Vaspers the Grate: Peoria Illinois web usability, music marketing, online video: January 2007

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

email from Swicki custom search engines

I really like my Blog Revolution Search Engine, a FREE custom SE from Swicki/Eurekster. (See my sidebar)

Here's an email they sent me, which I pass along to you to help promote them.

[QUOTE]

Hi,

How do you make your swicki better than Google? By getting help from the experts in your swicki community!

This is a quick note to let you know about the great new "Community Features" in your swicki.

It is estimated that people find what they want from general search engines only 40-70% of the time. We want to make that closer to 100% and your swicki's new tools will allow your community members to fill in any gaps in the search results.

Your swicki uses the information you give it, along with the best indexing technologies, to gather search results about your topic. No matter how good the automatic tools it uses, there will still be gaps that you and other experts can now easily fill. This means your swicki can become the definitive search destination on the web for "blog revolution search engine".

Your swicki's users can now:

Vote for results directly on a new results page (http://blog-revolution-search-engine-swicki.eurekster.com).
Easily write an answer directly into the search results (see the "Write your own search result" link at the top of the swicki results page).
Use the new WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor for writing great looking search results, including: URL links and embedded video.
See a list of unanswered questions that includes search terms people have searched for or asked on your swicki but didn't find good answers for.
Subscribe to your swicki for the latest questions and answers using your swicki's RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feed.

As moderator, you can:

Click on the "write an answer" link beside each new search term in your Buzzcloud activity emails to quickly write answers.
Approve or exclude answers contributed by your community members.

Search is becoming increasingly verticalized and our aim is to help you use your expertise to turn your swicki into a valuable and useful search engine and to help you earn your part of the multi-billion-dollar search industry.

We always appreciate your feedback so let us know your thoughts.

Kind regards,

Grant Ryan
Co-founder

[END QUOTE]

blogs as surveillance tools

Since many bloggers mistakenly think that a digital journal is as intimate and private as a print diary, strategic details about a person's life may be seen in their blog. Details they may not have communicated otherwise.

Surveillance: covertly watching or recording a suspect to (hopefully) catch them doing something wrong.

Parents, who care enough about their children, can command the child to open their blog and let their mom and dad see what photos and text are in the blog.

On the U.S. television program "Wife Swap" last night, the parents of a 12 year old girl are exposed to the raunchy, sleazy, sexual content of the daughter's blog, and demand that she remove specific content.

When the parents took issue with her blog contents, she whined: "Everybody's doing it, so it's not fair for you to stop me. What am I supposed to say, that I'm an angel?"

You can do research on your competitors by reading the blogs of employees or the CEO blog. At the very least, you can learn how a competitor is talking to and influencing the market. You may also see some vulnerabilities and opportunities to provide a better product or serve a market segment (niche) that is underserved.

If you fire an employee, and that former employee has a blog, you can monitor that blog, for libel, defamation of character, lies, false accusations, over-compensating egotism, and other forms of wounded self-aggrandizement.

These details may prove useful in legal actions, for example, if the employee tries to sue the company for unlawful firing, if that archaic concept has any sense left in an At Will state. Unfortunately, corporations have all the rights and the individual has practically none.

For example: I was physically assaulted, commanded to conduct unauthorized activity on a cash register (enter retail sales volume under someone else's password whenever I had alreadymet "plan", i.e., the sales goals for the week), and sexually harrassed on the job -- but my attorney told me I had no grounds for a lawsuit. That's insane, it's not America or democracy, but that's what happened nevertheless.

My point is that it seems that many bloggers gush out all kinds of sordid, offensive, rash statements on their blogs, not thinking how it makes them look (immature, crazy, stupid), nor considering how it could be used against them.

Here's one way it works: the person has a web site. It might be an ecommerce site or a marketing site that displays expertise, talent, art, writing, music, or design work. On that web site there may also be a link called "blog", "journal", or "my diary". That's where the incriminating or embarrassing content can be found.

Why do bloggers post such self-condemning material?

I have warned bloggers in the past not to post hateful statements or threats against other individuals or companies. In the event of an arson, vandalism, murder, or suspicious death, what you wrote in you blog could come back to haunt you.

I won't address the issue of posting naked or sexually oriented photos on your blog, especially if you're a young girl, since this is so obviously stupid, it doesn't even require any cautions. Predators and stalkers are out there seeking such dummies.

I think we should all remember that what we publish in our public-access blogs (those that are not password protected) may be used against us as an individual or organization.

Think before you post. Pause before clicking that Publish Post button. Be sure that you really want the entire world to know what you reveal in your post. Some topics are best left out of the blogosphere and reserved for intimate conversations with family, friends, and confidantes.

This is not a new "rule" to limit the freedom of blogging, it's just a friendly reminder that "loose lips sink ships" and not everything needs to be blurted out on a blog. Use some discretion and protect yourself from those who might use your reckless abandon and ill considered revelations against you.

Sunday, January 28, 2007

Sci Fi Micro

Sci Fi Micro is my new journal of extremely short narratives based on fizzled out futures and futures that come to an end.

There will accumulate a pile of posts you can step into, and the first two entries, "What is a sci fi micro story?" and "alien age reversal ray" are holding down the space station, keeping it orbiting the minds we wish to invade.

Yes, all my old science fiction greats will appear there, including "Little Purple Pony", "Hair from Hell", and "Headless Soldiers".

Avant Garde Music TV episode 12

Welcome to the twelfth episode of Avant Garde Music TV, a mashup of Vaspers the Grate and YouTube, including YouTubers who so kindly upload great videos by great musicians.

Digital Rights? Whose digital rights? Artist, label, lyricist, consumer?

How about the consumer's Right To Universal Content Utopia?

Allowing fans to freely spread the work of musical artists is Share Economy genius. Help your loyal, devoted fans to distribute your music to as many strangers to it as possible.

