Recently the organization launched Version 3 of their site, aimed at “making personal CaringBridge websites easier to use, visually streamlined and more customizable.” A new feature is a Spanish-language option.

We talked with founder and executive director Sona Mehring about the thinking behind the new features.

What did you learn from your users that helped you shape Version 3?

We have feedback elements available on our site, and through the years people have been very proactive about providing that. We also do surveys periodically to ask users what new features they’d like and what they’d like to see improved. In our most recent survey we collected over 4,000 responses.

Three themes emerged. Users wanted to be able to share photos and integrate them into their journals. They wanted additional control of their own privacy. And they wanted to be able to personalize the look and feel of their own sites more.

We keep abreast of trends in the industry: what are the bigger, more broadly public social networks doing? There we also saw a trend toward more privacy control. Since it’s important for us to continue to reach more people all the time, we also added the multilingual component as a way to serve Spanish-speaking families.

A lot of our feedback on the site also consists of users asking us not to change anything, so we have tried to be conservative, keeping the site as familiar as possible even as we add new enhancements.

How are you measuring the success of Version 3?

We are trying to make sure that people are still engaging with the service actively: that the number of new sites continues to grow at the same rate and that they are continuing to leave journal entries at the same rate.

For example, we now average around 180 new sites a day. That’s been growing at an average of 25 to 35 percent a month, so we’re looking to make sure that that growth rate is sustained.

What’s the best frequency that will yield your blog the maximum results?

It really depends.

First you have to establish the type of blog you want as well as your goals for it. For example, a news blog selling advertising space will have a much different posting schedule than a personal branding blog or a blog used to generate leads for products or client work.

In this article, I’ll explain the three most common posting frequencies (multiple posts per day, one post per day, and a few posts per week) and the pros, cons, and optimal situations for each.

Multiple posts per day

Writing multiple posts in a day is optimal only for multiauthor news-type blogs that sell advertising space to sponsors.

Pros:

• People will keep coming back for the latest news and content – maximize content and page views
• Great for SEO [search engine optimization] keyword opportunities
• More likely to attract high quality sponsors

Cons:

• A lot of work that’s difficult to keep up with especially for one blogger
• Content quickly gets lost in the date-based format of most blogs
• Articles lack depth and focus – less likely to get links and exposure to each individual article
• Difficult to spread marketing over multiple articles

Best for:

• Big news blogs that have very large followings and sell adverting space to related sponsors

One post per day

This blogging frequency is probably the most versatile and I’d recommend it to everyone looking to grow their blogs-especially those just getting started.

Pros:

• Consistent posting pattern encourages readers to check back daily
• Gives bloggers the ability to write in-depth articles about a single topic rather than just report on news
• Good balance between content quality and posting frequency

Cons:

• Some bloggers might still have trouble keeping up
• Requires consistency and strong work ethic
• Difficult to come up with new post ideas, especially in niche topics

A few posts per week

This works best for blogs that already have established readerships and want to focus on quality in-depth articles, blogs used to promote products and services by showcasing expertise, hobby blogs on specific topics, and bloggers with limited time.
Pros:

• Do less work and maximize results
• Focus on quality, which will result in more traffic, links, comments, and exposure
• Posts are featured on the home page for a longer period of time

Cons:

• Readers are less likely to check back for new posts because of the lack of rhythm
• Inability for bloggers to keep up with the latest trends and news in the industry
• Less content mean less channels for distribution (SEO, links, social media, etc)

For me, I started off writing multiple posts per day and got burnt out fast. I switched to a once a day schedule and that worked great to build my readership and establish myself in the industry. Once I accomplished that, I changed to a few posts per week to focus on high quality and to free up my time for new projects.

It’s not too hard if the documents are different:

Turn off Track Changes in both documents.
Copy from one document.
Paste in the other document.
Turn Track Changes back on in both documents.

That preserves the change marks correctly in the pasted material.

This works with all or part of the document. For example, I often make
edits to one newsletter article in a different file than the whole
manuscript. After I’m satisfied, I follow the procedure above, selecting
all of the article from one file, then highlighting the original text in
the whole manuscript, then pasting. The result looks as if all the work
were done in the manuscript file.

