I have just become acquainted with the johnon.com blog. It deals with Competitive Webmastering & SEO. It often has thought-provoking entries and today is no exception. How could you resist reading an article entitled “Five Basics of Writing ‘Five Basics’ Articles for SEO“. It’s written with tongue-in-cheek and clearly is concerned with developing links.

Perhaps it’s missing the point to comment on the content of the post. However I’ve always found the most effective efforts for SEO come from thinking about both links and content. I’ve always preferred to stick to the Rule of Three. If you really want people to remember and act on your advice, I think it is better to try to limit it to Three Golden Rules. This also helps to achieve two of johnon.com’s basics: namely be brief and be specific.

Without further ado, here are Three Golden Rules for SEO:

1. Choose something topical: in other words, write about something that people may well be searching for.
2. Check what others have said: make yours more search visible.
3. Link out to others: particularly authoritative sources.

So if you are inclined to write your own “Three Golden Rules” article, do yourself a favor and link back here.

Tags: SEO, links

OK, I’m not sure where this post is going to go, so help me out with a comment or two and we’ll see where the conversation takes us.

I’ve noticed that the free time I think I have, and the free time I actually have are quite different. The delta is significant enough to be called my “imaginary free time”.

Why is this important? Because the things I buy are still centred around consumption within imaginary time - I frame my purchasing decisions based on what I’d really like to be able to spend my time on. Do you have any of these symptoms?

How is this relevant to personal media? First of all, things that enable the conversion of imaginary time into (real) free time are going to win out against things that eat away at your free time. PVR functionality will be a commodity offering from all major Internet brands.

Yahoo!’s Go TV (image courtesy http://go.connect.yahoo.com/go/tv)

Google doesn’t need to acquire TiVo to build Google TV, but it would give it a nice installed base. For advertisers relying on untargeted mass media, the irresistible forces of broadband, home networking, cheap storage and free PVR software all mean one thing: don’t bother with interrupting us, we’ve got better things to do with our precious free time. Instead, think about life after the 30-second spot, and about how you can really contribute toward helping us cash in some of our imaginary time for real free time (in other words, having more time to do some of the things you really want to do). And that may be spending time on creating our own content - from photos and videos of the baby, to blogs and podcasts, personal media consumers are likely to become more selfish with each successive generation of content creation tools.