Forums

For those of who don't know, there are several great reasons to use online internet 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.

California Cancelled Summer School

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.




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'Kung Fu' Actor David Carradine Dies

'Kung Fu' Actor David Carradine Died today. I heard a long discussion of it on NPR. It touched me since I had LOVED that show. I also wondered how I could play in the SEO game of breaking news. Obviously, I am half a day late to participate in that game but I've put it up on my martial arts blog. And here I'm building links to the article about the Kung Fu hero dying. I wonder if I'll get hits and traffic?

Actually, I care a lot more about links but that's another question.



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kaboodle unsubscribe

I think the can-spam law is great. I should be able to easily tell me to stop mailing me. I'd like it if there were real penalties and more standards.

I tried to get off a list this morning which reminded me how important good implementation is if you are NOT going to anger potential customers.

For instance, what about email lists that you can get off only if you remember your password? Of course, you can always ask them to send you your password and then unsubscribe. Still, it's a pain. Is that compliant?

What about lists where there is no UNSUBSCRIBE ALL option? I mention this since I just had to check 30 boxes to completely unsubscribe from a Hearst publication called kaboodle. What a pain! That'll definitely keep me from giving up my email to another hearst publication for awhile.


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Alabama Education Homeschooling

If you wanted some info on Alabama education, here's some choices. You can get Alabama homeschooling info from Joann. You can participate in an Alabama homeschooling discussion with Joann. There's also all the spelling lists that have been saved by schools in Alabama.

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!

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Whats a real blog?

I read an interesting post that took a new spin on a question that I've discussed at some length in our How to Blog Course. What is a blog?

We were interested initially (the course has evolved) as teaching blogging as a type of creative writing. For us, it was related to the diary, journal, or confessional but had an episodic or serial structure and most importantly, the writing included elements of audience participation, promotion, and an involvement in the world around us. Our approach to explaining blogs was to create categories saying that there are personal blogs; there are hybrids of personal blogs with either business, advocacy, or non-profit purposes; and there are sites which use blog software as a CMS (content management system) but which aren't blogs at all.

Edward De Leau has a post in his blog Why the whole world is wrong about weblogs in which he makes the distinction between weblogs as a media format and weblogs as the technology or CMS behind a website. He belabors it at some length but his definitions are tight and his cartoons are nice.



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Vocabulary

Learning Vocabulary Fun is the number two site on Google for "vocabulary". How to broaden it's appeal while focusing on keywords of real value to customers and advertisers. Watch this!

Vocabulary Flash Cards -
Vocabulary flash cards have traditionally been a key vocabulary teaching tool. Today, vocabulary flash games online are preferred vocabulary teaching tools to traditional vocabulary flash cards. Note that vocabulary went from nowhere on the search engines to number 13 last week by adding this discussion of flash cards versus flash games!

Expand Your Vocabulary

Word Power:-Developing your Vocabulary
GRE Verbal Tips
Improve Through Active Learning




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Craigs List - Bad Writing by a College Student

My company now posts all of our job offers on Craigs List and we do our hiring there. This response made me laugh.

Hello im a college student and have great communication skills computer skills.. i would love for this position.. if you can please contact me nicole (sic).

Pretty nice demonstration of her great communication skills, huh?

PS

Watch me direct google towards a certain image of John Edelson. from this post about john edelson.

SpellingCity.com

SpellingCity.com is my favorite website these days for fun spelling time. Check out these awards:

Parents' Choice Award
The Parents' Choice Foundation, the nation's leading experts on quality childrens' media and toys, recently selected the SpellingCity.com website as a Parents’ Choice Recommended Award.

Golden Lamp Awards Finalist
The Golden Lamp Awards are one of educational publishing's longest-running and most prestigious traditions. SpellingCity has been recognized as one of the four finalists in the Technology Innovations category.

Homeschool.com - Top 100 site
Homeschool.com is the number one site for homeschooling. In January, Homeschool.com announced their top 100 websites for homeschooling in 2009. Eleven websites were selected in the language arts area among them, SpellingCity.com!

