We have reached a new low, or have we?

On my other blog, I am getting spam comments a lot, probably because of the content, I talk about shopping and post links to lots of online shopping opportunities.

Most of the comments are obviously crap, and most don’t get through the spam filter.  However, this is a little something different.

Yay for me! Wow, someone thinks that search engines should find my post about buying a Bonsai tree and make it the top search result for related searches!

Oh, wait.

So, maybe not so much.

Chris Brogan talked about a similar situation, but his spammer left a comment relevant to the post.  What is better?  Since I don’t have nearly as many readers as Chris, maybe this person felt like flattery was the way to go, in terms of “what can I do to get through the filter and then NOT get manually flagged as spam?”

Too bad for you, “study abroad scholarships,” I think enough of my content that I will not be keeping your spammery around.

I was introduced to using Polyvore today and it is ridiculously fun.  I created this outfit based on the idea of spending a fabulous spring day enjoying NYC and using that baby blue camera.

This is one in a series of posts pulled from Chris Brogan’s “100 blog topics I hope YOU write.” (#9)

Travel is one of the things that inspire blog posts. Photo credit, uricacid.

I will create yet another list to address the topic of “how I find blogging ideas.” 

• Travel
• Photography
• Friends
• Family
• My job
• The Internet and all of the wonderful tools that we have access to
• The people I interact with online
• Blogs I read, including specific things such as the list of blog topics that I’ve been working on lately
• The grocery store
• Television
• Magazines
• So much more.

What inspires your blog posts?  Do you have any one thing that generates more ideas than anything else?

They already "pay" what they think our content is worth.

I read this post by Cory Doctorow this morning on BoingBoing, called “How are you coping with collapse anxiety?” It features a photo of a sign outside of a cafe that read “Pay us what you think our food is worth.”

Immediately it occurred to me that this is what bloggers and other creators of free content are already doing.  Pay us what you think our CONTENT is worth, pay us with traffic, pay us with an increase in Whuffie. Pay us with great comments that spark further conversations.

Of course these things do not come quickly (most of the time) or without quite a bit of work and perseverence.  Chris Brogan has mentioned a few times that it took a while before his blog really caught on and turned into the comment party that it is nowadays.

Are you getting “paid” what your content is worth? What currency is important to you?

Photo credit, gruntzooki

The question is…who should I write about? I’m taking suggestions.

Hi everyone.

I haven’t written in some time. 

I don’t like resolutions since I haven’t really ever stuck to one.  I am working to change the way I do things online, starting with this morning’s overhaul of my Google Reader and iGoogle Homepage.

I would like to aim for 15-20 blog posts per month.  I don’t think that daily is going to happen, but I will certainly try. 

I also am working on a plan to improve my connectivity.  Yes, I’m all set up at home and at the office, I post lots to Facebook and Twitter from my cell, but I need to have more connectivity to keep up with everything.  I went on a road trip from December 19-29, and while we had our new netbook along, I could only connect in the hotel and my husband and I can’t both use that netbook at the same time, and if he gets to the computer first, I’m ready to sleep by the time he is done.  My parents house doesn’t have wireless and their computer isn’t my computer and I got the netbook so that I wouldn’t have to use other people’s computers.

To resolve this a bit, I think I will need to upgrade my phone to something with a bit more going on.  I would love recommendations on this from anyone willing.  I have not heard good things about the Blackberry Storm and the data plan is more than I’m willing to spend.  I could go Blackberry Curve, but I really am in the dark because I wasn’t interested in my phone being so involved in the past.  However, I don’t think I can do all that I want to do without having my phone work with me as well.

I want to keep sharing photos, even though I’m pretty active on Flickr, I love sharing here as well.  I want to talk more about what I don’t know and what I’m doing to learn. 

I turn 30 this year, it’s really dawning on me although I would like to think that age doesn’t matter.  It apparently does, and I’m hoping that this helps to motivate me to do all of these things this year.

Happy 2009.  See you soon!

I would love to work with Gizmoz to create a video that my audience would love to be a part of, and let them come to my site to access it. I’m thinking it would be a bit more appropriate than my surfing video here.

