Muskblog: Homesteading the Internet since 1995

Notice I wrote “self publishing” not “blogging”, the world wide web always had the concept of self publishing and user created content in the form of a home page. It is only with the rise of blogging, social media, and various web services that self publishing has become so easy that even your grandmother can do it.

I’ve been self publishing content online since 1995, maintaining this domain since 2001, and even blogging since 2005. I’ve seen a lot of stuff come and go. I’ve used a lot of technologies and websites. I even have a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and an MBA if that makes me more trustworthy or authoritative… In the 15+ years I’ve been doing things my way and helping others, I’ve formed some opinions and learned some hard lessons, so I decided to collect the best ten of them together in one place:

1. Make a commitment to quality content.
2. Timeliness and Timelessness are the two most important qualities to strive for.
3. Why is more important than “how” when it comes to self publishing online.
4. Choose an appropriate venue and content management system. I tend to recommend WordPress to most people.
5. Know your audience: real people, search engines, news aggregators, your future boss, and potential mates.
6. Understand how online communities work.
7. Focus + Repetition = #winning
8. Learn to write for the web, people online don’t read, they scan.
9. Understand the difference between Impact and Influence.
10. Learn the jargon: blog, tweet, meme, hash tag, CMS, SEO, etc.

A day doesn’t go by when someone doesn’t tweet another blog posting advising you how to improve your blog, or how important it is to blog, or the power of social networks in building a brand, or…  You get the picture. Most of this advice isn’t new and it doesn’t even get right down to what is really important. You want to increase your GoogleJuice or your Klout about a particular topic it is all about focus and repetition.

I’m good at the latter not so good at the former. This is a classic case of do as I say, not necessarily as I do or have done in the past. Take advantage of me, many people have, learn from my mistakes, so you don’t have to apologize for your own or pay some other more costly price.

Search Engine Optimization is all about focus and repetition. Tweeting well often comes down to focus and repetition. You want a blog people actually care about and you want to be a person people come to advice on writing online, or setting up their own blog, or how to increase their online profile, you have to focus and you have to repeat the message you’re trying to get across to you audience.

Repetition

Repetition is no guarantee of success. Mindless repetition, annoying repetition, automated computer generated repetition, that can really piss people off and get you in trouble with the all mighty Google if you take it too far. What you really want is thoughtful repetition with variance. If you cram in the same keyword phrase over and over and over again on a single web page, GoogleBot will probably notice and you may well get punished for it. Instead of worrying about optimal keyword density, you should think how I can I make my point effectively, with as few words as possible, while still including the keywords, phrases, and most importantly the ideas I want to convey to my real audience, the people who surf the web late at night or while they are supposed to be working/studying.

Repeating keywords and phrases over and over is so 1990s. Repetition in 2012 ideally involves having other people repeat your message, words, and phrases. You can write the most brilliant Tweet or blog post ever, but if only your 200 fans/followers/readers ever discover it, well you’re not going to become influential or famous overnight reaching 200 people at a time. However if people ‘Like’ your post or Retweet your witticism you will reach a wider audience. The best kind of repetition is: voluntary, spontaneous, and someone else’s work.

In order to make it easy for people to Retweet and ‘Like’ what you write online you need social sharing buttons and you need to be active on social networks yourself and you also need a content management system. Hand coding and maintaining HTML is also so not an effective use of most people’s time. You need to ensure you writing is well titled. The title should be short and easily conveys the primary idea you’re trying to express. A good title is Retweetable. You also need to take the time to enter a brief description of your post into your CMS and craft a good opening sentence or two. Along with the title that is what people who use RSS feed readers and other news aggregators see. People have become very adapt at scanning on the screen for the most interesting tidbit of information and then focusing in and drilling down. 

