Making Lemonade from Life's Lemons

Darren Rowse runs a great site where he talks about how to make money blogging called ProBlogger. One of the many topics he discusses regularly is driving traffic to your blog, and search engine rankings are one part of that topic. Google has always been pretty close-mouthed about how they rank sites, and occasionally they change their algorithm. Apparently, they have made some changes this week to how blogs are ranked, and ProBlogger has suffered a drop in rankings. But by blogging about the change, Darren Rowse has turned a negative into a real positive. He talks in his post about how some very positive things have come of this experience, and what he's learned about it. Read it to find out why he says Don't get depressed, get motivated. Great stuff!

Choosing Passive Voice over Active Voice

What are passive and active voice?
Active voice: I am writing a blog entry.
Passive voice: This blog entry is being written by me.
Generally, active voice is easier for readers to parse and understand. However, there are some times when the passive voice is useful. Jakob Nielsen runs a great site on web usability at useit.com and he has an article this week describing how active voice can obscure the meaning of web page in a search engine listing. His example is of an article summary where his sentence starts "Yahoo finance follows all 13 design guidelines..." His studies show search engine listing are scanned by users, and sometimes only the first several words are read. So the listing has more impact when it starts "13 design guidelines are all followed by Yahoo Finance..." - read the article for a more detailed description of how using passive voice allows you to put key ideas at the beginning of headings and lead sentences.

Why the heck do we curse?

What is the purpose of using a curse word? Is it to get attention? Is it to create an emphasis that politer words cannot match? Here's a fascinating article on cursing. It talks about the why curse words don't quite work the same way syntactically as other words - "swat the stupid cat" works just as well as "swat the cat, which is stupid" but "swat the f***g cat" doesn't work as "swat the cat which is f***g." It talks about the role of religion in the evolution of curse words. It talks about the various reasons one might have for swearing. And it discusses how the brain reacts to swear words. But take a few minutes and read the darned thing yourself.

Oscar Wilde meets the Blogosphere

Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said The only worse thing than being talked about is not being talked about. I wonder if he would have made that claim if he had lived in a world with blogs. With blogs, there is such a thing as bad publicity. See, for example, this article about how Facebook has kicked off users for undisclosed violations of policy. Now, I don't know whether the claims in this blog post are true. What I do know is that now anyone with a complaint can find a forum for it. Is it worth the time for Facebook to track down all these complaints and address them? I found this one by reading another blog that I read because the content is interesting and eclectic, not because I was looking for content on Facebook specifically.

Do you disclose a freebie?

Here's an interesting post from a blogger who writes for travel sites, discussing how one might approach writing about a travel experience that was provided on a promotional basis. She suggests some guidelines to use while writing about a travel junket, but the most important point she makes is that you need to be honest with your readers. If you got a free night in a hotel, especially if the hotel staff knew you were a travel writer, that might make your experience different from a paying guest's. Thinking about how to communicate ethically is important for any writer.

Using a Dead Language to Describe Modern Life

Latin is widely considered a dead language. Yet, its supporters are alive and well. There is a Latin version of Wikipedia, written by students and scholars of Latin. But how do you use a dead language to talk about modern culture? This fascinating article from the Wall Street Journal talks about how to use a dead language to describe our thoroughly modern world. What would the Latin word for computer be? Read the article and found out about the debate.