Eventually, after freely giving tons of free music mp3s and CDs, a large cult will emerge, converting their friends, and most will gladly PAY now for MORE since you HOOKED THEM with all that free stuff, on which you received a lot of valuable user feedback and insight.

Forget property rights in this matter of music distribution, i.e., fan conversion.

Distribution of both free and paid product is the same as fan conversion: converting non-fans (strangers) to fans, and re-converting fans, and converting fans into super-fans (brand evangelists).

Quit "protecting" your product. Give tons of it away for FREE. Have some things that are NOT FREE, but use the free product to obtain customers for the paid product.

Dean Wareham (of LUNA) "moon palace (live)" (1:10)

Olivia Tremor Control "Another Set of Bees in the Museum" (3:39)

Cathy Berberian "Xango" (1:56)

Einsturzende Neubauten "Stella Maris" (3:40)

Galaxy 500 (Dean Wareham pre-LUNA) "When Will You Come Home?" (4:42)

Galaxy 500 "4th of July" (4:55)

Popul Vuh "Improvisation" (1971) (6:06)

And finally, here, for brave avant souls, are a couple of my latest music videos of techno sludge.

CompuMusik: "big bouncey sun corrosion (intro)" (2:37)

CompuMusik "hippie factory (intro)" (4:26)

Music Store

Free Music Downloads

books and music for blogging

These are the books and music that influence this blog. Not all of the influences, just a few of my favorites.

The following URL:

http://www.amazon.com/Acts-Religion-Jacques-Derrida/dp/04159
24014/sr=1-1/qid=1169976396/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-3825919-3217444
?ie=UTF8&s=books

has a length of 136 characters and resulted in the following TinyURL which has a length of 25 characters:

http://tinyurl.com/26k5js

Acts of Religion, by Jacques Derrida

Books can tell us things we would have not known, if not for books. We can curl up with them, when they're good, and boil them when they're bad. Book soup is not too grueling.

Some books come to us as self-parody and deep insight.

Some are technical resources for web analysts and usability professionals.

Others are marketing books that everyone should read, for laughs, lessons, and leaping ahead.

When you want to understand how the Technological Imperative is attempting to rule your life, there are books that treat the topic in a rich phenomenology.

It helps your mind to stay young, vibrant, and strong, when you read difficult, challenging, provocative, combative books on topics related to your passion and/or career.

Read the simple, study the deep, struggle with the esoteric, practice the fundamentals, master the profound.

Music, too, could be merely entertaining, or intellectually enlightening, mentally expanding.

Many ways to do it.

Music can appear to the ear as a concern with novel ways to organize and interrogate sound: clashing, jarring, explosive, harsh, abrasive, unexpected, uncategorized, suspended, inert, hovering.

[Iannis Xenakis: "Perseopolis + remixes, edition 1"]

Or murky quirky avant garde.

[Luciano Berio: "Corale, Chemins II & IV, Points on the curve to find..."]

Perhaps we decide to smarten our brains and refresh our creative and strategic batteries. Why not listen to successful blogger podcasts?

Ah, my friend in Moscow, the musician Djet.

[Djet: "Snow Maiden", "Abrasive", "Silent Pictures", "Inanimate Objects" EPs]

Back in 1972, when Tangerine Dream was a more experimental band.

This has the honor of being the first album I know of that deliberately tried to make music that was stationary, that seemed to move, sort of, but refused to actually arrive anywhere.

It was done to symbolize the inertia of time, the lack of motion in temporality, the stillness of eternity now.

burn podcasts to CDs

I have been downloading podcasts, opening them with iTunes, putting them into playlists, then burning CDs of them. By burning podcasts to CDs, I can listen to them in the car, in a boombox, or in the livingroom stereo system.

When you feel like listening to talk, don't turn to talk radio, full of jarring commercials, turn instead to podcasts in your field of expertise or practice, in art or music, marketing or management, whatever is your passion or career.

I have a meagre library that is doomed to expand exponentially:

(1) "Computer Music Pioneers" playlist with an interview and music by Tod Dockstader.

(2) "CalacanisCast Beta" featuring Jason Calacanis.

(3) PodTech Marketing Voices Interviews with:

http://www.podtech.net/marketingvoices/

Seth Godin

("most of the time you need to ignore your customers, because the goal is to get your customers talking to each other, and you need to listen to what they're saying to each other...customers cannot innovate for you, if Edison listened only to customers, he would have made brighter candles.")

Robert Scoble (PodTech.net)

Bill Kircos (Intel)

Debbie Weil (BlogWrite for CEOs)

Kelly Wagman (Juniper Networks)

Michael Sippey

Steve Broback (Blog Business Summit)

Peter Rojas (Engadget)

Pete Blackshaw (Nielsen Buzzmetrics)

Guy Kawasaki

Regis McKenna

Jeremiah Owyang (PodTech.net)

Steve Rubel (Edelman)

Sharon Wienbar (BA Venture Partners).

Saturday, January 27, 2007

85 blogger tee shirt sayings

Mr. Angry, my online sedative, makes tee shirts with fabric painted sayings on them.

Here are some ideas for him. As you hurriedly skim and scan my list, think of your own witty and fiendish blogger tee shirt sayings, okay? Then post a comment here, telling us what they are, please. Thanks.

(0) Proud Member of the New Reformed Insane Blog Media Network

(1) “I’m a blogger, therefore I will flame you in my next post.”

(2) "She-bloggers eat lumberjacks for lunch and spit hyper-nails."

(3) "Your _____ will be exposed in my next blog post."

(4) "My boss doesn't know I blog. About him."

(5) "Mommy bloggers put their children at risk with predators."

(6) "Political blogs make me want to vote for NONE OF THE ABOVE."

