Currently, the FDA’s site likes to direct users elsewhere. For example, let’s say you were a Medical Device company. You’re redirected to the HHS (Health & Human Services) website. While the HHS has taken the time to create a Social Media Policy, it isn’t actually a Social Media Policy, but instead a link to various other government sites and their social Media Policies.

But wait, what about the Web Content Managers guidelines on the USA.gov website? Great you should mention that as this page directs visitors to find additional information to individual services and references the website Apps.Gov; a government site that lists internet (cloud, social media, etc.) and localized based software applications approved for use by government agencies.

Of course for the many in government who just don’t have a clue about technology, generally anyone who has been in any elected office for more than two years and anyone in office over the age of 28, there is the government ran HowTo.Gov, a hilarious website outlining the common sense practicalities any high school senior has become aware of since the invention of MySpace and Sex’ting.

Of course not all government agencies are inept. After doing some digging I came across this government referenced, but not government ran site offering direct links to many Government Agencies Social Media Policies. It’s great to see that our Navy and other military branches have taken the time to come up with some social media policies and guidelines while fighting several wars, yet the people on Capitol Hill who work mostly at the golf course and behind a desk, can’t seem to find the time.

Shame on you FDA.

Somewhere out in marketing land someone has been trying to sell people on the idea that installing a CMS, such as WordPress or Drupal, will somehow make all your Webmaster or Web Designer needs go away. If you’ve believed this, I’m sorry to tell you, but unless your site is just text, you’re probably wrong.

While you can hire a Web Developer or Agency to build out a custom theme for your CMS, you’ll still need someone to maintain the site. Even if that person is only plugging in content they’ll need to touch HTML and CSS at some point. If you don’t believe me, try building a complex table with any WYSIWYG editor in Drupal the next time you really want to post that excel data online and you’ll either settle for a simple table or you’ll kick the project over to your web person so they can style it for you, or at the very least add in the proper Class=”blah” tags where needed.

And that’s just for general page information. If you, like most groups, ever want something built out that that requires anything from different links on the side bars to a block or widget of additional information, you’ll probably find that you need someone who actually knows how to work with modules like Views or Panels for Drupal or Widgets and Page Templates if you’re using WordPress.

Unfortunately many business managers out there hear the words Content Management System and they think that their receptionist or office manager will just be able to simply copy and paste the Word documents he sends over into the companies CMS backed website and magically it will look just the way he wants. Sorry, unless it’s text only, that won’t happen. This is why you’ll more than likely need to hire a Content Producer at the very least.

Oh, and we haven’t even gotten to the actual Web Operations part of a site, which is probably the only portion of your website you could most likely outsource to a hosting company.

/rant off

Google has done a lot of things very well. They launched a search engine in 1997 that changed the way we find information. Between 2000 and 2003 we saw the launch of Google AdWords and AdSense, which gave many websites some coin in their purse. In 2004 they gave us Gmail, a free unlimited email and over the years it has allowed it’s users to utilize its web interface, POP3 or IMAP functionality. All great technical achievements.

Unfortunately, Google’s development team doesn’t seem to understand social media, and maybe even the basics of human interaction. In 2004 Google launched Orkut, which is still popular in Brazil according to Wikipedia. Orkut was a social networking service that’s interface was very similar to Bebo and Hi5, which have now become little more than obscure social gaming sites. While it currently resembles MySpace without the customized pages ability, it lacks any niche, such as MySpace’s musician base.

In 2009 Google Wave came and went with barely a spark. Like Orkut, the product was never pushed and few people outside of the social media development interests groups knew or cared about it. Barely a year later Google stirred up some Buzz, which seemed to try and combine the likes of Twitter with their Gmail service and ended up just alienating users of Gmail and causing a series of privacy concerns to spring up.

And now we have Google+, which is definitely the company’s best attempt yet at making a decent social networking platform. For the most part Google+ is a clone of Facebook, though with the standard minimalist Google interface. You have a Stream which works like your Wall, Hangouts which work like Groups, and Sparks which work like Interest’s Pages and everyone can now utilize the Google +1 buttons just like the Facebook Like button. The only real difference is Google’s Circles, which are a great idea, but implemented poorly.

