Comments for The Webmasters' Desk

Comment on Podcasting killed the text edit star by John Surdyk

John Surdyk — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 18:09:58 +0000

If people want to sync a Powerpoint slide deck with an audio track, you might try Profcast on a Mac (www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/ipod_itunes/profcast.html). I’m not sure if there are PC-equivalent programs. If you need a Profcast guru, you might talk to Beth Wiebush or Randy Dunham.

Comment on Podcasting killed the text edit star by Chris Benish

Chris Benish — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 22:22:46 +0000

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself here, but what about video pod casting? Do the kids have a cool slang word for that? Some of us in the office were kicking around the idea of putting up a video of a presentation, or (even better) a powerpoint slide show accompanied by a voice over (do you do any moonlighting as voice talent?) on our site. Would that be much harder than an audio-only feed?

Comment on Podcasting killed the text edit star by Lucas Wall

Lucas Wall — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 21:39:53 +0000

Alright, how’d you get the podcast feed to work? The feed for this blog (http://www.bus.wisc.edu/webmaster/atom.xml) does not add the needed tags for a podcast to work, but the feed through Feedburner does. What gives? How can other aspiring School of Business podcasters get MTEnclosures to do its magic?

By the way, you’ve got a good voice for podcasting, Mark. No fake voice synthesizers needed.

Comment on Podcasting killed the text edit star by Mark Anderson

Mark Anderson — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 21:21:40 +0000

Wow, that was relatively easy. The sound isn’t the greatest and I’ve always hated the sound of my own voice. It took some fooling around with Audacity’s amplify filter to get the volume to get to this paltry level. Maybe I need to speak up, that’s what my mom always told me.

Some things to keep in mind: You’re looking about about one megabyte of disk space per minute for a spoken podcast. I’ll do some more in the future. Maybe not

Comment on Search Engine Basics - Part One, What Search Engines Are Important? by Seann Sweeney

Seann Sweeney — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 16:01:20 +0000

Mr. Webmaster,

Can you explain “description” meta tag and “keywords” metatag. I think the keywords meta tag is the description that shows up under a search result on a search engine. Where does the “description” meta tag show up? Also, can you somehow view these meta tags when you are on a webpage itself or just when doing a search from a search engine?

Sincerely,

Mr. Sweeney

Comment on Q&A: Search Engine Traffic and Blog Post Frequency by Mark Anderson

Mark Anderson — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 15:41:17 +0000

RSS stands for “Real Simple Syndication” and it’s everywhere these days. Services like Feedburner and Technorati are places where you can register blogs and track your traffic and RSS feed stats.

I need to take a close look at this before I post at too much length on it.

Comment on Q&A: Search Engine Traffic and Blog Post Frequency by Chris Benish

Chris Benish — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 14:46:49 +0000

In one of the links you provide, the author mentions:

“Eric writes in this post about RSS and how it is making it less important to post daily because RSS readers will just come over to read when you update. I totally agree with this IF your blog has a high level of RSS readership.”

I have a blog. Is there a way to track how many folks have subscribed to the RSS feed? What’s an RSS feed?

Comment on Search Engine Basics - Part One, What Search Engines Are Important? by Mark Anderson

Mark Anderson — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 14:18:13 +0000

Good question, Chris. Those statistics are for people who are referred from search engines only. We had about 350,000 page views in October. Of those page views, we received about 16,000 referrals from search engines.

Your point about internal traffic is a valid one. There are many computers within Grainger Hall that have their browsers default to a specific page on the School of Business site. Any time someone fires up a browser, it counts as a page view. Perhaps this is a policy we should look at.

On one hand, we don’t want extra pageviews. On the other, we don’t want to discount valid internal traffic.

Comment on Search Engine Basics - Part One, What Search Engines Are Important? by Chris Benish

Chris Benish — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 23:00:08 +0000

But webmaster, your stats seem to indicate that 99.7% of our traffic comes from a search engine. Aren’t there some visitors that just come here because they know about us already? Or, what about someone like me that has a page in the http://www.bus.wisc.edu domain set as their homepage, so I visit like a bajillion (also a math thing) times per day? Is this an example of the skewed statistics that [insert partisan talk show host] keeps warning me about?

Comment on Business blogs are important by John Surdyk

John Surdyk — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 15:52:27 +0000

While I see compelling reasons for professionals and faculty to blog, could you provide some more information on the posting frequency and quality expectations of most blog readers? I notice amazing variance across the blogs I read regularly every week where some submissions are sporadic, others posted like clockwork. Some blogs make use of guest bloggers with sacrifices to quality on occasion. Are there guidelines for whether it is, for example, better to post high quality entries every month versus lower quality entries every week if your goal is building readership and retention? Just curious where any tipping points might lie.