TV Sucks Pt. 2
Published July 28th, 2009 | 
Just found out that one of my favorite shows, Primieval, has been cancelled. I was already unhappy that, Kings, a new show I’d just started getting into wasn’t coming back for a new season. It’s bad enough that there’s practically nothing else on tv nowadays except reality show dreck and infotainment news talk shows without those idiot programming executives taking off the air the handful of scripted shows that can hold my attention for any length of time.
Let’s face it: variety may be the spice of life, but whether you have 50 channels or 500, it’s virtually impossible to find anything to watch. If you have cable, you’re paying an arm, a leg, and your left nut for a few channels that show the same shows and movies over and over again. I don’t imagine Direct TV is really so much better.
A Direct TV System may ultimately be cheaper than cable but, is Direct TV Service really so much better than cable? It’s like that old Bruce Springsteen song: “57 channels and nothin’ on”. Seriously, there’s a reason why more and more people are turning to the Internet for entertainment — it’s because both commercial and subscriber television is “programmed” entertainment and the programmers aren’t the least bit interested in what most people want to watch.
Searching for Mr. Goodword
Published July 26th, 2009 | All writers care about words. Okay, maybe not all writers, but all writers should care about words. One of my former professors used to say that all good writers spend their lives searching for the “golden paragraph” — that this pursuit is the pathway to greatness. Maybe so, but that prof was referring to literary writing and this was over 20 years ago — long before the Internet. As such, I doubt he could imagine SEO writing as a path to greatness.
Still, if you write content for the Internet, SEO writing is a part of your vocabulary. For most bloggers, SEO, or Search Engine Optimization is a secondary concern. Most of us are first and foremost interested in writing about a certain topic, covering it as thoroughly and clearly as possible. SEO writers — those who write articles for the sole purpose of achieving a higher page rank for a website, are mostly interested in keyword density and placement. The quality, depth, a clarity of subject is a secondary concern — unless, of course, you’re interested in being a “good” SEO writer. Because the key is the word “writer”. A writer is interested in the writing; a writer is interested in words.
Let’s say you have to write an SEO article for the keywords Oakland motorcycle accident lawyer, or Torrance Criminal Attorney. Of course, the accepted wisdom of good writing would dictate that one not use these exact keywords in a sentence because it would not appear natural to website visitors. What you might do is use this phrase in the title and break the phrase down into smaller pieces, related keywords and synonyms. The default keyword matching for most search engines is to use the broadest keyword matching possible so our phrases could be broken down like this:
Oakland
Motorcycle
accident
lawyer
accident lawyers
Oakland lawyers
Oakland accident lawyers
Oakland litigators
motorcycle accidents
torrence criminal law
torrence lawyers criminal
torrence criminal lawyers
Using any combination of these keywords, placing them in your article judisciously, with a keyword density of no less than 2% and no more than 5%, you can write something that is informative, grammatical, stylistically pleasing, clear and easy to read while still getting the most mileage out of a search engine’s algorithm.
Commercial Furniture
Published July 26th, 2009 | In my email this morning, a piece of spam with the subject header: “GREAT DEALS ON COMMERCIAL FURNITURE!!!” Umm . . . yeah. Unless you make your own furniture in your own workshop for your own personal use, isn’t all furniture commercial furniture?
I was confused by this as the phrase channeled my inner George Carlin and made my asshole tingle, so I emailed a friend who’s even more obsessed over this kind of thing than I am and asked him the difference between “furniture” and “commercial furniture”. He gets back to me a couple of hours later saying that he’s “not sure but he thinks they’re referring to furniture used in businesses” like office furniture and restaurant furniture.
So, I guess you learn something new every day. I still think it’s a fucking stupid distinction because a person looking to buy office furniture won’t go to a place that sells “commercial” furniture, but to a place that sells office furniture. Also, not all office furniture is purchased for commercial buildings. So I stand corrected on the use of the word “commercial”, but whatever . . .
