Posts

Google+ increasing its reach

Just about a week ago, it was announced that Blogger users may now mention either people or pages from Google+ in the same manner as within G+ itself. This would have been quite useful when I first promoted my  +Mayo Takeuchi Plus  page, which has now accumulated a good body of photographs. However, I cannot seem to cite myself, perhaps because I've linked this blog to my personal Google+ account and it would be self-serving? In the meantime, I've also added more G+ related widgets on this blog, including one that allows me to show thumbnails of people who have circled my personal account. Another button hopefully will encourage more people to circle my aforementioned Plus page. During my "day job" researching I'd also noticed that, although the follower/circle counts weren't up to date, that the PPC spots were also starting to make mention of sponsor pages on Google+. In an article " marriage of SEO and Social Media " (which likens this union

Three Tips on Time Management

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A little over fourteen months ago I'd posted the predecessor to this post , where I touched upon the concept of multitasking. Now, over three months since my last post, I find myself on vacation, and finally able (and willing) to return my attention to this blog. I recently read a discussion by friends that mentioned that "the days are long, but the years are short". I've certainly found this to be the case also, for the client-facing work I've been involved with since August of last year. There are advantages to being obsessive, focused, and absorbed in any activity, I believe, but there are also unavoidable detractors, such as needing to use a timer or other externalized tooling to ensure that less engrossing tasks involved in daily living are still accomplished as required. So, here are three tips to avoid ending up like that (altogether uncomfortably identifiable) XKCD character. 1. Learn to accurately estimate task duration and effort. As the XK

Caveat googlers?

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Courtesy of article from  getlisted.org , circa 2010 Google has enjoyed mainstream use  as a verb , in English and Japanese ("ã‚°ã‚°ã‚‹"). Furthermore, if Wikipedia is to be believed, people "google" things in Dutch, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish. However, a quick look at any of Google's portals shows that the company offers much, much more. Combining its various services with the perceived bias for presenting content with close allegations has led to my finding a recent article by Danny Sullivan . There he, in a nutshell, decries his company's having crossed an arbitrary line of what search engines are "expected" to do - objectively point to online content - and what it now (and increasingly) does: provide a biased subset of content that aligns with its business model. I'd found Mr. Sullivan's op/ed via an article posted to TechCrunch , which caught my eye due to its title: "Why we may no longer be able to trust Go

Google+ers, please circle my "Mayo T Plus" page!

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I use the macro feature liberally to create wallpaper-friendly photos Also known in more colloquial (and honest) parlance as a "shameless plug", I would greatly appreciate if everyone using Google+ who has enjoyed my nature photographs, rants about language, or who may have an interest in my views on Japanese culture, to add my new Google+ hosted "business" page  to their circles. Why, you may ask, should you do so? Well, several reasons come to mind. First, I have decided to begin populating this page, rather than use my personal G+ presence, to promote my "best of" photographs. Local foods and blurry candids may still be published to my Facebook timeline (as well as to pre-existing themed albums such as my pandas only album), but I believe that some of my pictures are actually good enough to use as desktop or mobile device wallpaper: hence the justification of this migration. Second, I have in past done some fast and loose freelance translation

ICANN't bring myself to buy a domain name (yet)

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Godaddy.com seems to have plenty of detractors With apologies for the unintentional hiatus I've returned to ramble, hopefully not too incoherently, about a topic to which I've given brief bursts of intensive thought over many years: domain names. For my day to day job, I consider things like how valuable the gTLD s (generic top level domain - such as .net, .info, .org, and the ccTLD values - ISO compliant two letter country codes) happen to be for my clients' web sites. Of course, since they've relaxed the rules on new gTLDs (at a price of $185K USD a pop, much to many people's chagrin, as ranted about by asmartbear - and his commenters - from a year ago), there will be even more to consider for future site analyses. In the context of maintaining (if intermittently) this blog, I'd read many articles and posts encouraging everyone to purchase their own domain, as the *.blogspot.com address "seems unprofessional" and could adversely affec