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10/06/2005 Meeting Notes

These notes are a best effort. Blog your corrections and commentary.

Attendees:

AW: Amanda Watlington
j: j
SG: Steve Garfield
Sara J: Sara Jensen
BI: Bill Ives
MS: Marshall Spriggs, Notes from the Cafe Fiasco
JA: Josh Ain
SR: Shimon Rura
MF: Michael Feldman
sj
RF: Randy Fenstermacher

DEF: Deborah Finn
JD: Jared Dunn
D: Diane, a Shorenstein fellow
AH: Ann House
–>

Proposed Agenda:

  • Introductions
  • Has anyone heard of Gather?

    • No, so we read the about page. We still have no idea what Gather is, but we know they make money through advertising.
    • Apparently, they’re local. Is it worth asking them to come? Gather is supposedly the next big tech thing.
  • Amanda Watlington on blogs and search engines and stuff
    • AW started off by having us write down some things describing out blogs
    • Search engines want to deliver relevant, recently updated content

    • Search engines look for keywords and links for relevancy
    • Hub, authority, and communities are important for getting traffic, getting ranked and included in search engines.
    • Joining a community can be one way to disambiguate your blog.
      • Writing about apples? The fruit or the machine?
    • ‘Click here’ in links is meaningless. Anchor text is really important.
    • Strategic linking can build the value of your blog.
    • Prominance, density, and reader
      • Titles (including post names) count, position on page, headlines (H1, etc., tags), description metadata
    • Use a keyword tool, like Overture’s Keyword Selector Tool. List relevant terms. Keep them in mind as you write.
    • Use 2-3 keywords per post. If you can start a title with a keyword, do it.
    • Shelf life ends. You won’t always be number one. You must work to keep up a ranking.
    • NicheBot
    • Google’s tool examining ad relevance
    • slides

  • Announcement: Vlogger gathering, Sunday, October 9, 6 pm

  • Reminder: upcoming topics:
    • Tuesday 10/11: A guest blogger you won’t want to miss: Hoder! with a potential appearance on 10/13. (?) Hoder will not be in town next week.
    • 10/20: First joint meeting with the Boston Weblogger Meetup Group
      • 3rd Thursday of the month
    • 10/27: something wiki this way comes with the Wikipedia Meetup folks
    • 11/3: Archiving weblogs, as in how archives that are interested in saving diaries might preserve blogs
  • We need to vacate the room by 8 pm so the folks doing Wikimania planning can use it. Anyone who would like to help with that is welcome to stay for that meeting.
  • What else?
  • Eat:
    • Last week: Cambridge Common
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