Focus

I’m capable of focusing. I’ve completed degrees and other challenging tasks that have taken sustained effort over an extended period of time. But this blog and this domain contain a lot of information on a lot of topics. I’ve been self-publishing content online since 1995, this domain has been in Google since 2001 and this blog online since 2005. I’ve written things I probably shouldn’t have. I’ve had to apologize, make corrections, even take stuff down. Muschamp.ca is my personal domain, this is my personal blog. It is all me, warts and all. However if you want to become famous or influential or make money off the content you publish online you need to focus.

You need to ask yourself why you want to publish online. Is it for fame or money? Is it to show off your expertise or talent? Is it to help other people? Knowing why you ‘re doing something is often more important than knowing how to do something. You can learn ‘how’, some people never learn ‘why’. 

A lot of my blog posts I compose in my head while lying awake in bed. Then I eventually get up and write them down, try to edit them and make them less stream of conscious. Sometimes I fail. Sometimes I rush home and write something in a hurry immediately after the event I’m writing about has taken place. Other times I’ll spend so much time researching and writing and gathering links that I end up with a monstrous post few people will read and no one will Retweet. You never know what will become popular quickly, but you can make an educated guess.

When I help someone setup up a website or a blog, I try to find out why they want to publish online and what they plan to write about. People who don’t have a good answer to “why” rarely stick with blogging. It is important to determine what you plan to publish in advance. Writing about everything isn’t very focused. I advise people to predetermine the categories they want to write on, enter them into their CMS, and to stick with them as much as possible. WordPress has both Categories and Tags, most modern content management systems have something similar. You sometimes see the rather imposing word “taxonomy” thrown about. Taxonomy is about Categories and Tags and other methods of organizing and classifying data. The reason you need Categories and Tags is they help you focus or at least they should help you focus.

As long as I’ve been self publishing online and as long as online search engines have existed I’ve taken to running little experiments. Often this has involved dubious keywords or slightly risqué topics or headlines. You should resist doing this. It takes away from your focus, it leads to dubious keyword referrals which can be amusing, but ultimately aren’t anything to put on your resume, and it could even land you in some hot water. You’re always writing for your future boss. And as someone who doesn’t have a boss at this time, I’ve obviously not been doing a very good job of it or haven’t done a very good job in the past. Learn from my mistakes and the mistakes of others such as Michael Crooks and Angie Varona.

Here are someone else’s 26 Tips for Writing Great Blog Posts, the advice is decent, practical, there are some good examples, but some people need to focus more on the why and less on the how or they could end up in a situation similar to Micheal’s, Angie’s, or mine. One last piece of advice never blog about human anatomy.

Much digital ink gets spilled writing about Google’s ever changing search engine algorithm, but lately some folks have been starting to consider how they can increase something other than their GoogleJuice. Klout fancy themselves “The Standard of Influence”. Just like Google they have an algorithm that measures, ranks, and assigns a numerical score. Unlike PageRank which measures a webpage’s importance, Klout’s score measures a person’s influence online. 

Klout score can definitely be gamed. Klout even provides incentives to game the system in the form of “perks”. Klout is heavily weighted towards Twitter, other social networks and web services have been added, but based on my experience what you Tweet greatly affects the topics over which you have influence. I’ve been experimenting with search engines for as long as they’ve been online. I also was an early observer and experimenter with Klout, they even gave me a badge.

Klout Score VS PageRank

There is more to Google’s search algorithm than just the original PageRank mathematical formula. Google supposedly considers over 100 factors when ranking a web page. Klout also gives everyone who requests one a mathematical score measuring their influence online. They consider more factors than just the number of followers you have on Twitter, but like Google they try to keep their algorithm secret, however Klout and Google both releases tidbits, hints, and advice to keep onlookers interested and to generate media coverage. Both Klout and Google have official blogs devoted to doing just this.

Besides assigning a score to people, Klout also classifies them based on their opinion of how a person uses social media. There is a lot of fluctuation in this classification, at least in my case. Currently I am a “Networker”. If you want to increase your Klout score you simply have to link and participate in multiple online social networks. If you are active on social media your score will reflect that. Not all online social networks are created equal, Twitter seems to be the most important and frequency seems to be much more important than quality in Tweets at least in the Klout algorithm.

