Journalists & Bloggers Toolbox Blog

I was in a chat forum the other day and one of the members was complaining because she’d updgraded her tumblr theme but it broke her playlist. Which, you know this is the reason I use tumblr without ever going into people’s actual tumblr blogs. I let them load on my dashboard instead. Sure, I miss the fancier designs some people have on their tumblr blogs, but it also allows me to escape the music playlists that seem to infect tumblr.

Now, there are many reasons you don’t want to include music on a web site, whether it’s tumblr or another site. Music takes longer to load and can slow down your site. That might discourage people but even the delay probably won’t discourage them as much as the actual music will. See, music tends to be a very personal choice and there is no way of knowing if your choice will match that of your viewer. But even if you go for a neutral choice or tell me that your music perfectly matches the theme of the site, have you considered that I might not be viewing your site in a location where I’m free to play music?

I’ve worked in corporate environments with everyone in tiny cubes. There is nothing blocking sound from traveling from one cube to another. So, if I hit a site that plays music, my coworkers know I’m browsing web sites. Actually, we had a couple of corporate sites that did that and my coworkers could tell me exactly which sites I was working on just by the sounds when I opened them.  To stop annoying them, I had to turn off my sound, which meant I could review videos or other site elements that were supposed to work. So, then I had to use headphones to review content.

If I hit a site that played music when I had the sound on and I hadn’t plugged the headphones in, my most likely action was to panic close the browser the moment I heard the first bit of sound. I didn’t know what a random site I was supposed to review was going to broadcast to everyone around me and I didn’t want to take the risk. I still hate websites with music because of that.

I’m having an interesting discussion with a friend who handles usability for websites. It’s all around the ongoing and sometimes heated debate over 1 space or 2 after a period when writing. Now, let’s get a little history on this. Years ago with type-writers, people put 2 spaces after a period to help emphasis that there was a space there. It’s considered to be just a bit easier on the eyes. But not everyone used 2 spaces. Newspapers used 1 space simply to conserve space on the page so they could fit in more words. After all, people read the stories for the words, not the blank spaces between sentences. Most of the publishing industry drifted to 1 space for the same reason – it saves space and therefore paper.

These days most people consider just using a single space after a period to be perfectly acceptable. I still find hold outs who want two spaces, and I’ve work for companies that insisted on two spaces in business letters even if all their publications went out with one space.

Of course, if you write on the web, you’ll find that often your only choice is one space after a period unless you want to go in and manually add non-breaking spaces into the html. In many cases, content management programs for publishing to the web are designed to resolve the double space into a single space. I know because I used to end up having this discussing with the big company I worked for where one group had made up its mind that there should be 2 spaces even though our content management system automatically removed the extra space.  The battle over that extra space gets so heated that they just wouldn’t accept – it is not technically possible for people to do what you are asking unless you’d like to pay to replace the content management system.

One space for the win.

It’s become an ongoing source of frustration for me.  Google and Facebook have become so tied into tracking your computer and your browsing and wanting to be the source to log you into everything that it’s becoming more and more difficult to have more than one “business personality.”

Now I know what some of you are thinking. Why would you have more than one business personality?  If you aren’t wondering it, I can tell you Google and Facebook certainly haven’t figured it out yet. You’d think I’m some sort of criminal because I need to have online accounts for more than one aspect of me. But it’s simple really. I’m an author. I write books.  I write in multiple genres.  And I have more than one pen name. It’s really very common with authors. And many of us have cases where we need to keep those pen names very separate because we might be writing spicy romance for a more adult audience in addition to fantasy stories that appeal to a teen crowd.  I want to keep two separate identities for these audiences and everyone says that social media is the newest form of promotion.

But Google and Facebook both have set rules about only having one account for their networks. Oh, I can have multiple Google email accounts, but only one Google plus. And Google now wants to log me in to sites, which means it logs in by the email account I’m using. Yes, Facebook’s newest terms say that you can only have one account. But even more, they’re now trying to be the point of login for other systems like twitter and pinterest.  So, even if you have only one Facebook account, it becomes difficult to have two Pinterest accounts.

I’m at the point now where I’m using different browsers for different pin names.  I think I’m okay as long as I have fewer pin names than there are browsers.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about the latest SEO changes made by Google. Now whenever Google makes changes to the way it rates content, there’s a big firestorm of forum posts and debates from SEO crowd. So, what’s SEO and why does this matter. And what does it mean for writers?

SEO is search engine optimization. It’s a process used to boost content and websites so they show higher up in the search returns for Google and other search engines.  It’s heavily used by those who write for sites that want to market to you, be it hotels, vacation destinations or energy drinks. Being ranked higher can mean more money in someone’s pockets. Which is all well and good if the reader is getting the information they need.

But the early search spiders or bots weren’t very smart. They determined rank by finding terms, metadata and other information in the post. This created a problem because the industry started creating entire pages that were nothing but terms for the search engine to find. Google caught on and started looking for text that looked like articles.

