would work, look below to find a gadget that produces the current Dilbert comic strip:

New FTC Rules for Sponsored Blog Posts

The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has recently approved changes to the guidance it gives to advertisers on how to keep their endorsement and testimonial ads in line with FTC regulations. Anyone involved in online advertising that involves testimonials or reviews, for example paid blog posts, should pay attention to these changes.

Under the old guidelines, an advertiser could feature unusual or atypical results in a testimonial ("I lost 300 pounds eating nothing but bacon bits and Jell-O!) so long as there was some kind of disclaimer in the ad.

Even more important to the online advertising world is that under the new guidelines an advertiser that has to disclose any “material connections” (for example, payments or free products) between endorser and the advertiser. To be more specific, if a blogger takes money or some other kind of consideration to review a product or service, that post would be considered an endorsement.

What Does This Mean for Bloggers and Site Owners?
It isn't clear what this may mean for the average blogger or site owner. If you own a single site or blog, and just have a few paid blog posts, the FTC probably won't even pay attention to you. However, if you have any kind of common sense when it comes to accepting advertising, you'll avoid any advertising that is promoting anything that is illegal, or that appears to be fraudulent or misleading.

When it comes to disclosing whether your site or blog takes advertising, it would probably be a good idea to do so somewhere on the site, or even in an individual blog post. It isn't clear what would be acceptable and what would not be acceptable, since the new guidelines don't go into effect until December.

While the FTC only has jurisdiction in the US, what happens in the US will likely become the norm around the world. If you are involved in online advertising, you should pay attention to any major changes in the US advertising market.

For more details on the changes, check out the FTC's press release from October 5, 2009.traditional ads, such as on talk shows or in social media.

What Is a Good Advertising Agreement?

If you offer advertising to web site owners, either as an advertiser or as some kind of broker or advertising representative, you have to have some kind of agreement with the site owner. Often that agreement is unspoken, or only mentioned informally in a phone call or email. Whether you have formal written contracts or just a verbal or handshake agreement, you have to have some rules about what you will or won't do, or what you expect from advertisers or site owners.

Below are a few suggestions for what you should look for from your advertising partners, or from your own organization. Even if you don't use a formal contract, you would be wise to have some ground rules written out ahead of time so that you can refer to them if someone asks or if you come across a problem with site owners or advertisers.

Please note that these are guidelines, and not a legal contract. If you need something that will stand up in court, please find the appropriate professional assistance.

Definition of Roles
Be clear about what you do and what you expect of the others involved in the agreement. For example, if you are an advertiser, say so. If you are acting as an advertising broker, don't hide that fact.

Advertising Type
The typical kinds of advertising types are plain text links or some kind of graphic or banner that has an embedded link. Most advertising is static in that they don't change over time, or they could be a type that changes over time or that is animated.

Advertising Location
Typical locations are on a particular page on a web site, in a particular post in a blog, or visible on all pages of a site or posts on a blog.

Duration of a Placement
Usually, an advertisement is in place for a fixed amount of time (month, year, etc.), or until some other specific event occurs.

Payout Rules
Typically, a site owner is either paid up front or paid after the fact. Pay may either be a flat rate, or based on performance like the number of times a link is clicked or based on sales of goods or services. Whatever the system is, make it clear to the site owner.

Change Rules
Most advertisers will expect a reasonable number of changes to the ad during its placement period. How many is reasonable is usually up to the site owner. For example, for a month-to-month placement, one or two changes per month should be expected. If a site owner insists on zero changes, it may make the site much less attractive to advertisers.

Advertising Visibility by People and Search Engines
Site owners should not do anything to undermine the ability of the ad to be useful. The typical advertiser will insist that the ad be visible to people visiting the site or blog. Most, but not all, advertisers will insist that the link within an ad be visible to search engines. This means things like no redirects or nofollow attributes, and use of plain HTML links. Both the advertiser and the site owner should be clear on what is allowed and what is not allowed.

