Stuff we collect

Hello to all!

Have you ever given any thought to how much stuff we buy, all in the name of improving our work? Or our lives? Or just because we can? I'm sure all of us have things scattered around, or gathering dust on the hard drive which we had big plans for and never even read fully through the course, used the gadget, or even looked at it again.

So why do we buy these things? The thought that they will help is genuinely there. Most times. But also so is the cunning of a very well-written sales page. Or even not so well written. It just pops up when we have been paid, or we think this is going to transform me from hopeless to the best thing since sliced bread.

Don't worry! I'm as guilty as the rest of you. I have stuff on my hard drive that is years old and has never seen the light of day, except when I bought it. I put a few on a USB the other day and, found, to my sneaky suspicions, 2 of them were exactly the same, just rewritten. Fair enough, they were not expensive ideas or programs, but it did annoy me.

I plan on going through ALL of the stuff sitting on my hard drive (early New Year's Resolution!!!) and cleaning it up. Not that I intend to bin it or delete it. I have a collection of USBs around the house :), so they can stop wasting space and become useful.

And I have a Tweet up at the moment from a very smart man who put together the list below on how to make our lives less full of clutter. It is true. The more simplistic your life is, the more enjoyable it is. You don't have to have the latest gadgets, if they are going to sit ignored on a shelf, on your hard drive, or making clutter when they really have no use to you.

Buy Less

Think carefully before every potential purchase. Before you buy, ask yourself these questions and carefully weigh your answers:

1. Will it save me time over the long run?
2. Will it make me happier over the long run?
3. Will it increase my productivity?
4. What effect will it have on the people in my life? Will it bring me closer to them, or will it distract me?
5.  What are the environmental costs of this product in terms of resources and energy used, and pollution created?
6. THINK ABOUT IT!!!!!!!

One answer - one thousand questions

Hello to all!

Do you remember your first attempts at writing any sort of content? A letter home from boarding school or college, an essay on some boring topic that was part of the anything-but-wonderful class you had foolishly enrolled in because... well, because. Pick any ending to this story. I picked chemistry, because I thought it would be fun to experiment with substances that were never meant to be put together, short of in a bunker for nuclear disasters. That really wasn't the problem however. The fact I had to document every step of the way to this resulting disaster was. I switched to music after I managed to burn a hole in a steel table, on advice from the headmistress.

But, seriously, was your first attempt at whatever-writing-it-was good? Letters to parents excepted. They always think any letter from their child is wonderful. Even more so in these days of emails and mobile phones. ASIDE: Please, all kids away from home, send your parents a snail-mail letter every now and then. It will be considered better than any Christmas present to them.

But back to writing content. Today, we all know we need good, honest, clean content for our websites. Without it, any website is going to be chewed up and spat back out sooner or later. Google is working towards understanding just what a person wants when they type in a query to a search engine. And there can be a thousand ways to ask one question. This is where Hummingbird comes in. Every person in the world has a different way to ask one question, although they may appear the same. Words bolded, words singular or plural, misspelt or correct, long and boring or short and not easily understandable. Take a look at the way your two-year old asks for a glass of milk and how your father-in-law does.

This will get you some idea of what Hummingbird tries to do. No alogarithm can match human speech yet exactly, but it is trying bloody hard. So don't try to be smart  or cute with your keywords. Keep them simple and they will be more effective. And by all means, try to use keywords that can also be long-tailed. As the example of the baby and the older man asking for a drink of milk shows, there can be a lot of ways to ask the same question.

So, don't spend days or weeks tearing your hair out trying to find what Google means with their latest 'pet'. Simplified, they are trying to build an alogorithm that can decipher 'human speak'.

And they will get there, or very close to it. Eventually.