I do not write about this concept too much on Maven Mapper’s Information these days, however there is a very good and slightly old fashioned way to network with other bloggers across the blogosphere.  Its called a blog surfing exchange. 

How Blog Surfing Exchanges Work

A blogger or a non-blogger signs up (works better if you have a blog).  You then surf through the directory of blogs that they offer, they tend to display a new blog one after the next in categories that you pick.  You control the speed and you can rate blogs as you go if you want to do that type of thing.  You can also block or favorite blogs as you go.

For each blog you visit, you earn some credits.  You can then use these credits to list your own blog in the exchange and other bloggers will then see your site in the que.

This is a good way to find other bloggers, see what they are doing, how they are doing it and network or share or develop ideas. 

This is not a good way to market your website or products or ebooks.  If you are into that type of thing, you should probably look elsewhere.

This is primarily for bloggers to connect with other bloggers and generally communicate blog to blog.

As I mentioned this concept has been around for a long time.  I am a long time member in BlogExplosion and BlogMad.  These are two of the largest surfing exchanges.  BlogExplosion is the oldest I believe and BlogMad seems to have recently eclipsed it as the largest.

To my knowledge if you have more than one blog, there is no limit on the number of blogs allowed at BlogExplosion.  That said, they are slow at approvals and very picky.  You can expect to be rejected a few times.  Try and take it in stride as it can pay off later. 

I do not agree with their philosophy, but it is their club.

BlogMad is much easier, but they limit you to 3 and then later 6 blogs.  Essentially you have to work your way up the levels to get more benefits such as the ability to list more blogs.

I’m just about to hit the ‘Mad’ level for example, I was hoping to win a Technomarine watch, but will settle for the ability to add more blogs.  Sounds goofy, but hey its about as mature as Facebook.

Big Picture Purpose for Building Subscribers

This isn’t a good place to go strictly to get traffic for your website, however as you network there and as people see and possibly like your site, they will essentially be able to use that introduction as a means to coming back and maybe subscribing to your syndicated delivery via rss or email.

As a writer, web designer and CEO, I have a serious need for creativity.  It is intrinsic to everything I do.  My business will not survive if I am not constantly innovating and creating new things from:

• websites
• graphic design
• artwork, buttons, banners, flash presentations
• mindmaps
• databases (yes designing a database requires a great deal of creativity)
• coding
• designing processes
• business plans
• stories,
• articles
• how to guides
• videos

Those are all activities that I will hit in a given month, sometimes a week and sometimes a day.  That doesn’t even include the marketing work that I do!

Now trying to stay fresh and creative when you are creating so much, so fast, so often is not easy.

To keep my creative juices flowing during so much production these are some of the things that I do to stay fresh and keep my soul from fading.

1. I read incessantly.  Mostly for time reasons, I listen to audio books from Audible on my Treo.
2. I watch a lot of movies and TV while I’m doing all of the activities above.
3. I read and watch a lot of news.
4. Traveling helps a great deal also.  New landscapes, sites and new people are very important.
5. I talk to people as much as possible.  Working in a home office, its easy to fall out of touch with people.  Fortunately technology comes to the rescue in the form of discussion boards, Skype, twitter, other blogs, calling people the old fashioned way, email and more.
6. Sleep!  This is very very important, and the thing that is my biggest weakness.  I do not get enough sleep.
7. Exercise, especially exercise in natural surroundings.  I can’t get much from a gym, the cold surroundings bore me to death and I leave feeling like crap.  Put me outside, jogging, hiking or doing sit-ups hanging from a tree and I’m happy.  Add in some swimming or kayaking and its pure serenity.
8. Don’t get into any routines.  For some people this does not work, but for me if I avoid routines and keep myself out of a comfort zone that challenges my thinking and forces me to continually re-evaluate and continually improve.  (Nice trick I learned at working for the Postal Service during the 90’s. )
9. Try new things all the time.  Food, hobbies, software, technology, etc.  The important thing here is to look for new insights from the new perspective that new things give you.  If you just go bungee jump off a cliff, you’ll get a nice adrenalin rush, but if you learn nothing from the experience you have missed some of the potential.
10. Learning new things all the time, follows that last one very closely.  I am a habitual student, which is partly why I have a couple hundred credit hours of education.  Its also why I have a resume that never ends and leaps from discipline to discipline.  Plus, its why I constantly by lots of training DVD’s and take lots of non-credit technical courses all the time.  I also am becoming a connoisseur of free courses.  The internet provides a lot of good knowledge for free.  The trick is that you have to typically create your own syllabus, then do the research to fill it in with good content!
11. Lastly, accepting your vices until you can beat them.  I am a coke zero junkie, never been much for coffee nor espresso machines, although I have rotated in and out of various teas.  At the end of the day its water with chemicals in it.  It could be worse, unfortunately its not better, but I do not stress over it.  Stressing over your vices is sometimes worse than the vices themselves.  Someday I’ll kick my vices or replace them with something better, but until then I accept the reality that they are there and that I could be even more flawed.