(7) "How am I? Didn't you read my blog today?"

(8) "Blog = Boring Lame Obnoxious Gushings"

(9) “You don't blog? You don't exist!”

(10) “Blog until your head falls off.”

(11) "Feed my RSS scraper, baby!"

(12) "Ping me!"

(13) "V is for Victory over the MSM!"

(14) "MOUSE = Multi Operational User Selection Enabler"

(15) "I blog, therefore I am (a blogger--doh!)"

(16) "Blog: ugly word with a lovely future."

(17) "Post videos and podcasts -- or delete your blog!"

(18) "What would Kurt Cobain blog? Oh, stupid lyrics, that's right. Never mind."

(19) "Friends don't let friends blog ~~drunk~~."

(20) "Blogrolls are the new RSS" -- Evan Williams.

(21) "Blog = an email to the world" -- Doc Searls.

(22) "Only web wusses avoid blogocombat."

(23) "She-bloggers are prettier than half-males."

(24) "Geek-neckers, unite!"

(25) "Embed my link in your name, baby!"

(26) "Reciprocal commenting: the new online high."

(27) "There is no offline reality."

(28) "My monetized blog paid off my student loan!"

(29) "Build your dream house for $1.49"

(30) "Web 2 point Oh No!"

(31) "I'm an auto-refreshing page boy."

(32) "Ajax: not just for sinks anymore."

(32) "XML is my feed size. Here it comes."

(33) "I want to Trackback you."

(34) "WARNING: I drank the social media Koolaid."

(35) "Meet me at my sidebar" OR "sip my parsing syntax" (not sure what this means...)

(36) "Push Button Publishing made me rich!" -- Post Secret.

(37) "Make millions doing next to nothing." -- Post Secret.

(38) "Let users create ALL your blog content." -- Post Secret.

(39) WEB INFORMATION UTOPIA: Any Content. Any Time. Any Amount. Any Format. Any Place.

(40) "Markets are now smarter than the companies that serve them." -- Christopher Locke

(41) "Sneak my Easter Egg into your Office app." -- Christopher Locke (Gonzo 49)

(42) "Up with Thick Description!" --Christopher Locke (Gonzo 45)

(43) "The future is already here. It's just not distributed equally."

(44) "What would a digital journalist do?"

(45) "What to blog about today? Your annoying defects and irrational masochism!"

(46) "Doug Engelbart rocks!"

(47) "Happy information trails 2 U" -- Vannevar Bush

(48) "/qW=e don't need no thought kontrol!"

(49) "typos R mandytory"

(50) "Jurgen Habermas was right!" -- Christopher Locke (Gonzo 156)

(51) "So was Jacques Derrida!" -- Christopher Locke (Gonzo 156)

(55) "Vin~t Cerf > ce]rtifie[d T\ech-nic^ian"

(56) "My dad is Charles Babbage and Konrad Zuse"

(57) "There is no one unaffected by the computer technology explosion." -- Steven Levy

(58) "Computer Literacy Tutor"

(59) "Multi Hyper Media Tycoon"

(60) "Help! I'm stuck in Arpanet!"

(61) "digitized appetite hunger strike"

(70) "World Wide Web Whiner"

(71) "Wanna Wiki?"

(72) "My blog speaks Python" (partially sure what this might mean)

(73) "I got your Up-skilling"

(74) "CPU first, RAM second" (may be fading in relevance)

(75) "Married to a data warehousewife"

(76) "Debugger...for girsl and half-males only" (intentional typo, see 49)

(77) "dot matrix guitar player -- Resonance FM"

(78) "Ooops. Was that your social security number? Sorry. Sold it."

(79) "Thwart and stymie and deter identity theft. De-entitize yourself."

(80) "Gmail, not Fee Mail"

(81) "Net Neutrality stole my girlfriend. Have you seen 'im?"

(81 1/2) "Technorati Illuminati"

(82) "They call me Macro."

(83) "I can fix your user error."

(84) "Sphere me."

(85) "Digg this!"

Vaspers the Grate

10 ecommerce insights

These tips are a mashup of advice to sales people selling ecommerce web sites and for clients who use ecommerce web sites to sell or advertise products.

(1) Don't sell web sites. Sell web-based marketing/sales/PR solutions.

(2) First, do research and consultation with clients to fully understand client business, what the company is trying to do, and what the users want to know, do, and buy, and then custom build a site around that.

(3) Ecommerce sites need to contain what all other blogs, wikis, and other web sites need: About, Contact (form and email address, fax, phone, land location, cell, etc.), Profile.

(4) User observation tests are mandatory.

(5) Don't give the client what will please the client, give them what their customers actually want from a web site, and make that astonishing customer gratification and service well pleasing to the client.

(6) Consider enabling the ecommerce site visitor to customize the product you're selling, as in Flash-enable "Design Your Own" functionalities. See www.uberprints.com for an example of tee shirt customizing Flash application.

(7) If you require registration for a site, provide and explain the benefits of, and reasons for, registration. Don't just have Register and Login links.

(8) Warn web design prospects of the dangers of letting amateur, student, or well meaning friends build your web site. Explain to clients why a professional, non-generic, stable, securely hosted, customized web site is essential to achieve their business goals.

(9) Study books and blogs by Seth Godin, Kellogg Marketing Faculty at Northwestern University, Jakob Nielsen, Jared Spool, Harvey Mackay, Peter Drucker, W. Edwards Deming, John Battelle, David Weinberger, Laura and Al Ries, Debbie Weil, Tom Peters for insight, strategy, and inspiration.

(10) A blase, laid back, non-hype, casual, relaxed, friendly, no pressure approach is best, plus helping customers to compare one product versus another in your lineup, helping them decide which product to buy is where most ecommerce sites fail.

24 tips for new bloggers

Advice, wisdom, and insights for a new blogger, for anyone who just started, or is "getting ready" to start a blog.

