Ah, September! The season of Back to School. Me, I’m always back to school, relying on books and web sites to teach me what I don’t know—whether it’s what I haven’t learned yet, what I didn’t learn the first time around, or what I forgot since last week.

In the spirit of life-long learning, let me share with you my two favorite web sites from halls of higher learning.
Purdue OWL
I turn to the OWL when I want to dig deep and learn more about some aspect of writing.

The acronym O W L (apart from being a metaphor for wisdom) …

A blog is an invaluable tool when dealing with a public relations crisis. With a blog you can correct errors and quash rumors, advance your company message, and deliver the facts ahead of the news cycle. Through fair and timely treatment your blog will show that you are concerned and responsive, and allow you to influence the lens through which others view the crisis.

It is important to focus on transparency, information sharing, honesty, and accountability. These four elements are essential to maintaining trust and credibility, whether you are a multinational aerospace company or a local coffee shop …

Last week I started building a glossary of acronyms essential to understanding the modern internet.  Links to that article are interspersed amid five new acronyms to help you master the web.
Yet More Acronyms to Rule the Web
API - Application Programming Interface
An API is a set of standards used by one program so that it can interact with another without having to reveal what goes on inside. It’s sort of like a postal address for computer programs. So long as you properly format the address on the envelope, your letter will reach the desired destination, even if you do …

This week’s Online Ore comes to us from programmer Zac Matthews.

Zac likes using delicious.com (or del.icio.us) to track the pages he wants to bookmark.  Delicious is a social bookmarking tool.  When you bookmark a web page, you can see what tags other users have applied, how many users have bookmarked it, and how they have rated it.  You then get a chance to apply your own tags or ratings to the site.

Even if you don’t use the social elements of Delicious, it can still be used to store …

Earlier this week I discovered that one of my best friends from college, who is now a professor in his own right, had never seen the abbreviation RT for retweet.  It was a somewhat sobering realization that even though we grew up with personal computers and Internet access, social media ken is not inherent to my generation. Finding out that a good friend, who is one of my more learned contemporaries, was operating without the base vocabulary for today’s online world inspired me to put together a quick primer of acronyms to rule the web.
Five Definitions to Start With
RT - …

It’s September, soon to be October, and— ever interested in words—I again note the oddity that the root of September means seventh, October means eighth, November ninth and December tenth. Do the math: September isn’t the seventh month, nor is October the eight.

What other words do we use daily that no longer mean what they meant?
Congratulations, that’s so awful.
London’s St Paul’s Cathedral was built out of the ashes of the 1666 Great Fire. It’s said (perhaps apocryphally) that this masterpiece was described as awful, artificial and amusing. In those days, amusing meant amazing, awful meant awe-inspiring and artificial meant artistic.
Tell …

One of the major benefits of Social Media is how it can significantly improve search engine rankings—if done with SEO in mind.

I have been reading “Social Media for Business—101 Ways to Grow Your Business without Wasting Your Time” and came across a handy table with a list of which social media content gets indexed by search engines and which does not.

It’s important to know what content gets indexed and also to realize that this might change… what gets indexed today might not get indexed tomorrow and vice versa.

Here’s the list from the book (which was published in August …

Earlier this month Google unleashed its newest search innovation, instant search. Every single keystroke will trigger a different search function based on Google’s popular auto-complete function.
What Does Google Instant Change About Searching the Web
Let’s be honest, Google Instant is a wonderful innovation for anyone who likes conducting research online. There is effectively no delay in search time, and your search results will get refined with every single touch of your keyboard. In essence, Google Instant lets you the searcher decide when your results are sufficiently on-task to justify following the revealed links.
What Google Instant Will Do To …

This is the million dollar question — well, maybe not a million dollars, but quality video isn’t cheap. So making a good decision about whether to pursue a video production project or not is important because the stakes are high. In my experience, creating video content for a client’s website often costs more than 25% of the total cost of producing the website in the first place. Logically speaking, the video content should account for a great deal of the overall impact and effectiveness of the site.

Let’s take, for instance, a website that is built around marketing a single product. …

I’ve been recommending Mark Twain’s treatise “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” for years now. Read it! You’ll learn a lot about writing, and you’ll enjoy a few laughs.

Here are Twain’s points 12-18, with my own comments beneath. He says that these “little rules” require that the author shall:

Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.

When you merely come near to it, your reader might be confused. Worse, your reader might not be confused; he might accept as true what you don’t mean.

If you mean to say “Wednesday at 3:00″ don’t say …