Better Blog Branding: What’s In a Name?

Here are a series article i get from chrisg.com. Why i post it here ? Because  it's i like to know.

One critical consideration when launching a blog is what you are going to call it. Why did I choose to use my old chrisg.com domain rather than create a new one?

 

Branding was part of the reason. OK, now I said the ‘B’ word some people will have clenched. Please relax. It is a much talked about, much derided and even more misunderstood topic. My personal take on branding is that it is what people think about you, your product or service. It’s about giving the right impression. I don’t know about you but I think a good impression is worth working on.  With a domain of course there is more to it than just branding so let’s talk about those issues first.

 

What other considerations are there?

•    Time to live - I had the domain, I wasn’t using it and I could have it working very quickly
•   SEO benefits - It is a 9-year-old domain, that has some benefits where trust from search engines is concerned. Plus there are still some inbound links that still work, despite many many years of neglect, server moves, breaking site changes, and other dumb-ass moves on my part. There are no keywords in my domain, I think the SEO benefit of keywords is small, I would much rather have a memorable name than a keyword-laden one.
•    Its “Me” - chrisg has been my shorthand identity for quite a while. Obviously the vast majority of the time I used my full name but chrisg as a short form has worked pretty well.

 

Which brings me to branding …

 

Brand Implications of Blog Names

When choosing a domain name there are some factors to consider:

    * How original and unique is it?
    * How descriptive is it?
    * What image does it convey?
    * Would you remember it after seeing it once?
    * Could you spell it after hearing it once?

Choosing a name for your blog is like choosing a name for a child, you have to choose carefully because it could stick around for a long time. How do you go about selecting the perfect name?

 

Names are tricky, along with choosing your niche a name can be one of the harder initial decisions. When you do find a name that you like then you have to go back to the drawing board because the ideal domain is taken. You can only do this properly after settling on a niche for your blog, each niche will have different expectations and requirements. For example “Flickr” wouldn’t play well to a straight-laced-grammar-nazi audience, the missing ‘e’ would just annoy, but the Web2.0 audience embraced it.

 

First a word to the cynics amongst you. Yes I know that a great deal of your brand will come gradually from what is written, and how. A good name though really can help.

 

First have a think about what sort of blog you are writing. Take a look around at what sort of blogs are in your subscription list, here are some examples.

    * Gillianic Tendencies
    * Gapingvoid
    * Woot
    * PVRBlog
    * ProBlogger

 

What do they say to you? Would you say they are memorable?

A good name is

   1. Readable
   2. Pronounceable
   3. Spellable
   4. Memorable
   5. Concise
   6. Unique

So have a think about what your blog is going to be and think about what type of name you need to choose. Descriptive, evocative, direct or metaphor?

 

I chose to use chrisg.com and for the blog to be titled with my name because this blog is about the stuff in my head. Narcissistic? Possibly, but this blog will succeed or fail by my efforts and using my own name shows I stand by what I say. I’m hoping “being me” makes this blog a little more approachable to encourage people to post comments knowing they are dealing with an actual person.

 

An identity doesn’t require your own name of course. ProBlogger and CopyBlogger are good examples. A Rowse by any other name … ok, bad joke. In both cases Darren and Brian are closely identified with the blogs but other bloggers can post without breaking the format. This is also what has allowed Aaron to put his blog up for sale, Technosailor can transfer to another owner where chrisg.com could not unless the owner was also called Chris G____.

Completely made-up names, the Xerox type names, are a lot harder to sell. It takes far more effort. On the other hand they are definitely unique and sometimes memorable. I try to stick to at least variations on familiar words though.

 

When looking at evocative or metaphorical names it is sometimes useful to think about the benefit that your blog will provide, or the problem you are solving? I’m thinking Shoemoney is good here, as are SEOBook and Tropical SEO (with a bit of imagination). Standing out is important you need to consider what your competitions names are like. If they are all descriptive a more creative name might give you that bit of difference. Your name is very important in positioning. It wouldn’t work so well launching a new blog to compete with Darren and calling it BlogPro, ProBlogr, BloggingProf, etc. There is only one ProBlogger.

 

Expansion vs Focus

Will your blog always have focus or will you want to extend out? A more generic name might be necessary if you will want to have multiple blogs off the same root name. DSLRBlog is fixed forever as a blog about a particular type of camera. Nothing I can do about that. But it does mean my audience is very targeted. Focus is good. It’s the old idea of specialist versus generalist; in most cases people prefer the specialist.