Any person or organization.

In no particular order, just a random riffing:

(1) Get, buy, or create a custom or at least non-default, non-generic cookie cutter blog design template.

(2) Have a purpose for your blog and an intended audience. Family and friends? Employees and customers? Potential clients? Other musicians? A niche market? A specialty expertise? Art lovers? Voyeurs and nosey busy bodies who love to drill into other people's problems and confessed shortcomings? A people of the future?

(3) Focus on what really matters to you, to your company, to your customers, your peers, your readers, your fans.

(4) Use a Post Quality Test: "Does this post REALLY satisfy any known or guessed needs of my readers, or is it just an idiosyncratic tangent or vain confession that need not be publicized?

(5) Don't imagine that people are searching for you.

People are searching for rich, rare, relevant content, task-accomplishing functionalities, answers to questions, good deals on quality merchandise, expertise on difficult subjects, fully customized products, fully personalized service, truth, honesty, and value.

(6) Be aware that the MSM (main/morbid stream media) is your enemy, with a few exceptions.

Some exceptions are Business Week, Fortune, US News & World Report (because they interviewed me), Business Week, New York Times, CBS MarketWatch, PBS, NPR, and C-SPAN (e.g., Book TV). There may, and I stress that word "may", be, and I don't stress the word "be", others.

(7) Blogocombat is fun and builds mental muscles. Attack the MSM every chance you get, except for the exceptions I mentioned earlier, of course.

(8) Blogocombat is a good use of your time, defending the blogosphere and the core values of blogging.

(9) Blogocombat is calmly, intellectually, giftedly, gently and gingerly clobbering your debate opponent. I think I've only lost two or three fights, but that's because I was tired and sleepy.

(10) Practice blogocombat never. Just use it when absolutely necessary.

(11) Avoid it whenever possible.

But face it, one day you'll read a blog, and something will jump out at you. You'll feel a delicious shiver of hate pulse up and down your spine.

You hate a lie, a stupidity, an unbearably smug hubris that you detect in a post by some blogger. You fill out the comment form and pass the Turing test to put your comment into moderation, hoping it gets published by the spambot fighting blogger.

(12) Get a book on HTML, the code that web sites are built with, though other code is also used.

Learn enough to be able to get into your design template source code and fiddle around with it, changing colors, adding images, creating blogrolls of recommended external sites, feedrolls (like I used to have with Digg and Lockergnome), polls, Technorati tracking code, various sidebar category links, podcast players, video players, custom search engines, games, news rivers, and other embeds into your blog.

(13) Change your photo, blog colors and design, and other things once in a while, to stir things up, and keep it interesting.

(14) Do unexpected things, blog about some tangent, some odd topic, again: to add spice and variety to your blog, to keep it from getting stale and predictable.

(15) Use some comedy, self-parody, and all the grand unquestionable principles of Winning Through Self-loathing which dovetails into Miserably Servile Customer Pampering which can easily run on the platform of Zero Budget Marketing for Mass/Niche Market Triumph.

(16) Choose your blogroll entries carefully.

One of the best ways to judge a new or unfamiliar blog is by the blogroll. If it's a blog about online marketing, universal content utopia, absolute switched-on user empowerment, and the new share economy, for example, does the blogroll contain the established thought leaders, marketing practice (not consultant) bloggers, and business book authors?

(17) Remember you want to blogroll those who practice and succeed in their field, not ivory tower speculators, or armchair salesmen. You want to link to experts who are experts not by thinking and writing about something, but by thinking and DOING and writing about it. A list of clients or accounts is nice, if you can verify the veracity of it.

(18) Craft your post titles with utmost care, perhaps spending more time working on the title that you do on the post itself.

Why?

That title is what search engine spiders will see, it's what will show up in your Recent Posts sidebar display, it's what will probably/hopefully appear in your post URL (the web address of that specific post, rather than the main index home page of your blog).

It's the post title that is the advertising ambassador of your entire blog. The post title will be what decides an RSS subscriber who is seeking relevant, helpful, useful, interesting, shocking, or entertaining content.

Treat that post title with the respect it deserves. Shorter is generally better, and numbered lists convey substance and organized information that is easy to skim quickly.

Use bizarre, poetic, absurd, or surreal post titles once in a while, to stir things up and strike an off-key chord.

See Carrie Snell for post titles that are imaginative, provocative, and usually totally irrelevant to the posts themselves, which is a good avant garde blog technique.

(19) If you want traffic and comments, there are only two ways to get them: (a) be famous and sought after already, or (b) post rich, relevant, funny, polite comments at other, comment-reciprocating, or high traffic, or niche influence, blogs.

(20) Interact swiftly, politely, and completely with your readers. Reply quickly to their emails and post comments. Never attack or censor commentors.

Comment moderation with delayed posting and email notification of comments in moderation is the way to go.

You DO NOT need to use a captcha, a word or character verification device. In most cases, your blog will not be under relentless onslaughts of spambot attacks, which is what captchas block. When you have to answer a simple math problem, or type in the letters/numbers you see in a fouled background box, that jazzes the characters so it's a real pain to decipher them, you're in a captcha botkiller.

Don't annoy your readers with a word verification test. Just moderate comments, not censoring, but deleting spam comments, comments that are off topic, vague, stupid, and contain a link to some web site that usually is pornographic, pseudo pharmacy, attaches spyware or viruses or other malicious attacks or dubious if not criminal practices.

Filter out ALL and IMMEDIATELY the comment spam and abusive comments that try to fight its way into your blog. Learn about abusive comments and spambot prevention devices and techniques.

Do not allow anyone to use your blog as a free billboard for their products or services, by posting opportunistic comments, comments that contain links to their sites, whether commercial or informational. Unless you know and like them.

