Google+, I’m Starting to Get It
Image by Aray Chen via Flickr
I’m starting to realize what Google+ is good for and it’s a great social tool once you realize it. The number one thing I’ve realized is that it’s not a competitor with Facebook. I was trying to look at it that way and this view will ruin your experience with Google+. Facebook is for checking to see what you’re friends are up to, Google+ is for your interests and passions your following.
Google+ is better because it’s searchable. Facebook’s search is lacking. The only thing Facebook’s search was good for was typing in a name and finding who you were looking for. It would just act weird for anything else. With Google+, you actually find posts and profiles that relate to your search! Using this, you find other users with the same interests that you have.
With Facebook, you get the sense that you should know the people in your friends list. Everything posted goes out to everyone on the list. Sure, there are privacy concerns, but what if it’s not about privacy? For example, I like motorcycles and photography, but there are many on my Facebook list that could care less about it. If I’m posting about these interests all of the time, they’re going to see it in their feed. If they see them to much, they’ll just ignore or delete me because I’m jamming their feed with things they don’t care about. Google+ solved this problem with Circles.
Circles allow me to organize post coming in and going out. Let’s say someone likes spouting off drama and posting photos of cats. I like the person, but I could care less about their marriage problems or their cats most of the time. However, just in case I really need to see one of these posts, I can place them in a rarely checked drama circle and a cat photo circle. Also, this person can create a drama and cat circle if they want and post these only to the friends they know will appreciate drama and cats.
With circles, you can limit the amount of personal interaction. With Facebook, there is a feeling that someone is actually a friend, with Google+, adding them to a Circle is just showing that you have some of the same interests.
To get the most out of Google+, search your interests, circle many people that have that interest, then your incoming feeds will start to turn into a worthwhile look. There really isn’t that much of a learning curve and if you do it wrong, circles are easy to correct. Some areas of interest are taking off much faster than others with photography being an example of an interest with a huge amount of followers.
Related articles
- Find Out Who Removed You on Google Plus Circles (madrasgeek.com)
- Why Google+ is Not the Facebook Killer it Wanted to Be (geeknewscentral.com)
- How To Use Google+ (readwriteweb.com)
The Fall Has Arrived in Ohio
Fall In Ohio Image via Wikipedia
Today, I had a great motorcycle ride out on rural country roads. I felt the first chills of Fall and seen the leaves starting to change. It was a hot, humid summer. When it wasn’t hot and humid, there was a looming storm. These first fall days are a sad ones for a motorcyclist in Ohio. You know that you’ll get in a few more rides, but for the most part, their over.
The good part about Ohio is that the Fall colors and the rural areas are some of the best motorcycle riding one could experience. As far as I’m concerned, it’s right up there with riding down The Pacific Coast Highway. It’s just a matter of what a rider’s personal tastes are. Everything in Ohio is just a little more subtle than stunning vistas of the ocean. I quiet river with few people around can be just as enjoyable. A stop in any Ohio small town can be just as interesting as any California big city if you spend some time exploring it.
I didn’t take any photos of the ride, but I did get some photos of the Centerburg, Ohio farm festival that I’ll put up later. It was fun to see the farmers enjoying their hard-earned time off after the harvest season. Tons of motorcycles were there too. I’ll have to remember to put it on the calendar as an event to spend some time at next year.
Every time a season changes, I look back a little at the previous season. Not a bad summer. A few motorcycle rides, a few to many posts about the government, and I few posts from the things I’ve seen while working. I can do better though. One of the cool things about having a blog is that it’s easy to look back at what you found worthy of a post at any given point in time. Sometimes I wonder, “What was I thinking?”, when I look back at a post and that’s food for thought for the future.
So after looking back, I realize that posting about political things is no longer a good idea. They are headed down their path and I’m pretty sure there’s no turning back at this point. All that we can do is hope for the best on the other side of the mess that’s been created. My opinion along with the millions of others is irrelevant. I’d like to think that a vote is all that I have, but even that’s questionable. I’m going to concentrate on some posts that mean a little more in the long run.
I’ve quit watching the news and have limited the news I read on the Internet. I’m finding personal blogs to be so much more interesting. When I see a news story, I start looking for a local regular person’s perspective in Google’s Blog search. I’m also finding that going at least 5 pages deep on a Google search for anything is bring interesting perspectives. Digging a little deeper on anything has benefits.