Brainstorm

Try to create a long list of options. Play with ideas. Combining words and creating new words, checking a thesaurus, getting the help of friends and family can all help. Switch off your internal critic while you create. Jot down every name no matter how daft, at this point you are aiming for quantity, not quality!

 

Sometimes it is good to see the names in a list, there are some names that sound great but look bad (”powergenitalia.com” anybody?) and vice versa.

Once you have a big long list go through and ditch the worst offenders then copy the remaining list and either choose or get friends to each score a top three. Those you take to the computer and check for domain name availability.

Finally

Nobody can tell you the right name for your blog, the name you choose has to be up to you as you have to live with it. While I have suggested you take others opinions into account, you go with what you believe is right.

How can software be free?

Free software falls into two categories; promotional freebies, and software developed to help people fight back against the power of the big software providers.

 

Free software as a commercial giveaway

Many commercial publishers offer free versions of their software, hoping it'll become the industry standard in its category. After all, having a product sitting on millions of PCs is a fantastic marketing tool. Then they try to persuade you to upgrade to 'advanced' or 'corporate' versions.

 

Open source software, Freeware, and Shareware

The other side of free software comes from the thousands of developers, both amateur and professional, who contribute to developing free applications so as not to be tied to big software houses, especially Microsoft.

 

This software falls into two categories:

Open source software

As well as being free, here the code used to write the program (effectively the program itself) is available too, so anybody that wants to can work on improving it. This has pros and cons. The bonus is it's constantly being honed and updated, and the problem's that support is often limited as there are no big bucks backing it up. The open source model has come a long way since it began, and the growing popularity of Linux-based operating systems and programs like Mozilla Firefox suggests it'll only continue to grow.

Freeware and Shareware

As the name suggests, freeware costs nothing, though some developers request a donation if you like it. The difference is that here you can't access the source code, so development is centralized in one location. Shareware is similar, except here the software's only free for a limited period, after which you have to either pay to register it, or lose some of the functionality (or have an annoying reminder message pop up every time you use it).

Generally there's less shareware and freeware available as more software goes open source, which is a good thing for people that are easily irritated by 'nag screens' (ie. Just about everyone I've ever met).

Where to Find Free Software

This list is just the tip of the iceberg; there are plenty of sites out there with vast databases of free programs. Yet always be careful what you add to your computer, and regularly check the Add/Remove Programs section of Control Panel for things you've downloaded yet never use. Get rid of those you have no need for to keep your PC in shape.

If you're looking for free anti-virus software, read the full article on How To Protect Your PC For Free. Also if you're a newbie and have questions visit this site's Techie Board, where regulars are keen to help (though remember there are no guarantees they're right).

As for browsing free software sites, there are a few big ones, which have programs on virtually anything under the sun. Be careful to check the veracity of other download sites before using them; after all, it's through downloading that the most vicious malware will get onto your machine.

 

Osalt.

Osalt is a software database with a difference, as it only lists open source equivalents to commercial programs. You just tell it which commercial program you want, and it'll list the free programs that are most similar to it.

Sourceforge.

Sourceforge is another open source software database, this time in regular search-to-find style.

FileHippo.

A user friendly and well organised site, FileHippo catalogues browsers, firewalls, audio tools and DVD tools. It also promises no pop-ups when you visit the site.

Snapfiles.

More slick than FileHippo SnapFiles has the added bonus of user reviews and feedback, though it can be hard to find what you're looking for.

Download.

One of the biggest databases, Download.com includes everything from digital photo tools to developer tools. Also has a Mac section.

Tucows.

Like Snapfiles, Tucows includes its own and users' ratings and also has sections for Linux and Mac users.

For Mac users.

As well as some of the sites above, it's worth stopping by Sof tpedia's Mac arm, VersionTracker for OSX, and Apple's own software repository.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Unleashed

Sams Publishing 2008, 1244 pages

Microsoft® Visual Studio 2008 Unleashed is an end-to-end, deep dive into the Visual Studio development environment. It’s meant to provide you guidance on how you can squeeze the ultimate productivity out of the many features built into the .NET development tools. Understanding how to use your tools will make you a better developer. This book was written with that premise as its focus.

