Tired of Hearing, "Turn on the Nightlight"? Snap-Power is For You!

Finally, someone has wired a nightlight into an electrical outlet cover. Ingenious.

• #1 Night Light Available
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• Turns On/Off Automatically with a Light Sensor
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Get Google Rewards - Add an About Us page to your blog

Google is a glutton for information. It has a ferocious appetite for quality material. The more (great) content you load up and diversify your pages with the more likely that the big g will reward you with higher page ranks.

This should be no surprise to bloggers, yet it appears to be. Why should you expect that your blog will be treated any differently than any other webpage? With rare exception most blogs fall flat. And then they wonder why. If you're in it for the page ranks then listen up. This simple trick will get you started. Create an About Us page for your blog.

Enhancing your blog with some text and image links on an About Us page is like a mating call to Google's crawlers. I wanted to put the idea to the test; but it also seemed like a big waste of my time. An About Us page? On my blog?Linda Maintanis? which already has a link to my Google+ profile?...they know who we are, or I am, so why be redundant? To be specific.

The answer. To be specific. A validation, a declaration you might say, of who you are and what your intent is. That's all. Simple. Oh, and did I say Simple? Yes, keep it short and simple.

So how and where do I do this? I begin by "googling" the subject. A little research sums up the project and produces a few decent links to some instructions. Try reading Derek Halpern, How to Create an Amazing Blog About Page for a step-by-step guide to create a page that resembles a mission statement. A straightforward approach for an About page with original content can be found on Mashable's list of 21 Creative Blogger Bio Pages . You'll see here that practicality should govern common sense. Points here are to be humble, honest and humorous so as to provide transparency to your readers.

Lastly, you'll need some technical support, if like me, you're on your own. This page, How To Create Static Pages in Blogger, from HelpLogger is a no-brainers guide to perfection in one try.

It only took about fifteen minutes per blog to add the page, I will make note of today's date and monitor my Google Page Ranks for any change.

Should Blogs Have an Expiration Date?

The other night I found myself clicking through the blogroll. By this I mean clicking on the "next blog" button at the top of the page. This habitually addictive behavior began last week and much as I hate to say it I find myself drawn to peek just one more time at what's next.

 Regardless, that brings me to the topic of the blog graveyard. More than once while playing this game I've stumbled into a string of blog posts from three, four, even five years ago. Blogs written with flair for months, then abandoned for more pressing matters. Blogs created for a cause but never fulfilled to their legacy. Blogs posted fastidiously until 2009 and then...Wait, 2009? Exactly. They're dead as door nails. Shut them down. They occupy and clutter too much blog space. And the sheer number of title and names that they claim and broadcast to the keyword choked internet is staggering.

Believing that I was not the first to figure this out I searched for what others might have said about this and in the process got an education. The Google search results were eyeopening. They were old blog posts. I searched for the words; blog, life, cycle. and the first page of Google bares two "Google plus authorship" results from Problogger and Wired. Problogger's 2008 post Understanding the Blog Lifecycle to Prevent Common Downfalls is actually very informative and worth the read but I can't help wondering what might have changed in the last five years. The other post from Wired was wonderful, from 2007, called The Lifecycle of a Blog Post. Again, is there anything new out there?

Google has the position of control over this. The obvious answer will be a policy which addresses blog dormancy and dissolution. I expect that to happen sooner than later as the number of blogs created daily continues to grow.

Google Authorship the Easy Way!

I started this little project.

About a week ago I decided that it was time to clean up my image. My "on-line" image needed some polishing, and I had read that I should take ownership of my own identity on the internet before identity fraud took it from me. Where to begin?

First off, Google yourself. What do you see? and did you know that the most reliable source of that information is you? You can create your own profile and project via the web everything you want the public to find. Beat them at their own game, so to speak.

So, I Googled my name and the list was clean (smut free) but boring. That was good, but not great. I needed more credibility. More finesse. I wanted those little pictures of my face to show up next to my affiliations. How did that work? So began my latest project, The Google Authorship Program.