The 82nd Airborne

I live in North Carolina, not far from Ft. Bragg. When you drive into North Carolina from, let's say, Tennessee, you're likely to see a billboard proclaiming ours as the most "military friendly" state in the nation. And it's true. Many of the people who serve our country at the various bases across this state come to love the TarHeel state, and stay here after their military service. They become part of our community, and everyone knows a few of them.

So even though I have never had any contact with the military when I lived up North, I've begun to take a sense of pride that the 82nd Airborne is based here. They have a remarkable history; their members have been, over the years, true heroes.

This morning we hear that nine members of the 82nd have been killed in a massive explosion in Iraq. The circumstances of their death were probably unavoidable. The direct cause was the placement of US forces in small outposts, making them more vulnerable to terrorists tactics. In this case it was two trucks loaded with tons of explosives, strong enough not only to kill people, but to destroy some of the walls of the compound. These young men never had a chance.

If this serves any useful purpose, I can't imagine what it is. I just listened to Joe Biden imploring the president to wake up and face the reality of Iraq, that we are mired in the chaos of a civil war which we are powerless to affect.

Enough already. This must stop.

The evils of SEO

When I launched this blog, my purpose was to free myself from the pernicious habit of not writing unless I was being paid by the hour. It worked. Lately, whenever I have a block of unfilled time, I turn to the blog. It seems I always have something to say, although I'll admit my subject matter has no particular focus.

This seems to have fallen out of favor in the bloggers' world. Most of the blogs I happen upon have a specific subject, and sometimes the content is little more than a link to someone else's content. That's the "community" aspect of blogging, and it's extraordinarily valuable, but - unfortunately - it doesn't encourage creativity.

The fact that one can monetize a blog simply by putting Google ads on it and finding tricks to increase hits has spawned an entire industry of plagiarism. I'm aware of this because the source of many of my copywriting gigs is an online service that matches freelancers with companies needing professional services of various sorts. On any given day, you'll find a least a few posts that read like this:"I need you to paraphrase a competitor's website. There are a few pages that I don't want copied, since my company doesn't offer the same things."

or this

"We are looking for a part time or full time web content
writer paid on a per week basis. The content that you will be writing is articles for submission, blog entries, and basic content.
- 10 articles a week for a period of X weeks.
- no technical writing, a small amount of research may
be required when writing around a specific keyword
- article length - between 400 and 600 words per article
- the content is written based on keywords that we will
provide
- All content MUST be written by the winner of this bid
and must be unique, ie not directly copied from the
internet. Pay is $40 USD per week for 10 articles or $40 for a 1 week period."

Does anyone really believe that a competent copywriter will want to write ten articles a week, on subjects with which s/he has no familiarity, and get paid $4 for each of them? There's only one way to do that, and it's to lift someone else's copy from another site, change a few words, alter the sentence structure, and consider the job done.

It's clear that what's going on here is that "get rich quick" types (many of them not in the US) are putting up Web sites and blogs for the specific purpose of placing advertising on them. The content is secondary.

This reminds me of the 90s, just before the dot.com crash, when people believed that you could run a profitable Web site by selling ads from other sites, which in turn derived their own income from advertising. It was a house of cards, and destined to collapse.

This current plague of blogs existing solely for the purpose of providing a platform for SEO optimized text that will get enough hits to bring in advertising income seems unpleasantly familiar to me, and I won't participate in it. If people find my blog, they're not going to be attracted to it because it pops up on a Google search.

But I'm still considering monetizing this blog, just to see what happens. Watch the left column to see if I've made the leap.