Time to dust off the ol' blog and remind myself that blogging, like exercise, does no good if you don't stay active. Photo credit: Cizauskas @ Flikr (under Creative Commons licence 2.0).

I’m great at giving advice, but terrible at following it. I blog for several companies, and the biggest piece of advice I give them is to blog regularly, something I’ve failed to do around here for a very long time. As a bit of an exercise for myself, and a good place to store some of my tips for easy cut and paste access, here they are:

I can’t say this enough: Blog regularly. If you say you’re going to blog on Mondays and Wednesday, do it. If you only want to post once a week, or once a month, that works too. The only rule is to be consistent so your readers know when to come back. If a reader checks your blog 3 or 4 times to see the same post at the top they won’t come back a fifth time.

It doesn’t even really matter what you blog about, just make it interesting and on topic. Company blogs are much harder to write than personal blogs. There is a thin line between sharing company news and boring your readers to death with a litany of press releases and tired recycled product descriptions.

If you don’t have new company news to share then find something else your readers like. For example: if you run a yoga studio you can write about a local yoga in schools program, interview one of your instructors or review a new yoga video or book.

Embedded pictures and videos make your blog more engaging, and increase your ability to get noticed by Google and other page rankers. You can find images you can use for free on Creative Commons by searching relevant keywords. Just remember to properly credit the photographer.

I don’t use SEO here because I’m not concerned about page ranking, but if you’re blogging for your business you’d better be. If you don’t know much about SEO, there are plenty of services you can subscribe too like My Scribe SEO and use Google AdWords keyword tool to find the keywords that will bring people to your blog.

Another important key to SEO is links, links, links. Don’t go crazy, but if you mention one of your products in a blog post, link to it. In addition to being beneficial to SEO, it will help your readers find what they are looking for.

Social media is all about engaging with your customers/ readers, so give them someone to engage with. Reply to comments on your blog, Facebook and Twitter, and don’t be shy to ask them for ideas on what they’d like to hear more about. You just might be surprised.

To say Riel’s story is complicated is an understatement of historic proportions. Descriptions like Métis community leader, religious zealot, mentally ill, anarchist and historical icon all begin to paint his picture, but don’t completely explain the man. Riel led the North West Rebellion of 1885, in what is now the province of Manitoba.

It began as an attempt to ensure the Métis people of the North West received their fair dues when the Hudson’s Bay Company sold Rupert’s Land to Canada but became a pact with God to free his people from an oppressive government.

Brown is the first to admit his story takes liberties from historical fact when it’s convenient to his method, but he includes an extensive notes section at the back of the book to correct any misunderstandings.

The novel’s style is a bit of an homage to Little Orphan Annie creator Harold Gray, with the character’s large bodies, small heads and blank eyes. Each page features six black and white panels but the layout never feels restrictive. It provides enough space to see the tiny details in Brown’s work from footprints in the snow to the wisp of a man’s beard in the winter wind.

I was familiar with the history before finding Brown’s book, but the story line keeps me hooked today. It’s paced to leave to breathless as you flip from page to page during a battle scene, yet can still give you pause to contemplate Riel’s situation as the court hands down the verdict in his treason case.

If you have even the slightest interest in Canadian history or graphic novels this book will fit the bill. You can order the soft cover edition through Drawn and Quarterly.

My theory is that I’m not the only one. There are tens of thousands of books published in Canada yearly, not to mention copious imports from the south. It’s easy to miss a great read, especially if it was produced by a small publisher.

With that in mind, each Wednesday I’m going to review a book I love that you may have missed and provide links to where you can find a copy of your very own. For the love of independent book sellers and small publishers alike, I’ll list their sites over behemoths like Chapters-Indigo and Amazon.

[Photo by Ginnerobot. Image used under Creative Common Licence 2.0]

We arrived in Halifax just north of 9 am and slept some more. This time in a bed. As I’m rubbish at sleeping in the day time I got up to plan the next leg of my trip.

I want to see a friend’s band play in a chinese food restaurant half-way between Halifax and Sydney, NS, my ultimate destination. While I have a ride from there to Sydney, I need to get to Antigonish first. I could get a ticket for a bus or shuttle van, but where is the fun in that.

Halifax’s Craigslist ride share section is a little bleak. There’s an ad from a psychic who does love spells, and several from people going on long haul drives, but nothing headed my way. I post an ad and cross my fingers.

