So I was doing my normal blog writing this week, and as I was proofreading through one of my blog posts I noticed that I had mistakenly used the word “no” in a place where “know” should have been used. I have to say that I may not be the greatest of spellers, but I have never had a hard time with using the correct forms of various like-sounding words such as two, too, to – or know, no – or pair, pear, pare. As I thought about why this may have happened, it dawned on me that my texting is beginning to influence my brains typing process.
When you text (or in some cases tweet), you are going to be shortening your typing strokes and hope that the recipient will understand the meaning based on the context. Many times, someone will “no” what I mean when I type the shorter version of the like-sounding word and therefore I choose to use the shorter version. Since you are limited on the amount of characters you can use in a given message, you use a vast array of abbreviations. Many times, it is just plain quicker to type the shorter version as well.
Is texting causing our content to suffer?
The one simple reminder that comes into place is be sure to proofread all of your emails, blogposts, and marketing materials. Sure you can likely get the same point across with using the incorrect shortened form of a word, but on a medium that is not limited by characters, you should always use the correct form of a word. Do not replace “you” with “u”.
Sure texting has become an extremely valuable medium for contacting individuals, but be sure to separate the quality of writing used in your texting life, with the quality of writing used in your professional life. Your business’ image is dependent on everything you do in life, every email you send, every blog post you write. Make sure that you market your image correctly with proper writing techniques.
Recently, a client came to us with a hard drive which they couldn’t get to function properly. The product was the seagate goflex desk external drive that they had purchased from Costco a few months prior. The hard drive had functioned properly, but it was formatted originally under NTFS file system and they were really trying to reformat the drive under Mac’s OS Extended format. But many different attempts weren’t allowing this to occur. They could only get a fat32 format running and this severely limited the value of the hard drive. Not only that, the file system was now completely erased and they had no way of at least getting back the NTFS file system they had previously had working correctly.
Research into this issue showed others had gone through this same type of hard drive difficulty with the seagate goflex hard drive.
After reading through these threads, we concluded that the seagate goflex desk external drive does not function well with the Mac’s Disk Utility that runs on OS Panther, Leopard, or Snow Leopard. We are not sure about the Lion OS. In order to properly format the drive entirely to function with a Mac OS Extended format, we had to start the Apple OS from our installation disc and use the disk utility function within that startup. For some reason, that disc utility correctly formatted the hard drive where the dick utility version on our Loepard OS was not able to do so. We are not certain if this is a Seagate issue or a Mac Disk Utility issue. Nevertheless, the hard drive was formatted correctly for Mac OS Extended and client is happily using the entire drive under this format.
Never take for granted the value of backing up your content. Get a nice size external hard drive that is trustworthy and make sure to have a good back-up routine setup. Recovering lost information from a failed hard drive is painful! While there are many advanced ways to recover “lost” information from a hard drive, proper hard drive recovery tactics are the best solution for ensuring all necessary documents, photos, and videos do not bite the dust forever.
A recent video from Google expert Matt Cutts suggests that Google is now using signals from social media such as twitter and facebook to help them figure out what sites should rank well in the search engines. This should not come as a surprise to anyone who cares about getting their site found on search engines. Basically, this is just a confirmation that the more involved you are on the Internet in general, the more you as an author and your company build reputation. The reputation you build as a whole ultimately will fill in how google and other search engines rank your content.
Does this mean that youtube videos are going to help my site get found in search engines?
The short answer is, yes. Ultimately, anything you do on the Internet can possibly effect you authority on the Internet. If you post a valuable video that many people want to share and talk about, the discussions ultimately will get pointed back to the author of the video. Whether you like it or not, google does its best to figure out what they should do with that data they get about you as the author and then ultimately add (or decrease) rankings accordingly.
This is just a reminder to think about what you post before you post it, on any content site. It is also a reminder that there is some significant value in creating quality social media avenues not only for short term traffic, but long term sustained traffic as well.
