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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]