Top 10 Tech Web Tips

Top 10 Wikipedia Tips

Wikipedia is an extremely valuable web resource that can be utilized to gather resourceful reference information and can be used to provide reference information.  We will cover our current top 10 Wikipedia Tips.  If you know additional tips, please leave us a comment and if your tip is better than ours, we’ll bump our tips and load your in to the top 10 list with a link back to your site!

1. Get Your Facts Straight! - Always do your homework and make sure your entries into Wikipedia are factual.
2. Build Up Your Wiki-Credibility - Building off our last point, you need to build up your Wikipedia credibility so that your entries will remain complete while they remain correct.  Facts and circumstances for an encyclopedia entry do change over time.
3. Make Updates - The facts do change and evolve over time so go back in and make updates regularly to the indexes that you start or edit.
4. Can’t find it? Make an Entry - Many writers and bloggers will check Wikipedia to see if any reference information is available as they write up an article.  If you do not find an index listing in Wikipedia, consider building one and linking to it in your new article.  Requirement, make sure you follow point 1 first!
5. Follow the standard Wiki formats - Wikipedia has its own subculture of personalities and styles.  There is no point in being abrasive or rocking the boat.  Follow the standardized formats and your work will be more readily accepted.
6. Pictures, Pictures, Pictures - Upload a relevant picture and make sure that its copyright safe.  Just like in blogging, pictures speak a thousand words and will make your reference stand out.  Upload pictures where they are allowed and cite sources accurately.
7. Reference links - In your write ups provide great links to internal references as well as external references.  Many topics in Wikipedia are covered, if you are covering a tangent link into the the parent topics, and link to external topics as well.
8. Editing tangential indexes with links - If you write up a topic that is tangential to a parent topic, go into the parent topic and submit a footnote or section to describe the tangent and internal Wikipedia link so that people can find further information on the topic.
9. Don’t fight the wicked Wiki Wars - If someone edits up your entry, try to avoid going to war with them.  Most editors have good reasons for making changes and corrections.  Don’t take it personal, just keep working and improving your game.  Every now and then someone will scam the system or snarf over your work.  Fix it where you can as they probably won’t come back for a second round of snarfing and scamming, if they do report them and then let it go. 
10. Blog about it! - After you write up an entry in Wikipedia promote it just a bit and blog about it.  You did the work, take some credit for it!

Blogging for a Purpose

I have been blogging full time almost for a year now. In the early days I made nothing from blogging and these days 60% of my income comes from blogging. I say this as the monetization of my blogging efforts enabled me to experience a bit of a writing break through. Putting money to my blogging efforts made my efforts feel valuable.

I always thought they were valuable, but with out money to show for my efforts, it didn’t measure up in the real world.

I have read over and over again that people should blog about their passions or they will suffer from Blog fading. I do believe this is true almost. I often provide executive coaching consultations (paid and unpaid). I can talk about it with a passion, but the same thoughts don’t flow through my fingers. As such, I had a blog fade on the subject despite my passion.

Similarly, I have a blog about the Distribution Business. I am not passionate about it, but I write about it weekly. Its a money earner. There is readily available news to write about it and I have expertise in the area. The money makes it possible to cover that one.

Money is not everything

As the money started to come in from my blogging work last summer, I became reinvigorated and I went from writing a half dozen articles per week to dozens per day sometimes hundreds per week. (I fluctuate and I do not advocate my style of method.) The money confirmed the value of the work and initially translated into a bit of something else.

It almost transcended into a Purpose

About 5 months ago, I started to realize that I was blogging about my passions and I was earning money. However some of my blogs had purpose that did not make an impact.

I was blogging to share my ideas, providing my insights, even sharing a bit of my twisted humor. This was a purpose, but it didn’t do that much. People were reading but nothing tangible aside from reading my stuff was taking place. I was making money for my efforts and it was work. I enjoyed my work more so than much of the work I have done in the past, especially when I was able to exercise my twisted humor.

But I am an idealist and on a good day a visionary. I need to dream the future, grab the vision and make a better world by moving towards that goal.

Writing about second and third hand news with my personal insights wasn’t quite cutting it. But there was definitely something there. I knew that I did not want to be a traditional journalist. There was a time in my life about 10 years ago, that I did, but not now. My ego is a little to big to cover the story, I need to be a part of the story. For a journalist that is taboo unless you want to go Gonzo, which for me has some appeal. But going Gonzo doesn’t bring a dream into a reality it just turns reality into a ludicrous hallucination.

