Keeping Up

There are strange terms permeating everyday conversation. I recently joined Twitter and have been making a conscious effort to be more active on Facebook and LinkedIn. But I swear, some of the other folks on these social networking sites speak a completely foreign language.

One posting on a LinkedIn group which focuses on content creation was asking for connections to people who own or create video content. Well, I know a few people who do that, so I replied and said so. The woman who posted invited me to check out her website and send my contact info so we could talk off line.

I went to her website, which indicated that they provide “mashup” software to clients via the web. I had to Google mashup and learned that it’s just a fancy word for repurposing video, text, audio, etc to create derivative materials. OK, but how do the owners of the original materials get paid? Still not sure on that.

The first few times I heard people reference SEO I thought they really meant to say CEO and were just misspeaking. I’m glad I kept my mouth shut for once and did not politely correct them. It finally sunk in that they were talking about Search Engine Optimization.

Last week my business partner and I went to an SEO workshop where we learned that we have to pick key words for each page of a website and then use those same key words in the copy of each page a bunch of times in hopes that search engines will be impressed with our redundancy, index our pages, and give us a high ranking. It poses an interesting problem for people who make their living by providing clean writing to a variety of customers. We decided to simply find a balance.

I guess the bottom line is that our world is constantly changing and there are always tons of new things to learn. We can’t tackle them all, but if we can at least take a closer look at a few here and there, we not only learn a little bit, but we might also have some fun. Think of it as making life mashable.

See you on Twitter!