The authors have folded in real-world development experience alongside detailed information about the IDE. The result is practical, easy-to-employ information that will make you a more productive and complete developer. This book also helps to ease your transition from other development environments and former versions of Visual Studio.

Finally, this book provides an entire section dedicated to Visual Studio Team System. It will help you understand how the Team Architect, Team Developer, Team Database Developer, and Team Tester work with the Team Foundation Server to increase team collaboration, visibility, and productivity.

Microsoft® Visual Studio 2008 Unleashed provides straight, to-the-point answers to common developer questions about the IDE.

The Moment of Silence

The Moment of Silence is a classic point-and-click 3rd person adventure game set in New York City in 2044. Players step into the role of Peter Wright, an advertising executive currently heading up the Government's 'Freedom of Speech' campaign. When a heavily armed SWAT team storms his neighbor's apartment, Peter must uncover the truth behind his mysterious disappearance as he becomes drawn into the deceptive worlds of corruption and power.
The Moment of Silence marries fully-rendered, animated backdrops with a traditional and intuitive adventure interface, resulting in one of the best-looking examples of adventure gaming in today's market. The game mixes real-world locations with fictitious environments to create immersive and incredibly varied worlds.
The Moment of Silence offers more than eight hours of professional voice talent for heart-pounding drama that sounds as good as it looks.
Traditional adventure puzzles are fused with dialogue choices and moments of high drama, putting the game on par with some of cinema's greatest thrillers, where action sequences are integrated to create a constantly challenging adventure.

Microsoft Virtual PC

Microsoft Virtual PC is a virtualization suite for Microsoft Windows operating systems, and an emulation suite for Mac OS X on PowerPC-based systems. The software was originally written by Connectix, and was subsequently acquired by Microsoft. In July 2006 Microsoft released the Windows-hosted version as a free product. In August 2006 Microsoft announced the Macintosh-hosted version would not be ported to Intel-based Macintoshes, effectively discontinuing the product as PowerPC-based Macintoshes are no longer manufactured.

Virtual PC virtualizes/emulates a standard PC and its associated hardware. All Windows operating systems released to date (May, 2008) run on Virtual PC. Other OSes like Linux may run, but are not officialy supported.

Virtual PC emulates the following.
32-bit Intel Pentium II processor (but virtualizes the host processor on Windows versions) with an Intel 440BX chipset
standard SVGA VESA graphics card (S3 Trio 64 PCI with 4 MB Video RAM, adjustable in later versions up to 16 MB)
system BIOS from American Megatrends (AMI) Creative Labs Sound Blaster 16 ISA PnP (native Vista audio when Vista acts as host and guest)[clarify] DEC 21041 (DEC 21140 in newer versions) Ethernet network card.

Not all programs are guaranteed to work because they can use undocumented features of hardware, exotic timings, or unsupported opcodes, although overall compatibility can be considered satisfactory.
The Macintosh version of Virtual PC uses dynamic recompilation to translate the x86 code used by a standard PC into equivalent PowerPC code used by a Mac. The Windows version of Virtual PC also uses dynamic recompilation, but only to translate kernel mode and real mode x86 code into x86 user mode code, while original user mode and virtual 8086 mode code run natively.

It also uses some guest calls traps (especially when using the guest extensions) to accelerate emulation or offer additional features, such as integration with the host environment.

Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) is the file format used by Virtual PC and Virtual Server, for which Microsoft has made available all documentation under the Open Specification Promise.

Supported Host and Guest Operating Systems

 Host Operating Systems

Virtual PC 2007 supports the following as a host operating system (although some, such as Vista Home Premium, will display a warning and work regardless):

Windows Vista ( 32 bit and 64 bit versions of Ultimate, Enterprise, Business editions and European Business N only, not Vista Starter, Vista Home Basic or Vista Home Premium or European Vista Home N editions)
Windows XP ( XP Pro 32 bit and XP x64 64 bit only, not Home or Media Center editions )
Windows Server 2003
Windows Server 2008

Virtual PC 2004 was the last version to support Windows 2000 as the host OS.