Klout Score VS Klout Topics

Klout also measures what you’re influential about. This seems to be of more interest to advertisers and marketers. Anyone can lookup whether Conan O’Brien has more Twitter followers than Jay Leno or whether Coke has more Facebook fans than Pepsi. Television ratings have long measured how many people watch a TV show and even some basic demographic information like age and sex. Television ratings however are aggregate data and anonymous. Online in 2012, social media usage patterns can tell an advertiser a lot more about a person than just age and sex. Klout is the opposite of anonymity. People opt-in to using Facebook or the even more public Twitterverse and blogosphere. Sharing your information with Klout is basically enabling them spy on you, rank you, and then to sell that information to advertisers. To make the transaction even more commercial, Klout may reward you with perks. 

Not everyone is a celebrity with their own TV show or a nationally syndicated columnists. So achieving a raw Klout score comparable to anyone in traditional media will be hard for a mere blogger. However being influential about a specific topic is much easier. Unfortunately for Klout it is also easier to game these topics and what you Tweet about especially the hash tags you use is extremely important.

Search Engine Optimization VS Share-ability

SEO best practices are pretty well established now, though many still claim to have secret esoteric insights and influence over Google and the other major search engines. I’ve been asked many times to write guides or best practices:

• Some older search engine optimization advice
• My Top 10 SEO Tips
• 10 Keys to Blogging Fame and Fortune

Keyword density and correct usage of HTML tags are unlikely to be a factor in Klout’s algorithm though they’ve long been suspected of being staples of search engine algorithms. To increase your Klout you need to think about share-ability. What you write/Tweet has to be something other people will share, repeat/retweet, comment upon, or at least laugh at. This post is not very shareable. It is too long, isn’t cute or about celebrities, it isn’t even about tech that the average consumer cares about such as smart phones. If you want to increase your Klout score you have to remember people spread awesome, they don’t spread “meh”.

Repetition

The single most important factor to increasing your Klout score or your influence on a single topic is repetition. Note my “bacon Klout”. I’ve never blogged about bacon. I’ve never posted anything on Facebook about bacon. There are no pictures of bacon on my Flickr photo stream. I don’t subscribe or comment on any bacon blogs. My bacon Klout comes from making bacon Klout jokes on Twitter.

This whole blog post is a result of a series of Tweets between myself, Dennis Pang, and someone at Unbounce. Dennis and I demonstrated how easy it was to gain and maintain bacon Klout. Your Tweets don’t have to be insightful as long as they are frequent and use the correct hash tag you will gain Klout for the topic that corresponds to that hash tag. You don’t need to use any other social network. You don’t need to worry about quality. You don’t need a blog. It does help if someone retweets and responds to your tweets though, so you definitely need some followers.

I’ve had influence over topics according to Klout that I have no interest in whatsoever. I’ve traced this “Klout” back to a single retweet or even just a comment on someone else’s tweet. This could be potentially embarrassing but luckily if you only do it once and while your “Klout” will only be temporary. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll have “Vinyl Klout” for instance.

Choosing a Topic

You can’t have Klout about a topic people and by people I mean potential advertisers don’t care about. Klout doesn’t waste much time measuring information they don’t think has commercial value. Note my complete lack of Nurgle Klout. I use different social networks for different purposes. I try to be professional but not take myself too seriously on Twitter. However in Google one thing I and Muschamp.ca is known for is miniature painting, particularly painting Nurgle Chaos Space Marines. I haven’t had a lot of time or energy for this hobby the last few years, but I’ve put up and have maintained a web page since long before Klout or Twitter or Facebook were even ideas. People all over the world read and discuss my painting tips and techniques. Strangers have come up to me and known who I was based on seeing pictures of my models online and recognizing them. Advertisers and companies contact me about adding links to their websites from my hobby site. Yet Klout’s algorithm has never noticed. Klout doesn’t care about Nurgle.  

