Blorum.info: A blog+forum for discussions, often with myself, about how the digital media industry functions. Since you've wandered in, feel free to share some thoughts as comments on the blog. You might find a few insights. Please share a few too.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
So many violations in one paragraph!
BLANK.com December 2009/January2010 Educational Newsletter
Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to all you participants! BLANK.com has NO FEES. This site offers 2500 pages of interactive word puzzle activities that focus on learning Latin/Greek roots. XXXX and YYYY appreciate your sharing information about its content with colleagues and friends. YYYY[at]BLANK.com will send copies of the newsletter directly to them if you provide their email address. Participants may also use the Monthly Newsletter button (green box on the left side of the home page) to sign up. Thanks for clicking on ads as your efforts help defray some of the expenses of this voluntary effort.-----------------------------
Did you catch them?
1. A CAN-SPAM violation in which they solicity third party names and say that they will email them!
2. Asking people to click on ads. If anyone at Google gets wind of that, you forfeit your adsense account and lose your position in their search engine.
A third possible problem is that they say that the site is run by volunteers. My estimate is that the couple running it pull in a nice six figure income.
Should I tell them?
Thursday, October 01, 2009
Free Business Advice for Facebook
I read the business advice given to you recently by Time magazine and Wired. Don't be dumb, don't listen to them, listen to me.
My guidance is good, my insights profound, and I'm a sage business advisor. Here we go. A corporate strategy for your success in a few hundred words. Here's the summary:
2. Provide me for a fee a digital archive or vault service. I'd happily pay.
3. Allow me to use Facebook as my single place for discussions, groups, clubs, and forums. Right now, I use way too many phpbbs, yahoo groups, ning groups, and so on and so forth, It's only because your groups and discussions are so weak.
Monday, August 24, 2009
SEO Tools - My Education Continues
There are so many different types of SEO tools. Learning about them and stayin gcurrent on them is an endless exercise. Many of the most useful and insightful tools that dominated have become unavailable over the last decade. Here's a quick glance at the current SEO tools that I use, organized by what they do.
Long gone are the detailed kayword data that Google Analytics use to provide. Overture, which gave the volume of searches by keyword, also gone. The Cool SEO Tool was one of my long term SEO Tool favorites. It's gone. sight.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Fanning and Tweeting and Friending, oh my!
But now, these durn social media things. I"m tweeting to twitter and posting to facebook. I'm retweeting my friends and following many more. I'm friending many people and inviting them to fan our fan page.
Should I be forming facebook groups or are they lame? Should I have identical posts and tweets or handcraft each one? Why do I have 500 fans on Facebook but only 150 followers on Twitter. Do I tweet to much? Not enough? Do I not tweet so well?
Does all this social stuff mean I can drop those confusing technorati , digg, and delicious tags that someone made appear on each post of this blog? Can I forget everything that I learned in that old blogwritingcourse and ignore the parent chat forums? Do emailed newsletters still get read or do tweets only matter?
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Writing Tips
In his book Brain Train: Studying for Success (London: E & FN Spon, 1996), 164, Richard Palmer offers great insights on how to study... and enjoy it. One example of the information he delivers is this memorable list of Rules of Grammar for Report Writing:
- Remember to never split an infinitive.
- The passive voice should never be used.
- Punctuate run-on sentences properly they are hard to read otherwise.
- Don't use no double negatives.
- Use the semi-colon properly, always use it where it is appropriate; and never where it isn't.
- Reserve the apostrophe for it's proper use and omit it when its not needed.
- Verbs has to agree with their subjects.
- No sentence fragments.
- Proofread carefully to see if you any words out.
- Avoid commas, that are not necessary.
- If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a lot of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
- A writer must not shift your point of view.
- Give slang the elbow.
- Conversely, it is incumbent upon us to avoid archaisms.
- Don't overuse exclamation marks!!!!
- Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 onwards or more, to their antecedents.
- Hyphenate between sy-llables; avoid un-necessary hyphens.
- Write all adverbial forms correct.
- Writing carefully: dangling participles must be avoided.
- Steer clear of incorrect forms of verbs that have snuck in the language.
- Take the bull by the hand: always pick on the correct idiom and avoid mixed metaphors.
- Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
- Never, ever use repetitive redundancies.
- Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
- If I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times, resist hyperbole.
- Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration.
- Don't string together too many prepositional phrases unless you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death.
- ""Avoid overuse of quotation marks.""""
- For Christ's sake don't offend your readers' sensibilities.
- Last but not least, avoid clichés like the plague; seek viable alternatives.
Friday, August 07, 2009
Chrome - Second time is amazing
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
The directories are a waste of time and other insights
They seem to be focusing on the enormous amount of nonsense and expense that SEO firms spout and cost when they drag their clients through all sorts of ineffective exercises.
I agree with a lot of the article, particularly that people are spending endless time and money on techniques that are old fashioned and mostly ineffective: listing in directories and posting press releases. These are tired old techniques that google knows for what they are. Thin attempts to get links rather than natural attempts.
I disagree where they start listing techniques that have no value when in fact, the jury is still out on them. How much can link sculpting let you concentrate juice in some place? Can switching to user-friendly URLs make a big difference (I'm betting it can)?
What I like best is that he encourages the use of common sense and testing. And admits how much BS there is in the SEO industry. I've heard way too many of the people in the industry defend their approach as "Industry-standard best practices" which is a clever way of saying, everyone else does it, so it must be right.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Education and Parenting Domains
http://www.parentingbible.com
http://www.mathcity.com
http://www.parentaltech.com
http://www.vocabulary.co.il
http://www.vocabularycity.com
http://www.analogycity.com
http://www.grammarcity.com
www.homeschoolcurriculumcity.wordpress.com
Are they good domains? Should I look at them?