What’s my gripe?

Having to manually sort through all of your contacts and drag them into Circles is functional, but if I am already using Gmail and have multiple contact lists set up, it should be a no brainer that I be provided an option to convert the contact lists into Circles. This is especially annoying for people like me who may have several hundred contacts. Likewise, there should be a better way to manage contacts if I want to pull in lists from Orkut, Wave, and Buzz. And what about Fans and Followers from YouTube – does no one think about big picture expandability and application synergy at Google?

Another issue I have is that to make a suggestion to the Google Development team I’m linked to Google+’s Facebook page – no really, I’m supposed to use the number one social networking site to offer suggestions on how to make a competing social networking site better.

While Google announced they are rebranding Picasa and Blogger soon, Google quickly has made itself a jumble of tools that all share some mediocre interactions with each other but ultimately are an awkward and tangled web of applications. And what of my Google Profile, the public info that is supposed to be the umbrella of my Google experience, what will become of that?

All in all it’s clear Google is trying very hard to get into social media, but the developers at Google are apparently just not savvy when it comes to the social interactions of human beings. They’d be better off looking to gather input from young non-college graduates instead of relying on their technically brilliant, but clearly socially retarded programmers.

While I have a less than favorable view of their new service currently, as a Gmail, Checkout, AdWords, AdSense, YouTube, Picasa, Google Search and Chrome user I hope they’ll take the Facebook suggestions to heart and improve their service, though given their track record of releasing interesting social media related tools and ignoring them, means I won’t be holding my breath.

While I can understand that many search engines want to cut down on the amount of spam sites that pollute our search results, I would like us to take a breath, hold and exhale. I think a great write up that conveyed many of my same opinions on this matter was done here by SEO Theory.

And yet, by the PBS-Ickipedia definition, just about any news organization that publishes a 150 word blurb about breaking news must be a content farm, right? Wouldn’t Twitter be a Content Farm? And Ickipedia itself, right? – Michael Martinez

Personally, I think people are going a bit overboard when they claim sites like Examiner, eHow and Answers should be blacklisted from search engines. They aren’t any different than Yahoo, Google News, Mashable or even Slashdot. There is a difference between SEO and Spam, just as there is a difference between Content Farms and User Generated Content sites, though it’s not always easy to describe the difference, as one user elegantly put it:

It reminds me of art and porn – we know it when we see it and everyone defines “it” differently. – marcohmann

My Linux Flavor Choice: Fedora running Gnome3

Why Fedora? I come from a dabbler of Red Hat, and Fedora is the free OS sponsored by RH, based on RH. Fedora includes RPM, and my favorite installer ever, YUM. Why do I prefer YUM over Debian based APT-GET? Because it’s 4 characters shorter to type and I find I have a lot more Repositories to access.

Why Gnome3? When you hear Linux, you probably think command line interface. That’s true. However, over the last couple decades many GUI’s have been released and have recently gotten to the point where they do everything you expect the GUI to do, just like in Windows or OS X. While you could be using KDE, XFCE or Gnome3, I recommend Gnome3 for those who are coming from an OS X environment as you’ll find it very intuitive. If you prefer a Windows interface, than KDE would probably be the choice for you. It’s worth mentioning that Gnome3 is very new, Gnome2 has an interface similar to Windows, though flipped around so that my primary task bar is at the top, similar to OS X apple icon and system preferences pull downs.

My Design App Choices: Scribus, Inkscape, Gimp, Dia, Bluefish, ImageMagick

To over simplify things: Scribus works like Indesign, Inkscape works like Illustrator and Gimp works like Photoshop. Dia you may not need, it’s a neat little drawing application that you can use to make flow charts, so those who have to wear a project manager hat will probably find more use for it than your average designer. Bluefish works like the code view of Dreamweaver, while it doesn’t have a WYSYWIG interface, it does highlight and organize code just like Dreamweaver. If you need a WYSYWIG, the choices are very limited, with Sea Monkey being the only thing still in current development, which is a web browser slash html editor. ImageMagick will more than likely already be installed, but if not, you can install it using “yum install ImageMagick” note: this installer is case sensitive. ImageMagick is used by some UI Designers, as well as other types of Designers to do batch scripting with images without having to use a program like Photoshop to do it for you.

