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About this site

My name is Neil MacLean. I am a new media strategist in the UK and this blog covers social media technologies and the travel business.

I study the impact of consumer generated content and analyse how your customers can help you be found and trusted in a crowded marketplace.

This blog is a playground and in a constant state of experimentation. Sorry about that.

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If I was still globe-trotting I would be marvelling at the newly spruced-up St Pancras. As it is, from where I sit, I am just in awe of Eurostar’s For Tomorrow site. Clients seem to understand when I discuss the SEO benefits of using WordPress for their blogs; but from now on, when they express concern about its aesthetic limitations, I can point to that.

Can anyone say Photoshop?

This morning I found a QuickPost bookmarklet for WordPress which replicates something which Tumblr users find very handy. Given that a sizeable chunk of my working day at the moment seems to be spent trying to find the easiest possible route between client and published content, this looks very good indeed. Unfortunately on my test blog, it publishes every post twice. I suspect it will be the same here but there is only one way to find out.

Now that I have got that email-to-WordPress posting business sorted out, the work flow looks like this: the client writes a quick email (on their mobile phone if they prefer) or opens Windows Live Writer (they are MS people) to compose something more considered. They hit send - or publish - and off it goes to the blog.
Very shortly afterwards, thanks to a combination of RSS Menu and Growl, the new post appears before my eyes or at least pops up on my monitor.
I go into WordPress, tidy up post - and any images - and then put my SEO hat on and rewrite meta tags, including the title, the description and list of keywords. This last bit is a reasonably quick process thanks to an array of really good WordPress SEO plugins including SEO Title Tags and Add Meta Tags.
Then I save the post again and make sure directories are pinged.
And then we come up with some ideas for the next post.
That’s about as easy and effective as I can make client blogging.
For now.

James Cridland’s links for the day led me to Mark Ramsey’s post on widgets and making your brand embeddable, which in turn made me click on the video clip in the sidebar.

Which then reminded me that a combination of images, the Ken Burns effect plus a sound track could occasionally be as useful - and probably faster loading - than a full-motion video. Which then also reminded me of the existence of Stickam. This example is horribly dull but I am embedding it in this post to check how quickly it plays here, with future use in mind.

I am really glad Google has decided to make it easy for people to embed their maps online. I have been through the process of requesting the API and playing with the code, but this new facility to grab an iframe on the map page makes it all so simple.

This, for the sake of a test, is my tennis club.

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There is no particular reason for choosing this video - except you have to wonder what ratio of lifeguards to bathers they have at this Tokyo wave pool.
No, I am inflicting this on you as a test of a new Firefox extension from VodPod which offers one button posting of embedded videos - direct from YouTube and other video services - into a WordPress blog with no need to insert any code by hand.
It occurs to me I could combine it with iMovie 08’s ability to post directly to YouTube for a very slick shoot-edit-post -to-blog workflow.

A combination of summer holidays – ah, the sunshine, ah the clear blue skies of the Austrian Alps, yay to drizzle in the Scottish Highlands – and getting two client blogs off the ground, has kept me away from doing anything here for so long I could have grown a beard and you wouldn’t have known.
However, I haven’t disappeared, my chin is still clean-shaven and it is time to blow the dust off this old WordPress install with a paean to the brand new Zoho Viewer which just popped into my feed reader from assorted sources. For many people (I hope) it will do away with email attachments for all sorts of file types. Give it a go – particularly if you were thinking of sending me a 10 page press release any time soon.
Now, I realise I am just adding to what will be a commotion of blog noise about it today but to be honest the point about this post is to see how well the embedding option works on a blog.