Blogger and WordPress.com are now part of Klout’s algorithm so eventually I think Klout will notice some of my hobbies and interests as I regularly comment on other people’s hobby blogs. Currently you can only include a single WordPress.com blog you contribute to and zero self-hosted WordPress blogs. So this post and 100s of other posts, indeed this entire domain which I’ve maintained for over a decade does not have much of an impact on my Klout score. I do sometimes tweet links to things I’ve written here but I don’t do that automatically. I do automatically share my posts with my friends on Facebook, but my lack of focus and my decision to write about unpopular topics doesn’t help my Klout much.

The 140 Character Limit

A lot of early critics of Twitter did not like the 140 character limit. It does result in too many acronyms and extremely dubious grammar. What it does promote is brevity, the soul of wit. It is also easier to decide what 140 characters is about, much easier than it is to determine what a web page or even worse an entire domain is about algorithmically. My lack of focus has hurt my PageRank, Klout score, even my career, but the 140 character limit definitely helps Klout and likely contributes to why Twitter is the most important network in their algorithm. Facebook has more members but most of the conversation and sharing is out of public view, whereas product recommendations on Twitter are visible to everyone.

If you want to maximize your Klout score you don’t have 140 character available for your use. You have closer to 12o characters. Basically you have one sentence or phrase. This is another reason to keep blog post titles short and paunchy. Cramming keywords into the title tag is so 1990s. You need a title that quickly encapsulates your idea, if it is keyword rich, even better. You have about 100 characters to convey your main idea.  You need 20 or so characters for the URL and a hashtag to make it even easier for the Klout algorithm to know what the topic is. The rest of the 140 characters you need to leave blank so that people who want to retweet you and thus vote for your content and increase your influence have room to include “RT” and your Twitter handle.

Good luck gaming the system and trying to gain enough perks to offset all the privacy you’re giving up to a single corporate entity. Maybe someone will give me a K+ for Nurgle as a result of this blog post. That’ll show Klout the power of Nurgle.

Apparently yesterday while I was at a job interview or on the ferry or otherwise not online, Google made a major change to their search engine algorithm. They call it Search plus Your World which is a pretty lame name. People have already reduced it to an acronym SPYW or as I like to read it “Spy W”. This change was clearly in the works, something anyone who has been observing the evolution of search engines for even a few years, could have seen coming. Chicken Littles are once again out in full force. It certainly has generated a lot of Tweets and link sharing. Plus a lot of screen shots of Google search results.

I’ve actually been experimenting with search engines since my days as an undergrad computer science student. There was no Google back then, the first big search engine was AltaVista. Now there is mainly just Google. Microsoft recently became the number two search engine in North America further rendering Yahoo irrelevant. It isn’t the other search engines that are complaining, nope it is is the other social networks and social sharing services. They now see themselves at a big disadvantage and maybe they are. 

It could be because Google.com redirects me to Google.ca or it could be because I hardly use Google+ or it could be because my go to keyword search term that I’ve been monitoring for over a decade is “Nurgle”, but I don’t see much to get upset about or indeed much of a change at all for a keyword term I have monitored for an extended period of time. Trending terms and stupid/cute/funny pictures will more likely see their results drastically change. SEO folks will try to game the new algorithm to get you to stay at their hotel in Bangkok. Travel and other recommendations is one of the areas people expect to see improvements in their personalized search results, that and apparently when looking for pictures of your dog.

I’m sorry if I want to find a picture of the family pet I don’t Google it.

Below are more links where people generally object to the changes Google has made.  Apparently the big losers are Twitter and Yelp and probably other niche social networks.