Guest Operating Systems

Virtual PC 2007 can use the following as a guest operating system:
Windows Vista (All 32-bit editions)
Windows XP
Windows Server 2008 (Virtual PC 2007 SP1 onwards)
Windows 2000 Professional and Server
Windows 98 Second Edition
Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition
Windows NT 4.0 Server
Certain editions of IBM OS/2

Support for Windows 95, the Windows 98 original release, Windows Me, Windows NT 4.0 Workstation and MS-DOS 6.22 as guest operating systems has been discontinued in VirtualPC 2007. [1]

Guest operating systems which are officially unsupported may be installable, however, they may or may not work properly and Virtual Machine Additions are not available.

Linux guests are officially unsupported in Virtual PC 2004 and 2007 although Virtual Machine Additions support for Linux was available in Connectix's version of Virtual PC before being acquired by Microsoft. Microsoft supports VM Additions for Linux only in their Virtual Server product. Both the OS/2 and Linux VM additions were developed by German company innotek GmbH for Connectix/Microsoft

EssentialPIM - free personal information manager

www.essentialpim.com
EssentialPIM Free is an absolutely free personal information manager that can store, manage and encrypt data: day/week/month/year schedules, to do lists for keeping all your tasks up-to-date, notes (pictures, tables, any formatted text) and contacts. Offers Rijndael 128-bit encryption, MS Outlook import/export, Windows Address Book import/export, search capabilities, versatile print features and adjustable contacts storage with unlimited number of fields.

Features

EssentialPIM Free is a full-featured personal information manager, which offers:

• Excellent usability. Shortcuts that are fun to use and boost your productivity. Easy, intuitive tools arranged right where you need them
• Security. All data can be password-protected and the database file is encrypted with the advanced industry standard AES (Rijndael), 128-bit key
• Versatile import and export capabilities. You can import and export HTML, RTF, CSV, TXT and TreePad. You can perform import/export with Microsoft® Outlook; and you can import from Outlook Express
• Available in many languages: Bulgarian, Chinese (simplified), Czech, English, French, German, Hellenic, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, etc.
• System tray icon with a hotkey for starting and configuring the software
• Open-source Firebird database. Advanced users and system administrators get great flexibility in managing databases

What is Google Adsense?

Google AdSense is a fast and absolutely ridiculously easy way for people with websites of all types and sizes to put up and display relevant Google ads on the content pages of their site and earn money.

Because the Google AdSense ads relate to what your visitors came to your site to read about, or because the ads match up to the interests and characteristics of the kind  of people your content attracts, you now have a way to improve your content pages AND make some serious bucks off of them.

Google AdSense is also a way for site owners to provide Google search capability to visitors and to earn even more money by putting Google ads on the search results pages. Google AdSense gives you the ability to earn advertising revenue from every single page on your website—with a minimal investment of your time

So what kind of ads do you have to put up?  That’s the good part—you don’t have to decide.  Google does it for you.  AdSense always delivers relevant ads that are precisely targeted—on a page-by-page basis—to the content that people find on your site.  For example, if you have a page that tells the story of your pet fish, Google will send you ads for that site that are for pet stores, fish food, fish bowls, aquariums…you get the picture.

If you decide you want to add a Google search box to your site, then AdSense will deliver relevant ads targeted to the Google search results pages that your visitors’ search request generated.

If you’re into upgrades, Google is now offering “AdSense Premium”, which is CPC based and, for the time being, offers less flexibility in terms of ad sizes -- only banners and skyscrapers are currently available. You can apply using existing AdWords accounts, or you can request a new account. Applicants are usually notified within a day as to whether they’ve been accepted for the program.

Here’s the thing you need to know:  Google has no strict criteria for acceptance into the AdSense program, and Ad Sense doesn’t hit you with a minimum traffic requirement. The only criteria they’re really sticky about is the standard “acceptable content” requirements, and that’s pretty standard almost anywhere.

Google AdSense says they’re serious about attracting quality content sites, and because of that they only allow AdSense members to serve one ad per page.  This means you can’t use AdSense for both banners and skyscrapers.(Note: banners are those horizontal ads that run up top and down bottom.  Skyscrapers are the tall ads that run vertically, on the left and right of your page text.)

Once you’ve been accepted into Google AdSense, you’ll be able to get the AdSense advertisements on any site you own using the same ad code, provided you obey the Google guidelines. (And that’s very, very important—more on that later.)Your reporting doesn’t occur in real time, but is updated regularly throughout the day. Right now, you can’t view reports based on a domain or site basis if you run the AdSense on more than one site. Before you sign up, you really ought to read the lengthy and detailed FAQ on the AdSense site.

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