Kijiji’s ride share board is far more active. Haligonians are jetting all over North America in their cars, and looking for company. Unfortunately, no one is headed my way. I post an ad, and again hope for the best.

Within 10 minutes Kijiji yields an answer. I’m excited as I scroll through the superfluous Kijiji ad material looking for the text from my potential chauffeur. He’s passing through Antigonish on a drive from New Brunswick to Newfoundland on the day I want – but I’d be almost 12 hours early to meet my friends. As there’s not much to do in Antigonish (or rather, absolutely nothing to do) I thank him and decline.

And now I wait.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/penmachine/

My mother says I was born with headphones on.

In elementary school I saved up my allowance (in 1988 it was likely in the 50 – 75 cents per week range) to buy a Walkman. My dad was prolific mixed-tape maker, and I wanted to take his jams to school. I graduated to a Diskman in high school, which I dragged around well into the mp3 player’s reign – much to the amusement of my technologically advanced father.

For the last 2 years, it’s been podcasts rather than music filling my ears. Here are a few that have been constants on my  playlists.

I can’t say enough about RadioLab (WNYC). It’s been my favourite of mine since I jumped on the podcast bandwagon. This science podcast boils down significant scientific discoveries, big ideas about the human mind and thematically linked audio essays on topics like placebos and randomness. As an audio geek I can honestly say the production on this podcast makes this one of the most interesting sounding podcasts I’ve come across.

Also from WNYC is On the Media. The only thing  journalists like talking about more than news, is talking about talking about news. Though it’s predominantly American stories, the podcast often features stories about unknown journalists in other under-covered countries and important stories you’ll miss if you only follow conventional media streams.

Until recently I would never have believed I’d subscribe to an economics podcast, but NPR’s Planet Money has me hooked. I first started listening after Planet Money and This American Life co-produced a podcast about the financial regulators who should have seen the sub-prime mortgage crisis coming. I now understand what makes a toxic asset, well, toxic. You can also follow the (not so) slow death of the Planet Money Team’s own toxic asset.

On the home front, I’m really enjoying the resurrected Listen to This podcast from This Magazine (where I interned last fall). Like its elder sibling, the podcast features stories and people you’re not likely to hear on the CBC. This editors and contributors talk to artists, writers and politicos about the news you’ll care about when everyone else catches on.

This morning I received an email from a friend’s Gmail. First off, he generally contacts me from his work address, and second he’s a magazine editor. If the first sentence, “I’m writing this with tears in my eyes,” didn’t sound quite right, the next was impossible.

“i was mugged at gun point last night,at the park of the hotel where we lodged all cash,creditcards and cell were stolen off me, thank God we have our life and passport,” it lumbered across my screen.

No editor would miss those lowercase i’s, the brutality of the subject verb disagreements, the comma splice, or the over all mangling of the poor words in that sentence. Not even with tears in his eyes. It made me wish for the good old days.

I was in high school the first time I received the grandfather of all Nigerian email scams. My great-great-something-or-other had died in Nigeria. Despite my never having heard of him, he’d left me a cool mill. Problem: I couldn’t access the money without paying a hefty fee. I laughed, hit the junk button, and went on with my day. At least I didn’t need to get the red pen out to fix it before reading.

Last fall, while I was looking for a sublet in Toronto I received a response to my Craigslist ad from a jaunty fellow named Lamberty Maxmillian, an INTERNATIONAL SUPERVISOR (his caps, not mine) with Chevron Oil. He owned an apartment in the state of Toronto he’d just love to sublet. All I had to do was wire him $300 and he’d mail me the keys. A quick Google maps search revealed that the address to be a park. And to think he’d offered to send me a photocopy of his international passport!

Does anyone actually fall for this? You’d better believe it.

The FBI still lists it on their E-Scams and Warnings list, which includes other chestnuts like “process money transfers from home,” and the sublet scam.

UltraScan, a Netherlands-based research group that studies 419 scams, estimates the amount of money lost at  $41 billion USD since the 1970s. That includes last year’s record-setting $9.3 billion USD. Canadian’s lost $298 million USD last year the report says. The group calls their numbers low estimates, and their report contains a few too many exclamation points for me to take it completely seriously. But you can’t blame them for trying. It’s not as though many people enter “Nigerian email scammer” as their profession on Facebook.