Hal's Blog

Requiring Sign-up to Post Comments

Hal Goodtree - Web 2.0 for Business (Goodtree & Co., Inc.) — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 13:09:27 -0500

Super-Realtor® Mike Jaquish brought up an interesting question in his blog recently:

Is it a good practice to require visitors to your blog to register before posting comments?

Mike (and most commenters) said No, it's not a good idea. They're right.

In a nutshell, requiring sign-up minimizes the number of comments you will ever receive. And that depresses your interaction with your audience (the whole point of social media).

WHAT ABOUT SPAM

The reason people consider requiring registration is to cut down on the spam. One popular blog post and you are sure to innundated with comments advertising Viagra.

So what's a blogger to do?

AKISMET & CAPTCHA

Most blogs accept plugins that can catch the spam before it hits your comment queue.

1. Akismet sniffs for spam - too many links, certain unmentionable keywords and known spammer domains. Offending comments are segregated to directory where you can save, review or delete them en masse. Akismet has plugins for more than 20 blogs and applications including Joomla, Serendipity and Geeklog.

Facts:

89% of all comments are spam

Just today, Akismet has caught over 9 million spam comments

Historically, Akismet has caught over 6.4 billion spam comments

2. Captcha are the funny looking letters that you have to type to post a comment. The robots that distribute spam can't read Captcha.

SUMMARY

Leave your blog open to commenters. But take precautions to protect yourself.

Broken Link Checker

Hal Goodtree - Web 2.0 for Business (Goodtree & Co., Inc.) — Mon, 19 May 2008 13:31:00 -0500

Now and then, it’s good to check if all the links on your site are functioning. Here’s a handy online tool to do just that.

Add-me.com, a site devoted to search and web tools, has a free online link checker. Just enter the url of your home page and Broken Link Checker delivers a report of active and broken links.

The amount of time the tool takes to process your site depends upon the size of your site. For a site of reasonably modest proportions (50 pages or less), the tool might take 20-30 seconds.

You can also try the W3C link checker, but it’s a little more geeky

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Hal Goodtree writes about Web 2.0 for Business here.

What's a Landing Page?

Hal Goodtree - Web 2.0 for Business (Goodtree & Co., Inc.) — Wed, 14 May 2008 12:06:50 -0500

Landing pages are mini-sites built around a specific search keyword or CPC campaign.

Here’s how a landing page works: let’s say you have a potentially lucrative niche product or service. You create a Google AdWords campaign to address your audience. Then you design a web page to turn your audience into buyers.

The following example is about healthcare but it applies equally well to real estate:

Southern Vascular Institute in Greenville, SC has a niche service they’d like to promote - they can treat uterine fibroids without traditional surgery.

Treatment of fibroids is a great example of a niche category. It’s easy to target with keywords and by geography.

We set up the AdWords campaign, driving traffic to the Institute’s general website. The traffic was significant enough that the practice decided it worth making a landing page specifically targeted to explain their minimally-invasive treatment of uterine fibroids.

We built a page and re-directed the traffic. Here’s one of our ads:

See the landing page for yourself at CarolinaFibroidDoctors.

We've built landing pages for realty clients - contact us if you'd like more info.

LED Lighting for Video

Hal Goodtree - Web 2.0 for Business (Goodtree & Co., Inc.) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 08:55:07 -0500

What generates 500 watts of light but only draws 40 from an household outlet?

The Complete History of Lighting (Abbreviated)

Back in the day, “hot” lights were the norm. Incandescent, HMI, tungsten - they could light up a room like the sun. Generate about as much heat, too.

Smaller hot lights could be plugged into the wall, but larger instruments need special outlets. On location, that meant an electrician and tying into the power box.

Then, fluorescent lights for film and video came along. Banks of tubes started popping up on locations everywhere - lightweight, low power draw from any household outlet and soft, even illumination.

But a new light is dispelling the darkness. It’s LED lighting for film, video & photography.

The Future of Lighting?

FloLight in Campbell, California has introduced the LED 500. This 14×8x3 package has 500 tiny LEDs and generates 500 watts of illumination while drawing only 40 watts from the wall.

For versatility, the output is switchable in steps down to 25% of total wattage. The unit weighs only 5 pounds (!) and can be mounted horizontally or vertically.

Two interesting facts about LED lights:

Very rugged compared to hot or fluorescent lights
Narrow beam angle - that is, more of the light is pointed forward. This gives the LED500 a usable range from 5 to 15 feet. Fluorescent lights especially fall off in brightness dramatically as you move the subject away from the source.

At less than $500 (with 50,000 hours of projected life for the LEDs), the FloLight LED500 seems perfect for web video, podcasting and vlogs.

We’ll see if we can get one and test it out

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Goodtree & Company specializes in Web 2.0 for Business including websites, web video, blogs, SEO and more. Way more. Visit us.

The Best Camera for Video Blogging

Hal Goodtree - Web 2.0 for Business (Goodtree & Co., Inc.) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:32:47 -0500

We recently needed a new camera for video blogging. Thought we’d share the results of our research.

The first thing to consider is features – what do you need for video blogging and what’s extraneous?

FEATURES

From our point of view, two features are paramount:

Digital connectivity
Microphone Input

By digital connectivity, we mean the ability to connect the camera directly to your computer. Generally speaking, Firewire or USB 2.0 are the standards. These come in a variety of flavors (4 pin to 6 pin for example) but all are pretty much equally effective. The key here is to make sure your computer can handle the output from the camera. USB 1.1 is too slow.