No Abuse of Insider Information
If you have an agreement with an advertising broker, and you find out sensitive business information such as what advertisers that broker is using or what other sites that advertiser is working with, you should not approach those other businesses unless you first clear it with that broker.

Full Disclosure to Site Owners
In the online advertising universe, site owners often have the least information about what is going on. Advertisers and brokers are usually much more savvy about how the game is played. If a site owner, wants to know what's going on, tell that owner everything you can within reason. For example, if they want to know what percentage of the advertising dollar that they get, there is no reason to hide. If they want to know if you are the advertiser or the agent of an advertiser, just say so.

Things You Won't Do
Typically, this would include the kinds of advertising your wont' deal with, or what you would do if an advertiser did something underhanded like change the page behind a link to inappropriate content.

A 5 Step SEO Process for Your New Site or Blog

When you are in the planning stages for a new web site or blog, there are a few basic steps you can take to make that site or blog interesting to your audience and attractive to search engines.

These days, when you are starting a new web site or blog, it helps to plan your content so that it is interesting to your audience and also attractive to search engines. One thing that helps to accomplish both is to have unique content. Even if you are reusing your own material from another web site or blog, you should put in a few changes to update it for the audience and to keep search engines from thinking that it is duplicate content that should be ignored.

Making a site more attractive to search engine is one of the best ways to grow an audience since because potential new users will be able to find your site or blog while searching for something related to content. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the big buzz phrase you may have heard about, and if you think you should know something about it, you are right. The 5 step SEO process used when AirSafe Media creates a new site or blog is pretty simple, very free, and after reading this post you may want to use the process yourself.

Step 1: Plan on Making it Useful to Your Audience
Unique content should be the foundation of your site or blog, as well as an understanding of what your audience wants. The basic AirSafe Media philosophy is a simple one--give the people what they want, and just a little of what I think they need. Keep this in mind as you add content to your site or your blog.

Step 2: Find the Best Sites and Blogs on the Subject
Whatever it is you are planning to do, someone else has probably done it before. If you can find the very best sites or blogs in your area of interest, you will probably find excellent examples of what to do, what not to do, and where you can best contribute. Finding the sites can be difficult, or it can be easy. In my book Parenting and the Internet, I laid out a detailed procedure for making that happen. If you subscribe to the Speedbrake Publishing mailing list, your confirmation email will have a link to the free PDF ebook. The details are on pages 163-169 of that document.

Step 3: Find the Hottest Keywords and Key Phrases on Those Sites
Once you have a list of these key sites, put them through Google's Keyword Tool to find out the most relevant and popular keywords or key phrases that are associated with these sites. These top sites became that way in part because the sites ranked highly in relevant search engine searches. If these words and phrases are relevant to your site or blog, then using them will make it easier for a new visitor to find you.

Step 4: Find Out the Trends of These Keywords and Key Phrases
Once you identify keywords and key phrases of interest, you should get an idea of how often people use those terms in searches. Google Trends can easily show what terms are on the upswing and what terms are on the way out. You can even compare two terms to see which ones are doing better. You can use this tool to figure out which of your many alternative words or phrases you may want to use, or if you want to use some more than others.

Step 5: Put These Keywords or Key Phrases in Your Site or Blog
If you have done your work it Step 1, you probably have a lot of these words and phrases already in your content. Remember that you want to make your work useful to your audience, so only add the keywords and key phrases in Step 3 if it makes sense in the context of your work. You should also include these words and phrases whenever possible within the HTML tags for the page title and description, as well as in the 'alt' field for any image tag that you use. Also, try to put them in the heading tags as well as in the body of your text.

An AirSafe.com Case Study
While you should go through all the steps if you are designing a new site or blog, you can use parts of the process for a smaller effort within an active site. I was adding a podcasting section to my site AirSafe.com, and I wanted to figure out what kind of podcasting related terms I should include on the pages in that section (Step 4 and Step 5). I found out during my research that podcasting was a kind of social media. I did a Google Trends search for phrase 'social media' and the term 'podcasting' and found that the use of 'social media' was on a long term upswing and the second on a downward slope. I also did a comparison of the two terms and found that 'podcasting' was getting many more searches. I originally thought about adjusting the content to fit in the phrase 'social media' but decided against that idea after I finished my evaluation.