Larry Ferlazzo - Top 5 Choice for Best Online Learning Games
Larry Ferlazzo picks SpellingCity as one of the Best Online Learning Games on the web. Larry Ferlazzo is a well-known language teacher and blogger about language arts and ESL websites. He provides two rankings of the best sites: one he ranks sites himself and the other ranking is based on his readers votes. On both rankings, SpellingCity.com was selected as the second most useful learning games website on the web!

ThePioneerWoman
"My recent find is SpellingCity.com. I love straightforward sites like this. The site is focused; it does one thing - and it does it VERY well. I did not have to join to use this FREE site, but I chose to create an account so SpellingCity would save my word lists, making it easier and faster to use the site for daily visits or weekly/monthly reviews. The site has various Spelling uses, like testing or teaching words; it also offers 8 Spelling and Vocabulary games."




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Florida in Education

Florida education online is a weird online marketing theme. But oddly, it's one that I now have several lines in the water on. Florida is a big fishing state so that'll be my metaphor for today.

People need information on homeschooling in Florida. Time4Learning has a page of information to help.

People need to study to pass the vocabulary portion of the FCAT. The vocabulary education site has that need nailed.

For all your spelling needs, there is a page to help you find Florida schools on SpellingCity. Is this a page that Google will be able to use?

And while there is not yet a discussion about Florida, there is a great discussion forum for homeschooling parents.




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Monetizing Content - The future of media

Newspapers are going out of businesses. Top bloggers are abandoning their industry-leading blogs as not worth the effort financially. Information wants to be free. The outlook for content and journalism is pretty bleak, if the media reports are to be believed.

I think the future is ours to make. Here's my two cents for the media people to think about.

1. Education is a very very profitable industry.
2. Journalism as supported by advertising and subscriptions is failing.
Think about it.
I'll add a third point of departure for my suggestion.
3. The classic concept of education, running from K-12 followed often by college, sometimes by advanced degrees, is pretty out-dated. There's huge opportunities for new models of education.

Rather than proceed with a macro-industry meta-discipline analysis, I'll switch to the mode of some personal advice.

If you are a journalist or blogger with a good following but a shakey business model, pay me $700 and in a three hour one-on-one seminar, I'll teach you how to keep doing what you love (assuming that's journalism or blogging), build your following, and make it into a solidly renumerative business with control in your own hands.

Sound impossible, keep reading.

Actually, I'm kidding about the $700 and the seminar. I'm too busy to do that. Although, now that I've opened up the question, it might make a good business. Here's what I'd teach you in that seminar.

1. You have an audience that admires you. They listen to you and they read from you. They think you know more than they do about something of interest to them. They read you not because they want to click on ads, they read you because of your expertise and writing skills.

2. In your fans eyes and hearts, you are a celebrity.

3. If they had a chance to learn directly from you, to take a course, many of them would like to. Not all would but many would.

4. My point is that while your routine blogging and journalism might not make enough for you to live on, you can supplement it by selling your expertise in courses to your following. This will deepen your relationship with your audience and allow you to repurpose your expertise as courseware. Frankly, writing and teaching are very closely related. Not identical but they are close.

5. Todays tools for pulling together courses using public domain or cheap learning management system and online community sessions makes the creation of these mini courses practically available to anyone. It's not quite as simple as blogging yet but within maybe 12 months, with a little effort from the right groups, it could be made that easy.

6. Depending on your following and their level of involvement with you, you should structure an online or in-person course in which you charge them a significant amount of money and they get to interact directly with you. How about:

A three week $199 course for groups of twenty with two one hour sessions each week each plus email etc. This could gross $4K each time it runs and could run 12 times per year. That's $48K of revenue. Or, how about charging $499 per student? Or $999? Selling courses at these prices in the abstract sounds very hard. But, if you have a following who already admires, respects, and follows you, I think that it's likely that there is a significant demand from your audience for more than just your regular writing.

