Cliches

I thought of writing a post about greatest hoaxes but discovered that this theme is widely covered at http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/

And so I decided to tell you a little about clichés. Cliché is a trite, hackneyed, stereotype or overused expression. Every life sphere has its own clichés. It’s better to avoid them speaking or writing, didn’t you know? :) By the way I’ve just used one. The phrase “life sphere” sounds pretty but is so trite.

Suppose that most often we come across clichés on the news. Here are some groaners with comments from http://www.newswriting.com/groaners.htm

Slain – Dragons are slain. People are killed.

Hospitalized – Bathrooms get sanitized. Shirts get Martinized. People do not get hospitalized. They’re in the hospital.

Area Residents - “Shhh, Tommy, don’t play the drums so loud, you’ll wake the area residents!” Normal people don’t refer to their neighbors this way. Why should we?

Blog http://tommangan.net/banned/ is devoted to groaners too and it is remarkable for its epigraph:

“Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.”
George Orwell

Movie clichés are the objects of ridicule for a long time. For example, no matter how dead you think you've killed a bad guy, he can still get up at least 3 more times. You can find villains, cars, alcohol, wars, asteroids, aliens and other movie stereotypes at http://www.moviecliches.com/

Phrases “someone once said... [followed by an obscure quotation]”, ”24/7”, “...just doing my job” are common life clichés. See some more at http://hypocrisytoday.com/cliches.html

Worth1000.com photoshop contests also have some overused entries: Britney Spears, George Bush, Statue of Liberty, Star Wars and terrorist references. Read FAQ section http://www.worth1000.com/faq.asp#3 for more information. I'd add Lord of the Rings references to this list.

It’s not hard to find collections of different areas clichés (try to search Google “RPG clichés” or “music videos clichés”).

Finally one more time: filter your speech and texts, don’t use hackneyed expressions and your image will be more attractive :)

Tags: cliche - movie cliches - RPG cliches - news cliches - cliches - common cliches - expressions - phrases - cliche list - popular cliche

Researching bookmarks. Part 3. Conclusion

4. I noticed that about 15% of my bookmarks concerning me in person. Mean sometimes I save links to outstanding discussions where I’ve participated, to sites where I’ve done something. And also I’ve bookmarked my accounts at last.fm, flickr.com, plime.com and so on.

So in theory involving people in your blog processes, asking them to do something engaging for your site stimulate visitors to bookmark. Readers may get your RSS feeds, and maybe it’s even better, than bookmarking.

5. Everybody has some just cool links. For example it can be web comics’ page.

If you’ve managed to do something great, and somebody except you admits it, try to reflect it in your blog. You may find some unexpected associate. Well, if you’ve really done cool thing, you’re lucky :) My compliments

You’ve noticed for sure that I haven’t too much shocking facts about bookmarking. But here’s short conclusion. If you follow it you’ll have some more chances to be bookmarked.

1. Arrange useful reference lists.
2. Post concrete and particularized stuff.
3. Keep your blog carefully.
4. Involve visitors in discussions and contests.
5. Write cool :)

Tags: bookmark - bookmarking - research - conclusion - analysis - analyse - browser - involve - cool - stuff

Bookmarking research. Part 2

Let’s continue bookmarking analysis.

2. Everybody likes entertainments but also has a list of interests. For example, I’m interested in web-development, blogging, Internet on the whole, computer role-playing games, roller skating and so about 70% of my bookmarks are quite particularized. Remaining 30% are quite heterogeneous, mixed and casual.

Resume: suppose people bookmark something of a particular speciality, specific and concrete. I’d rather bookmark some blog on post-rock than just cool music blog without any specialization.

3. I’d say that about 60% of web pages I’ve bookmarked contain articles or stories. 40% are site roots (home pages). The first means I’ll return to particular page once or twice to refresh some facts in my mind. Or maybe I’ll send link to this page to my friends.

The second means I’m interested in the site and its various contents and I’ll visit it again and again without any concrete purpose hoping to discover something worthy (e. g. http://www.pitchforkmedia.com).

I think that the second variant is much better. So write good posts and make your blog history attractive :)

To be continued…

Tags: blogging - bookarking - bookmarks - research - analysis - analyse - facts - visit - posts - attractive

Some facts about user's bookmarks. Bookmarks research. Part 1

Someday I’ll write about blog success measurement. And now I just say that one of the best indicators of your blog’s success is a quantity of people who visit your blog typing address in or using bookmarks.

So my desire to find out what people usually bookmark is quite natural. I’ll start my research analyzing my own browser bookmarks. Here’re some facts about my 110 Opera bookmarks which may somehow help to understand bookmarking psychology.

1. I have some links to online blogging tools: http://co.mments.com, http://blogsearch.google.com, Technorati Tag Maker at http://www.speciousreasoning.com/tags/ and so on.
2. 9 links to documentation resources (e. g. http://wiki.cakephp.org)
3. 1 link to webcomics (http://www.qwantz.com/) and 5 links to some amazing pages (http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Main_Page, http://totallyabsurd.com/archive.htm)
4. 5 links to libraries and book lists.
5. 9 links to my site accounts at http://del.icio.us, http://worth1000.com, http://last.fm and so on.
6. 6 RPG-related links.
7. 10 links to blogs (7 are themed blogs)
8. About 20 links for webmasters (e. g. http://urlinvestigator.com, http://google.com/addurl, http://abouturl.com, http://sitemeter.com)
9. The other links are just cool links, which are difficult to categorize :)

And here follows some analysis.

