Most people think of Google as a monolithic intelligence.  That’s probably not true, most people don’t think about Google at all. But of those that do, few think of breaking down Google. Google in fact has about a dozen major data centers around the world.  And, there is a Google for many, perhaps most, countries and languages.  For instance, hablamos de google espagnol.  There is not only a spanish language google, there is a google.mx (Mexico), Google.es (Spain), Google.co (is that Columbia), maybe a Google in Spanish for the States, and probably a lot more. The fact is, I don’t know.  But, I’m interested in keywords and vocabulary and language working to help me so here is a list of keyphrases representing pages that we’ve built to help foreigners, ESL-types, who want to learn English, find our site

If you haven’t registered for our next Blogging course, now is the time, because we are starting up the next 8-week series on January 11. 

I took the course. I loved it. Everyone does. Sign up Now!

Blogging 101 is an instructor-led course that will guide you through all the basics of creating and establishing a new blog.   With Blogging 101, you will even have a built-in audience for your first posts – - your fellow classmates!  You will have fun learning with them and from them, and getting honest feedback and comments on your blog content.  Plus, your instructor, experienced blogger and writer, Topsy Techie will hold your hand as you go step by step through the process of creating and starting your new blog.  The Blogging 101 course is more than just a class – - it is a community of people who want to see you succeed in the world of blogging.

This is going to be a terrific course, so register today for the blogging course and don’t miss out on your chance to start a New Blog for the New Year!!

Disclosure – The blog writing course is part of Time4Writing and Time4Learning for which I work!  Time4Writing teaches writing online to homeschoolers and Time4Learning is an online homeschooling curriculum.

1. I blog to collect my thoughts. As a tool for reflection and to record decisions that I’ve made. I tend to have a blog on each topic that I think about. This blog, for instance, is about my thinking on blogging. I tend to keep these blogs anonymous since I intend them as journals. They are only public because of reason 2.
2. I blog to support my core businesses.  As we say, a BLOG can be said to stand for: a Better Listing on Google. Writing a blog with links done appropriately can help build your position in the search engines. So as long as I’m writing to keep track of my thoughts, I might as well make them public, insert a few links and get some extra google juice from them.

With that background, here are four resolutions that I’ve made about blogging for 2010.
1.  Disclosure. I’m going to strive to be more upfront and put a disclosure policy on each of my blogs. This blog is run by the owner/founder of http://www.blogwritingcourse.com. I also created/run other sites including Time4Writing.com and Time4Learning.com.  My endorsements and enthusiasm for those sites should be taken with the large grain of salt that such a close commercial relationship engenders. (woops, really mixed my metaphors and confused my grammar there….)
2. Organization.  I’ve never really organized a blog well for very long. I’m talking about using tags and categories in a truly effective way. I’m hoping this year to build or rebuild a blog or so in which I master and maintain tight organization.
3.  Sustained effort to build readers and community. I tend to focus on a blog for awhile as I’m exploring an area and then move onto another one.  The result is that a community of readers and participants never really gets developed.  This year, I’m trying to be more systematic about building some of my blogs.
4.  I’m going to try to push these same principles through a few key people on my team.

an initial target to implement these efforts is a homeschooling blog that I’ve created which is full of potential. It’s the online homeschooling blog.

The FTC followed up their recently revised Guides with a nice set of videos by Mary Engle explaining the changes. As we’ve discussed as a blogging best practice here, creating a Disclosure Policy and linking it in a clear and conspicuous manner sitewide (e.g. similar to Privacy Policy) helps your readers understand the practices and conflicts of your site. If all the blogosphere discussions haven’t already prompted you to adopt a Disclosure Policy of your own, maybe these videos will push you over the edge:

1. What’s new about the Endorsement Guides?

I just read the section on Interdependence and Modulary (pages 29-32) in which they explain:

To explain this conflict between schools standardizing the way they teach in the face of students needing customization for the way they learn, we first need to step back and understand the concepts of indterdependence and modularity form the wold of product design.

All products and services have an architecture, or design, that determines  what its parts are  and how they must interact with each other .  The palce where any two parts fit togetehr is called an interface.  Interfaces exist within a product, as well as between groups of people or between departments within an organization that must interact with one another.

I’ve always wanted to write a great set of articles, maybe a book on this topic. I think you could teach college courses on history from the point of view of standards.

- Evolution of standards. think of blacksmiths and cobblers beginning to come up with standards for handles for tools and sizes for shoes
- Interchangable parts & efficient production
- History of vinyl, South Pacific – true? stories? Royalties?
- most screwed up standards and royalties
- lego, standard metaphor of our time. it’s not a game. Big bucks are at work.
- Beta vs VHS
- video games with hardware getting software royalty
- phone industry with monthly expenses subsidizing hardware
- internet, the triumph of standards. Applied technology to big problem, widely accepted.

I’ve never wanted my children to think I was perfect, because then they’ll think they have to be perfect, too. I share the mistakes I’ve made, hoping they will be able to learn something through my errors.

Those two sentences are a profound summary of much of what I try to do and to be as a parent.  I hope my kids will learn through me and most importantly, I hope that they’ll see that I try to keep learning. Sometimes, I have to learn the same lesson over and over again. Not because I’m dumb or a slow learner but because life’s lessons are both simple and hard.  The principles are easy: it’s figuring out which principle to apply at which time is hard.

That blog post Never Let Them See you Sweat continues onto another parenting question that I agonize over. How much of my inner dialogue and confusion should I share with my children? The post doesn’t cover this question in depth, it summarizes: They don’t need to be privy to every agonizing step in the decision process, though. My thought is that it depends on the child’s age, the question, and a lot of other factors. It depends.

Young children need to feel safe and comforted. Older children are ready to start dealing with life’s complexities.

Facebook Strategic Plan

1. Allow individuals to have multiple Faces and categories of friends/contacts.
2. Archiving my digital assets.

I think this can make a world of difference to those kids. It’s hard learning to read….when there aren’t any books!

• Discuss or teach about a topic that I need to learn about. For instance,  SEO and education and technology and homeschooling and karate are topics that I need to know more about so I read blogs on these topics.
• Are interestingly written or funny or racy or all of the above.  I tend not to read the racy ones in the office.
• Have an author whose life or situation or stories I find interesting and connect to. So a 50 year old guy struggling to balance work, family, and sports, I find that interesting and very pertinent.  A writer interested in English vocabulary and blogging about it? Good.  Someone with an off-the-walll hobby like joker collection? tell me you are kidding….

When I launched my online learning venture a few years ago, a blog was the cutting edge technique for online communication. Forums and Yahoo newsgroups were well-established by then and the traditional internet list-servs and old-fashioned bulletin boards were waning.

Since then, Friendster and Myspace hit their peak and have declined. Google groups came and seem to have gone.

Podcasts arrived and claimed their niche as did wikis and Linkedinand blog communities. They aren’t exactly taking over the world but they seem to have their spots.

Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook, on the other hand, are taking over the world. They have dramatically changed our personal networks of communication and how we get news and communicate. Amazing. Thrilling.

Time4Learning is trying to navigate these trends and find a balance of how cutting edge we should be. We do have a Time4Learning fan page on Facebook. We started it within the last month or so and are up to 600 fans. Is that good? I’m not sure. I try to compare it with the fact the Time4Learning parent forum has 3521 members who’ve joined and 28 users on the site right now (it’s Saturday, 4:48, 7 registered, 21 just visiting) but I find that I’m trying to compare apples and oranges.

So, we’ll keep trying to listen to our members and locate interested non-members where-ever online they seem to be.

THIS is interesting. The Facebook streambox works on Blogger but not WordPress.

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