These can all be installed quickly by opening a terminal and typing:

1. su root (hit enter and put in root’s password)
2. 2. yum install scribus inkscape gimp dia bluefish (it will “do stuff” then tell it “y” for yes)
3. Keep your terminal window open, you’ll need it for the rest below

My Office Choice:  Open Office

This product has always been trying to rival MS Office for years and always seems to have the latest features from the previous version of Office included in it. It’s probably the closest mimic of a closed app I’ve ever seen.

• The install for this is: yum groupinstall office

My Utility Choices: Pidgin, Filezilla, Wine, GParted , Preupgrade, Yum-FastestMirror, Yum-Utils, Yumex (note: the installers for these are all lowercase)

Filezilla is my choice for FTP/SFTP. Wine will allow you to run some Windows based programs while within Linux, so if you can’t really get away from Dreamweaver… GParted is the best partitioning tool since Partition Magic. But what are these other things?

• Preupgrade – this package will allow you to upgrade from one version of Fedora to the next version of Fedora every time there is a new stable release (about once every 12 to 18 months)
• Yum-FastestMirror – when using YUM to install applications, this package will allow YUM to search for the repository closest to your location to potentially save on download time
• Yum-Utils – a bunch of little YUM tools, kind of neat, but by no means essential
• Yumex – If you don’t want to use a command line to install applications on your system, here is the GUI to replace the command line. You can search for, install, uninstall and update all from a nice little interface

With this setup you should be well on your way making the switch from OS X or Windows to Linux, though after so many installs on a fresh system, it wouldn’t hurt to clean things up a bit. I’d recommend running the following, after getting everything installed and setup the way you like:

• yum update – updates all of Fedora and everything you have installed on the system
• yum clean all – cleans up any temp files left behind by installing the various packages above

With that said, if any of you are Designers, web, graphic or UI, please feel free to comment below and offer suggestions on what applications you find the most favorable. Also, I’d love to see if anyone has tried getting Xcode to run under Linux or what solutions are available for that.

With that said I realized, after some pressuring from one of the voices in my head, that it’s probably best I invest some personal time in developing from scratch my own unique website template. I’ve already decided to continue to use WordPress for my personal sites, even though I work exclusively in Drupal these days. My opinion on these two content management systems is still that same as it was almost a year ago.

Needless to say I still need to go through the content of this site sooner than later to update information, as well as I’ll be migrating the content I wrote for SanJose.org to here over this coming weekend. This definitely has put a cramp in my gaming habits, especially as I have been enjoying Rift very much lately.

The end result to most of us who work on the web is that it’s made our SEO jobs a little easier as we don’t have to focus efforts on trying to guess the different algorithms. Instead we just have to continue to follow the Google SEO guide (PDF) and continue to produce unique content and you’ll find yourself in top ranks soon enough.

But Mike, you’re really over simplifying things, there are other search engines out there…isn’t there?

Let’s think about that for a moment. Last year Yahoo.com decided to use Microsoft Bing’s search engine to power their sites, which pretty much made Yahoo’s search obsolete unless you’re a smaller site like Excite.com who is licensing their engine. That said, I challenge any webmaster to show me current stats that show their site receiving a significant amount of traffic from any search engine that’s referral ID is not Google.com, Bing.com or Yahoo.com – seriously, when was the last time you had 40% of your traffic coming from Ask.com? How about even a measly 10%? From the sites I manage both on a personally level, to corporate to city tourism I can tell you honestly that other than the three search domains listed above, less than 2% of traffic comes in from places like Ask.com, Excite.com and AOL.com

But this doesn’t mean Google is the end all. There is still a problem that plagues the three top dogs; Content Farms. These are the content sites with user generated posts, blogs and images that currently are supplied nearly endless amounts of traffic from search engines. Places like Huffington Post, Examiner, How To, Squidoo, E-Zine Articles. Yes, places I write for, or have written for, but also the places that are now contributing to where many web surfers find their news, read their gossip and create the latest internet celebrity.