A friend of mine (kenny) had asked me a few days ago to write up something about how journalists should get into training. I had intended to write this but then forgot until I looked at my email today. From a group who "gets it", the search engine marketing group, I got an invite to have them train people at their next show. Are they expecting people to pay up? Check out these rates: Workshops $1,345/$745 Cost 8:00-5:00pm. If I had more time, I'd write up about the seminars and conventions that the NYT and Economist seem to run sometimes. And how colleges are beginning to wonder if the future of education is not so much a four year involvement but a lifetime opportunity to sell education to someone.

Journalists and bloggers should think of their writing efforts as the media and rather than accept lots of other advertisers selling things that your audience doesn't care about, sell them what they want. More from you. Cut out the middleman. Journalists should be educators with education being the profit center.

just a thought.....john



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USA Geography

If this isn't one cool implementation and tour de force of seo and marketing prowess, I don't know what is. It's from a Geographic US & World Search Function.


Alabama,
Alaska,Arizona,Arkansas,California,ColoradoConnecticutDelawareDistrict of ColumbiaFloridaGeorgiaHawaiiIdahoIllinoisIndianaIowaKansas

KentuckyLouisianaMaineMarylandMassachusettsMichiganMinnesotaMississippiMissouriMontanaNebraskaNevadaNew HampshireNew JerseyNew MexicoNew YorkNorth Carolina

North DakotaOhioOklahomaOregonPennsylvaniaRhode IslandSouth CarolinaSouth DakotastateTennesseeTexasUtahVermontVirginiaWashingtonWest VirginiaWisconsin
» United States Military
Armed Forces Americas (AA)
Armed Forces Europe (AE)
Armed Forces Pacific (AP)
» United States Overseas
American Samoa
Guam
Northern Mariana Islands
Palau
Puerto Rico
Virgin Islands
» Other Countries
Canada
Australia
United Kingdom
New Zealand
Other Countries




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Dental Games

Yes, we have created a new genre. Games with Teeth!!!!

I'm not kidding. A few people in my office worked on a project when I wasn't paying attention and now we have a page of dental games. Go figure.

Does anybody have any ideas on how to market such a thing?

Actually, i just checked google and found:
Results 1 - 10 of about 11,200,000 for dental games. (0.21 seconds)

Heat Maps - Google is not the be-all and end-all

Google analytics has a nifty feature that it'll tell you what links people are clicking on. But, it's not the be-all and end-all. It falls short in that it:
- groups all the links that go to the same page from a page. So you have no idea if they clicked on the "more info" link at the top or bottom
- it only tracks clicks onto links. Not confused clicks onto things that look like links.

Does anyone track such things? Apparently they do;
Crazy Egg & Click Density.




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School pages into the search engines - ?

According to webmaster tools, the SpellingCity page on First Presbyterian Church School is not listed. I'll do a google search to see whether this school can be found on SpellingCity.com: First Presbyterian Church School site:SpellingCity.com. The answer is that while some other school pages are found which have links to that page, First P's home page is not yet in the Google index.

Why isn't First Presbyterian Church School's home page on SpellingCity.com in the index?

This is weird in that:

1. There are at least two schools that I found that link to this home page which have links to them from their schools (Tinsley Elementary School & Greenville Elementary School). Of course, the links at the bottom of these pages in which the local schools link to each other should ideally have well-less than 100 links on the page. Unfortunately, these pages seem to have about 260 other schools listed which could account for the links not being counted.
2. There are two blog posts from twenty days ago which have direct links to this First Presbyterian Church School. School pages not appearing and School home pages.
3. I have been hoping that this page would appear in the index and mostly, my dreams do come true.

Any ideas? Since we have 125K school homepages that we're hoping will begin to get listed, this is a question of some importance. I could imagine that Google is reluctant to include these pages since they are short on content and links. Still, over 5K of these schools have links directly from the schools to them so it's hard to imagine why they don't get listed. Maybe, too many of these links are images?

http://learnseowithme.wordpress.com/2009/03/04/school-home-pages/