I always found tag clouds interesting. I think it will be fun to watch this “cloud” grow as posts continue.

So why is this in the SEO section? Tag clouds organize your pages into categories that cater to the specific word they are targeting. They are the Web 2.0 version of keywords. They add navigability to the site which helps both search engines crawl your pages, but more importantly, users trying to find the material that is relevant to them. Click on the word “SEO” below to see all the posts related to… SEO.

It should be noted that tag clouds aren’t just for blogs, they work for any site with lots of content. Large corporate sites that use tags include Amazon and Flickr. If your site utilizes the pretty much useless meta-keywords (which has been defunct for years but is still somehow touted by “SEO Experts”), now is the time to upgrade to tags and the power of the tag cloud to bring usability and improved navigation to your site. Add the SEO benefits, and it’s a no-brainer.

I like sites that continually provide me with information and use different ways to engage and interact with me. For example I first found out Michael Wesch’s Digital Ethnography site from a YouTube video he made about Web 2.0: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLlGopyXT_g

Here is a short list of blogs I recommend following if you are interested in web technology and where it is headed:

• Michael Wesch’s Digital Ethnography
• Matt Cutts’ Gadgets, Google, and SEO
• SEO Moz
• Search Engine Watch

And while not blogs, forums can prove to be just as effective for getting new information:

• Webmaster Forums
• Experts-Exchange

And those are just a few of the ones I like reading. A simple google search on seo blogs found this list of the top 25 SEO blogs based on SEO rankings.

What technology blogs do you like to read?

Technology is changing fast, and to become complacent is to risk irrelevance. Here are some of the methods I use to keep in touch with how technology is ever changing:

• Participating in Experts-Exchange. This has me answering questions in a wide range of technological areas. To solve many of these problems I need to research the solution, and try it out on my own before posting an appropriate response. This gives me a lot of hands on experience and keeps me finding new and different solutions to ever changing problems of the computer world.
• Subscribing to multiple Microsoft blogs via RSS on MSDN and Technet, such as the Microsoft Security Response Center blog. I read blogs like these daily to get the latest information on what is going on in the industry. By setting these kind of blogs onto my homepage with an RSS reader I am able to get information from multiple sources and read further about titles that interest me. I also subscribe to email alerts, such as the Microsoft Security bulletin to keep up with new security threats to PC systems. Microsoft doesn’t dominate the blogosphere, however, and other great blogs that I subscribe to including Google’s Matt Cutts. He posts a lot of innovative information about google and other search engine topics.
• Using and participating in organizations that promote technology standards. I am a large proponent of HTML standardization and other such efforts to bring standards to technology implementation.
• Using multiple web browsers. As of this post I have Internet Explorer 8 beta, Firefox 3, Google Chrome and Apple Safari for Windows. Right now I use Chrome, but as updates are added to other browsers, I may change. For a long time I used IE and then switched to Firefox before settling on Chrome when it was released. I use these installs to verify how webpages I code appear in different browsers. This is also very helpful when trying to solve a browser specific issue for a friend or on Experts-Exchange.
• Furthering my education, by working on technological certifications. The biggest one I am working on right now is the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer certification. More will definitely come after that one is completed.

How do you stay up to date?

• Students Helping Students (video)
  
  
  Toward the end of last semester, K-State Proud approached me about being their “Honorary Co-Chair.” Usually this is somebody who is well-known and respected throughout the K-State community. The former co-chair was our popular basketball coach Frank Martin, and before that it was (now retired) University President Jon Wefald, so obviously it was [...]
• “The Class” – parody of The Office
  
  
  This is from Lynn Schofield Clark’s Innovation in Mass Communications class at the University of Denver. If you are a fan of The Office, and you follow the discussions about technology use in the classroom, you will love this. They really nail the opening, and they have some great moments.

  I saw [...]

• Toward a New Future of “Whatever”
  
  
  Here is the video from my recent talk at the Personal Democracy Forum at Jazz at Lincoln Center. About 10 minutes of it is a minor update (rehash) of An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube, but the rest is new. The gathering may have been the highest concentration of amazingly creative and concerned global [...]
• The hype and hope of the past and a big fat gay collab
  
  
  While surfing for videos about the future from the past, I found this little gem from Apple:

  The video comes from a time in which very few were actually on the internet, hence the question, “What *would* you do?” The most recent YouTube comments paint a disheartening picture of what we have become:

  There is considerable GLBT [...]

• The Machine is Us/ing Us – Dance Mix
  
  
  Almost 9 months ago, the College of Wooster president, Grant Cornwell, forwarded my video to a remarkable collection of people who were daring and creative enough to think they could dance it … not just dance to it … but truly dance it.  And they do.  What a great performance.  The choreography by Kim Tritt [...]
• Our class on how we run our class
  
  
  The following are brief notes from our recent discussion with the great Alan Levine (twitter: @cogdog) and the New Media Consortium.  To see & hear the full discussion, click here.
  First off, here is our research team for 2009:

  How our class works:
  First off, we organize it as a research group, not a class.
  So, instead of a [...]

• SmartPen as Digital Ethnography Tool
  
  
  This little smartpen from livescribe just might revolutionize my note-taking in seminars, discussions, and ethnographic interviews.  If you have never seen it before, check out some of the demos on YouTube.  In short, it records audio as you write and links what you are writing to the audio (by recording what you write through a [...]
• The Anonymity Project (Video Preview)
  
  
  After the 94 articles activity I reported about here 2 weeks ago, my research team (”students”) began crafting their research proposals.  These were then aggregated into one collaborative proposal showing how each project is related to the others.  In the meantime, they have also been learning the language of video; gathering clips, pictures, and techniques [...]
• How to get students to find and read 94 articles before the next class
  
  
  My student-researchers and I tried something a little different to kick off our semester.  Instead of the standard syllabus that requires everybody to read a few articles to discuss, we decided instead to organize ourselves into a Smart Mob that would try to read a good hunk of the literature on a single topic in [...]
• Collaboration Strategies
  
  
  Now 2 weeks into our new project I am really pleased with the collaboration strategy we have adopted.  You can check out the revised platform here.  Here’s a screenshot with labels:

  As you can see, each student-researcher has their own blog.  These blogs are aggregated through a Yahoo pipe posted on the upper left.  Comments are [...]