(21) Understand what "blog residue" is. Blog residue is what remains inside you when you walk away from the computer: your connecting with other bloggers, and your increasing skills in debate, research, networking, writing, web design, HTML, CSS, RSS, credibility evaluation, and even improvements in your appreciation of diversity, democracy, and free thought.

(22) Evolve your blog. Come on, learn something, okay? Put a podcast "welcome" message in your sidebar. Put a photo of you on it. Why? To humanize your blog, make it more personal, more intimate, candid, transparent, authentic, that's why. Think of new ways to get more of you into your blog, not for narcissistic, myopic, or selfish vanity reasons, but to connect with other real human beings transmitting their thoughts and visions via networked overwrought computers.

(23) Never post "boilerplate" comments on other people's blogs. "Boilerplate comments" are basically press release type remarks, defending a company or product or person, and paid or somehow incentivized by a third party, like a company. Also, you don't want to kill your credibility and ethics by being a PayPerPost spambot, littering the blogosphere with pollutions in the form of insincere or sincere, but paid, compensated, incentivized, or coached comments attacking or promoting a third party or product.

(24) Don't believe everything you see in the blogosphere.

Some blogs are NOT HUMAN. Yes, the threat is at its greatest when you do a search on a word or topic. You'll run into RSS feed blogs, vampire blogs, inhuman blogoid objects that do not enable reader comments, no About or Contact page, floating like an aggregated lump of exploitive cyber sewage. These blogoid monstrosities will suck a post right out of your blog and re-blog it, re-post it to their authorless blog. Your post then sits there, linking back to your blog, as can be seen in a Technorati Other Blgos That Link Here search. It sits there, staring at you like a kidnapped child in distress. And there's nothing you can do about it.

What other blogger reveals such blogospheric estoterica to you? Name one.

Smiling sincerely,

your pal Vaspers

Vaspers the Grate

CyberJournalist post titles in newsletter

I got the latest CyberJournalist email newsletter yesterday I think it was.

Here's a smart idea for you newsletter senders, which I must become soon. Include a linked list of your 20 latest, or 20 best or most popular posts, so newsletter subscribers can catch up, derive benefit, and fall more deeply in love with your resources.

Turn the clocks in your head back to square one and, as you burn into your brain the truth that users are always impatient, distracted, multi-tasking, hurried, and madly searching for relevant info, task-accomplishment functionalities, or nichey entertainment, with all this in mind, now go, go to the very beginning and ask yourself, from ground zero:

"Do my blog post titles, archive categories, content, sidebar buttons, profile facts, and navigation systems truly reflect what my readers need, want, and seek?"

CyberJournalist.net recent articles:

Recent headlines

Which title do you click, if any? I'm curious. Do YOU think these post titles are compelling? Which is the most attractive to YOU???

I like "Blog Readership Growing for Major Newspapers" (since online newspapers never know how to do a blog, link to other sites, or enable comments for every article).

I also am intrigued by "New York Times launches video obits".

Imagine if your obituary in an online newspaper, or in your own blog, could be like

"Hello. If you're viewing this, then it's official: I'm deceased. Dead. Departed. Hope I end up in a better world, but not no heaven or nirvana if it don't have no computers, blogs, or noise music CDs."

while you're clowing around with tuna and ketchup.

Yesterday, I figured out how to sell web sites to local businesses. I now know how to pick the low hanging fruit of those who want a web site, who are proclaiming "everybody's buying everything online now". It's so simple what my boss taught me, but I'll never reveal it.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

say hello to these CEO blogs

Here are some CEO blogs -- some good, some rather poor. Can you tell which is which?

John W. Scherer Video Professor Blog
www.videoprofessor.blogspot.com

Bill Marriott, Chairman & CEO Marriott Intl.
www.blogsmarriott.com

Jim Estill, CEO, Synnex-Canada
www.jimestill.com

Marc Cuban, CEO, HDNET, Dallas Mavericks
www.blogmaverick.com

Lester Wunderman
http://lesterchroniclesblog.wunderman.com/default.aspx

Michael Hyatt
www.michaelhyatt.com/fromwhereisit

Jason Calacanis
www.calacanis.com

John Dragoon, CMO, Sr. VP, Novell
www.novel.com/company/blogs/cmo

Joe Wikert, Publisher, Wiley & Sons
http://jwikert.typepad.com/the_average_joe

Ted's Take: the blogging site of Ted Leonis, AOL
http://ted.aol.com/index.php

CEO Blogs List

www.thenewpr.com/wiki/pmwiki.php?
pagename=Resources.CEOBlogsList

new Bibles of personal revelation

Blogs are the New Bibles of Personal Revelation.

People, journalists, web sites, universities are starting to say "the blogs are..." and "in the blogs they're saying..."

Blogs are becoming solemn, prestigious, recognized for the hard, disciplined work of research, insight, and inscription that they are. A blog can be a frivolous piece of junk, yes, like any TV show, music band, telephone call, or direct mail package. But increasing numbers of respected intellects, most of them authors or thought leaders, are starting blogs.

And even in the most exalted and intellectual blogs, the blogs act as mirrors, mirroring the passion, knowledge, skills, and personalities of the bloggers. Every blog is a personal blog. CEO blogs just happen to have a CEO as the person blogging. Product blogs are simply personal blogs in which the product and it's blogging surrogates are the star.

Blogs enable you to express your deep or casual feelings about a brand, a company, a person (self), a product, an expertise, a hobby, a life style, an artform, a social cause, an ideology. To understand a market, it wouldn't hurt to read a bunch of blogs devoted to topics relevant to your target market.

Do a Google or Technorati search on a key phrase related to your market, say "small business accounting". You'll see web pages and blog posts devoted to "small business accounting". Click on a few of them. Inspect their blogrolls. A blogroll can tell you a lot about a blog. Do the blogs that look professional and credible link to certain blogs consistently? Click on them.

