March 22, 2011

There were 2 posts published on March 22, 2011 (this is page 1 of 1).

Coffee and Google hits

I decided to wade into Google’s Webmaster Tools tonight, just to see how Google sees ol’ MT.Net. As typically happens on these adventures, I was amazed at what I learned.

One thing I never appreciated when I first began blogging is the power of images to attract web hits. I take hundreds of photos each week, and my lazy nature dictates that I often don’t bother naming them something descriptive: I simply copy them to the blog and assume the visitor will figure it out. Of course, web spiders, search engines, and the like cannot make sense of images, so services such as Google’s Image Search (GIS) must rely on metadata, filenames, and other information to properly index the images it finds. The long and the short of it is that my search hits have increased dramatically now that I’ve been giving more descriptive names to my images.

Tonight I discovered that my blog is one of the top hits for the “coffee” image search. My site earned 22,000 impressions from that term, leading visitors to my musing about the power of coffee.

Attached to that post was a wonderful image I obtained from Wikimedia Commons taken by Julius Schorzman (and seen above). Julius’s Creative Commons license stated that I did not have to attribute the photograph to him provided it was used on a non-profit site.

MT.Net is still free and worth every penny. Regardless, in light of the image’s popularity in GIS, I want to give credit where it’s due and thank Julius for allowing me to use his image.

Broadband op-ed in News and Observer

The News and Observer ran my opinion piece on municipal broadband today:

Don’t block broadband
BY MARK TURNER
Published in: Other Views

RALEIGH While farm life has never been easy, at one time it was significantly harder. In the mid-1930s, over 97 percent of North Carolina farms had no electricity, many because private electric companies couldn’t make enough money from them to justify running the lines.

Aware of the transformational effect of electrification and recognizing the need to do something, visionary North Carolina leaders created rural electric cooperatives, beating passage of FDR’s Rural Electrification Act by one month. Through the state’s granting local communities the power to provide for their own needs where others would not, over 98 percent of farms had electricity by 1963, and our state has prospered.
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