Paul Kortman

Google recently released an update to its display of content called Real-Time Search. At first I thought this would be a better experience than twitter search or facebook search, because its from the king of Search, Google. Unfortunately it has become apparent that this was more of a knee-jerk reaction to Bing’s Twitter Search announcement less than 50 days earlier.

We knew that Google and others were indexing the tweet stream earlier this year, but this is a game changer in how they have integrated their display of tweets with standard results.  Continue reading »

Today is an American holiday known as Thanksgiving, and while the foundations of this holiday are different, the current culture dictates that there be a large family gathering with overeating and a turkey involved. There is another more subtle tradition of listing the things a person is thankful for. This is my venue of choice for listing my 2009 thanksgiving “I’m thankful for…” list. Continue reading »

What is On Page SEO?

On Page SEO is a term used to describe the work done to change Page content (Titles, Headings, Alt text, internal link text, keyword density, etc) in order to affect position (page rank) in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). We’ve been working with quite a few of our clients and copywriters training them to have an eye for optimizing on-page content in light of SEO and keyword positioning.

It brings good success. But we have learned not to stop there. Continue reading »

We all know our normal latin characters. We know them world-wide because English is the primary trade language.

We also know that the Internet has been based on the latin character set. There has been a shift away from this to UTF-8 encoding. But there is now a larger shift. We’re approaching the 20th birthday of the Web, and for the first twenty years the web has been based on Latin-1 for domain names. This is about to change.

English is still the predominant language on the web but, this will not last for long. The Chinese are quickly becoming the dominant player online despite the Great Firewall of China.

Continue reading »

I implore you to investigate Twitter lists. A New feature rolled out by twitter last week. A quote from twitter’s own non-micro-blog:

“We believe Lists will be a new discovery mechanism for great tweets and accounts.”

I have to underscore that. There are great list strategies and great twitter lists being created and curated everyday. I’ve tried to list some lists and catoroize them to give some inspiration. There is no way to include the thousands of lists, nor the many different list making strategies, I’ve tried to cover the basics with links to more information. Continue reading »

Thank you Flickr user xjy

Are you kidding me? He’s going to be just like one of those other SEO guys who blog about blogging or about blog content?

Yes, and No.

I have been struggling lately with this concept and so I’m going write my struggles and invite you into a process/growth/learning/development I’m going through.

Content is King

If you haven’t heard it before, please search on the terms content and king. You will find a wealth of bloggers discussing how it’s about the content you put out there.

It’s true: A Twitter profile, a YouTube channel, a Facebook fan page, a blog, these are all methods of putting content out there. So to be social, to take advantage of the new marketing style, one has to have content. Continue reading »

The Furniture City Sets the Table for the World of Art 2

Yeah, I’m a believer. I believe that Art is cool, but I’m not an artist. I’m a Michigan Citizen from a great town called Grand Rapids, The “Furniture City”. Starting on Wednesday September 23 2009 there will be a new competition called ArtPrize in town and I am loving the buzz and activity it is creating.

Typically I blog about social media, or strategy, or tactics like twitter and facebook, but this is different. This is about integrating art and social media, about using the new tools to reflect what we do in real life, faster and more efficiently. The organizers of Artprize originally claimed it was going to be an American-Idol-Style voting, what I didn’t realize was how much they were planning on leveraging Social Media. When I realized that the artists basically had to earn their votes in what ever means they could I saw the potential for social media. So that’s when I got involved. I am passionate about social media and business, I believe that all businesses could improve with the correct usage of social media. Just like these artists who are vying for a vote could get more votes with the correct usage of social media. – more on that here: micro blog on artprize

Continue reading »