So what’s the problem Mike? All these sites are producing unique quality content.

Yes, but here is a thought – the problem isn’t that these sites are doing well; it’s that they are doing well at the expense of other sites. With their longevity and daily content updates it’s quickly becoming almost impossible to create any new site and have it do well without having to invest a ridiculous amount time, energy and money in marketing it. What we could really use right now is a search engine that ranks, rates and focuses around new sites and ideas. Not just the latest current affairs and yet another SEO landing post.

The webinar was hosted by DMAI, Destination Marketing Association International, which is an organization where I sit on the Technology Committee. My work on the migration was looked at by DMAI as a potential case study for other DMO’s within the US and ultimately something they felt could be beneficial to look into.

I had initially been disappointed with the turnout; only nineteen attendees were listed, though I have been told that this is actually a substantially higher amount than most of the organization’s webinars. My initial thoughts here are that more needs to be done to promote the webinars if this is the case. That aside, both the Technology Committee and the user feedback was positive. Only one of the nineteen felt it could have been better.

While the webinar was focused around concepts, with my reality part a very short segment, I was glad to hear that DMAI is requesting we do a follow up webinar where we can go more in-depth with hands on, technical insight. Something I think is very important to understand when considering moving to or utilizing any cloud service.

Now the following is simply my own advice and what I deem are worthwhile activities for those looking to go into this type of career.

While it goes without saying that you have your own site, even if it’s simply a blog to display your writing, content production is a little different than your typical creative. For example, if I were simply a graphic designer, artist or photographer I could put up a site with my artwork, photos, etc. and when asked I could send a link to people who were interested in seeing my work. They look at it and if they like the style they hire me – very simplified; but accurate.

With content production you don’t always get to write how you want. You’re hired to produce content for company XYZ that makes ABC item. Ideally this means you have to be diverse in your abilities to write for any given niche at any given time.

So while a personal blog is a good idea, it’s hard to get traction with a blog that covers various topics. My blog is a good example of this as it makes SEO very difficult. It’s worth noting here that if you’re really only interested in writing about one thing, and one thing only, you should probably focus more on being a freelance writer or journalist instead of a content producer.

In either case you’ll still need to build an online portfolio of content, but there are a couple things to consider. One, if I write for other sites and I’m not being paid, how much effort should I put into this? Two, can I get paid while doing this so that I don’t have to starve while I look for work?

If you’ve never written anything online before, or at least not something you can portfolioitize (heh that word is fun) then I’d recommend spending a fair amount of time on non-paid sites like Yelp and EzineArticles. Yelp because you don’t have to be a good writer to get your reviews on there, but users are very active here and you can gauge how good you’re doing from the interaction your reviews receive. I know EzineArticles is hated by many online writers and content producers because they don’t pay their authors, but I still recommend it as a good starting point as they actually have people who review your writing. This helps if you tend to struggle with grammar and spelling.

But what about making some passive income on the side? For that there are a lot, though the sign up is generally easy enough to do. Some places like Examiner will have you submit a piece first, then if they like it they will accept you as a writer, after which nothing is ever checked again accept by users of the site or spot checkers – this can be good and bad obviously. Other sites include: Hubpages.com, About.com, TextBroker.com, Helium.com, eHow.com, and AssociatedContent.com (Yahoo). While you could join all, I’d recommend just focusing on one or two, anymore than that and you’re either planning on making this you’re full-time job or you won’t have enough time after getting a job to maintain all of them.

Once you have your articles up you’ll then be able to take advantage of the backlinks to your site, the RSS feeds you can utilize and you’ll be well on your way to creating a diverse online portfolio of content that you have created.