1. I have about 10 links to pronounced lists and tops (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-apocalyptic or http://www.alvit.de/blog/article/nifty-tools-and-tutorials-for-creating-diagrams-charts-and-chart-flows). I’ve run into them some time and have decided they were very useful. But unfortunately I’ve not much time to explore them. So I visit half of these links rarely. The other half is waiting for consideration.

Resume: you may compose lists and post them in your blog, readers will bookmark them, but don’t hope they’ll return again and again just to reread this list. Some solution: you may update your list constantly or you may write more interesting posts in your blog.

To be continued…

Tags: bookmarks - bookmarking - research - analysis - exploration - investigation - blog - blogging - success - facts

Writing thoughts: how to become a great writer :)

1. To write charming texts you need subjects. You can draw ideas from your experience or you can just imagine. Both methods are quite effective. For example Ernest Hemingway wrote “Green Hills of Africa” based on his personal experience which he got hunting in Africa. Jules Verne was a great dreamer, he didn’t travel, but he read books, imagined and improvised.

You need some sources of information, that’s for sure that. It can be your own biography, school lessons, books, Internet, canvases in museum or anything else. So you need some food for thoughts, starting points for your imagination.

2. A good way to learn some writers’ tricks is reading books and articles on writing (quite smart, heh). For example I’ve read “Hot Text! Web Writing that Works” by Jonathan and Lisa Price and have found it very useful (their site is useful too). It would be generously of you to share you materials on this subject in comments.

3. Here’s one more frequent advice: show your texts to your friends and relatives and ask for critics. There’re some sites focusing upon this. This method is often mentioned but is rarely used.

4. Of course you’re to practice a lot, to write everyday. Good practice is revising your works again and again. Even if you read your text the next day you wrote it, you’ll improve something for sure.

Tags: writing - web - book - article - become - writer - imagination - experience - advice - critics

Blog writing software: online Technorati tag maker

I’m searching for a nice blog writing tool, but I haven’t found it yet. I’ve tried Performancing for Firefox recently, but it has some problems with beta Blogger. Promising MarsEditor is only for Mac OS. And so on.

But I discovered online technorati tag maker. It’s quite simple but saves a little time. I’ve a Utopian idea to make fully automated which needs only post’s text as an input.

Now meet the Technorati tag maker and don't be afraid of some political framing :)

Tags: blog - blogging - tool - Technorati - tag - maker - Blogger - beta - Performancing - Firefox

In Search Of Worthy Blogs

It seems the quantity of blogs keeps on growing from day to day. It’s excellent. And the same time it’s terrible. The ratio between worthy and worthless blogs changes constantly. Suppose these changes are negative.

What are the ways to find some interesting content?

One of the most popular ways is visiting aggregating sites (joint blogs, catalogs of blogs) where there’s not so much content but a lot of links sorted and categorized. The main minus is that in some way you don’t choose what to read and to look. Everything is done for you. You see only what other people shows to you, what is interesting to the most of the audience. But the advantages of such sites trump the drawbacks. It’s a really great way to find nice blogs and sites quickly and surely.

The other method is searching by yourself, browsing and browsing lots of pages. The efficiency of this way is quite low, but the results may be fine. Blogger.com fit for exploring badly. That links in your profile (interests, movies, books) works poorly.

Still everything is not so bad :) Google provides a powerful tool for searching blogs at blogsearch.google.com. Use Advanced Blog Search page to tweak your queries and get incredible results.

Tracking Comments To Interesting Posts With Co.mments.com

I had my first blog at livejournal.com where tracking replies to your comments, your friends' posts and comments to your posts is easy (you may tune your account and receive e-mails for each comment).

When I started blogging at blogger.com I found out that here there's no "replies" to your comment, only comments to your post and there's no any e-mail notifications. So watching some interesting conversation is a labourios process.

And I found a solution. Co.mments.com is a very useful free tool to track comments. Try it and you'll see.

Photo Tips: Noise Reduction

Not being a great photographer, I’m keen on taking pictures and have some secrets. One of the main problems of digital photos is noise (visible red and green grain present in the image). Here is example:



There are some ways to remove noise. I’d like to tell about Neat Image software. It reduces most high ISO noise, film grain visible in scanned slides and negatives, JPEG artifacts in overcompressed images.

Open input image on the first tab, go to the tab “Device noise profile” and press the button “Auto profile”, go to the tab “Output image” and press the button “Apply”. That’s all. Now you can save your less noised image in fine JPEG quality even in trial version. Here is processed example image:



A useful side effect of Neat Image noise reduction is that noise-free images are better compressable. By reducing noise you can reduce the JPEG file sizes by 30-40% (even if the same compression level is used to save both noisy and noise-free images).

Try to guess what’s on the example photo and see the answer

Download Neat Image (2.1 Mb)