Author: Shelley Powers

Categories
Weblogging

Feb 4, 2002

Recovered from the Wayback Machine. 

Allan found a great Valentine game — for the romantic among us, of course.

I am NOT telling the scores I got. No siree. I quickly found that Orange sucks big time at this type of game.

Personally, I think the people on the high scoring list either cheat or are under 12.

5:44pm

Visting my Plutonian friends today I found some terrific gems I wanted to share:

For instance, if you think I can rage, you need to visit Sharon today. She burns with a wonderfully cold fire. Give him hell, Sharon!

I noticed that Chris otherwise known as Stavros has re-designed his site. I like it! And he’s thinking about going Orange. I want you all to go visit Chris and drop him a comment — tell him to give in to the Orange.

I cracked up with NJ Meryl’s story about her cat. The great thing about having a cat is they teach you how to have fun, every day.

Let’s hear it for the Cat people in the audience! Yeah!!!!

Back to my weblog visiting.

4:47pm

Categories
People

Accents

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

What is it about accents? Everyone has a favorite accent. Whether you believe it or not, you speak with an accent — to people with other accents.

Take English, and variations of same.

Probably the most common accent in the US is the “mainstream” accent — think national TV newscaster and you’ve got it. We’ve removed most regional inflections from it and it is this accent that we force on the majority of people who want to hack it in the business world. Even in areas where other accents dominate, you have to speak a certain way or you’re not going to get ahead. The Western part of the country tends to speak mainstream, and it’s use is spreading. Unfortunately.

It is the Kraft processed American cheese of accents.

Another common American accent is what I call rural American. You’ll hear this accent in farming communities in many states. I’ve heard it in Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Ohio, and Oregon. There’s variations of rural, but when you hear it, you’ll know it. The strongest variation is Western, as in Texas.

The East has a rich variety of accents from Maine fisherman to Boston to New Jersey to New York and all parts in between. One of the things I particularly liked about living in Vermont and Massachusetts was the wealth of expressions and the number of accents. Never dull.

Then there’s the southern drawl, with its connotations of lazy hot summer days, and hospitality and warmth. Nothing better than a well applied drawl to make people stand up and take notice.

Outside of the US, the assortment of accents become richer. Canada has its own variety of accents, from the “oot and aboot” of Newfoundland to the use of “eh” as a catch all ending in other parts of the country. As Canada also has a French speaking population, a charming French accent is added to English within parts of the East.

The accents in the United Kingdom are striking. Cockney, Liverpool, Oxford, Welsh, Cornish, Irish, Scot — the different dialects are so extreme, they’re almost different variations of English.

How about Australia? Everyone in Australia does NOT speak like Crocodile Dundee. As I found out working with several people from Australia, as with any other larger countries, you get variations, some more extreme then others.

We all have our particular likes and dislikes with accents. I like English accents, and find them very sexy. Same for Australian. Why? Don’t know, just do. I don’t think mainstream American is sexy, probably because I speak it. I’m also not overly enamored of stronger Boston accents, though I’ve become fond of them in time.

As just mentioned, I speak mainstream American for the most part, but sometimes the accent of my youth will surface. It’s part rural and part Canadian, somewhat Fargo in nature. I use ‘eh’ to end my sentences, and will drawl occasionally when I’m tired or in certain moods. I don’t quite use “oot and aboot”, but can come close. I pronounce “salmon” with the ‘l’ sound — everyone in the community where I grew up does. Sa-l-mon. Perhaps it’s our thrifty nature: don’t add a letter if you’re not going to use it.

Categories
Web

Googlestak

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

One last post as a favor to my antipodean friends. (Antipodean — what a perfect word. You meet the most charming and erudite people in weblogging.)

Victor wants to try to do a Googlestak — stacking the decks for a Google search by having webloggers link to a specific web site. The more links to a site, the higher it’s Google ranking, and the closer it will be in the returned results.

This is an experiment. The fact that the company being linked is owned by Victor, and that another weblogging friend is rumored to work there has nothing to do with this.

No siree, this is an unbiased experiment to influence Google. A test. An unbiased test. No gain here.

And here it is, my contribution to this unbiased and totally without gain and in the interests of science experiment:

If you want training in Australia on Macromedia and other web development technologies, go to Stand Out Training. Learn CSS. DHTML. HTML. Macromedia. How to eat Vegemite.

(Shameless hussies. Just because they have sexy accents, think they can get away with murder <smile />)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
Weblogging

In praise of Notepad

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

After working with Radio 8.0, Blogger Pro, Graymatter, and Moveable Type this weekend (for writing assignments and for my own weblog use), I have reached a saturation point. Right at this moment, I can’t stand any of them — equally. Even taking a break and doing some work on one of the books and a little Perl scripting on the side and a couple of nice beach walks didn’t help. Too many blogging tools. Too much blogging. Too much computer. Deadlines will just have to slide.

What you see before you is the remnant of a woman who is drowned by a flood of blogging tools. And I’m tall — it would take a lot to drown me.

