Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

So I’ve (finally) been following a meme (define) run through the blogosphere - the ‘Five Things’ meme that’s (apparently) become so passe that now we have people blogging ‘Five Things We Don’t Know’ about dogs… and some people have been tagged so many times, they’re asking readers to submit questions they’ll answer - although most questions were so unbelievable I’m grateful for the relative anonymity of my readers’ curiousity…

What if there’s a meme and no one tags you? 

Well, if you’re like me, you just write about it anyway, and thank the person responsible for the first instance of your discovery. (Thanks Tamera!)

How did I find out about this meme?  Tamera commented on one of my posts.  And, as I’ve told people in every presentation I’ve ever made about blogging, it’s human nature to wonder who took the time to comment? 

So I followed the link in her comment.  I’m pretty sure she came to me through my friend Michael O’Connor-Clarke, being that she’s in PR and from Toronto, two things they have in common. 

Regardless, I’ve made a new connection, and now I know things about people in the world that just perhaps, I didn’t want to know. There are all sorts of reasons you just don’t need to tell everything about yourself.

 

Have you ever tried to move from one web site to the other and (unknowingly) been directed to a secure site that’s normally hidden?  It happened to my love the other day, and she was surprised, wondering what the heck?? 

You see, she’s used to typing in domain names, and Firefox on the Mac is pretty cool, because it will simply highlight and select the portion between the http://www. [and the] .com when you double click on a URL and want to type in a new domain address.  Which is brilliant unless you pay no attention to what’s before the //. 

Pay attention to everything on the line as you move around the web, with all the “modern conveniences” built into browsers and search engines. 

As I’ve noted before, what a difference an ’s’ makes. It makes me very aware of how much I take for granted as I negotiate the online world. 

The Oscars…  We’ve always loved them…  and it’s such a joy to watch them.  This year is especially good, with Ellen hosting and the international group of nominees and winners…

One of our favorite themes of the moment is that the Oscar is going green. Seeing Leonardo De Caprio with Al Gore - what a treat! An Inconvenient Truth just won the best documentary film.  Inspirational… so here’s a segue…

We’ve tried to do our part by using public transportation and ridding our home of all cleaning products that are anything but organic and sustainable.  

What a big difference changing cleaning products has made.  We helped my love’s mom move recently, and exposure to our old cleaning products made us both have headaches. 

It was quite stunning - after months in a home without them - we were each overcome by the noxious chemicals we used to use every day.

In honor of this precious earth and your family’s health, consider trying organic cleaning products:  Anything by Ecover - made by natural plants and minerals that are quickly biodegradable, or by Seventh Generation. If every househod in the US replaced just one bottle of petroleum-based dishwashing liquid with a vegetable-based product like that from seventh generation, we’d save 81,000 barrels of oil.  That’s enough to warm 4600 homes for one year. 

Cheers…

I love Tiny URL – it’s great for taking hellaciously long URLs and making them (you guessed it, tiny).  When would you use that? 

When you’re sending a web page from a site to someone else via email, for example.  How many times have you done that and they’ve said, “I can’t see the page!”  Because it’s so long it ‘wraps’ in your email and consequently loses the entire link. 

For example, you’ve found a link to Barak Obama’s book on Amazon that you want to show someone else.  Amazon has a huge database of information and throws together information on the fly.  This often results in URLs that are long strings of numbers, and you can’t ever be sure it’ll arrive at your friend’s email destination as a clickable link:

Tiny URL will transform this 99 character URL:
http://www.amazon.com/Dreams-My-Father-Story-Inheritance/dp/1400082773/ref=xarw/103-9122416-2231013

To this:  http://tinyurl.com/246lmh 

Brilliant!  And it’s free!

Hey, kids!  Check out Link Harvester if you want to see who’s linking to your web site. 

It’s a piece of cake, just type in the web address for the site for which you’re trying to discover inbound links. It’s a freeware product by the guy who wrote the SEO book that I just bought. 

I’ll continue to post treats that I learn here.  Thanks, Aaron, for the nugget.