Watch what you blog…

As a fairly active blogger, I am always always quite impressed by the fact that ones opinion (or blog) can be readily accessible and also deemed as quite important… especially for those of us without any formal writing experience or training Free speech at work… got to love it!

But then, every now and then, an article gets posted that makes all bloggers sit up and take notice… and no, this is not an article about Google putting a man on the moon, or Microsoft funding the first manned flight to Jupiter… but rather something a lot more alarming that affects the very thing that many of us would-be “writers” (read bloggers) do on a daily basis… and that is being liable and accountable for what we write, and possibly even being thrown in jail for it! Yup, writing on a blog could land you in prison…

This article on the ABC News website, really made me sit up and start thinking a little more about what I write and especially who I write about.

The bottom line is that in the last 4 years, over 159 civil court actions have been taken against bloggers… with verdicts against bloggers ending up in cumulative penalties totalling $18.5 million!!! Yikes! Talk about clamping down on free speech… believe me, if I knew I was going to have to fork out a few million because of something I said, I would definitely start shutting up. And surely this reaction is the exact opposite reaction of what free speech, and hell, what the blogosphere is all about?!?!

Or maybe I am just overreacting… ? Well, read the article and let me know what you think.

Optimising for geographical regions

As we all know Google and many other Search Engines have the ability to search very specific geographical regions… and as expected, all websites that fall within the domain registration of that country will tend to have greater importance than sites that don’t… Which can be expected and also heps level the playing field, just a little, for a few local sites that might not have a chance against the bigger, top teir domain names on Google.com for example…

However, what happens if you do have a .com domain or any other top tier domain name, that just happens to be country specific too? Sometimes the Search Engines or even local engines will not register the domain as being regionally viable and possibly rank you lower than necessary because of this…

Enter geo-tagging… drum-roll please

Geo-tagging is a way to add geographical Meta Data to virtually any content: photos, RSS feeds, or just to websites. A geo-tag essentially defines the longitude and latitude, the location place name or a regional identifier.  By placing a geo-tag on a Web page you provide information to readers and to search engines about the geographical location of the site. And as an added bonus, it can also refer to the location that the page or photo is about. so you can write a story about Ventersdorp for example… and then this can then be indexed in Google… oh, and Ventersdorp is in South Africa

To add geo-tags to your site, you must first know the latitude and longitude of your location.  Seeing as not everyone has this info at their fingertipsd, there are a number of geo tag generators online to help you on your way. I definitely recommend Geo Tag Generator. (Simply enter your complete address and the proper meta-tags are provided to you for placement in your page headers).

So there you have it, an easy way to get geographical content “noticed” online…