Presentations I saw on day 3:

• Morning keynotes (see the video of Arianna Huffington and Tim O’Reilly below, other keynote videos available on the Web 2.0 Expo website)
• Micro-Interactions: How Brands Can Influence Consumer Behavior in a 2.0 World with David Armano of Critical Mass
• What Would Google Do? How Media Must Revolutionize Their Thinking with Jeff Jarvis of BuzzMachine.com, as well as John Byrne and Steve Adler of BusinessWeek
• Enhancing Engagement and User Experience Beyond the TV Screen: Some Lessons Learned from a Transition to Web 2.0 with Tony Carbone of VH1 Digital
• Agency 2.0 with Romi Mahajan of Ascentium, Pete Stein of Avenue A/Razorfish, Susan Credle of BBDO, David Thorpe of Ogilvy, and Rick Webb of The Barbarian Group

The keynotes were all enjoyable.  Not as much targeted information and also presented in the dark so note-taking wasn’t happening.  I’m glad the videos are available though to be watched again.  I really enjoyed the presentation on Micro-Interactions with David Armano (slides are available here).  It has me thinking about every instance where my websites are interacting with my users.  An example that really struck me was that each time you receive a new Netflix mailer, it’s a positive interaction between Netflix and me. He talked about audience engagement, how can we DIRECTly interact with our audience, reach out to them and have them respond back.  You don’t know who the influencers are or will be, so everyone gets “the Disney treatment.” I love that, because it’s something you totally understand, if you’ve experienced it. This is something I need to really consider in further site development, we could be communicating so much more with the users.

The next presentation I saw was “What Would Google Do? How Media Must Revolutionize Their Thinking” with Jeff Jarvis, who review the BusinessWeek.com BusinessEdge program with John Byrne and Steve Adler of BusinessWeek (slides are available here).  Jeff used the word “googly” and I missed it in a previous presentation and now I am hooked.  I want everything in life to be Googly, because I associate it with wonderful things. Anyway, the idea was that BusinessWeek has launched BusinessEdge on their site, a cross of social interaction and news content, people who join create profiles and share what it is that is interesting to them.  The journalists that are contributing to BusinessWeek are also on the site and available to interact with users.  The discussion was mostly related to bringing more features to the BusinessEdge feature to make it even more user-friendly and even more Googly by letting users post about their BusinessEdge activity on their blog, LinkedIn profile, etc.

After a final trip to the exhibit hall, I came back to sessions for “Enhancing Engagement and User Experience Beyond the TV Screen: Some Lessons Learned from a Transition to Web 2.0″ with Tony Carbone of VH1 Digital.  The big thing that I took from his presentation was a lot regarding tie-ins.  VH1 is all about tie-ins, there are constant reminders while you are watching the network to go online for more content, games, etc.  VH1 also launched Scandalist, their own version of a celebrity gossip and video site, which posts up to 30 times a day.  They tweet all major headlines and content is syndicated across all MTV Networks properties.  They offer content to the visitor that they would not otherwise see on TV.  They also focus on improved reaction time, embracing things quickly so that the audience knows that they are listening.  This sounded to me like what Gary Vaynerchuk said in his keynote, that listening to your audience is great but giving a shit about what they say is so much better.  How many times do we ask them to take a survey and then sit on results for 3 months before anything happens?

My last session was “Agency 2.0″ with Romi Mahajan of Ascentium, Pete Stein of Avenue A/Razorfish, Susan Credle of BBDO, David Thorpe of Ogilvy, and Rick Webb of The Barbarian Group.  I’m not part of an agency but found the discussion between the group to be enlightening about their arena.  A lot of agencies in recent years have been all about going digital, and not paying attention to the other aspects of advertising.  Unfortunately I don’t remember who said this, but I loved this: “Agency needs to re-invent themselves so that they aren’t made useless by the tech-savvy person at the client company who knows twitter and LinkedIn.”  This is a big as I see more and more people embracing their role as the masters of their own online destiny.  In addition, a discussion was had about risk-taking, that clients might be drawn in by an ambitious plan that might fail, and if it does, will take the agency down as well.  This is likely to appeal to the client as they will understand the idea of taking a chance.

This took forever, I think I need to keep blog posts short because this has been daunting.  I have many more notes from these sessions but wanted to post about some of the major stuff that stuck with me.

Now I will continue to keep posting about everyday stuff and won’t cover any more live events until itec New Jersey in December.

On Wednesday afternoon, I participated in a team status meeting where I heard that while multiple documents requesting information had been sent to a few of our “experts,” that they were unresponsive. I immediately thought of how to make it more fun, like a game, and suggested that the questions they were asking be entered into a survey program, with a link sent to the expert instead of an attachment. On Thursday, emails went out to 3-4 of these experts with links to surveys, and after weeks of no responses, we received multiple responses in just one day.

I will be thinking a lot in the coming days about where else I can use survey software to engage not only my audience, but the experts I’m using to develop content for that audience. The idea of “the quest” has really worked here and I’m excited to take it out for another spin.