Getting along in the Beverly Hills of the Midwest

from www.theonion.com posted with vodpod

This kid is pretty funny. His parents probably don’t think he’s too funny, though.

from youtube.com posted with vodpod

Slashdot | Comcast Proposes Self Regulation and P2P Bill of Rights

“In a recent move, Comcast has proposed a ‘P2P Bill of Rights,’ joining the ranks of every great monopoly when threatened by government regulation for alleged misbehavior. They have instead proposed comprehensive industry self-regulation and cooperation with major P2P software vendors as a lesser evil: ‘Comcast is looking to further position itself as proactively — and responsibly — addressing the issue of managing peer-to-peer traffic that traverses its network, announcing Tuesday it will lead an industry-wide effort to create a “P2P Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” for users and Internet service providers.’”

Jill is a neuroanatomist who observed herself having a stroke one morning. She remembers everything. From http://blog.ted.com/2008/03/jill_bolte_tayl.php:

On the morning of the stroke, I woke up to a pounding pain behind my
left eye. And it was the kind of pain, caustic pain, that you get when
you bite into ice cream. And it just gripped me and then it released
me. Then it just gripped me and then released me. And it was very
unusual for me to experience any kind of pain, so I thought OK, I’ll
just start my normal routine. So I got up and I jumped onto my cardio
glider, which is a full-body exercise machine. And I’m jamming away on
this thing, and I’m realizing that my hands looked like primitive claws
grasping onto the bar. I thought “that’s very peculiar” and I looked
down at my body and I thought, “whoa, I’m a weird-looking thing.” And
it was as though my consciousness had shifted away from my normal
perception of reality, where I’m the person on the machine having the
experience, to some esoteric space where I’m witnessing myself having
this experience.

And it was all every peculiar and my headache
was just getting worse, so I get off the machine, and I’m walking
across my living room floor, and I realize that everything inside of my
body has slowed way down. And every step is very rigid and very
deliberate. There’s no fluidity to my pace, and there’s this
constriction in my area of perceptions so I’m just focused on internal
systems. And I’m standing in my bathroom getting ready to step into the
shower and I could actually hear the dialog inside of my body. I heard
a little voice saying, “OK, you muscles, you gotta contract, you
muscles you relax.”

And I lost my balance and I’m propped up
against the wall. And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no
longer define the boundaries of my body. I can’t define where I begin
and where I end. Because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended
with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I could detect was
this energy. Energy. And I’m asking myself, “What is wrong with me,
what is going on?” And in that moment, my brain chatter, my left
hemisphere brain chatter went totally silent. Just like someone took a
remote control and pushed the mute button and — total silence.

And
at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then
I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of energy around me.
And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I
felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that
was, and it was beautiful there.

Then all of a sudden my left
hemisphere comes back online and it says to me, “Hey! we got a problem,
we got a problem, we gotta get some help.” So it’s like, OK, OK, I got
a problem, but then I immediately drifted right back out into the
consciousness, and I affectionately referred to this space as La La
Land. But it was beautiful there. Imagine what it would be like to be
totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to the
external world. So here I am in this space and any stress related to
my, to my job, it was gone. And I felt lighter in my body. And imagine
all of the relationships in the external world and the many stressors
related to any of those, they were gone. I felt a sense of
peacefulness. And imagine what it would feel like to lose 37 years of
emotional baggage! I felt euphoria. Euphoria was beautiful — and then
my left hemisphere comes online and it says “Hey! you’ve got to pay
attention, we’ve got to get help,” and I’m thinking, “I got to get
help, I gotta focus.” So I get out of the shower and I mechanically
dress and I’m walking around my apartment, and I’m thinking, “I gotta
get to work, I gotta get to work, can I drive? can I drive?”

An excellent plugin:

http://www.netconcepts.com/seo-title-tag-plugin/

Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.

According to Brian Clark over at Copyblogger:

While there are as many ways to approach blogging as there are
blogs, some things remain steadfast when it comes to gaining influence
and prompting action. Here are the 5 bedrock elements to keep in mind
when you blog to persuade:

1. The Law of Value

Your blog must provide value to the reader by addressing a problem,
concern, desire, or need that the reader already has. Fresh, original
content is critical.

2. The Law of Headlines and Hooks

Your post titles must stand out in a crowded, noisy blogosphere, and
you must quickly communicate the value of reading further with your
opening.

3. The Law of “How To”

People don’t want to know “what” you can do, they want to know “how”
it’s done. If you think you’re giving away too much information, you’re
on the right track.

4. The Law of the List

Love them or hate them, informational posts presented in list format
are easily digestible, and allow for an efficient transfer of your
value proposition to the reader.

5. The Law of the Story

Stories are the most persuasive blogging element of all, as they
allow you to present a problem, the solution, and the results, all
while the connotation of the story allows readers to sell themselves on what you have to offer.

From Dan Schulz over at the SitePoint Forums:
I do use WordPress. To start, I wrote my own master theme framework
that uses clean, minimal, pure, semantic and valid XHTML (even though
it’s served as HTML). That means using headings as they were intended,
having the source code order defined (header, menu, content, sidebar,
footer) to ensure that all pages that NEED to be are able to be
indexed, using an actual image for my masthead (rather than abusing an
H1 element), and so forth.

From there, I use the All In One SEO Pack
to allow me to not only rewrite my page and post titles, but also write
which keywords and meta descriptions I want to use on each page and
post, rather than the whole blog (since hard-coding it n the header.php
file will cause the same text to be used on every page and post).

I also use Enforce .www Preference
as well to not only enforce whether or not I use the .www subdomain or
not (I personally use it), but also to redirect all index.php calls to
their directory (such as www.example.com/blog/index.php getting redirected to www.example.com/blog/).

The next thing I do is use Category Base Killer
to remove the /category/ directory from many of the links - that way I
don’t have as many duplicate content issues since all the pages will
have the same link structure.

Then I modify my robots.txt file to block the tags and archives
sections from those spiders that actually obey the protocol (the
legitimate spiders, of course, meaning search engine spiders). There’s
no need to block the category since /category/ has already been
stripped from the URL string anyway, and the “articles” “entries” or
whatever directory I have my blog posts in will be where the posts are
at anyway (and they are where I want the engines to go to anyway).
There are two ways you can do this. One is to use a hand-written
robots.txt file; the other is to use KB robots.txt
so you can manage your robots.txt file from within the Dashboard. I
have a sneaky suspicion this feature may be incorporated into WordPress
2.5 (even though I haven’t tried the betas) so keep your eyes peeled.
If it does, then remove the plugin.

With regard to what ssandecki said, WordPress uses rel=”nofollow” by
default in comments, so there’s no need to use a plugin to add it (or
even modify the WordPress core files). But if you want to remove them,
then the Do Follow plugin will let you do so.

You may also want to read Pushing WordPress’s SEO Boundaries and WordPress SEO MasterClass For Competitive Niches, both by Andy Beard as well as Understanding Search Usability and Understanding Search Usability, Part 2 by Shari Thurow.