• Search & Social – you can’t get the cream out of the coffee
• Google’s new social search: How far can you trust it?
• How to turn off Google’s social search features
• Google Just Made Bing the Best Search Engine
• Twitter vs Google : the history of the battle

Update

More news from the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog of yet another change to Google’s search results and algorithm. Will this result in more people using Bing or will people just shrug? Will anyone even notice with SOPA/PIPA protests, the US Election, NFL playoffs, pipeline disputes, and winter storms?  It is hard for me to get upset or excited about these minor changes to Google’s algorithm. I don’t have any advertisements on my website, let alone so many that the actual content gets pushed below the fold, requiring users to scroll to find the information they searched for. Of course given some of the crap I’ve written about, it is obvious I just don’t know what to say or do anymore. Google algorithm changes just don’t seem very important in the grand scheme of things, but I’m confident a bunch of people will leave nasty comments on Google’s blog none the less. Some people enjoy being nasty.

Last night while lying in bed I finally broke down and read an article on Rick Santorum. The article was in the Globe and Mail and was entitled “Rick Santorum: A Republican menace or a messiah?”

I had just gotten through updating my most popular blog post of 2011, when I was confronted with another example of someone who had online reputation management issues. This post isn’t about politics, certainly not Rick Santorum’s politics. Rather more interesting to me is the fact his last name was turned into a noun by folks he had offended, annoyed, or otherwise pissed off.

The most famous example in the English language of Google bombing is of course George Bush another right-wing American politicians but there are some very famous examples online in languages other than English. A Google Bomb is a co-ordinated effort to link to a webpage, using very specific link text, often with critical or humorous intent. Google bombing is another example of the power of search engines, particularly Google, but also an example of the power of self publishing and search engine optimization techniques. 

I’d actually forgotten the name of the latest teenager I read about who regrets posting stuff to the Internet, but I looked up “Angie Varona” again. I never posted or reposted any of the pictures she now regrets putting online, but I did wonder last night if you can get sued for posting a screen shot of another website. Generally when a lawyer contacts you about something you’ve written online it is bad news but not always…

The other thought I had after reading more about Angie Varona on Gawker was some people get paid for researching dubious content online, yet another career opportunity I missed out on.

What you post online can definitely have a major negative impact on your life. It doesn’t matter if you tell the truth or if you said something in confidence or even if your photos were password protected. Tweets, texts, and candid snapshots can be spread at the speed of thought. It would be nice if fellow human beings showed a bit more compassion and forgiveness, but based on my own life I don’t expect much of either anymore, certainly not online from the bottom of the barrel of humanity.  There is definitely a downside to being Internet famous.

Little is private in your life anymore and with communication technology particularly later generation cellphone service becoming more and more pervasive, the world of checkins, Twitpics, and Timelines will make it even easier for your future boss or your next date to learn stuff you’d rather forget. Don’t be like Rick Santorum, Angie Varona, or even myself, read the recommend best practices below or just step away from your computer and cellphone before you post anything in anger or inebriation.

Online Reputation Management Best Practices

• Official Google Blog: Managing your reputation through search results
• HOW TO: Manage Your Online Reputation Using SEO
• Protecting Your Online Reputation: 4 Things You Need to Know [INFOGRAPHIC]

I’ve been waiting for iTunes Match since before the project had a name.  Then I had to wait even longer because I’m Canadian.  iTunes Match combined with iCloud was supposed to allow you to store your entire music collection online so you could access it anywhere. The early iPods had actual hard drives in them and could hold numerous songs.  They didn’t have touch screens and iOS wasn’t what it is now.  Now not only do iPods have color LCD screens and in many cases touch screens, they have WiFi, and they have lots and lots of apps competing for hard drive space.  New iDevices don’t have hard drives, they have solid state memory and generally less capacity than the older iPods which have actual rotating hard drives.  All the songs, apps, movies, and other data compete for less and less storage space, putting data into the cloud becomes something of a holy grail solution. 