I’m looking for a new theme to use on this website.  If you look at the article below this one, you will notice that the article section of the blog is rather skinny and doesn’t utilize the full range of the browsers space.

This lack of use of the valuable browser real estate doesn’t help this blog communicate as effectively as it might.  This is exceptionally true when we offer up videos or large images.  Under the current theme those images or videos must fit into a pixel space of approximately 450 pixels in width.

That just doesn’t work when it comes to Mind Maps or wide videos presumably of mind maps or other full screen software applications.

So far I have not been able to find a theme that would be just right, and so I am also rapidly studying up on the things needed to code my own custom WordPress theme.  So over the next few weeks you may see some testing of new themes when you visit here.

Hopefully, I will find one rapidly and find one that utilizes the screen space more effectively and for those folks with slower DSL connections, I will hopefully also find one that loads faster as well.

As I am going through these tests, I would definitely welcome any feedback about the themes that I test out here. 

My friend AndrewIanDodge of DodgeBlogium is trying to win a trip to the Superbowl and be featured in Superbowl ad.  He’s one of 10 finalists.

Please consider dropping by to sign up and vote at

http://www.fuelmyblog.com/index.jsp?t=mybowlad

I received an invitation to join a new advertising program for publishers and advertisers via email this week from Tumri called AdPods.  The new service offers a unique twist on the concept of offering up one of those little boxes with rotating product ads.

Instead of offering a box that only provides ads to products from one site like chiquita or Amazon or a dozen others, AdPod offers ads from multiple retailers from Amazon to Target to Best Buy and more.

Basically, they consolidate lots of different offers into one box.  For a publisher or blogger that is good as it utilizes your web real estate much more efficiently and effectively.

Everything else about the program seems to be pretty much standard as these types of programs go.

I came across an excellent resource providing information on 100 different online resources and tools for freelancers.

I wanted to internalize the information in a way that I could rapidly work with in multiple settings in the future if I ever needed to find the right tool for the job. So of course I mindmapped out the tools listed, plus I added in the tools suggested in the comments and I added a bunch of my own.

Now I have a great starting point for the future whenever I need to build up the list or find something I need quickly. I linked back to the original article from my MindMap Central topic and I created sub maps for each of the categories identified. This kept each category of items viewable at a single glance.

I’ve provided snapshots of these maps below. For more details about each of the tools I suggest a quick visit over to the site yourself as it really does have a great deal of information.

In the meantime, I did this experiment in part to internalize the info as I mentioned, but also in part to find a more rapid way of mindmapping this type of information from primary sources on the web. I hope to find more efficient ways to achieve this goal in the future.

If Google is banishing your content to the “supplemental index” gulag you might just have this problem … and need this solution!
Great article.

Each time I consider this problem I keep thinking that we are fixing something that isn’t broken. Google is the problem here not the website owners. Google is essentially missing important information on the web that their google bots have mistakenly dumped into a supplemental file (reminds me of a ‘I will file it later stack that never gets filed’).

If Google doesn’t get around to getting a better grip on this, their search engine results will continue to degrade and eventually the market will offer up some company that can do the job more effectively (again).

It would also seem that Google already has some of the technology to deal with this scenario present in Google News. Instead of penalizing a site for perceived duplicate content, Google should offer up an alternative option with these listings with a link in their results like ‘All 1,534 Pages of similar content’.

If I am searching the web and I find the version of content that Google deems to be correct, its possible and often likely that Google is wrong. I’d much rather have the ability to drill into a look up of other sites with similar content and find the source (possibly the primary source that isn’t as search engine friendly).

From a webmaster’s perspective this is a great article, from a web researcher’s perspective it shows the failing of Google to get things right and opens the door for competition. Isn’t it about time someone knocked off the king of the hill for search? Its been a few years now. . .

read more | digg story

The LinkyLoveArmy.com is launching a beta program this week.  Today, they released several insights into their Internet marketing 2.0 of strategies.  They are forming an army of bloggers to leverage the numbers of bloggers and blog campaigns in the direction and shape reminiscent of a wedge formation.

You lazy this type of structure they hope to penetrate advertising campaigns and in particular keyword searches that generates large amounts of traffic such that the bloggers can directly market to business-to-business and business-to-customer groups.