You're "trust-linking" from reputable sites to what they link to. You're starting to assemble a fairly valuable, seat of the pants list of seemingly credible and authoritative sites on a topic or industry. It's fun.

Be sure to post your final list for your own blog readers.

Deconstructively speaking, or rather writing, the word "blog" is beginning to get close to both "babel" and "bible". Most blogs are in the middle. Somewhere between narcissistic chatter and technology white paper.

Blogosphere: from private musings to network storage.

When people say "blogs" now, everyone knows that only the good blogs is meant. "Bloggers" now refers exclusively, in most cases, to the good bloggers. Personal bloggers, science bloggers, art bloggers, mommy bloggers, CEO bloggers, musician bloggers, it makes no difference.

Blogs: the New Telephone, Television, and (Compu-) Telepathy.

No matter what business or art or hobby you're in, you can learn a lot from the tech bloggers. You don't even have to understand or care about their blog content. Just skim through them and notice how each post title sounds like the name of a seminar. The posts are like mini-seminars.

Here's how a data storage blogger speaks of his little corner of the blogosphere. Notice what he says is "impossible". He's right.

Blogs: the New Defenders of Democracy.

Blogs: the New Thought Liberators.

Blogs: the New Bibles of Personal Revelation.

You can trust them more than you thought you could.

From "Top 10 Network Storage Blogs"

[QUOTE]

When you're immersed in storage as I am, it’s impossible to ignore the blogs of analysts, vendors and consultants.

The blogs written by storage company executives can be surprisingly vendor-agnostic, though the analysts and consultants still tend to pull fewer punches.

[END QUOTE]

Isn't this what blogging's all about?

Freely expressing your un-incentivized, non-compensated, spontaneous, uncoached opinions and gripes?

Mouthing off, loudly, relentlessly, triumphalistically -- about your fears, dreams, desires, needs, solutions, products, music, art, expertise, lunch, favorite movies, marketing ideas, parenting experiences, exercise plan, office innovation, and political view?

your pal,

Vaspers the Grate

22 things you could do with a web site

…but hurry, before your competitors beat you to it.

1. Show customers who like to surf the web that you care about their business: you have a web site they can visit.

2. Make your expertise, credentials, and products known to a global audience.

3. Establish yourself as an industry leader, innovator, authoritative speaker, or rising star.

4. Sell more product with a 24 hour, 7 days a week, 365 days a year sales channel.

5. Put your yellow pages information online: hours, location, phone number, years in business, types and brands of products carried, payment methods, credit cards accepted, menu, slogan, claim to fame, reasons why customers should buy from you.

6. Take dining reservations, class registrations, and other forms-based input.

7. Get valuable feedback, questions, testimonials, and purchase orders from customers, with a web contact (or blog comment) form.

8. Provide customers with news updates, press coverage, road construction detours, school closings, business address and map, and other urgent, time-sensitive material.

9. Reach more educated, higher income customers, which is what web users tend to be.

10. Announce changes to your organization, staff, product line, store hours, or location.

11. Attract customers by showcasing your products in text, photos, mp3s, and video.

12. Have a blog in your web site, in which you frequently post announcements, anecdotes, how-to tips, promotions, ads, downloadable free, trial, or paid products, and links to relevant sites.

13. Become visible to researchers, job applicants, and suppliers who search the web.

14. Get more media attention and interviews by having a “media room” page on your site. Journalists prefer online information and are increasingly not accepting paper press kits anymore.
15. Sell products online with an ecommerce site that includes a shopping cart, credit card processing, and order tracking.

16. Show your customers and colleagues that you understand the changing environment of sales and marketing that now requires an online presence: web sites, wikis, blogs, podcasts, VoIP, digital catalogs, and online interaction devices like virtual receptionists and digital butlers (human-like personas who help web users).

17. Make it easy for customers to find your company when they use search engines to find a product. This requires SEO (search engine optimization) techniques & frequent, relevant content updates and enrichments.

18. Test market new products and services, to targeted audiences, i.e., hot prospects only, without the huge expense and randomicity of print, radio, and TV promotions.

19. Find fresh, new focus for your marketing strategy by having a web site that zeroes in on the most important message and offers that will increase sales and brand loyalty.

20. Easily update, revise, tweak, reformulate, or revolutionize your marketing strategy, since web site changes are relatively easy to make.

21. Network online via chat, VoiP, webcam videoconferencing, etc., with business allies, who may end up partnering with you on special projects or promotions.

22. Reach a specialized market of hard-to-identify “rare item” customers. Those who are searching for products that are exotic, one-of-a-kind, out of the ordinary, and unique –and who tend to search the web for them (using both eBay and Google Search).

your pal,

Vaspers the Grate

Wednesday, January 24, 2007

9 values of CEO blogging

(1) Community:

are you willing and eager to form candid, sincere relationships with your customers, that can evolve into an online community of shared interests and common goals?

or would you prefer to NOT have to deal with customers and their unpredictable complaints, suggestions, questions, or critiques?

(2) Responsivity:

are you willing to act tuned-into social media and online community -- by replying quickly to comments posted by readers?

or do you plan on delegating comment perusal to underlings, reading a comment summary report, and responding with a blanket statement to the general topic trend?

(3) Dedication:

(a) are you willing to be a devoted blogger, which means reading other blogs, posting comments on other blogs, and assembling a list of blogs you like for your sidebar?

or do you want to just post articles and be done with it?

(b) are you going to demonstrate your visionary zeal and experiment with podcasts, photos, sidebar enhancements, RSS/Atom feed syndication, tags, and videoblogging?

or are you going to do the bare minimum, and have only a plain text blog?

(4) Courage:

are you ready to risk looking foolish, awkward, or unprepared?

or do you only want to use communication tools with low risk?

