One inspired girl – a big dash of social media, social activism, motivation, traditional media and what do you get? One of many, many success stories of how social media and the Internet can make a difference in the world. My daughter’s story is just one of many. Imagine the impact if each person who learned about Tom’s One Day Without Shoes spread the word to their friends and contacts.

WordCamp Toronto 2010 delivered everything it promised. Great speakers, great venue, great topics and great people. Blogging and social media, all things WordPress, SEO, and blogging at the core of your building your brand. A highlight for me, and I think everyone, was the success stories and interviews from bloggers. Two takeaways for me: keep the social in social media – and make sure that you blog about what you care about.

The Open Directory Project has a long and important history on the web. ODP or dmoz claims to be “the largest, most comprehensive human-edited directory of the Web.” The Open Directory Project’s main purpose has been to organize information on the web – by reviewing content (websites) submitted to it and listing these sites in the directory. Definitely helpful to users. Its usefulness extends beyond users. Search engines access new websites to index data for their search results. Webmasters use the ODP to create link juice by listing their sites in the directory. But is this changing? Is ODP as meaningful and useful as it once was?

In my last post, I talked a bit about why listening can be difficult – especially when the conversation is a tough one; the stakes are high; we are feeling offended or we feel accused of something.  This time, I want to talk a bit about some things we can be aware of or we [...]

There are two sides to every difficult conversation – the speaking side and the listening side. We all need help with the speaking side; the where, when and how – but guess what? We also need help with the listening side. Often we can’t or don’t listen when someone is trying to communicate something important to us. Why is it that we can’t or don’t listen?

Can you remember a difficult conversation that you had recently? What made the conversation difficult? Were you happy with the outcome? How about the person that you had the difficult conversation with – were they satisfied with the conversation? Intimate conversations or conversations that revolve around disagreement are difficult.  Are there some conversations in particular [...]

Last week, I was challenged by someone on Twitter, to update my blog, with the promise that he/she would drop by to visit once the blog was updated.  I waffled back and forth between excitement that someone had taken the time to look at my Twitter profile and website and mild annoyance that someone was [...]

Grantwriting is one way to raise funds for projects and programs in your organization. How do you get the gold medal in grantwriting? You get gold by doing through research about the foundation to whom you are applying. Then demonstrate why your community needs your project. Make sure your grant proposal presents professionally and without errors. Conform to the foundation’s application process. And most importantly, be persistent and build relationship with a foundation. Remember, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Some SEO tactics are considered outdated. But I still use them – but for different reasons. Do you still use alt tags in images for SEO? Keyword metatags? What about submitting sites to directories?

How many times have you read something on the web or in print and you’ve had to go back and read it again? Sometimes two or three times? No, it’s not your shortened attention span. Sometimes the text is just badly written.

Other times, reading some text is pure pleasure. You grasp the point easily. No going back and reading the text again. Do you want to know why? The writer has used some simple techniques to make your reading experience article. Read on to learn techniques to make your writing stronger, clearer and more focused.