If the two documents are the same but you want to combine different changes
made in each, use Merge Documents. Open one file, click Merge, select
the other document, then choose Merge into New Document. Look at the
result and decide if the result has combined the changes correctly. If
not, open the second document first, then select the first document, and try
again. It takes a bit of experimenting, so make sure to save copies of
the two original files—it’s far too easy to overwrite.

For more details, consult Hilary Powers’ book Making Word Work for You. Among other useful tips, she warns that the Compare/Merge function is a little…quirky.

Lise Lingo uses Word to track edits in books for the Urban Land Institute, annual reports for the World Bank, and newsletters for AARP.

Now, in a flash, that era appears to be over.  Can it be?

For almost a year, we’ve been using free wiki software to store and organize large quantities of information for multiple users on a variety of projects. Our wiki sites have helped simplify management by reducing file transfers, allowing content to be updated without hassle, and giving all participants ready access to information.

But we’ve had to host our own wiki sites. Both our experiences and our graphic results were frequently primitive, at best. Until now.

Launched in 2006—but relatively obscure until recently—the hosted site WetPaint offers the upgrades we’ve been seeking. As tech blogger Sean Colombo puts it, “WetPaint uses MS-Word-like editing to remove the otherwise-substantial learning curve from contributing to a wiki….” File attachments are simple to execute; the graphics have Gmail or Yahoo!-like appeal; and all registered users receive email notifications when content has been updated.

Let freedom ring.

We invite you to share your experiences with WetPaint and other hosted wikis across cyberspace.

Unfortunately, they fall into the same trap as many other companies. They let the techies run their website. Techies hate human contact and will do anything to avoid it: bury the contact information, FAQs, you’ve seen it all.

If only they understood that customer contact of any kind is something to be valued. You can find out what your customer thinks, fix a problem, or maybe even sell something. Sometimes an ordinary conversation is all that’s needed.

Oh, yeah, Starbucks. They offer “automatic replenishment” on all of their cards. When a card balance drops to, say, $15 they will automatically add money from your credit card. This is a good thing for Starbucks, keeps the revenue flowing, helps keep the customer from thinking about price. You pay with the card, it’s free. The card is automatically loaded, you never have to think about it. Duh.

But there’s a bug in the website when you try to set this up. To tell them about this bug required plowing through endless phone menus and then waiting. How about a “just talk to me, press 1″ option?

Those pesky customers. Always wanting merchants to make it easy for them to spend money.

Bob Bailey is a Message Builder who helps executives and organizations say more with fewer words.

If 2008 was the year social media went mainstream, 2009 should be the year of content marketing, the corporation as media company, the brand as publisher and broadcaster. Why? Because everyone of those incredibly intelligent people I met with, in some way or another, told me that the difference for brands who make it versus those that don’t will be relevance. How can we, as brands, be relevant to our customers? How can we create and develop real relationships with them? How do we engage?

As my friend and colleague Kirk Cheyfitz has said over and over—brands can do only two things to create the goal of 100% engagement—we can inform our customers—or give them a good time.

To help, I’ve put together 10 tactics that I believe you need to seriously consider NOW as part of your 2009 content plan (not in any particular order).

1. Tell the Story Differently through Different Media – It’s frustrating to watch the sheer number of marketers tell a great story, but repurpose that story the same way in all their media. Ian Alexander over at Eat Media constantly harps (and rightfully so) on the concept that the story you tell in print versus mobile versus website versus video must be told in a very different manner. Seems obvious, but it’s not done. Most commonly, this mistake is made from taking a print custom program and just putting it online. Do you engage with content in the same way in print as you do the web? Most likely, you don’t. Do not expect more of your customers than yourself.
2. Raid Traditional Media Outlets – As traditional media continues to lay off the best journalists in the world and layoffs and bankruptcies abound, your opportunity to acquire talent has never been greater. Of course, I’m biased a bit that I believe most marketers should outsource their content and find great providers through our service, but this opportunity is too good to be true. First, the talent is available now. Second, expert journalists are very open to working with corporations today. Third, you need great content to survive as a marketer. To do this, you need talent that understands how to tell a story. Go get that talent today while there is still time (and before they all start up their own content marketing businesses).

Read the rest of this post here.