Microphone input is the other key feature. Most cameras come equipped with an integrated microphone, but, for our money, this feature leaves a lot to be desired. The camera-mounted mic picks up too much ambient noise. It can also pick up the noise of the camera itself including the sound of a tape drive or the mechanical noise of zooming. Some mics even pick up the sound of your hand on the camera.

A few cameras have an accessory shoe, but we prefer a standard audio jack (usually a miniplug). The accessory shoe limits your options and adds cost.

FORMATS

As has been true since the dawn of video cameras, a bewildering array of formats exist in the marketplace. Here’s a condensed run down of formats on the market that make sense for web video:

Mini DVD
High-Def
Mini DV

MINI DVD

Mini-DVD records picture and sound on small format DVDs. The main advantage of this format is that you pop the DVD out of the camera and stick it in your computer. Voila! All your footage is instantly available and can be accessed randomly. But mini DVD has three disadvantages in our opinion:

Pretty short run-time in high quality mode, sometimes as little as 20 or 30 minutes.
The quality is the worst of the three camera types under consideration (about as bad as VHS)
DVDs have questionable longevity. We’ve experienced a flaking off of the emulsion on DVDs in as little as six months. Scratches and fingerprints also compromise the discs. Put it this way – how many bad disks have you gotten from Netflix?

Old skool Hi-8 cameras and Neolithic VHS-C cameras still exist in the marketplace, but those won’t connect directly to your computer. You’ll need a digitzer (sometimes called an Analog-to-Digital converter). Once again, we’re talking additional expense and hassle, so these formats aren’t ideal for video blogging.

HIGH DEFINITION

No doubt, these cameras are great. Some record on tape, others directly to a hard drive. In the high-def arena, you’ll find a dizzying assortment of recording formats including different aspect ratios (like 16:9) and capture modes (780i and 1080i). Picture and sound quality are generally stellar, but we found two drawbacks for video blogging:

HIGH COST – these new cameras are also the most costly on the market. Expect to spend at least $1000 on a high-def camera.
OVERKILL – for video blogging, you’ll be shrinking the picture down to a smallish window (320 x 240 or smaller), so all that great picture info is really a waste.

MINI-DV

MiniDV is a tape format. It captures standard definition (NTSC) on inexpensive tapes which are slightly smaller than a credit card (but wider of course). This is our favorite format for video blogging. Here’s why:

CHEAP – Mini DV cameras start around $300
ARCHIVAL – MiniDV tapes last a long time. When properly stored, the media should be fine well into the next decade of longer.
SMALL – Our new miniDV camera is slightly larger than a pack of cigarettes.
LONG RECORDING TIME – miniDV tapes come in lengths of up to two hours.

WHICH CAMERA TO BUY

Unfortunately, most manufacturers have been getting rid of the audio-in jack on consumer cameras in favor of flashy features no one really wants. The only cameras still sporting a mic-in jack are made by Canon.

Fortunately, Canon has good lenses, solid construction and long experience in the field. We ended up buying a ZR-800.

OTHER CONSIDERATIONS

BUY A LIGHT – the low light performance of most consumer cameras (including ours) leaves something to be desired. We suggest buying an inexpensive light on a stand that plugs into a standard wall socket. Camera-mounted lights make an ugly picture, so place your light above the subject and about 45 degrees off access for a nice shot. Soften up the light source with an umbrella or diffusion material. Just remember to use something heat resistant.

MICROPHONE – for interviews, we recommend a lavalier. That’s the little mic that clips to a necktie or blouse. One with a hard wire can be had for about $100. A wireless system costs about twice as much.

Happy video blogging!

Check Your Website's SEO Score

Hal Goodtree - Web 2.0 for Business (Goodtree & Co., Inc.) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 10:21:14 -0500

We love this handy online tool from SEO Workers for scoring search engine optimization on your website.

It's easy - just plug in the url (web address) of your site, answer the silly question to prove you are a human and click on submit. In the blink of an eye, the SEO Analyzer will show you a score for your page. Here's what it looks like (your results may vary):

Try it for yourself with one of your web pages: SEO Analyzer.

4 Top Rules for Blog Headlines

Hal Goodtree - Web 2.0 for Business (Goodtree & Co., Inc.) — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 14:16:19 -0500

Every post needs to start with a catchy headline. More than anything else, a headline determines whether or not a viewer will read your post.

Here are the Top 4 Rules for writing blog headlines:

1. Be clear (not cute or obscure)
Generally, we’re talking about a noun, in this case “headlines.” An example of a far weaker headline would be “Top 4 Ingredients in My Secret Sauce.”
2. Use a question
Every headline can’t employ every rhetorical device, but a viable option in this case might have been “Want to Write Better Headlines?”
3. Numbers create interest
Tried and true attention-getter. Works in email subject lines, direct mail and good old television advertising, as in “99 44/100% Pure” for Ivory Soap.
4. Keep it brief - 50 characters or less including spaces

Video Testimonials for Julie Roland, NC Realtor

Hal Goodtree - Web 2.0 for Business (Goodtree & Co., Inc.) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 11:20:51 -0500

Many thanks to Julie Roland, Pittsboro NC Realtor® at RWCP, for letting us produce this video for her website.

And thanks as well to Eleanor Thorne for acquainting us with ActiveRain :)