I love Skype. Paul and I bought a domain name from a Libyan registrar today. Even though we paid $150 for it, the domain still shows as available on their site. That worried us. So I called Libya and got someone even though it’s Saturday at 9:30pm there.

One of our names could be a controversial topic since it relates to politics. Paul and I were literally going crazy to make sure we secured it. We plan to send out a press release about it if we do get it. The call was a reminder that free speech is something we expect and don’t even think about in the US, but it’s not guaranteed in other countries.

Here is what the man in Libya said:

Hello Janet,

As I was saying about political.ly I am not sure if [other company] will accept to register this domain names, first question would be what are you planning to use it for? Anyway I will ask them tomorrow and if they don’t mind I will register it for you, if not then I will inform you, if they rejected, we could do full refund or replace this domain with any other domain name you choose.

Please accept my apology and note that we have nothing to do with this domain policy.

The other domain name will be registered tomorrow.

Yes, this is how we spend our Saturdays, jumping up and down about buying cool domain names! Update, I’m the proud co-owner of political.ly.

Vocus, the company that bought PRWeb is offering a free social media press release webinar.

It’s Tuesday, April 24, 2007 at 3:00pm ET. Register and download Vocus’ accompanying whitepaper, “Optimizing Your Public Relations with Social Media.

They will cover:

* Targeting and engaging with social media in an informed and appropriate manner
* Search Engine Optimizing (SEO) your news to maximize its online visibility
* Tailoring your pitch for the new media
* Monitoring the success and impact of your new, integrated PR

I just learned how to export my links when a coworker asked for the blogs I read. You can export it from Bloglines. Under the “blog” tab you can choose to make your blogroll on Bloglines public or private. If you have public, it gives you a URL!

I need to do some Spring cleaning of my blogroll. As my interests change or my job changes I read different blogs. Blogs are how I keep up on the world of whatever I’m making a web site about or marketing at the time. I credit blogs for making my career and now with making my own businesses. It’s a rich world and many of my friends are bloggers.

I’m trying to make a new pact with myself. I’m going to go on a date WITHOUT mentioning the word blog one time. Last night I was at the ballet and we were talking about a particularly dreamy part where the ballerina was almost like a feather in the arms of her dancing partner. We talked about why you watch one dancer and what stage presence is. It’s that the dancer LOVES to dance.

Somehow I said, that is how I feel about blogging and what I do. I LOVE it. Then I started talking about how text online is not elegant and how I wish it were easier to make it so (without using graphics). Since words are more often our medium online, why is text so ugly most of the time.

I probably drove him up a wall. I’m going to try to be more mainstream so I have and relate to regular friends as well as geeks and bloggers (you know, be more well-rounded: people to go to concerts with, more girlfriends to hang out with, and such). I guess I had a lot to say about this because all I started out wanting to cover, is my blogroll!

Here it is my Bloglines blogroll – the blogs I read regularly (sometimes I forget to add some, in fact, I can think of a few that need to be on there right now!): http://www.bloglines.com/public/newspapergrl

I just found out we just have until Friday to get 420 more signups to get Seth Godin to speak in Utah.

Please, if you are in Utah and work for a large company, talk to your coworkers about this. If you work for an MLM company tell distributors in Utah to tell their downlines. Seth will talk about his new book – his books are always excellent. You’ll get 5 copies for the $50 plus get to hear him talk about it. And you’ll get to see the Seth “Shave off” when Seth shaves the heads of people in behalf of our sponsors.

We have a good list of sponsors, see progress at our Word Mob blog. We have secured the Salt Palace as our venue.

Sign up if you haven’t yet…and please tell your coworkers to sign up:
http://www.pledgebank.com/SethGodinUtah

Note: to confirm your pledge you’ll get a confirmation email. Many people have reported that it goes to their trash. Make sure you complete that final step. We’re wondering how many people have gone to pledge but aren’t showing up. Also, be sure to put your company name or URL for some social mileage!

This in from Hitwise and the Web 2.0 conference (which I follow via Twitter and try not to get too jealous that I’m not there!). Visits to Web 2.0-style sites have spiked 668% in just two years! Visits to web 2.0 web sites is up to 12% of US web activity. Two years ago that figure was just 2%. Remember that for SEO, social networking sites are another word for FREE LINKS using your keywords as the link text.