I have seen things that would make me weep passed off as content. Articles that were obviously written to fool a machine because the moment I tried to read them, they made no sense. I’m not talking about bad writing where someone used the wrong form of its or missed a comma.  I’m talking about content that was created by feeding existing articles into a computer and having it churn the content regurgitate something that looked like an article and would get past a Copyscape test for originality. Yes, it was original. Mostly because it was random and no one trying to write an article would want to arrange sentences that way.

But all of this pushed to cost of content down. How was a real writer to compete for jobs when then needed time to research and write a well-written readable article when SEO providers were able to buy vomit content generated to work with Google’s SEO engine with just the right distribution of keywords. Articles from overseas were down to $1 for 500 words. I saw some of those articles. They were created by chopped up bits of sentences rearranged to look like an article at a glance.

And Google has apparently seen them too. They’ve changed their search indexing process to make it even tougher for articles to get to the top rank. And the SEO people are all scrambling and debating it because Google won’t tell them exactly what the changes are.  But I have a solution for them.

Look, guys, it all comes down to hiring or paying good writers for quality articles. Yes, we’re going to cost more than a dollar or two for five hundred words. This is because we care about the actual words we write and are going to give you content that people can actually read. Sure, we can work in a few SEO terms for you, if you keep it within reason.  But what Google is telling you is that content – good content – is king. What I’m telling you is – we’re the people who write good content. We’re real writers.

The European Union has been in the news a lot lately. So has Greece. We’ve all heard about the economic crisis going on in the country. In fact, I was scheduled to visit Greece recently as part of a tour of the Mediterranean, but because of riots, we were sent to Crete instead. This caused a bit of an upset on the tour since most Americans don’t grasps that Crete’s ancient history is an important as that of Greece. I think the only people excited about the change were me and a retired history professor. Alas, I don’t think Greece’s gambling problem is going to be solved by rerouting to Crete. It’s been going on for a number of months and now the country is facing more complaints. So, what’s behind all this?

Well, the EU Commission was expected to open gambling throughout the EU countries in a sort of “fair trade” agreement. However various countries in the EU have turned around and drafted their own gambling laws, restricting and charging additional fees for companies who want to offer gambling inside their borders. Greece, a country that is truly desperate for revenue, is trying to force new gambling operations to be based in Greece itself and to operate out of Greek banks. Added to that, they’d like apply a back-tax to companies who already do business there.

All this strong-arming by Greece isn’t being taken lightly by European online gambling companies. In fact, the online gambling companies have filed a complaint with the European Union asking that body to force Greece to change its stance on gambling. The report is carried in this Bloomberg news article:  Online Betting Companies Complain to EU Over Greek Gambling Law.   Greece is holding firm because they could use the money.

As a journalist, I’m sometimes still surprised at how many overlooked stories affect our lives without us realizing it.  Stories are waiting to be told wherever we look.

I’ve been writing about blogging for a while now because it really is a big movement in journalism and writing and just communication in general. But it’s been some time since I’ve written a post about blogging basics.  Blogging is a slightly different form of written communication than writing articles for print. Sometimes I’m surprised at all the different terms that bloggers use when writing about how to blog.  So, I’ll make it simple.

Start by clearly stating what you’re writing about. Don’t rely on cute titles. And don’t follow the old rule of ending with the most important thought. Start with the most important thought and go from there.  Readers don’t always make it to the end.

Write short paragraphs. People usually scan through text on a web page quickly and shorter paragraphs keep them from skipping ahead to the next paragraph. The extra white space on the screen can actually help the reader stay focused on your words.

• Bullets and lists are also a good way to break details down into shorter segments.
• Bold for emphasis! But don’t go overboard.
• Italics are harder to read and should be restricted to short, needed text, such as book titles.
• Underlining often indicates a link and probably should only be sued for that.
• ALL CAPS is considered shouting. DON’T use it unless you mean to shout.
• Text size can be changed to indicate headings, but it’s not a good idea to change text size within a paragraph.

I prefer a consistent font and font color.  Yes, I’ve read advice that says “vary the font and font color to draw the reader’s attention.”  I’ve also worked since 1995 on corporate websites and seen all sorts of attention getting variations. I could write a blog post about them. (Maybe I will.)  But trust me, changing font size and color can be dangerous.

Do you have a background in journalism? Are you trying to tackle the world of blogging and social media?  I work with folks who come from that background and some of them find the personal approach that blogging, media, social networking and journalism a bit difficult to adjust to.  Now, I’m not going to try to tackle the entire state of journalism in the twenty-first century in a blog post, but I am going to focus on blogs and how they can be different from the journalism you learned in school. Or practiced when writing for that newspaper.

