2009 September | Tribeswell

In a word… yes.

Recently I’ve found that I’m getting some relatively significant traffic on my blog/website for the search term “blog designer Bloomington, IN”

What this tells me is that people are thinking about the web differently. Increasingly, websites are able to strip down their page content in favor of blogging. Companies and organizations are starting to realize that there are some real advantages to blogging.

Blogs are a lot easier to update than traditional websites. Just post a few paragraphs and you’re done.
Blogs are easier to organize. With search, categories, and tags, it’s very easy for visitors to find what they want in your blog posts.
Google loves blogs. Why hire someone to ‘SEO’ your site when you can just blog a lot and accomplish the same goal.
Blogs cool and new.
Blogs allow you to rank for random things in Google searches. This doesn’t have much value for short-term conversions, but the long tail of this is huge. Over a period of months and years, your marketing message can be seen by lots of people who weren’t necessarily looking for you. You’ll likely pick up some business along the way.

Why Would You Want Search Engine Optimization (ronmedlin.com)
Blogging Remains a Great Tool for Small Businesses (myventurepad.com)
Is content really king when it comes to SEO? (browsermedia.co.uk)

me and my dreamgirl Every once in a while I like to throw a personal element on my blog. As well as being passionate about social media and internet marketing, I am also an active musician who plays in a few different bands.

When my wife and I were married last July, I decided to write a special song for us to dance to for our first dance. It’s called ‘Dream Girl’. It’s kind of a 50′s doo-wop style song that I wrote especially for her because I know she loves that kind of music (I’m a fan of it also).

Most of ‘Dream Girl’ was recorded at my good friend Ryan Beck’s home studio, and live drums and mastering were done at Farm Fresh Studios here in Bloomington. Special thanks to John Marque for his stellar drumming, Jake Belser for doing an amazing job engineering the track, Bill Headley for his great work on the keyboards, and especially to Mr. Beck for all of his help putting the whole package together.

Here’s the track in .zip format for free download. Just download the file and double click to ‘unzip’ it to listen to in your favorite player. It’s around 5 megs, so it will take a minute, but feel free to burn it to CD, share it with friends, or add it to your iTunes mix for your next party

Click to Download Dreamgirl by Colin Clark and the MWMC

Click to Listen first before you Download

camino

Regular readers of this blog know that I am notoriously disloyal when it comes to web browsers. I’ve used all the most popular browsers, and I can honestly say that no one browser has it all, though Chrome and Firefox definitely come out as my favorites.

On Saturday I decided, based on a few articles that I’ve read recently to give Camino a chance. Camino is made by Mozilla (makers of Firefox), but it’s designed to be a stripped down, leaner version of the web browser. It’s also important to note that Camino is only available for Macs.

The main reason I decided to give it a try is that I’d seen a few posts saying that it could be considered a Mac alternative to Chrome (which is PC only). I wouldn’t go that far. Camino is exceedingly simple and cool, but it’s definitely not as slick or fast as Chrome.

With that said, Camino is definitely very nice and I’ll definitely be getting a lot of use out of it until Chrome is released for Mac. It’s pretty fast, very simple, no-frills, and it does a great job of displaying web pages (important in a web browser ).

Just an update on other browsers… I still rarely use Safari, and I never use Internet Explorer. Suck it, Microsoft!

42 Useful Portable Apps For Mac (maketecheasier.com)
While We Wait For Chrome For Mac, Mozilla’s Camino Gets An Update (techcrunch.com)
Chrome For Mac “Coming Along Fine” (techcrunch.com)

Rob Doty playing guitar on the porch

So my best buddy Rob Doty did something pretty cool with Google Maps today that made us say, “Why aren’t more people using these features, I mean COME ON!”

Last weekend Rob Doty, myself, and a bunch of other friend’s hopped in a full-sized Ford conversion van and drove up to Montague, Michigan for the wedding of our good friends Nate and Teresa. We had a killer time and took lots of pictures with our iPhones which we uploaded to Facebook in real time.

I thought we were pretty high-tech with our killer web 2.0 mini-vacation, but Rob Doty took it a step farther.

Rob used the ‘My Maps feature in Google Maps and plotted out every place we went on our trip with a short description of what we did there. He also shared the map with the rest of us so that we can all edit the map with our own additions.

This is way better than keeping a vacation journal or photo album. We’ve got the spacial context of the map showing all the places we went. We all help to tell the story. Best of all, we can always look back and remember the awesome time we had.

View Our Michigan Adventure in a larger map

disqus_125 A few weeks ago I installed the Intense Debate wordpress plugin to help me manage comments here on the Tribeswell blog. Kevin Hood mentioned that he was using the plugin as well, though he also mentioned that he had better luck with its rival Disqus.

Well, here’s the bottom line. It seemed to me that Intense Debate wasn’t very much of an improvement over the standard comment functionality in wordpress.

I’ve decided to give Disqus a try. I’ll be honest, it didn’t seem particularly easy to install. It was a little unclear, however it’s up and running now. I’ll let everyone know how it’s working and if anyone else has problems installing, sent me a message in the comments and I’d be happy to help you figure it out.