Content Fairy – Guy Redwood's Blog

A local search engine optimisation company was recently overheard recommending to a customer that they should get a blog to help with their rankings on Google. The company then offered to write the blog for them, to ensure the keywords etc were correct.

This is so wrong. In fact it’s as wrong as selling live8 tickets on ebay. Yes you can do it, but it’s wrong. Blogs should be written by passionate individuals, experts in their own field – whether it’s your personal blog (being an expert in yourself) or your area of interest. How can an SEO company write your blog?

If you have a trademark or product, I recommend heading over to a blogging search engine like technorati or blo.gs and do a few searches and see who’s using your words and brand within spammy blogs, stuffed with keyword rich site maps and random text. I wouldn’t loose too much sleep over it, but something to bear in mind if this activity ever influenced your placement within search engine results.

3 Stories from Steve Jobs about joining the dots

3 nice stories about events that shaped Steve Jobs – the top man at Apple.

There is little in life to get bitter about, everything moulds the person you are today. I constantly get asked about the rollercoaster world of digital media and whether I hate X,Y or Z because of famous incidents that have brought huge change into our lives. My response is usually that life is too short to bare a grudge and if it wasn’t for X, Y and Z, I would not have been introduced to A, B and C. The tough bit for team builders, is having the balls to see beyond the CV and embrace the personality and skillset forged by experience. That’s why when interviewing, I spend 5% of the time talking about the CV and rest is about the person in front of me.

Forthcoming: on (completely new) software

Great words from Sigurd

creating the first light bulb in the light of gas lamps

I had to stop and think about this for few minutes.

Recently, I’ve been getting pretty exciteable on the concept of things having a context. Add into that, the context of creation/evolution and, and, and … I need a coffee to think about it some more.

Skype Phone Review: Siemens Skype Phone – this is a significant shift. May even replace my evangelism for amazing Carpet Tiles and better carpet in the home.

After 24 hours, my head is still spinning, we have a new gadget in the building…. Some new cordless phones from Siemens in the office. The thing is, I can now recieve skype calls on any of the handsets in the building, just like a normal call. There is no difference between a normal call and a skype call, period. The phone rings, I answer it and wander around the building as normal. If you don’t get the hugeness of this, then go play with skype – it’s free international telephony over your broadband. And it’s not one of those plug in skype only phones, this is a full featured DECT phone system that can route voip skype calls to handests.

Skype is no longer a geeky thing you have to do at your computer in hotel rooms to side-step huge call tarifs.

OK, so to put things into perspective: This is totally huge. This is convergence. This is a major problem for the telcos. My subconcious is really under pressure trying to process all the implications for this…

I’ve used Skype on and off over the last few years, and to be honest, it was hassle, making sure the microphone was plugged in etc… But after a bit of argie-bargie with the siemens software and dongle, it just works.

I’ve had a few calls from Switzerland and one from Spain so far…. lets see if I still love it in a few months?

Battlestar Aggregatica

Great article and nice site about one of the most important shows this decade and it’s also built on Drupal. Looks good and works well. Nice to know that there’s a whole band of people out there that know the significance of BSG and also compare it to the other classic, Babylon 5.

Must come back and look a bit more.

Must also come back and look at Drupal. They now have the Drupal Theme Garden enabling any implementation to look great. (Plone, please take note).