Joe Pulizzi is founder of Junta42, the go-to site for content marketing and custom publishing. You can read more about Joe at his blog or check out his book, Get Content. Get Customers.

While the strategies look intelligent, closer examination of the analyst’s examples reveal that they still need a little work.

Did the Sun run out of gas?

Here’s one of the analyst’s examples: The Baltimore Sun integrated widgets next to their content about gas and oil-related content help readers find the cheapest gas prices in the region.

What a smart idea. Let’s see what other useful information we can get from the site. How about a topic that matters even more to people these days: jobs. Well, first we need to find articles about jobs or the economy, which requires searching through their ponderously indiscriminate “Topic Galleries” (Jo-Ann Stores Incorporated; Joachim, Joseph; ah, here we are, job layoffs). I see it’s a beta version. Note to Sun: it would help to bold important topics or otherwise organize the thing.

“Job layoffs” delivers 112 stories and a keyword cloud of related topics, not one of which is about how to get a job. Hey, maybe your reader is out of work. How about some help?

Well, silly reader, go to the classifieds. Back on the home page, in the left-hand column, where you’d expect them. But here again we’re confronted with a less than well-conceived set of topic headings. Fifteen categories. There are thousands of different job categories in this country. How did they come up with 15? One is “executive,” not too helpful.

So I clicked on “Part-time” (yes, it’s one of the 15) and found—ta da—a work-at-home assistant for an insurance company at $2,500 a month. That would take the sting out of losing your bank job. You can even apply online.

Better still, once you get into the system you can go to “Advanced Job Search,” which lets you enter key words and locations. There you discover that 741 job openings were posted in Baltimore within the past month. Maybe you won’t need to sell apples on the street corner after all.

Need a Grown-Up

The Sun’s strategy just needs a little work. The Washington Post’s strategy requires more serious thought. The Post is teaming with Sphere to show readers who is blogging about a particular writer’s article.

The example shown by Forrester was an op-ed column “Obama’s Brain Trust” by E.J. Dionne, Jr., published on November 25. One of the three entries under “Who’s blogging” isn’t a blog post at all, but a Washington Post article about the appointment of Timothy F. Geithner, President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, as Secretary of the Treasury. But it’s been given a new headline—hold your breath—“Wall Street JEW Tapped To Head Treasury.”

Monstrous. It’s from hypercrypton, a virulently anti-Semitic Website.

Clearly, Sphere is using an automatic feed to generate the “who’s blogging” feature. At least, I hope they are. But where are the grown-ups at the Post? Is the staff stretched too thin to moderate their Website?

What is the reader to think? That the Post regards anti-Semites as entitled to their say, right next to the eminent Mr. Dionne? Would the print version have run an ad paid for by the Ku Klux Klan next to an article about our President-elect?

Please, Post online editors, if you’re going to open the doors to all and sundry, at least run a disclaimer: The following contains vile, dishonest, and potentially dangerous subject matter. Reader discretion is advised.

When I scripted a recruitment video for a government agency, it was the agency’s first attempt at recruitment marketing. Management wanted to train recruiters and also show the video at trade shows and job fairs, as well as hand out the CD.

Based on what they told me, I wrote a one-page treatment. (A “treatment” is just a prose description of the story a video or movie will tell.) The clients approved it after only three rewrites! Then I wrote the script. It was approved after only seven or eight rounds of review and revision (I lost count), and we proceeded to the video shoot.

In the middle of the shoot, the frantic director called and asked me to change all the words starting with “s.” It turned out that the narrator chosen by the client—the “talent,” it’s called—had a distracting speech defect that was obvious in close-up shots. Some words she couldn’t pronounce at all.

Most of the close-ups ended up on the cutting room floor. We filled the gaps with background shots from B-roll (that is, supplemental video footage) and graphics with text to emphasize key points as the narrator spoke in voiceover.

In the end we got a more engaging video than planned. There were more quick cuts from scene to scene and less “talking head.” The client loved it, and the video won a respected Telly, a national telecommunications award. The production team never let on.

My advice for scriptwriting? Be imaginative. Be flexible. Be patient. And never overlook the opportunity to turn lemons into lemonade.