(5) Understanding:

do you really grasp what the blogosphere is all about?

or do you care nothing about the blog culture?

(6) Passion:

are you really enthusiastic about your industry and how your products benefit customers?

or are you just an administrative type who could be heading any company?

(7) Transparency:

are you willing to be upfront about your vision and agenda?

or do you things you want to hide from public scrutiny?

(8) Friendship:

are you being altruistic, benevolent, not self-serving, helpful -- and are you willing to sound relaxed, blase, slightly awkward, a bit eccentric, i.e. HUMAN?

or are just a walking talking corporate brochure, without feelings, and free from imperfection and sympathy?

(9) Conversation:

are you encouraging visitors to interact with you, voice their opinion, ask you a question?

or are you aloof, elite, uninterested in dialogue, preaching from a cluelessly lofty pulpit?

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

abandoned blog wiki & blog

The deconstructivist experiment in blog phenomenology is under full sway now, up and running to who knows what glorious goal or advantageous aim?

Wiki contributors include: Carrie Snell, Vaspers, Liz Strauss, Yvonne Divita, Valeria Maltoni, Paul Woodhouse, Chip Camden, Steven Brent, and Bill Dennis.

Dropping Out of the Blogosphere (wiki)

Archiving and analyzing the terrible tragedy, or the refreshing liberation, of quitting the discipline of blogging.

View the constantly updated content and watch the saga of blog abandonment unfold.

Now up to 10 highly motivated Contributing Editors at your service, collecting and commenting on orphaned, deleted, or poorly maintained blogs and vanishing bloggers.

New content added daily, as much as possible.

A world premier web site.

..and don't forget
the exciting and
super-sized...

Abandoned Blog

In which posts occur, tragically betraying the sense and sincerity of the title, making the Abandoned Blog one of the most active and unabandoned blog, but it's still worthy of the title Abandoned Blog, because it's a little deconstruction machine.

It's unobtrusively digesting the mystery of the meaning of being an "abandoned blog".

Monday, January 22, 2007

electronic linguists and word voltage

Electronic Linguistics

[Written by George Quasha, in part in dialogue with Gary Hill, and with a view to further dialogue with Chrissie Iles, as preliminary statement in contribution to Thomas Bartscherer’s project of a collection of art-centered essays on information technology. The views expressed herein are George Quasha’s, reflecting many years of collaboration with Gary Hill, who expresses agreement with these views, as well as Charles Stein.]

The notion of “language” is subject to radical reframing in any unprecedented context, and indeed, albeit subtly, in any actual unexampled use.

[VASPERS: But "reframing" means we're speaking of a visual metaphor, as if language, that is trans-mental communication, were a landscape, capable of being rendered or received in the form of a photo or painting, and what bizarre language could this be then?]

“Information technology,” due in part to its continuous demand on new descriptive terminology as well as its appeal to artists, may be regarded as a continuous opportunity for reframing further the possible understandings of what language is. This seems particularly true in the artistic uses of new technologies.

[VASPERS: Information Technology means replacing humans with Automated Inter-Computer Communications, and even Language Itself now needs to be clarified by means of a means? We are going to take our picture of language and rip it or gently lift it out of its frame, it boundaries and borders, and not to let it roam free, either. No. It must immediately have a new frame imposed upon it. Call it a "reframing". A repeat taming.]

As an instance of such an artist’s response to new technological use, Gary Hill from early in his work developed a parallel interest in new uses of technology and in innovative uses of language.

He discovered, for example, a language function that kicks in when working with specific electronically generated processes of image formation (initially with a Rutt-Etra Video Synthesizer).

Visual abstractions through synthesized video, of which there are a potentially infinite number, take on a self-limiting and self-organizing quality of “identity” manifestation; that is, they come to seem somehow entitative, even though the boundaries of a given emergent entity are relatively fluid.

[VASPERS: And what "fluids" are you now pouring down your thirsty throat, that makes you talk so?]

There comes a point where the emergent entity assumes a sort of responsive intelligence with which one feels oneself in dialogue, even to the degree that it appears to embody a condition of request, as if it wants to be a certain way.

It is at this point that one feels oneself to be in a state of language.

[VASPERS: With all these emergent entities crawling around, I feel more like I'm in a zoo.]

Understanding this state may make use of innovative notions, such as the one Gary Hill proposed: “electronic linguistics,” languaging that arises uniquely within an electronically generated process.

[VASPERS: And here we now have the unheralded "tyranny of the machine", a totality that squeezes even language and relationship out of the human world that is trying to escape or dominate it.

We see the tyranny in the form of "...one feels oneself to be in a state of language". Why language? Could it also be a state of hunger? Mathematics? Lethargy? Why language, or does it take language to separate the causes: human makes machine which destroys or dominates human?

If there is a "language" that is emerging in the imagination of the narrator, emerging imaginatively with the machine, the information, the technology, that language can only be the inverse metaphor of the silence that exists in between man and made.]

If one’s response to this state of language were to turn to existing vocabularies pertaining to a given domain of, say, information technology or formal philosophy, then the state of language might withdraw from one or refuse further access.

That is, if one interferes with the dialogic state of responsive listening by supplying an already existing languaging, the very creative matrix closes down. This leads to a question as to whether a “natural” or self-generating language state requires radical openness and is therefore in opposition to formal language systems aimed at precise one-to-one referentiality.

[VASPERS: But where is there any evidence that any reality, that of language and its referents, is one-to-one? No word has only one meaning at all time and in all places, nor does a thing have only one word pointing at it.

Why is something as unnatural as "self-generating language state" called "natural" with the quotes being used to beef up the ambiguity?

A "language" that mysteriously "arises" out of the digital realm! But we see it everywhere now: chat abbreviations, emoticons, intentional typos, secret net slang, symbolic typographic gestures, an anti-corporate sloppiness and aggressive opinion slinging.]