I love being in such a dynamic, growing segment of the internet. It’s been about four years since I got into internet marketing and I’m still eating it up. Granted, I have a little more balance in life (it’s addicting!) but I still don’t consider it a “job” to write or be a part of it. It’s fun. It’s especially fun to own your own businesses and write your own ebooks (ours is coming along a bit slowly but there is progress). That’s my transition from consuming to creating content. I’m sure more of us will as we become more comfortable.

Just this morning I was remembering a video I made with friends in high school. I want to put it on YouTube. I’m calling one of my friends to see if he has a copy. I was playing broadcast journalist and there are some funny moments.

I read this amazing blog post about how Google’s Blogsearch ranks blogs. It’s featured on Problogger but written by Alister Cameron.

I haven’t read Cameron’s blog before but I’m subscribing to it on my Bloglines (which needs some Spring cleaning soon). After reading this post I don’t think I want to use all of Google’s products. It makes me feel like they are spying on me (and on us) too much.

Since I can’t link to a post on Podango and the formatting looks bad, here is my list:

Factors in how Google Ranks Blogs in their blog search engine Blogsearch:

- popularity of your blog (how many people click on your posts)
- how often your blog is listed on other’s blogrolls
- the quality of the blogrolls that link to you (A high quality blogroll is a blogroll that links to well-known or trusted bloggers)
- pagerank of your blog
- how many other blogs subscribe to your RSS feed and the popularity of those blogs
Google can tell if you have subscribed to your own feed or spammed the sytem. He thinks this is one of the MAIN ways Google ranks your blog because it shows loyalty. They may use data from their RSS reader, Google Reader. They can also see if people actually read and/or click on your posts.
- Social bookmarking – how often your post is bookmarked in Digg, Technorati, del.icio.us, etc. It also matters what tags they choose to describe your post. Here are rules for Social Media Optimization (SMO).

- Google looks for links to your blog in email, chat, even TWITTER (so use to your advantage! Twitter is good for more than building community, sharing news, or as a personal branding tool. It could help you build your blog rank too.)

It appears Google uses a different algorithm when ranking blogs.

This is a very useful list of social media sites and rankings from Seth Godin (we have 76 pledges and some new sponsors today. We are getting Seth Godin to speak in Utah – where he has a solid fan base).

Today I was in internet marketing heaven. I was surrounded all day with people who speak my language. I wasn’t the weird one! In all of my other jobs I was the only one. Sometimes it took a lot of educating and convincing to get anything done. I’m training right now and will be an internet marketing coach. It’s great to get out of my house and see and talk to real people all day.

I don’t know what is so great about working from home – it’s too isolating to me. The key is to find the right job that is flexible. If more employers offered flexibility and more employees loved what they do, most of us would choose to go to work. I’m sure there are some people who are truly anti-social, but I’m not.

I enjoy talking to other bloggers but I rarely get to talk to other internet marketers – besides my business partner Paul Wilson. (Note to self: we used LegalDocs.com to create loan papers).

I had lunch with some other coaches today and we got to talk shop the whole time. One gave me an idea that will complement my dating site (a niche that hasn’t been done). I predict that it will be more popular and get better word of mouth than our other dating site that has been around much longer.

I’d love to get all of my internet marketing friends in this area a job as a coach so we could all work together. It’s amazing to be surrounded by people who love what they do. I heard words like “blog” “social networking sites” and “Ebay” all day long.

I was reading how people are getting news about today’s awful shooting at Virginia Tech from Wikipedia. Also, the school took so long to email that students were using text and going to Facebook to find out what was happening!

I get a lot of my news from Twitter. I follow CNN. Now if they could add Snap.com to Twitter than we could see a small text snapshot of the Wikipedia entry (like you can see above) without even clicking off the site. This feature is helping keep people on your site longer. If you are an ecommerce site that usually translates to more sales. If you already have snap.com this and other new features are automatic.

Want to reach the wealthy online? Target blogs and social networks. Bizreport says more wealthy Americans are participating with social networking sites and reading blogs more than the general public.

The Luxury Institute, 76% of wealthy Americans read blogs, up from 57% in 2005. Blogging is at 24%, up from 18% in 2005. They say that only 25% of the general American population read blogs and only 9% maintain their own blogs. They are also more likely to use instant messaging (55%) than the general public (39%). 31% are active on a social networking sites while only 16% of the general public.

That’s a poll of 1,000 people active on the internet who make $150,000+ per year.

Look at the growth of signups! We just started promoting this and it’s growing like crazy! On the pledge page you can see the names of everyone who has signed up with their $50. Scroll to the bottom of the pledge page for the list. I love how some people are including their URL – good thinking!