Thursday Meetings at Berkman Blog

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