Your Next Step
Don't just sit there, take some action. At the very least, sign up to get a free copy of Parenting and the Internet. I guarantee there are at least a half dozen other things in that book that you could use right now.

Multitask Your Email Management System

If you have an ongoing relationship with an audience, you are probably using several methods to keep in contact such as podcasts, blogs, mailing lists, and Twitter. To make life easy for you, it makes sense to make them all work together. The following is an example from the aviation safety web site AirSafe.com.

Whenever the site creates a new podcast, a notice about that podcast is placed on the site's news blog. The mailing list used by AirSafe.com automatically reads the updated RSS feed from the news blog, and sends out an email to all the subscribers that has the title of the blog post along with a link to that post. That same list is also tied into AirSafe.com's Twitter account, so that those who prefer using Twitter over a mailing list will also get notified.

Using a mailing list with the option of notifying multiple channels of communication is much more convenient way to manage your audience and frees you from making a separate effort to notify each audience segment. For more information on the mailing list system used by AirSafe.com, visit speedbrake.aweber.com.

If method of managing customer relationships sounds interesting to you and you would like to test the system for yourself, you can take a free test drive of the system by signing up below:

Take a Free Test Drive today!

Abraham Lincoln, the Gettysburg Address, and Your Blog

How long should a blog entry be? Like an email, a blog entry can be as long or as short as you want it to be. Usually, problems arise with blog posts that are too long rather than those that are too short. While there are no hard and fast rules about the maximum length of a post, there is one rule inspired by a 19th century writer that that provides a useful guide for today’s writers.

President Abraham Lincoln’s address at the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg, PA, on November 19, 1863 was a speech of only 266 words that was both a powerful message on the principles of democratic government and a shining example of how a short message can speak volumes. This speech also provides the inspiration for the Gettysburg Criterion for email that I wrote about in my book Parenting and the Internet. This is a rule that the text in the body of an email should be shorter than the Gettysburg Address. If the rule makes sense for email, it should probably make sense for blog entries.

To use the Gettysburg Criterion, get a copy of the Gettysburg Address and keep it nearby when you are writing. When you get though with your rough draft, compare the length to that of the Gettysburg Address. If the draft is longer than Lincoln’s speech, then consider making it shorter. If making it shorter is not an option, then your consider options such as breaking up the posts into two or more posts, or just post a synopsis of your writing in the blog and make the full version available elsewhere such as in a downloadable file.

For your convenience, I’ve included below the text of the version of the Gettysburg Address that is inscribed in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC (punctuation added for clarity):

Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But in a larger sense, we can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow, this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

The Gettysburg Criterion is only one way to evaluate your writing. If you can write a post that is much longer or much shorter but that is also effective, then do so. If using the Gettysburg Criterion encourages you to take time and energy to become a better writer then, it will probably help you in ways that go far beyond your next blog entry.

You can download a free copy of Parenting and the Internet, including the Gettysburg Criterion, at http://www.airsafe.com/downloads/pati.pdf.

How to Search Twitter for What's Hot

One of the things that was notable about last week's plane crash in Amsterdam was the use of Twitter by nearby witnesses. I heard about it in the media as I madly updated AirSafe.com with accident information, but I was frustrated because I didn't have an easy way to search Twitter. Actually, I had a way, I just didn't know about it.

Summize.com allows you to search Twitter for up to the minute messages. It is such a good service, that Twitter acquired it. You can find it either at summize.com or search.twitter.com.

By the way, here is another shameless plug for AirSafe.com. Often after a several plane crashes in a short period of time, someone would ask me if "plane crashes happened in threes." I used to dismiss this kind of question as nonsense, at least until I actually analyzed the concept behind the question. I no longer dismiss the question. In fact, not only do I think that crashes can happen in threes, I know that they can happen in fours and fives as well. Check out AirSafeNews.com for details.