I don’t know how Garth can tweak and tweak and tweak and tweak with Radio. Man must have nerves of steel.

They all work, can do nifty things, and are really impressive pieces of software — but they all have something that goes haywire. Inconsistently haywire. Is it my machine? The tools? Me? Combination of the above?

Right now, my eyes (normally green) are a scary looking red color from too much time at the machine.

Take your hands off the keyboard, and back away slowly

Gurrgle.

You know something? Notepad never breaks. Think about it — have you ever crashed Notepad. I dare anyone to say that they’ve crashed Notepad.

Categories
Web

Googlestak

Recovered from the Wayback Machine

Victor is trying to see how we can influence Google page rankings, using weblog links. He’s calling the process Googlestak. It will be interesting to see if this effort works. Target link is Stand Out Training — Victor’s company.

Because of my interest in the semantic web, I’ve always been interested in our friend Google. Through research I’ve found that you can, with effort, influence Google, but the circumstances have to be just right. There are entire mailing lists and web sites devoted to how Google works, and how the page ranking algorithm works.

The number of links to a particular page are only part of the Google search algorithm. The importance of those links can also influence the scoring. If you have one page that is linked by 10 pages that are themselves ranked fairly low, it won’t rank higher than a page that has one or two links from very high ranking pages.

Unfortunately, weblogs are — for the most part — not the highest ranking pages. Links are sporadic outside of the blogrolls, and these tend to be incestuous: page A links to page B which links back to page A. Put a lot of links within your blogroll linking back to you, and you’re still going to be low ranking because of that “importance” ranking catch 22. You would need to break this cycle by getting linked by an A-lister such as Scripting News or Doc Searls or Rageboy or JOHO — people that are linked by a disportionate share of the weblogging community.

As an example Jonathon will usually get more blogroll hits from my weblog rather than from the Scripting News blogroll because I’ve made his link part of the  “Australian Delegation”  — I made it stand out. However, within Google, Jonathon’s weblog will get more buzz because of that Scripting News link than anything I could do.

In addition, because our pages roll off into archives, the ranking algos start to break down because they don’t necessarily figure in the temporal nature of weblogging.

If you have a static page that generates mild interest and covers a topic that isn’t time sensitive, over time that page will rise slowly to the top of Google because the interest is cummulative. Weblog pages can rise to the top (especially when helped by strange words such as googlewhacking), but they’ll fall away quickly once the initial intense interest fades, and as the weblog pages roll off into archives (which are not directly linked to from blogrolls, remember).

I’m linking to a specific post of Victor’s. Others will join me. Eventually, this post will fall off into the archives and less pages will link to it. And the page where I created the link will also fall off into the archives, and less pages will link to it. Instead of a cummulative effect, with weblogs you get a decremental effect — over time the rank will decrease rather than increase. Regardless of the time sensitive nature of the topic or not.

The decremental effect of weblog postings is a good reason to use a Story mechanism for more important and wordy postings rather than the usual weblog posting — the story will remain accessible rather than get lost in the archives. However, this doesn’t help you when the pages that link to you eventually fade away. Still, the hope is that new, fresh links will come along. It helps to mention or reference the story occasionally in newer postings — call it a form of weblog pinging.

If you’re trying to raise to the top of the rankings associated on popular search terms, good luck. You can’t influence the rankings with something like Linux; it’s been around too long, and the major sites associated with this term are too firmly entrenched. You would have to invent a Microsoft buster within the Linux world to generate enough buzz to even get to the first page of the result set.

As for other subjects, I imagine you might have a shot if you’re diligent, work hard, get tricky.

I found a page with some interesting and clever tips for influencing Google. From this, I found that one thing you can do is find pages that link to you and make sure that Google is aware of them. Interesting idea, isn’t it? Because the more buzz these pages get, the higher ranking your linked to page gets.

Another thing you can do is package word sets to capture specific searches.

I’ve started an online C# book (that I really need to finish). Now, searching for C# is not going to return my book pages in the first result set — I haven’t finished the book and only have so many sites linking to the pages. However, if you search on “C# book”, I’m the second from the top in the listings (yasd.com is my domain as well as burningbird.net and several others). I’m using the term “C# book”, and I have sufficient links — combined, I’m close to the top.

Another way to influence Google is to do something to drive people to your site. If you write, write articles for online publications and insist they use a link to your weblog or site within the author bio. This is probably the number one reason why I get so much Google traffic — I’ve been writing online articles for years.

Can’t write for an online publication? Then start joining newsgroups, MetaFilter, whatever and post, post, post! Post to anything you can attach a signature to that has your weblog or site address. Believe it or not, this can influence Google — I’ve seen it happen with content in my own web sites. I still see it and surprises the heck out of me (as well as made me a bit more cautious about why I say at said newsgroups et al).

Fascinating tool Google. If we harness this type of connectivity and attach it to “meaning” rather than ranking, then you have the semantic web — one short step away. Exciting stuff.