This blog has been nothing more than a file cabinet of things I find interesting with a few photos and stories mixed in. I’m going to change that as there are better ways to do that now. We’ll see how it goes. As the season’s change, sometimes projects should as well.
50 Free Writing Tips
Here’s a link to 50 Writing tips – it’s free.
Finding County Lines With Yahoo Maps Instead of Google Maps
Google has street level images, but no county lines?Image via Wikipedia
Google maps are great for many things, but occasionally I want to see the county lines. If there is a way to see them in Google Maps, I haven’t found out how to do it yet. When I searched for a method to make them appear, the only answer I could find was a reference to use Yahoo Maps instead.
I would guess that there is a way to see the county lines on Google, but it’s just illusive to me. If it’s not there, one has to ask why Google doesn’t show them considering that so much other detail is provided. Why would Google find counties to be irrelevant? The only other reason I can think of is that county lines may clutter the view for many users that do not need them.
Another question I would have is why Yahoo even bothers with maps at all? It seems a huge expense and for the exception of county lines, I cannot find any advantage. The satellite data is old, no street view, poor directions capability, and no ability to manually change a route are just a few areas that I find them lacking.
Related articles
- Google Maps & Its City Labels (41latitude.com)
- See Google Maps being edited in realtime (techattitude.com)
- Roads, Streets, & ‘The Smallest Effective Difference’ (41latitude.com)
- Google Maps & Label Readability — Part 3 (41latitude.com)
How to Install WordPress on Your Computer With Microsoft’s WPI.
- Image via CrunchBase
Microsoft WPI is a cool system to install WordPress or other CMS systems locally automatically on your computer. It automatically installs PHP, MySQL, and a webserver along with whatever extras, like WordPress, that you choose.
For those that don’t know, this setup on your computer allows you to setup a website without the use of a server on the web. You can experiment all that you like for free and without the public seeing the website. There are some other utilities that this is useful for, like creating a home or small office intranet, learning how to maintain a webserver, building a website for demonstration, or training.
Just follow the instructions, and for the exception of a few passwords, take the default settings and you can have a local website. There are other programs like WAMP that will do this, but Microsoft’s is the best that I’ve seen so far, and it’s free.
Related articles
- How to Install WordPress on Your PC (brighthub.com)
- How to Install Joomla on Your PC with Microsoft Web PI (brighthub.com)
- Microsoft’s Blogging Platform Deal with WordPress Looks Like a Win-Win (dailyfinance.com)
Google’s NGRAM Is a Fun Tool
I recently found Google’s Ngram and it will keep you busy and it’s a cool way to research things occurring in recent history.
NGRAM looks through all of the books in Google and counts the number of times a word was used in specific time periods. You can come up with some really interesting facts. For example, I put in “well regulated militia” and found this excerpt about how the U.S. reduced defense cost with this in our Constitution. At a time when France had to pay 525,000 troops, the U.S. only had to maintain 33,000. It gave us an incredible financial edge against our European counterparts and it was very effective. Fast forward to more current books and you’ll find where a certain group of people were vehemently denying that it had any use at all.
Check it out! You’ll learn some history and wisdom at the same time. Don’t forget to put in the obligatory cuss words too.
Related articles
- For You N-Gram Fans (arnoldit.com)
- Google Ngrams: OCR and metadata (teleread.com)
- Ngrams: one more way to win an argument using Google (quomodocumque.wordpress.com)
- The Google Word Books Ngram Viewer (webandrank.com)
RSS Feeds. A Simple Explanation
I don’t like the computer jargon and acronyms. They make things that are really not that complicated seem that way. Sure, some things like COBOL, they’re complicated. There’s no reason for a person to see the word COBOL and get excited. It’s a 50 year old computer language that’s miserable, so who cares?
RSS isn’t like that. This is more exciting than “Blue Ray“, DVD, IPAD, or IPOD combined. What RSS does is allow you to pull in “feeds” from websites. A “feed” is something that occurs every time a post is made. It’s a little excerpt of the post that can be sent out to millions of “readers” every time a new post is made.
