I had the great fortune to be at a fun, informative think tank yesterday called LifeWork 2.0 . I connected with a lot of interesting people and learned many things. Something that stood out to me was the importance of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). At one point it was said to be as good as almost as good as SEX. While you can pay for sex, SEO is often not that easy to come by. SEO is REALLY important… very critical to get right. And when you get it right, you can rule your world.

There’s a good bit of information on SEO at Wikipedia and of course, you can Google it.

What I took away from our SEO conversation was that Quality is probably better than Quantity regarding the traffic on a web site. Also, having organic search results and good keyword density is a must.

We learned about lots of new web apps and tools. One I’ve been playing with today is saynow.com . I’m thinking of creative ways we could use this for our church. Also, as a designer, one of my favorite color tools is Kuler from Adobe. If you send large files, having a free or paid  YouSendIt account is a must have. There are so many tools and apps, I could never list them all, but hopefully you’ll find a few of these useful.

I love being a part of Water Cooler Wednesdays!

Today must be all about shifting. For me and my family… we’re all shifting right now. My life, my career, my ideas about everything are shifting. It’s like a psychological & emotional landslide/earthquake. I’m glad things are getting shaken up a bit because, to tell the truth, I think I’d become 1 part bored and 1 part complacent. I’ve had all these dreams from so long ago just waiting in the wings. All the while, new dreams have been born nearly every day. What to do with them all? I haven’t aborted them. I haven’t abandoned them. I have neglected them. I’m looking for every door and window of opportunity to fling open and allow me to be who and what I am. Life is too short to be ineffective. As my good friend Annie Lennox recommended, I checked out this video called The Shift. Please have a look.

Most people take the information they are given (television news, newspaper, internet) as fact. Most of the reporting is, in fact, fact. However, in my studies I’ve learned to be a little more critical or skeptical of all the percentages and figures that bombard us every day. Credibility is HUGE in the world of statistics and research. RELIABILITY and VALIDITY are crucial.I am about to wade into the waters of research like never before in order to complete my master’s thesis. Academia wants proof. Cold, hard, undisputed, peer-journaled proof. Proof that can be considered synonymous with fact. Sometimes that’s easy. I wish we could just point to a few Wikipedia links or Googled references, but they want more. Research. Proof. I’ll be devising and conducting proof-producing experiments in the coming months to get what they crave. In the meantime, check out this great presentation created by Karl Fisch, Scott McLeod and XPLANE. You can read more about it here. Enjoy!