My twisted humor savors the ludicrous hallucination, but my inner idealist needs to taste a realized dream every now and then. Plus I can pass on the sour and hollow belly feeling that follows the hallucination.

Putting all this together enabled me to figure out that I needed to do something with my blogs with my sites, I needed to achieve something to make something real out of knowledge bouncing around in cyberspace. I won’t list out my plan for the future, but I can share some early steps that I am taking to blog with a purpose.

I recently launched a political site, calling it a movement might be a better description. Its NoMoreIncumbents.org.

I have been sitting on this domain for many months now running the scenario in my head that I wanted to start a political action committee or a lobbying group or some kind of grass roots community to help defeat incumbents in elections. In the states an incumbent is 98 percent likely to win re-election. It has been built into our political system for about 100 years now, but Radio, TV Cable and now the internet have made it a bit of a plague, threatening the concept of democracy all together as multi national corporations and special interests literally rewrite the laws to suit themselves.

So I am going to do something about it. I do not know how big this movement will get, but I’m looking for writers and bloggers to join and manage individual blogs on the site covering each of 50 states and I might expand to other countries if there is a need.

That’s not the culmination of my efforts

No More Incumbents is not the final step for me. The technology and the business process running this site are akin to a beta test for something that I will be doing next, that is very far away from politics. Something that will change entertainment significantly in the years and decades to come. (Don’t worry you can dis believe me if you like, I thrive when I’m told that I am wrong or crazy or what have you. Has something to with my childhood. I have always been an underdog and learned a long time ago how to channel negative energy into a positive.)

The Main Point

The key here is that there are three primary components to successful blogging that I have identified so far:

1. Blog about your passions - (our hero said as he looked someone else’s dead horse in the eye and beat it again)
2. Blog for money from day one - otherwise you are not taking your passion seriously or giving yourself a fair opportunity.
3. Blog for a Purpose - When you blog to achieve something, and you surpass Gonzo journalism, you become part of the story, the event. The blogosphere enables you to cover yourself. You become the content embodied and from an internet business model, you become the source of the primary content. Primary content on the internet is the most valuable thing going. Channel that value through your purpose, channel that with your passion, leverage it with the money you earn, and you will be successful.

If you read this far, you know or remember that I am a wordy bastard. My apologies, I will do my best to step away from comment responses for a time to let others get some equal time on the subject. Being a wordy bastard is also a taboo and one of the original reasons why I spent so much time not blogging with a purpose. I was blogging to hear myself think out loud. There’s nothing wrong with that, but its much more valuable when there is a purpose in it that takes you towards a goal.

Introductions to Top 10 Tech Web Tips

Greetings!

We are launching a new collective of Sites around Top10Tech.com.  Within Top10Tech.com you will find a number of categories covering various forms of items that might be reviewed, summarized, written about, tested, improved, shared and completed in some form of a top 10 list.

Top 10 Tech Web Tips

Top 10 Tech Web Tips is one area that will focus on  . . .  Web Tips!  You will find many articles covering individual Top Web Tips on a wide range of topics including:

•  coding html, CSS, XHTML, PHP, Perl, java, Ajax and much more
• Useful Websites to aid with these web tips
• Reviews of tools, functions and sites that break the mold on the Web
• Even some useful services

This category will likely fill out and evolve over time, but this is just a start and a summary.

How the site will work and Grow?

Overtime, we will write articles and on a weekly basis we will provide a Top 10 Tech Web Tips list of the week.  As time goes on we will accept Summaries from readers and additional writers.  Those summaries will be voted upon with a weighting provided by our readers and our editorial staff.  The top 10 Tech Web Tips as counted in the final vote will then be listed, along with links to the sources of the Summary articles.

We are looking to gather great Top 10 Web information and we will cite the sources where we find them.  If you have a great tip for us to consider, please email it to us including your link to the original article, a 50-100 word summary and a username or first name that we can credit in our article.

You can send that email to top10-WebTips@top10tech.com

Please never hesitate to ask us any questions or leave any comments of agreement or dissent.  We want your feedback as that will make the context of our tips more useful for all our other readers!