Up until this point in time, those Internet marketing 2.0 firms have offered up a bit of a free-for-all where advertisers come to purchase reviews with contextual links inside of his and bloggers respond acting as individuals in the marketplace offering up individual benefits.  The LinkyLoveArmy hopes to organize those bloggers with a much more focused strategic objective and at the same time harness a new revenue model for bloggers yielding a higher return on effort.

Here is a short video that they are offering on their website today:

So I had been using Dragon Naturally Speaking Preferred 9 for about four days, and I was wondering just how fast I was actually typing.  I knew it was easier, my hands and arms were much more relaxed not doing half as much work, I was multitasking and doing many other things while I was typing just like I am right now.  (I’m currently were adding spy sweeper on a different computer and going to the simple mouse clicks required for that.).

So, I looked online to try to find a free typing test program that I could use with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.  The trick was I needed a typing test that would actually receive the text input from the program but wouldn’t have to be triggered by a keyboard key press.  I found a program on a United Kingdom site called typeonline.co.uk.  This was not the perfect typing test program for my needs, but it got the job done.

The test was designed to throw in some curveball type of words from 19th century English that sounded slightly archaic and outdated, along with capitalization, punctuation and other items that I wouldn’t normally type myself.  It reminded me a lot of typing class back in high school, so it was basically your normal typing test.  I ran through three or four tests initially, and I made a bunch of errors because I was learning how the typing test worked with the program Dragon NaturallySpeaking.

So I threw out the first few tests.  I then did five tests in a row, and captured screenshots of the results.  Which you can see below.  My results range from typing speeds of 135 words per minute.  Up to 157 words per minute.  In the early typing tests I had 14 to 20 errors, and in the later tests I was able to get down to six to seven errors.  Most of these errors were due to the peculiarity of the typing test program.  To do it error-free I would probably have to slow down by half to a measly 60 to 80 words a minute. 

However, if I were to use a combination of voice recognition and typing, I could still probably hang in there at over a hundred words a minute.

There was a slight flaw or slowness in my computer system that probably decrease the speed by 20 words per minute.  I would often read a typing test paragraph and wait 10 to 20 seconds before my computer caught up with me and printed the text in the typing test program, at that point I would hit the submit button to in the typing test.  I’m running a gig of RAM on my new duo century no machine, but I suspect if I had a slightly faster machine and more RAM.  I could get my words per minute 180 maybe 200 words a minute.

I can type 70 to 90 words a minute myself, however fatigue will eventually set in, and doing that day in and day out for many years increases the chance of a repetitive stress injury.  If nothing else, Dragon NaturallySpeaking pays for itself when it enables your average person to type in over a hundred words per minute.  As a further disclaimer I’ve only taken two of the training exercises in Dragon, and so my accuracy and speed would probably increase the more I improve my profile.

I will do that over time, but I’m in no rush since the program works.  So damn good already.

I’m working on my third day using Dragon NaturallySpeaking.  Today I’ve been getting better at using a digital recorder in conjunction with dragon.  I can record anything on my digital recorder, transfer the wave file over to my computer, and use the Dragon NaturallySpeaking transcription capability to convert it into text.

Keep The Recording Rate High Enough to Transcribe

I’ve used a digital recorder for quite a few years for lots of different purposes.  In the past, I always used the lowest compression method of proximally 16 kB per second.  This allowed me to maximize the amount of recording time I can get on a memory card.

The quality is just fine for my purposes at this recording rate.  However, recently after I’ve started use Dragon NaturallySpeaking I’ve learned that if I use a higher compression rate 43 kb or higher fat dragon can then transcribe the sound files I make with my digital recorder automatically.

This is extremely convenient now. I can take my voice notes transcribe them into text and they can be searched through various different search tools on my computer, such as Google desktop. 

Don’t Forget the Punctuation

The only downside is that if I want to utilize Dragon NaturallySpeaking I need to remember to make my voice notes with punctuation such as, saying the word ‘Period’ or ‘Coma’. 

I’m truthfully very amazed at just how well this system and software works with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.  When I was attempting to do research on the product, several of the reviews led me to believe that the digital recorder device might not be compatible with Dragon NaturallySpeaking.  It’s now my experience with one device, but as long as you’re wave compression rate is high enough to probably be okay.

Potential Usage

With this capability I can write a paper or an e-mail or dozens of e-mails.  I can read an e-mail that comes in on my phone and I can respond to it in full without having to type my thumbs into nubs.  I can respond by a voice file. 

I can then transfer it to my computer and convert it to transcribed text. Then I can copy paste it into e-mail and send it back.  This may not work for every short little e-mail.  However in those cases were an important e-mail comes in on my phone and a short response won’t work, I can give it a detailed response, while the topic is fresh in my mind.

Hands Free Phone Microphone

Now I just need to find a hands-free microphone for my phone, and I could write lengthy e-mails while driving.