Wednesday, July 08, 2009
Duplicate Content
I'm sure Google discounts or ignores these pages. If content is widely copied throughout the web, I would suspect that Google awards the original source with some special points since everyone appears to be copying and citing the original source.
To illustrate what I believe, assume:
- an article first appears on site A
- the article then appears all over with the web with same outgoing links in it to site B, but also with links back to the original site A
Then, Google will:
- highly count all the links back to site A since it appears to be content that is widely cited evidenced both by the links back and the copying of content
- will not heavily count the links to site B since it's basically the same link all over the place
- will neither reward or punish all the copycat sites
I started thinking about duplicate content since there is a major article on sphinn which deals with detecting duplicate content within a website. And it mostly seems concerned with duplicated page titles and meta descriptions. This is a sloppy error that I'm sure my sites have a lot of. sigh sigh sigh. The article is by Shimon Sandler: Finding Duplicate Content with Free Tools
Top Five SEO Mistakes
1. Trying to optimize a site that doesn't stand a chance since it's got the wrong name, wrong structure, wrong content. If it's not going to do well in the search engines, don't bother playing with links. Start again. Maybe keep the old AND start with a fresh domain that feeds traffic to the old one.
2. Paying attention to what matters. The domain name matters A LOT. Learn this. Don't jsut be catchy, pick a name with the keywords that matter. You'll learn that your url gets mentioned a lot, including on your pages and incoming link anchor text.
3. Paying attention to what matters. The page title matters a lot. The other meta data, the content, the H tags, title tags, and alt tags also matter but don't screw them up weird just to impress the search engines. Present them as they are.
4. Content should be findable. Simple text. Not buried deep in code. Build with CSS. The content on each page should focus on a few concepts which relate to a few related keywords. The search engines understand and reward focus on a page.
5. Site structure. Build sections that relate to each other. Interlink among those sections. Put them in a common folder. The search engines like tidy and organized.
PS - did you notice that I know the difference know between A LOT (Correct) and alot (incorrect)? Thanks to the vocabulary lessons online.
Saturday, June 06, 2009
Forums
- Get help from the online forum community, the forum chats can be very educational
- Give back help to others via an internet discussion forum
- Find contacts. It's easy to tell from their posts on the forum whether they are knowledgeable, good spirits, or total jerks
- Marketing through discrete signature references and appropriate not-too-intrusive inclusion of key features and brand names within the flow of the discussion on the forum
- Get instant support directly from other users.
Beware, many forum managers are really zealous in banning people for being commercial. Forum managers know about "forum puppet shows" and other such tricks. A "forum puppet show" is when a person, under one ID, asks a question. Then the same person, under a different name, answers the question. The forum software often sorts posts, with just a click, by IP address or part of the country which makes it simple to detect a person switching identifies. Even if there are really two different people with different IP addresses and parts of the country, forum moderators still seem able to distinguish made-up discussions from real ones. Mostly, they know the real players and a vigorous conversation between a bunch of newbies...probably a "puppet show".
And there are forums on every topics:
Parenting homeschool forums , Non religious homeschooling forums martial arts blog and forum, etc etc
BTW, if you are thinking of how to create a forum, here's a few thoughts.
If you have a community already, it's likely to be an easier task to create a forum. You still need to decide whether to use a Facebook page, Facebook private groups, Facebook secret Group, LinkedIn Group,, Google group, Facebook page, Ning group, Twitter Hashtag or chats, classic online forum (vbulletin or phpforum), or, if you are using Wordpress, maybe Buddypress.
If you don't already have a community and you are both looking to create a community and the mechanism for their communication, you're likely to have a harder task creating the forum.
Once you have a forum, you need to moderate it by banning the forum trolls and other miscreants and spammers. This requires judgement and some technical sophistication with forum tools and programs.
In this day and age (updated Nov 2014), many people want to login to forums with a single sign on such as Google ID, wordpress ID, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Discus, and others. This can require a little technical sophistication since while it's easy to set up registration with Google ID, most forums still require the user to add a username somehow and you need to be careful not to expose anyone's actual email address. Any wisdom on this forum strategy question from the readers in the form of comments would be much appreciated.
Here's another post on the blog where you can read more about online discussion forums for education.
Thursday, June 04, 2009
California Cancelled Summer School
Gov. Schwarzenegger told a joint session of the state legislature Tuesday that if the $24 billion budget deficit isn't closed, the state won't have enough money to pay its bills next month. Because the budget has to be cut more, L.A. Unified School District has canceled most of summer school.
'Kung Fu' Actor David Carradine Dies
Actually, I care a lot more about links but that's another question.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
kaboodle unsubscribe

Thursday, May 07, 2009
Alabama Education Homeschooling
Homeschooling in Alabama
Hi, my name is JoAnn, and I am the Alabama state representative for Time4Learning!
I am 46 years old and I am married to Perry and we have 3 children and 1 grandchild. I homeschool our youngest while Perry's work takes him away from home throughout the week. I keep a busy schedule and never have a dull moment!
How We Homeschool in Alabama
We belong to North Alabama Christian School out of Valley Head. We meet once a week for PE, weather permitting. We also schedule several field trips throughout the year. As far as an average homeschool day for us, I don't have a strict schedule that I go by. I incorporate everything as a learning skill or experience. Breakfast by 9:00 and reading is always after. With dyslexia, reading is our most difficult subject, so I get it done early. We generally do Bible study next, along with music. By 2:00, my son is ready for Time 4 Learning, where we do more reading and language arts, math, science and social studies. By 4:00 we are done and usually out the door to the park!