For example, I’m going to make this post on my website, and because I’ve done the work, it’s going to go out to thousands of readers that have chosen to accept my “feed”. You can have your own reader to take in these feeds. Some of the most popular readers are
There are more and a Google search for “RSS reader” will find them for you. I use Google Reader because it’s simple enough and works with my e-mail. It’s not the best, just handy and good enough.
The benefit is that you can take all of the feeds from websites you like and put them in a reader. At a quick glance, you can see all of the new posts. It eliminates taking the time to go to the website looking for a new post. It also gives you the title and preview before you decide if you would like to go to the website. In short, content comes to you instead of you going to it.
As you’ll see in the video, the most difficult part is getting the feed address. Most often, right clicking the link and using “copy link location” is the best way to get the address of the feed. Many are simple. For example, markspearman.com’s feed is http://markspearman.com/feed. You just place /feed on the end of the address.
A nice feature in Google Reader is that you can save searches as RSS feeds. For example, if you do a search in Google’s Blog search, scroll to the bottom and you’ll see that you can save this search to Google reader. Everytime a new blog post from any blog comes out about your search, it will be stored in reader. It’s a nice way to compile information on a subject.
Here’s a movie that explains RSS a little better.
How to Blog Day 31. Make a Plan for Next Month.
- Image via CrunchBase
31 Days To Build A Better Blog
Day 31 of 31 Days To Build A Better Blog is about making a plan for next month.
The last day of the book tells us to make a plan for next month. It gives an example of a Google Calendar and some reference to their website where more discussion takes place about what to do daily. DO NOT follow the calendar that they give. If you do, you’re going to end up with a blog that is just like every other blog on the Internet.
Consider the things that should be done daily and consider maintenance tasks that should be done weekly and monthly. I have been learning from experience that promotion should be daily for any blog. Don’t be embarrassed about getting noticed, that’s what you started a blog for. It’s not a private matter.
I am going to work on my plan and refine my review of the book. If you’ve followed along, I hope you’ve enjoyed the journey. If Blogging is something you’re interested in, buy 31 Days To Build A Better Blog and try a month of following along.
How to Blog Day 30. Monitor Your Stats
- Image via Wikipedia
31 Days To Build A Better Blog
Day 30 of 31 Days To Build A Better Blog tells Bloggers to monitor our stats. For this you need Google Analytics. There are other packages and there are a few statistics that Google Analytics will not cover. The book covers some of these as well.
Be warned that it can be depressing in the early days of the blog. You do a bunch of work doing what you think will be interesting, and the blog barely gets a visitor. You rarely get a comment. Now that I’ve read this book, I know why. You have to ask or tell your readers to comment! Low stats are no reason to quit. I’ve written some posts which received a huge amount of traffic and I’ve even spun off other blogs once I’ve realized that there is an interest in the subject. You have to be patient and you must promote to get traffic.
Another aspect of low stats in the beginning is that sometimes the numbers climb exponentially over time. Your quality posts will start to be passed around and the “she told two friends and then she told two friends” effect starts to take place.
The book will take you through the 17 stats and shine some light on what they mean. The book is a little light on the subject. If you’ve never dealt with stats before it will be helpful. I find the stats to be very interesting. You will be surprised at where your visitors come from and how they ended up on your page.
One of the most important stats are the keywords that were entered to find your website. You can use these keywords that may have been misses to tailor your blog to create content that suits what people are looking for.
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How to Write a Blog Day 29. Make a Plan to Boost Readership.
31 Days To Build A Better Blog
Day 29 of 31 Days To Build A Better Blog tells the aspiring Blogger to make a plan to boost readership. Sounds important so far!
- Image by Getty Images via @daylife
The book’s instructions are basically to get involved with other websites and social media to build a presence. Long detailed posts with numerous references to other websites are supposed to tell us how to accomplish your presence. After that, the author tells us to limit this time. Don’t spend to much time and don’t let yourself “drift” into other things on other websites.
Drift is a big problem for me. I end up following other websites for way to long and my own websites suffer. I spend way to much time giving free content to news websites. News websites matter less and less everyday and opinions on them matter even less than the news. It’s a place to vent and venting doesn’t earn a dime. I’ll take note of this “drift” warning, the rest of the ideas are going to take a little longer to digest. I am reading the first edition. The second edition that I’m going to purchase soon is supposed to take a different take on this.
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