A Note from the author of The Findability Formula...

Heather Lutze read our prior post that mentioned her search engine marketing book, The Findability Formula, and reminded us that the related tools site can be found at:

http://www.FindabilityFormula.com

Thank you, Heather!

In praise of Weasel (The Cheese)...

I've tried, with just one exception to date, to refrain from borrowing content from posts on other blog sites. I'm not going to do that here, but instead recommend a very well writen - and very much from the heart - piece on Stinky Junior's blog. It's about Weasel, the cat who now resides in Feline Heaven. I think any animal lover, and all cat lovers, will identify with this posting.

Weasel (also known as The Cheese) was a well loved cat. Our Munchy says that although he never met Weasel, he knows they would have been great pals!

Here's the link address:

http://stinkyjunior.blogspot.com/2009/05/one-year.html

We are experiencing some technical difficulties...

The Blogger network, which hosts this site and other Blogspot sites, had an outage last night at 11:00 PDT, 2:00 a.m on the east coast. Some Blogspot sites have experienced problems since the service was resumed. A number of sites, like this one, can only be accessed using the full Universal Resource Locator (URL) address; this means you have to type in the "www" part in your browser.

Based on what I'm reading, some bloggers cannot currently put up new posts - so these sites may appear to be inactive - and a few others cannot add photographs, so those posts will be plainer than usual.

Fortunately, I can still post photos so here's a nice black & white one of the moon over San Francisco's Coit Tower. Let's hope that things soon get back to normal at Blogger so that we can all return to business as usual. Until then, in the words of a Small Faces song, we're all "waiting here in Patience."

Photo: flickr (km6xo); click on the photo to see a slightly larger version.

The Indirect Costs and Benefits of Blogging...

Every now and then I notice these family messages posted as comments on blog posts, like those between relatives, spouses, boyfriend - girlfriend, etc. This reminds me of a true story...

A few months ago, I had just begun this blog and was sent on a business trip to a conference in beautiful downtown Burbank, California; OK, so it was actually at the hotel just to the east of the Bob Hope Intergalactic Airport. The conference had nothing to do with the internet or writing or blogging. But at lunch a young attendee began to explain how blogging helped him repair his relationship with his mother. You see, she called him far too often, at least five or six times a week to ask him what he was doing, who he was seeing, etc., etc.

Finally, he started a blog where he reviewed the events of his life each day. His mother posted a comment that went something like this, "I used to worry about you. But now I read your blog and I know if you're home or traveling, if you're dating, what you're reading, what movies you've seen, the music you're listening to... It's great!"

From then on, his sainted mother called no more than two or three times a month. It saved them both quite a bit of money on their phone bills, although this young blogger began to miss actually speaking with his mother on most days. Sigh...

Beware of those unintended consequences!

This seems like a very good idea...

I recently happened to be in a Starbucks where, interestingly, the staff members were chatting about how a customer had labeled this location as a "non-cozy" one. I presume the customer in question posted this comment somewhere on the web... The funny thing is that this 'bucks is more hard-edged Irish pub than prim faculty club, so it seemed to me to be a very fair comment.

But when we post an e-pinion, or blog comment or a comment on a rating service like Yelp! how do we know that the business we're describing actually hears our voice? Well, when it comes to restaurants we now have a two-way site called BooRah.com. This is a site, based in Mountain View, California, that both collects and posts restaurant reviews - you can see the ones for your own community by going to the site and you can search for reviews from other cities - and scours the internet for more reviews and comments on particular restaurants.

If you go to BooRah, you'll notice that selected reviews are posted but not all of them. If the restaurant owner wants to see all of them, he/she can subscribe for a small fee with BooRah to see every comment/review that the web service finds using search instruments. You will see a 1 to 100 percent rating at BooRah for each restaurant, summarizing the positive versus negative reviews. For example, I earlier posted my favorable comments on the Sombrero Mexican restaurant in Mission Valley, San Diego (one of 340 Mexican restaurants in San Diego listed by BooRah). BooRah shows a 100% favorable rating for this chain restaurant at this location.

I see two key benefits: first, we the consumers are not wasting our time making comments on the world wide web because Boorah will find them and publish them; second, the restaurants that subscribe to view the customer reviews will hopefully take them to heart and make the needed changes to keep their customers and boost their approval ratings.

Come to think of it, a few nice couches and padded chairs would look nice in my local Starbucks... and maybe a few nice heavy throws and a working cat or two!

(The photograph shows the co-founders of BooRah.)