Thursday, March 27, 2008

Trying Out Zemanta

As most of you know I am enamored with new gadgets, and I'm trying out Zemanta, a new Firefox plugin.

Zamanta is supposed to add all sorts of new capabilities to my blogging by suggesting links and photos and tags. You can judge for yourself how well Zemanta works.

First, I'm preparing to give a talk at the Suburban Newspaper Association Interactive Media Conference. The topic is "Big Ideas in SEM/SEO for Small Newspapers," and I'm on the hunt for some big ideas.

My idea was to invite smart people who really understand SEM to contribute ideas for the newspapers - so please send me your suggestions for smart people. Naturally, I'm not trying to steal their ideas - I'll give them full credit, and also list them as resources.

I'm also totally enjoying spring time, though I haven't put my tomatoes in yet and I'm behind schedule for that. Last year I planted an heirloom tomato that was incredibly yummy, but naturally I forget what kind it was. This weekend I'll haunt the nursery.

Speaking of tomatoes, I'm reading a book, The $64 Tomato, by William Alexander. The writing is a little weak, but the topic strikes home with me...I'm forever discovering how high a price a simple garden can command in time, money, energy and physic grief. I love Alexander's descriptions of his gardening fantasies verses the reality of gardening.

Zemanta is suggesting WordPress as a tag - I have no idea why since this is on Blogger. It also offered me some very pretty pictures of tomatoes to add, but when I tried, the picture keeps going up by the SEM portion. It didn't provide a link to the site (www.64dollartomato.com) about the book mentioned above. Nor did it supply a link to the Suburban Newspaper Association (www.suburban-news.org). All the tags shown for this post were suggested by Zemanta, so I left them as a way to show off the program (tho it is easy enough to remove them).

Well, this is about as much experimenting I'm inclined to do at 8 pm after a long day at the computer but I think this little plug in is worth watching. What's your vote?


Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Small Business Summit - Looks Good

Just a quick post to give a heads up - the Microsoft Small Business Summit is being broadcast live March 24-27, 2008 (12pm EDT/9am PDT)...and it's free.

It's the kind of agenda for which you'd normally pay a hefty conference fee, plus get stuck eating hotel food. Though the best part of any conference is networking with others and I don't know how Microsoft will handle that. Anyway, it's about marketing and sales, productivity, technology, financial management, information on starting up, etc etc so check it out.

If you're thinking, "Someday soon I want to start a business," or even, "What should I be doing better" it looks like time well spent.