Accordingly there are art strategies that aim at keeping formal expressions unresolved. This may imply an understanding of language that is radically different from more common understandings, such as those that see language as generated in specific environments in a context of communication and consensus.

[VASPERS: Yet another informal fantasy. What (or whose) "art strategies", "consensus", "communication", "common understandings"? As expressed or researched by who? According to what definitions? Where is there any evidence to support any suppositions about such things? ]

Specific issues appear within the experience of language to arise from a particular process and state of composition.

Preliminarily we can name some of these:

—Configuration:

Instead of viewing language function as either the conventional one of definite figuration (referential) or its contrary, abstraction (non-referential), it is viewed as configurative.

That is, language is the medium of connection between self and world/other that configures reality. Here language is itself a reality generator. Therefore one’s engagement in a specific process moves toward generating reality through language that fits the process.

[VASPERS: But what kind of "reality" can something as flimsy and ethereal as "language" ever hope to "generate"?

Language, based on and permeated with, anxiety? Language, misconstrued and miserable in the stew? Language that changes with the occasion, now mumbled, now shouted. Are the "realites" that language "generates" merely mental, illusory, spoken and written on sands and winds?]

Language of course may also reflect the process and indeed reflect on the experience of the process, even to the point of generating taxonomies and analysis, but such language behavior is not the primary language function but one of many configurations.

The implicit view is that language as instrument of mind and body is inherently configurative. Thus the artist’s engagement with technology can be a magnified instance of the raw configurative force of language, called out by sheer unlimited formativity.

[VASPERS: But what seems impossible to pin down with any reliability is exactly WHAT is being "configured" and a victim of "formativity"? How can we assess the real raw power of any artist's "engagemnet with technology"? Is it necessarily something that is "magnified", even if only the ephemera of "instance" is invoked?]

—Speed:

One of the characteristics of electronic processing is the speed with which forms are generated.

[VASPERS: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz]

The artist attuning consciousness to such processing enters into a unique state of language, one that may have a direct relationship with neurological processing, on one hand, and, on another hand, a trans-neurological state that represents mind and body as a field of language composition and hyperlocality.

Language no longer is drawn to represent things as located in a certain place because things are not experienced that way; rather, things are hyperlocal, generated without regard to place-limitation and experienced as potentially located in more than one place at a time.

Indeed, the experience of speed may have the effect of seeming to abolish time as a constraint, so that one operates within a field of attractions that seems to offer a potential micromoment, a still point, a point of possible atemporality. Language itself may attempt to embody such possibility. (Early exploration of the implications of speed in language composition has occurred in various ways in experimental poetics, for instance, in Charles Olson’s Projective Verse [1950].)

—Body: Electronics seems to take one into more mental space and leave the body behind, which may be a factor in the general non-resistance to jargon-like terminologies dominating the language of technology. However, paradoxically, the artistic engagement with technology can have the opposite effect, perhaps due to the effect of feedback on neurological and trans-neurological (field) processing. Perhaps also such engagement at the electronic level triggers an implicit awareness of the energetics of languaging. Such awareness can see the connection between, for instance, electronic wave phenomena and physical waves (in the ocean, registered in the body [e.g., Gary Hill’s experience as surfer entering the electronic art domain]), suggesting a subtle connection between electronic process-thinking/languaging and body-thinking/languaging.

—Liminality: We think of language in terms of large oppositions – referential/non-referential; figurative/non-figurative; subjective/objective; natural/constructive; etc. However, processual thinking/languaging offers an opportunity to see how these oppositions are merely perspectival and functional most usefully in defining the dynamics of a field. Electronic processing offers an opportunity to see a liminalist stance as optimal in harnessing the energy of field oppositions; that is; instead of orienting thinking/languaging toward resolving the tensions of a field of oppositions, one orients toward sustaining the field and keeping it open. Language itself becomes the threshold where the tension of opposition is retained. Language does not expend energy so much as attract it and carry it toward a further expression. This view suggests that the art/excitatory aim of language is not so much communication as communion – a meeting place of energies.

—Living language: In objectivizing language we may move far from the view, held by many artists (especially language artists), that language itself is in some sense “living.” We say “living language” to mean what sounds the way people actually speak, but in many cases we also mean that the language itself is “more alive.” For the artist engaged in creative languaging there may come a point wherein language seems to have a will and an intention of its own. “Electronic linguistics” suggests a possible tracking of this phenomenon as an attribute of composition within an artist’s electronic processing. It raises questions about what we actually mean by animate language and indeed animation (in a root sense, “ensouling”), where a formal entity takes on a “life of its own.” Inevitably we have to wonder in what sense we are language or at least inseparable from it in the sense that we project it livingly.

— The Hermes Factor: This is a way of naming (after the trickster god or daemon) the unpredictable contrary force that feeds back from “language reality” to disrupt artificial or constructed language (as opposed to “natural language”) whenever it is “applied” to actual life situations. It stands as a placeholder for the unaccountable appearance that language is alive and has a mind of its own, or that there is a chaotic factor in language behavior that could as well be called the “trickster function.” A little “language devil” (Charles Stein) enters language behavior as poetic function to disrupt deadening tendencies in writing and speaking. Electronic language processing can also have this function. And indeed the open view of language itself can become a Hermes Factor in situations of academic discourse.

This view takes into account the way authority-driven language views – whether “conservative” (traditional standards of grammar, style, etc.) or “liberal” (political correctness, etc.) – risk impinging on the very source of creative/chaotic language regeneration, which may be the real hope for social and planetary transformation. Creative tension is at every point subject to dualistic pressure. The question is: what is the integrative focusing (notably in electronic processing) that retains the energy of originary force in such a way that further language is sustained?