Climate Change: Hindsight and Forward Thinking

In pictures: How the world is changing
This takes you through pictures varying from mountains to forests and the effects of climate change. It's hard to believe anyone could second guess what's happening in the world after seeing these pictures.

Hindsight:
What if the U.S. had never been invaded and never advanced? If Native Americans just kept living their lives the way they did, what kind of impact would the U.S. have had on climate change?

Foward Thinking:
Earth is a habitable planet because the presence of life is kept by hydrogen and vice versa. What if Earth became inhabitable? Would we really consider moving to Mars and is it possible? Think about it. We could send plants, animals and maybe humans to Mars trip after trip and possibly make Mars a habitable planet. What a mind trip.

Facebook: a free for all.

I remember when people needed to have a credible college e-mail to join Facebook. Those were the good old days without "I love the Jonas brothers" bumperstickers and a suggestion to "add your aunt".

Which brings me to my next point:
All in the Facebook family: older generations join social networks

"The trend is still relatively confined. Only about 7 percent of people
older than 65 have online social-networking profiles, according to research from
the Pew Internet & American Life Project. But Facebook's
popularity is growing most quickly among women older than 55, according to a
site called Inside Facebook, which tracks Facebook's growth."

I get it. I get it. It's an easy way for companies to look at your profile and older employees to keep up with the times, aunts to keep up with neice's children and moms to see what their kids are up to. But I really don't want to add my mom to Facebook.

Facebook is an online scrapbook of your life, and I have deleted 3/4 of my "college life scrapbook" because of potential employers when I already have 3 other professional sites they can look at. How many online sites can I possibly keep track of?

I know Facebook can't be confined to the college life. But hearing my 53-year-old aunt say, "Well my sister told me to just go on Facebook to look at my nephew's baby pictures," makes me laugh a little.

Gay Marriage - Better late than never.

In my adventure with Apture, I have decided to write about something more important to me... gay marriage being legalized in Iowa (and Vermont).

I only focus on Iowa because it was such a shock when my friend called and told me it was a real possibility. Iowa. Iowa?! It's so close to home!

From "Iowa Supreme Court legalizes gay marriage" (AP) on msnbc.com:
"We are firmly convinced the exclusion of gay and lesbian people from the institution of civil marriage does not substantially further any important governmental objective," the Supreme Court wrote. Iowa lawmakers have "excluded a historically disfavored class of persons from a supremely important civil institution without a constitutionally sufficient justification." To issue any other decision, the justices said, "would be an abdication of our constitutional duty."

I hope people are finally starting to get this because, after writing papers and articles on the subject from both sides, I have yet to see a good argument against same-sex marriage.

Come on Minnesota!

Apture!

What a better way to start playing around with Apture than with the Beatles? This is actually pretty cool and doesn't take long to download.

Free Royalty-Free Music?

I have been trying to find free royalty-free music but am having a hard time. The sites in the packet are hard to navigate and have mostly short sound bites.
If anyone has any good sites, let me know!

iMovie audio

I am really excited to try my hand at the iMovie audio/video making. I think having an expert in class really helped and so did the hands-on experience. I am hoping to create a really good photo gallery video with audio. After seeing the slideshow of videos in class, it made me realize that still photos can have as much of or an even bigger effect as video. It will be interesting to see how it all comes together and if I can use iMovie.

30 SEO Tips for Newspaper and Magazine Publishers

I was surprised to see that the first tip was to forget about keywords. I thought we spent so much time talking about putting keywords in the first 100 words. But this article is saying to forget them.

I like that it mentioned opening your site. This means not having to register. The minute a site asks me to fill in information, I try to find a different site with the same information. Don't have a separate archive is more good advice. There have been many times when I have wanted to find old articles and can't even find an archives page.

This article talks about structure. It mentions "siloing", which means having nice categories and a hub page. It mentions looking at what keywods generate the most traffic. I thought we were forgetting about keywords. It seems simple but the article mentions naming headlines and links under names that actually have to do with the articles. Many websites try to be cute and use mysterious titles.
This article made me think of a website that is not too great, my hometown's. It's a lot of ads everywhere and three columns for everything. http://www.gomarshall.net/

I like the idea of linking back to the home page consistently. Using the main URL is best because most people are going to link that main page on their website.

This article mentions using RSS feeds and one reason is plagiarizing. The RSS feeds links back to your site so plagiarizing most likely can't happen. I hadn't thought about that. Another thing I didn't think about was rewarding people for linking to your site. This article mentions creating a contest or offer. People always want to get something for doing something. So getting something for linking is easy.

This article also specifically mentions creating a Google site map. This is interesting to me because being mentioned specifically in 30 SEO Tips must mean you're doing pretty well.