A colleague recently made an offhand comment to me about how good writing has “steak and sizzle.” I couldn’t agree more. In the context of content creation, steak represents the heart of a piece of writing, which makes sizzle the metaphoric soul. The steak acts upon the writing, inculcating human senses within the words and [...]

The best chickens are the ones you raise yourself, fed on a steady diet of table scraps, locally-grown and milled corn, and flora/fauna from your yard. Here are my recipes for roasted chicken & chicken soup. Place your thawed/nearly thawed chicken (make sure the innards are removed) into a large roasting pan + rack. Breast [...]

32 ways to tweak your blog in an afternoon via MarianLibrarian. I love this list because it is so basic, requiring rudimentary skills to implement. Why choose Oberlin College? Because of their over-the-top unofficial web site.  The boldest marketing efforts are generally the most memorable. A new way of looking at higher education fund raising. Think [...]

Two of my favorite organizations introduced new web sites this week. The first one I saw was that of Le Moyne College, which represents a huge advancement over what it has before. They opted for mega-menus, made some interesting font choices (Note: ALL CAPS is not easy to read), but did a great job in [...]

A most excellent article, fear.change.edu, from @MattKlawitter. Building an audience for an Alaskan blog on carpentry via @stevenczyrny - I love reading about Alaska, and hope to visit eventually. Tips on advancing your online education via @leahmacvie - I’m signed up for a course through campus-class.org for the spring that is completely outside my current skill set, but [...]

Muffin tins aren’t just for muffins.  Via @lifehacker: Freeze stock in muffin tins. Also, for mini-meatloafs, mini-lasagnas, large crayons. A strategy for managing social media proliferation HT @markgr via @jowyang I missed this last month: Instagram is coming to Android! HT @erinkdoherty via @mashable. @Alumnitrending – a friendly, enthusiastic and informative voice for higher education and [...]

I contributed another article to The Agency Post, “Many Stories, Many Audiences,” which was published today. Creating compelling content for an organization presents a challenge for even the most seasoned writers. Working in higher education, I’m lucky to have several audiences to supply stories. Student achievements, faculty accomplishments and notable alumni all go into the metaphoric hopper [...]

I dug this out of the cold storage/old CD on which it was stored: my master’s thesis, all 67 pages of it. I wrote it so long ago (2003-5), I used (gasp!) non-electronic sources in researching it. The phrase “social media” does not appear in the entire work, but that’s not surprising. That term didn’t [...]

The theme: “[Number] [things] to [verb]…” 7 ways to turn your LinkedIn profile into a social media marketing workhorse via @elysa and Copyblogger 7 reasons you should launch white papers like products via @dwakabayashi and WhitePaperSource.com 20 crazy things to do on Twitter via @markwschaefer 29 ways to stay creative and keep going via @adamsconsulting and Bitrebels 20 non-fiction books [...]

Venture Beat’s article about “frictionless” sharing through Facebook’s soon-to-be-launched “actions” feature used the metaphor of the next block of Facebook’s Open Graph being the new “like” button. But it’s so much more than that. The example used in the article, a recipe site could create its own “cooking” action, means that we can expect to see [...]