Bill Harrison is a professional business writer and editor and the president of Harrison Consulting Group. You can see more of his work at www.harrison-group.com.

Did you know you can publish a book on Kindle right now? Go to Amazon’s Digital Text Platform for instructions. There is no charge up front—not a penny.

It’s all up to you

You’ll find a lot of options for upload format (including plain text, PDF, and Word), but Amazon recommends you go for optimal readability by formatting in HTML. For most writers, this requires hiring a graphic designer for about $85 an hour. Total design budget will depend on number and complexity of illustrations plus other design elements, such as sidebars.

On the other hand, a print publisher will typically design your book, although usually to their own specifications, not yours. Vanity presses—“self publishers” like iUniverse—do as much design as you’ll pay for. Their default design tends to be utilitarian, with narrow margins so as to minimize paper costs.

A better deal—maybe

With Kindle, you set your own list price, of which Amazon will pay you a royalty of 35 percent.

That’s considerably better than you’re likely to get from a print publisher, who will offer anywhere from 6 to 15 percent of list price, depending on the type of book (according to Richard Curtis in How to Be Your Own Literary Agent). Of course, if you self-publish using a vanity press, royalties are whatever you can negotiate with the outlets you persuade to distribute your book.

Kindle is sounding pretty competitive, right? But before you rush in, read the Terms and Conditions: distribution rights cannot be revoked, which means a traditional publisher probably won’t be interested in the material (they usually want exclusive rights).

At present, traditional publishers offer access to a much larger consumer base. If you sell your book on Kindle, you can only sell to people with Kindles. Although at least one analyst predicts there will be 2.2 million Kindles out there by 2010, right now there are fewer than 200,000.

Furthermore, some print publishers support promising writers with good editing and promotion. But don’t count on it. The truth, as revealed in excruciating detail by New York magazine, is that’s usually not the case anymore, except for a few favored books. If yours is not one of those marked as a potential blockbuster, you’re not likely to get much attention.

Even if you publish with an established house, you’ll probably have to do your own promotion, and your own editing. For the latter, some in our office have had good experiences with the consulting services offered by iUniverse.

[A]PIs work by establishing a trusted relationship between computer programs so that they can share information, the way Google Maps are used by real estate Web sites to plot the latest listings. The first one launched by the Times, a presidential campaign finance data API, packages what the paper’s own reporters use to track the money chase of Barack Obama, John McCain, and third-party candidates and then sends that data out onto the Internet to see if it can make itself useful. The Times has [subsequently followed up with] APIs of movie reviews, restaurant reviews, and congressional vote records.

APIs … might represent the paper’s best hope of becoming an integral part of the modern news process—sometimes as a destination, but other times as a savvy information broker. As a trusted source for culled and polished fundraising data, for example, the Times can not only feed the stories of local campaign reporters across the country. It can also become a valuable partner in the growing online movement towards greater government transparency. …

With APIs, it becomes easy to imagine reported anecdotes piling up each other over time, until, perhaps, a narrative emerges. With APIs in play, savvy reporters, editors, photographers, designers and other content creators will learn to think about creating for them.

Think, for example, about what a “Mortgage API” launched by the Times two years ago could have meant. It would have given government reporters a place to feed those reported bits on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that didn’t fit into actual stories. Business reporters could have delivered curious data chunks showing something funny happening in the derivatives market. What’s more, enterprising readers could have introduced that feed to Google Maps API or Outside.in’s localization tools. Perhaps no one could have predicted the Wall Street meltdown, but in retrospect it’s clear that reporters had turned up useful information that ended up falling through the cracks. …

Can an organization without the Times’ long history of Internet experimentation make APIs work? For a quick take, we asked John Redmond of Keystone Computer:

The Times APIs are a little different from a news feed, in that info is pulled, not pushed.

In order to use the API, you need to know what data you are going to get and what you want to do with the data.

• What fields are in each record? What type is the data in each field (text, currency, date, etc.)?
• Are you going to statistically analyze the data or simply summarize and present it on a web page?
  

The answers to these questions will determine the work you need to do to use the API. Dynamically putting a chunk of xml on a web page is pretty straightforward. Having it look pretty and making it interactive gets expensive. Check with your web developer; s/he will be able to prepare a work plan and budget.