July 2010
"Inter-capitalization": Sell a Lot by looking... →
Google’s Ad Help section tells us we should “inter-capitalize” our ad copy. This means we should randomly capitalize just about every word in our ad copy. This is of course anathema to copyeditors though Google claims it makes our copy look more “professional.” Worry about looking illiterate or sell a lot of products? Hmm…
Inter-capitalize the ad text to...
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“Running your company as if customers want to talk to you isn’t just...”
– Why Your Customers Don’t Want to Talk to You (Harvard Business Review)
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How Content Farms Train Their Writers to Write for... →
PBS’s Media Shift is doing a fascinating series of articles on the new generation of “Content Farms” that pay freelance writers to create user-generated content optimized for Google searches. This article looks at Examiner.com’s “Examiner University,” a series of online tutorials and videos that train its writers in SEO-focused internet writing. Here’s how...
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Jon Watts.com →
From the site description: “Jon Watts is a dedicated member of the Religious Society of Friends as well as a prolific songwriter and poet. He has spent the last two years touring extensively throughout North America and is now in the studio recording his 3rd full-length album.”
His site has videos, tour schedules and a ‘vlog’ from this Spring’s bike tour!
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Rules Seek to Expand Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s →
Today when a patient comes with memory problems, doctors might say that the person has a chance of developing Alzheimer’s in the next decade, a chance of not getting much worse for several years, and a chance of actually getting better. Tests like brain scans, Dr. Petersen said, “will allow us to be much more definitive.” If the tests show changes characteristic of Alzheimer’s disease, a doctor...
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WatchSwitching trains in Paradise, PA, the end of the line for the Strasburg Railroad.
“The editorial strength that may have been lost in terms of writing is going to...”
– Kristian Hammond, quoted in Techmeme Offers Tech News at Internet Speed
“Conversely, our times challenge those friendships. This is why we must reflect...”
– Friendship in an Age of Economics (NYTimes)
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Where I come from, this is called fraud: Apple's... →
Apple Acknowledges Flaw in iPhone Signal Meter - NYTimes.com
“Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong,” Apple said in the letter. “Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength.”
Apparently this is true for older models and has...
Boy, sum o'tho city folk sures are stoopid →
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Afghanistan is now longest war in US history. When... →
Afghanistan policy after the McChrystal scandal—The New Yorker:
The military key to counterinsurgency is protection of the population, but the difficulty in securing Marja and the delay of a promised campaign in Kandahar suggest that the majority of Afghan Pashtuns no longer want to be protected by foreign forces. The political goal of counterinsurgency is to strengthen the tie between...