Writing Handbook

I just went though a university handbook on writing. Use the active voice in your sentences. Do not use nouns that are verbs plus "-ion" at the end. Cut down on the number of words.

Short verbs are best. Skip the word "of". Instead use apostrophe plus "s". Remove clauses such as it is, it was, and there is. Vagueness is poor. That is, do not use area or degree or factor or situation.

Skip the big words. Get rid of multiple words string together. I can use these rules myself. I might have to work very hard when composing my prose.

Line Feed Failure

Recently I have found a weird behavior in Blogger. I press the Enter key when I am typing text in new posts to separate paragraphs. However once my blog post gets published, the carriage return and line feeds disappear. The result is that all my text is in one big blob on my blog.

Now I know a little HTML. So I go back and manually edit my posts. I click on the Edit HTML tab. Then I put in some HTML to force hard breaks between my paragraphs. However I should not have to do all this. Come on Blogger? What are you doing?

The Blogroll

I have not had a lot of time to talk about blogging recently. That's in part because I have been learning the JavaScript language. This might be a temporary fad. I really see myself getting deeper into writing code using Java this year.

If I do get proficient at Java, I think I might have a shot at getting a job with IBM Corporation. They got some interesting enterprise level projects that I have a great interest in. I also have the domain knowledge to back it up.

With the rise of FaceBook, some think blogging may become extinct. I have not caught the FaceBook buzz. For me, blogging is the best way of mass distributing information in an easy way. I plan to continue blogging in the future.

Bing Controversy

Google has accused Microsoft of using Google search results for Bing. They say that Bing is cheating. Google got a response from Microsoft that was vague. They then declared this response meant that Microsoft was admitting that they were stealing Google search results for Bing. All of this info was released on the Search Engine Land web site.

Microsoft quickly came out firing. They state that "we do not copy Google's results." They use about a thousand signals for their search algorithm. They did admit that their original email to Google was not entirely clear. They also call Googles antics a stunt. I am sure as Bing becomes more popular, there will be more to this war.

Google Staffing

Google has reported that they hired a whopping 4500 people this past year. And they anticipate 2011 to be an even bigger hiring year. Their previous record was 2007 when they hired 6000 people.

There are a lot of big new projects going on at Google. They are working on a web operating system. They are doing work on instant search. And there is even a project to have a computer drive a car.

All of this is very interesting to me. I had thought I heard rumors that Google actually laid off employees last year. Let's hope that they are actually hiring people. The economy needs it.

Blogger Basics

I just finished skimming through one of those dummies guides to using Blogger. Strangely enough, many of the ideas in the book were more geared towards Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I do want to point out some of the Blogger specific information I learned.

Blogger might make blogging simple. However the Blogger platform is not for beginners. You can do some more advanced stuff with it if you like. Here is something I do not practice that much myself. You should fill in your profile as it is very important to your readers. Put the best info at the top of your profile.

By now you should know that Blogger provides you with templates to guide how your blog will look. However you may opt to use third party templates. That will ensure you blog does not look like everybody else's. Finally you should get in the habit of writing controversial pieces. It will cause a stir and that is good for your blog.

Google Search

I saw a flowchart on how Google search actually works. It was quite involved. Let me share some of the highlights. To start with, there are Google bots out there crawling web content. They follow links on the pages they find. Google then indexes the page titles and content that the bots crawl.

When you type in some search terms, Google uses synonyms as well to find matches. The results set is capped at 1000 hits. The ones shown have the highest page rank and authority. There is a also a lot of ad processing that goes on in tandem with the organic search results.

Filters are also applied to the results. Popular terms from today's news get a boost. Local issues of interest also get some priority. I tell you. This is all very interesting stuff to me. Thanks to the PPCBLOG for sharing the info.