Paul Kortman

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 »

For those of you who follow me due to my social media strategy, this is a little break from the norm. I am a nerd and I used a lot of resources to develop this script, so in an effort to give back to the community I’m gonna nerd out for a post.

The Problem with ISO-8859-1 aka Latin1

I am not an expert in character encoding, so I’ll break it down in human terms. Latin1 cannot hold as many characters as UTF8. This becomes a problem when you have encoding from applications such as Microsoft Word, or different languages. UTF8 on the other hand can store everything latin1 can and a whole lot more. As an example, and to learn more about how to make your websites UTF-8 compatible, see Geir Berset’s Mother of all UTF-8 Check lists. Continue reading »

Try this video on for size. It is how I try to explain why social media is important to your brand. Anything Social about your brand (on or offline) is important to sales. But don’t take my word for it: Continue reading »

Policies: The Blame Game?

I recently asked for help in Drafting up some example Social Media Policy and Strategy Documents, I have had a number of responses both on twitter and offline.

I’d like to highlight a couple of those today regarding Social Media Policy. Continue reading »