There are those who see everything going in the cloud, applications, data, music, pictures, your entire social life.  Maybe eventually, but I still like to type on a keyboard, I own numerous hard drives, most of them far from full as I’m not a pirate, but rather somewhat who backs up and has had to do deal with hard drive failures now and then in my computer using life.  I have some pictures online in Facebook, Flickr, or Muschamp.ca, but even I don’t want my entire life online.  I don’t use Google Apps much, I prefer various desktop alternatives and am still regularly required to use Microsoft Office and nothing but Microsoft Office.

So after waiting and waiting I eagerly signed up for iTunes Match when it finally became available in Canada.  I was worried that the fact I keep my music on an old PowerMac G4 which can’t run Lion would be an issue.  It isn’t a deal breaker but at first I was unable to sign up due to servers being overloaded.  Now it has been well over a week since I signed up and still my collection has not been entirely uploaded, servers may still be overloaded.

Over 1000 songs have been uploaded or were already part of the iTunes store, but the majority of songs I ripped from my CD collection are still not in the cloud and I’ve left the G4 running overnight and all day for several consecutive days.  I’ve even tried  restarting several times, but still iTunes Match is unfinished the uploading process.  I suspect it is re-encoding the majority of my collection. I can play the songs it has managed to upload on my iPhone or my MacBook Pro. My custom playlists have been even less successfully transferred to the cloud. They are all missing tracks and some of my smart playlists are incompatible with iTunes Match.  Apparently playlists that rely on other playlists are incompatible with iTunes Match, maybe they fear circular references.

I’ve also noticed other inconsistencies in iTunes and especially with my iPod Shuffle  2. I created an official support thread discussion, but that hasn’t resulted in any help being forthcoming. I’ve continued to experiment and test, but my iPod Shuffle 2 is no longer updating play count or last played date. My other iPod still does update metadata successfully.  iTunes Match is supposed to as well. Tracks downloaded from my laptop have shown up on my desktop, but I’m not convinced the metadata is updating correctly through iTunes Match. There are currently different play counts for Kathleen Edwards new single which I got free off of iTunes the other day.  Hopefully this works itself out eventually.

So far iTunes Match is definitely not working as advertised.  I am allowed 25,000 songs sourced from anywhere plus all the tracks I want to buy from the iTunes Music Store in my personal iCloud.  I’ve paid my money and after 100s of hours I still don’t even have half my collection in iCloud let alone 25,000 tracks.  My smart playlists rely on other playlists and various piece of metadata to function.  Something has happened in iTunesland particularly with my iPod Shuffle 2 updating metadata, making my workouts at the gym less enjoyable. I use the  smart playlists and last played date to ensure fresh music to listen to while working out. A lot of my more elaborate playlists, plus playlists I was working on are incompatible with iTunes Match which is annoying.  I can use WiFi and iTunes Match to listen to music on my iPhone without having to store any of it on my device, but there is a noticeable pause between songs and without my playlists working…

It was previously possible to listen to music on one Mac through sharing over WiFi, but metadata didn’t update. Now that I’m paying to share my music between devices I want metadata to update properly.

In conclusion iTunes Match has been a disappointed.  I still hope they fulfill their promises and let me upload my entire collection of tracks and all my playlists.  I also need iTunes Match and all my iDevices to update metadata such as play count and last played date so I can enjoy my music away from my PowerMac G4 the way I enjoy it at home.  I’ve scaled back my smart playlist ambitions after Tangerine did a disappointing job of estimating beats per minute and just like Apple repeated attempts to get support for a product/service I paid for have gone unanswered. So I’ve written this, hopefully non-whiney blog post in the hopes that others experience difficulty with iTunes Match, iPod Shuffle 2′s, metadata, and smart playlists can point me in the direction of solutions or at least answers.

Sorry if this post is even more disjointed and rambling than usual, but I was distracted by movies, lunch, dogs that wanted walking in the rain, etc. etc.