Archive for category blog

Content- whose is it?

Thanks for hanging in there and not throwing tomatoes. I have been testing to see if Posterous has been able to “work around” difficult web posts- blip.fm songs, for example, and the elf yourself videos, which you create and then are available for download if you purchase them.

Elf me, Baby!

Elf me, Baby!

Posterous is smart and can sense a lot of things. When “disallowed” access to media- as in these cases, I assume- it does the best it can and at this point does not circumvent the “stops” that are in place.

I had seen reference to whether or not Posterous blurs “copyright standards” even further than they are. I use Posterous often to grab an interesting article that I see, and post it. You can tell on the site itself what part is quoted and what isn’t, and after the first few times, I took only enough to lead me back to the article and show up in Posterous search.

You could even tell which was which on most of the themes that I experimented with on WordPress. Some even put big honking quotation marks around the “quoted text”- and that was fine with me. I am not out to steal someone else’s ideas- only “build off of them” and “learn.”

But the line is blurry. When my Posterous clips are “shot over” to Facebook, they are stripped of a lot of the “identifiers” th at let you know when one person’s quotes leave off and my thoughts begin. Even sometimes when I click the “share” button for ordinary events I want to pass on from other friends you can’t discern that “it really isn’t my post.” I have to go back in and make an attribution note.

Likely, if it is posted on the ‘net, someone is hoping the content goes viral. We all want to be the next Shay Carl or Robert Scoble- well, I would have to be a hell of a lot smarter to be Scoble, but you “catch my drift.” And online, that is possible.

Diane believes that she was a Zagat Guide in a past life

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Using WordPress to Build Websites Instead of Blogs | I’d Rather Be Writing - excerpt from Tom Johnson

Using WordPress to Build Websites Instead of Blogs

May 5th, 2008 | Posted in WordPress 28 Comments »

Announcement: Hey, check out …. –>

One of the things I like about WordPress is its versatility. WordPress isn’t just blogging software. With the right theme, you can build a website that doesn’t resemble a blog at all. Essentially, writers who become familiar with WordPress become empowered as web designers as well.

A few weeks ago, I made a website for a client who was launching a green building business (see or click the image below).

It’s a predesigned theme that I purchased from ithemes.com, customized a bit and configured. I also wrote the content. I like WordPress because you don’t have to start from scratch with the theme design. If you get a system down and are familiar with the theme you’re implementing, you can create a professional site fairly quickly.”

Gotta love WordPress. Read the rest of Tom Johnson’s post for ideas, but think: what could you add to this blog to make it more of a “website”?

There is much more than blog functionality in the design, just like there is much more than blog functionality designed into Posterous, but in a different way. You can have pages in addition to the blog part of a WordPress site, and these pages can be as simple as an “About Me” to as intricate as a contact form or an MLS property search.

Speaking of MLS searches: our MLS provides an embeddable home search function for free (well, not in addition to the MLS fee), so if you self-host you can structure yourself a decent site for next to nothing.

Posted via web from heyamaretto’s posterous

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The many faces of WordPress

This is what I think. If you are in business, you need a blog- just like you used to need a static site. A WordPress blog is flexible enough to be used in place of a static website. For example, this was tweeted at the National Association of Realtors®’ Conference and Expo:

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WordPress

originally from my Active Rain blog

One bite

at a time…

An elephant is impossible to eat, isn’t it? Not if you do it one bite at a time.

I have been reading post after post lately about social media. It is definitely the elephant in the room. Some people love it, some people hate it, and some people just plain don’t get it.

But here is the deal: it can be an effective tool in your arsenal. It doesn’t need to be the ONLY tool, but it might be smart to look at your overall approach, weed out the 2 or 3 methods of farming that you use now that don’t work that well, and add in a couple of social media tools. From all appearances, it is going to be the way you have to go eventually, anyway.

How quickly you need to adapt depends on the demographic of your client base, most likely. You will have clients who don’t have an email address, and of course social media will not be a way to touch base with these people.

First bite. Have a static website? Why not replace it with a WordPress blog? You can customize them until the cows come home. Here’s one that I put together as part of a package that we made for Bill Bell of Gotcha Covered! in Delaware:

This is remarkably similar to his original static website (well, okay. I am partial to it and think it looks a little better). The big difference is that he himself can embed video and change the content by logging in anytime he wants. And the site benefits from the “Google juice” that frequently updated content brings.

There are navigation tabs that lead to information about the company- information that he wishes to have available all of the time that won’t be buried in blog posts.

Check it out here.

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