Friends Blog is Your Platform !!!

Everything has changed.I remember when I first discovered computers.

I was in high school when Radio Shack came out with their TRS-80 Model I personal computer.

I remember going to the store and staring at it...ogling it... feeling the power of its keyboard...

Hey, I guess I just wasn't into girls yet. That timecame along eventually as well. ;-)

Oh, those were the days.

I worked at the food court at the mall (Northbrook Court in the Chicago suburbs), and when I finally saved up enough money, I bought one of those suckers. It was 4K of pure raging microchip power!

Yes, you heard me. Not 4 MEGABYTES. 4 K. 4000 bytes of memory.
There was no hard drive. Heck, there was no FLOPPY drive. Nope. The save and load storage device was a cheap radio shack tape recorder.

Want to save a program?

Type "SAVE" and press play and record on the tape recorder.Want to load a program?

Type "LOAD" and press play. And then wait for it to load.

Yes, those were the days.

I'll skip by the rest of my computing bio for now, though maybe I'll share it one day as it is pretty darned interesting.

Fast-forward to 2007.Web 2.0 is in full gear.Traditional media is scrambling to figure out why they are losing power and influence.

It's because of technology...And You!

The internet now provides each and every person with a platform... a way to publicly share their individuality,opinion and expertise.

It used to be that only newscasters, politicians, sports figures and entertainment celebrities had the ability to share their thoughts and feelings to the masses.

Not so in this day and age.Anyone can do it!

Now we've got Matt Drudge reaching millions of people each day with stories that you may not hear on the nightly news.People get /.ed or Dugg, and their influence grows.

You Tube and Google Video are bringing talent out of the woodwork (along with some talent that ought to stay IN the woordwork...)

Anyone can be a star!

What Andy Warhol said it truer now than ever before.

Everyone can have their 15 minutes of fame.

That's one of the reasons I love my blog.

Before I ever wrote a book on AdSense or Internet marketing, I was blogging.

I wrote movie reviews, travelogues, analysis of current events and whatever else I wanted to.

These days, I write more about making money online,though I am already planning a redesign of my blog to provide a more realistic glimpse into my life.

Let's face it. I don't go walking around in a suit all the time.

But I do smile a lot. So that won't change. :-)

I've used my blog to share my displeasure with a local furniture company and ended up getting a warm customer service call from their headquarters.

I've used my blog to share my experiences with a MLM company that I was displeased with and now have the single most popular page on the web for discussing that company.

And I've used my blog to raise funds for an organization that helps orphans in third-world countries.

So what about you?

Are you using your platform to make your ideas, opinions and expertise known to the world?

I am a firm believer that everyone should be blogging.

It's easy to do. If nothing else, go to Blogger.com and set up a free account. It's free and you can get started right away.

What do you write about on your blog?

Whatever you want! It's YOUR blog!

In fact, because it is yours, you can share your thoughts and ideas freely, as long as what you are
writing isn't illegal or immoral.

For ages, the mainstream media has given special attention to the policital and social opinions of
celebrities who we love because they act well or sing beautifully.

But that doesn't give them the credibility to wax eloquently on the war in Iraq or the fat content
of an Oreo cookie!

Yet, they are frequently presented as credible authorities just because they are popular.

Well guess what?

You may not act well or sing beautifully, but I would bet their your opinion and take on topics
of the day is more thoughtful and insightful than these so-called experts.

I'm not saying you should turn your blog into a rant on liberals or tree-huggers, though you
certainly may choose to do so.

I'm saying that you should use your blog to express yourself freely. Let people see who you are!

As you do, you may gain a following and increase the size of your platform.

And as your readers comment on your blog, the dialogue takes on a life of its own, evolving and changing to communicate with the masses.

If you set your mind to it, you can be an agent of change... an influencer.

The blogosphere belongs to those who blog.

Write on, my friends.

Write on.

Blogging Should Be Fun!

I treat my online businesses pretty seriously. Ihave to. They feed and house my family and that's a pretty serious business. But sometimes I wonder if I'm not missing a trick.

Just surf at random around the blogs at Blogger.com and you'll come across a bunch of sites that have been put up for no other reason than to make the people who write them smile.

They might make the half-dozen or so regular readers of each of those blogs smile too, but I
doubt if those sites are making enough even to cover the cost of the coffee drunk while typing
the posts.

Those writers don't care. They're not in it for the money. They're in it for the pleasure of
blogging.

Sometimes though, you will come across a site that's well-written, well-designed,
well-optimized... and according to the About Me page, earning enough to let the writer give up
the day job. And those sites are still fun too.They're fun to read, and you can bet they're fun
to write.

The writer might be blogging about life as a stay-at-home mom or the commute to work or what
they like about their local coffee shop, but they do it in a way that's enjoyable to read. That's
all it takes to get enough users coming back,clicking the ads and generating revenue.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I don't enjoy blogging and writing content. I certainly do.
Heck, life's much too short to do something you don't like. I'm just saying that sometimes you
can achieve real results by taking it easy and thinking less about the money and more about
doing what you enjoy.

If you do that and get the ad optimization right,the money will take care of itself.

Google Loves a Tasty BlogRoll

Judging by a patent application filed by Google for ranking blog search, one of the three things a blog should have is a blogroll, and being included in some high-quality ones will help too

Google considers blogs to contain three content types:

• The content of recent posts,
• A blogroll, and;
• Blog metadata (author profile information and/or other information about the blog or its
author).

While it's likely Google is going to look at other factors in ranking blogs, the positives and negatives observed by experts show how the process resembles the fabled PageRank Google has used as part of its website rankings.

Positive factors for a blog include its popularity, inclusion in blogrolls (especially high-quality ones), and tagging of the blog. News aggregator subscriptions could imply high popularity. Google said that it could validate those against "subscriptions spam" by checking for unique subscriber IP addresses.

Some negative factors could impact a blog. New posting frequency, especially at set intervals, could be a tipoff of a low quality, i.e. spam, blog. Post content and size might raise alarms in Google's algorithm, and push the blog to a lower ranking.