Around the Office is a weekly group blog that shows what the OnlineFriendly.biz team and Kobayashi Online have found interesting, funny, poignant, or otherwise notable over the past week.
Wayne’s been doing some night school at Khan Academy, a website that has 2,400 odd educational videos on topics ranging from Black Holes to US social security, the French Revolution to linear algebra. Wayne’s been watching some of the finance lectures, but he’s interested in pursuing more topics. Given enough time, he might be able to take on A. J. Jacobs and his encyclopedic knowledge.Brent has been listening to the TEDxToronto conference today, in which Adam Garone talked about the genesis of Movember, a brilliant, real-world viral marketing campaign that helps create prostate cancer awareness among men. It’s proven every November that a ‘stache is a great conversation starter. Can’t grow a moustache? You can always go with the stick-on variety.
Having an article featured on Google News can drive loads of traffic to your website or blog. Roberto has been interested in Google’s largely secret process by which it picks its top stories. According to the Atlantic Wire (which often tops Google News), your article has the best chance if your site is the authority on a particular topic (like ESPN is to sports), there are relevant keywords in the title, and the story is being shared a lot on social networks. Some things to avoid are posting content copied from other sites and vague headlines that lack keywords. For more tips, check out the Atlantic’s Google News tip sheet.
Eva knows how annoying it is when Internet Explorer crashes expectantly. The comedy site 9GAG, shows a screen capture of someone who must have had a lot of windows open when it crashed, causing a cascade of messages. It reminds us of the waterfall of cards when you finish a game of Windows solitaire. If this came up after IE crashes in the middle of writing a long email, it would soften the blow a little… just a little.