Blogs can be personal. They can be subjective. In fact, blogs often gain more readership when writers are personal and actually present their opinions on things. Now, it’s not just about opinions. It’s about creating that personal connection with the reader and that often means opening up the door, or at least a window, into your own personal space.  Readers don’t just want to know what you think about a topic. They want to know who you are and then what you think about the topic.  It really is about making a connection.

So, what do you do? Well, yes, the rule of journalism as far as researching your subject still hold. After all, you need to know about the subject you’re forming an opinion on. But when you right about the story, you’re actually allowed not just to present the facts, but what you think about the facts. And then you can go further and even talk about how the facts affect you and your family.  You can open up and be a real person in the blog. Because we like to connect with real people.

There’s a new study out that shows that browsing the internet while at work may actually help performance. This will probably come as news to employers who’ve spent a ton of money investing in methods to block the internet or inappropriate sites from their office staff.  All that money spent making their employees less efficient.

Here’s what’s going on. We always think of browsing the internet as a distraction, and we know the work day is filled with distractions already. So we want to eliminate distractions, right?  Well, probably yes to the distractions part. We’d all love to eliminate those annoying distractions that bug us during the day – random emails about the parking situation, phone calls trying to sell us something, requests for updates to that spreadsheet you’d be able to update if you didn’t have to stop updating it to respond the email about updating the spreadsheet …   Those are distractions and annoyances because they’re out of our control, and for the most part offices rather than eliminating them contribute to them.

But what the study discovered is that browsing the web isn’t a distraction. It’s a break. When we surf the web, we visit sites that we enjoy visiting. Turns out this is actually pleasurable, which is probably why we do it. And that means it gives us a break from the daily turmoil and makes a more productive when we go back to our assigned tasks.  And web surfing has an advantage over other types of break. Since we don’t have to leave our desks, we can take a web break for 2 or 3 minutes to reset our minds and get back to the task. Now, going for a walk in the park might be better, but let’s be realistic, most of us don’t have time to go for a walk during the work day.  Someone still wants that spreadsheet updated.

Do you work in an office or at home? If you work in an office, is there a water cooler?  Actually, where I work there isn’t. Instead we have a kitchen, but it serves the same function as the proverbial “water cooler.”  What’s the water cooler function?  It’s not just to dispense water but it becomes a gather spot of conversations, for gossip, even for casual brainstorming sessions.  Where I work, we have a white board in the kitchen so people can even make notes of their brainstorming sessions.

So, what does this have to do with twitter?  Well, in this age of freelancing and work at home jobs, some of us work in somewhat isolated environments where we don’t have a water cooler to gather around.  I’m an author and I need to chat with other authors from around the world and exchange ideas and thoughts.  And sometimes just keep up to date on each other’s lives.  So we need a virtual water cooler. And that water cooler is twitter.

This is something that some supposed twitter experts miss when they give advice on how to use twitter and social media.  Everyone wants to advise me about branding and getting followers and promotion and SEO.  It all seems to be about going out there and beating people over the head with social media to sell something.

That’s not really how I use twitter. Am I wrong? I don’t know. Twitter is still fairly new and social media seems to reinvent itself every couple of years.  But I do know that I don’t just have followers on twitter, I also have friends. Real friends who share advice and stories and who love to chat with each other.  For me, this seems to be the best use of twitter. As that virtual water cooler where you never know what topic will come up next.

When you write an article or blog post, do you stay focused and on topic or do you wander off onto tangents and risk sidetracking the reader?  Now I’m thinking of this topic because I attended a writing group last night where one writer read three pages of a piece with some wonderful descriptions and great lines, but no focus.  I was there to offer critiques, but afterward, I wasn’t sure what to say about this one except to recommend editing for more focus. I couldn’t really speak to the subject because I wasn’t sure what it was.  Actually, I would probably have recommended some planning before tackling the subject, but we were already past that stage.

Now, readers are somewhat forgiving. They’ll let you get away with the occasional side remark or interesting story tidbit, but if you use them, you have to bring the topic back in focus.  And the two techniques I recommend for constructing a focused piece are those I wrote about up in that first paragraph — planning and editing.

Planning a piece in advance is essential because it helps you determine not only what you’re writing about but if you have enough material for the length that you want to cover for the piece or if you need to do more research. Bloggers often skip this stage believing that to sound more natural and chatty, blogging should flow unplanned from the keyboard to the website. But sometimes that sounds too natural as the topic wanders off on tangents and becomes lost. Planning can help even the natural writer.

And then there’s editing. I’m amazed at how many bloggers skip the editing step.  It’s as if they’re afraid to stop and breathe between creation and publication.  Or perhaps as if everything is written for a tight deadline and there is no time to even read through the piece before showing it off to the world. Give yourself a little breathing room and plan some editing time in your day.  Step away from the computer for a minute and then come back and read the piece over again. Ask yourself — what do I expect the reader to come away with. Then ask yourself if you’ve accomplished that.  Have you written a focused piece?