An awesome workout machine I like: Ultimate Body Press.
Real Estate in North Carolina: The Peaks at Wolf Ridge.
Attention Dial-up users! Support corporate-free media by switching to IndyLink for your internet access and hosting needs:
Here's a great CD by RudePundit:
As a case-study in blog activism, let's take a look at the satire webcast: The Western North Carolina News Network. (WNCNN)
WNCNN started in 2006 as a creative way to fight against the political machine of a local Republican heavy-weight: Congressman Charles Taylor.
Bloggers didn't only write about how unfair the media was to Taylor's Democratic opponent, Heath Shuler; they also decided to produce their own commercials and reports, then post them to YouTube.
WNCNN was the brain-child of "Screwy Hoolie" of the blog ScrutinyHooligans, but several other bloggers joined him - such as Thesyntaxofthings and Patgobyebye. (ON EDIT: I also acted in a few of them.)
These videos were created independently of any campaign, and with a budget of zero dollars and zero cents. The cameras were borrowed, the actors were free, the editor learned how to use the software on his laptop as he went along, and, most of the dialog was ad-libbed.
The series was a hit locally. It was viewed by thousands of people thanks to bloggers cross-posting to videos they liked. Group blogs and social networks like BlueNC and Reddit also helped spread the word to an ever-widening audience.
WNCNN got local mainstream media attention, helped educate voters, and, ate up Taylor's resources because his staff had to view the videos and somehow respond.
After Shuler's victory, the creators of WNCNN took a well-deserved break. But now they're back. Here is a sample of a recent report:
They aren't The Daily Show - but so what? Keep in mind the next national election is still twenty months away and the producers are miles ahead of where they started in 2006. The clips are shorter and to the point, the main characters are more developed, and, the humor has improved.
No doubt, by November 2008, WNCNN will be an established counter-media outlet.
And the true beauty of all this is it's totally independent of a campaign.
As someone who studies blog activism, I've observed the most effective campaigners aren't the A-listers. Instead, they are informal blog networks that use their collective knowledge of emerging media platforms to experiment on behalf of causes they feel passionate about.
So how should a candidate who wants to take advantage of the net-roots go about harnessing this power?
Campaign managers need to identify, and develop relationships with, local bloggers early.
Let's go over that last sentence again, with emphasis added: Campaign managers need to identify, and develop relationships with, local bloggers early.
How to develop those relationships will the next topic for this series.
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A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of interviewing Robert Cox of the Media Bloggers Association for my radio show. He suggested bloggers should have a written editorial policy, like newspapers do. Not only would this would go a long way toward avoiding lawsuits, but it would also help alleviate many of the concerns some organizations have toward bloggers.
Therefore, here is Brainshrub.com's editorial policy:
Brainshrub.com is a progressive political blog that features counterpoints to encourage critical thinking. It is also a journal of my own activism. "Happiness to the people through good blogging" is the underlying ideal behind each post.
Brainshrub.com is a website for grown-ups. Opposing viewpoints are encouraged and vibrant discussion is valued. Personal attacks are not.
Godwin's Law is enforced here: First person to compare another to a Nazi, loses the debate.
This is a "Safe For Work" blog. Unless done in context of art, there will be no nudity or graphic depictions of sex.
With some exceptions, such as humorous anecdotes, I do not blog about the following topics:
Disclaimers:
Copyright policy:
All rights reserved. You are allowed to copy up to four paragraphs of this blog for your own site, provided you link back to the original source. Anything more than that, please ask permission.
The answer will usually be "yes".
Comment posting policy:
By and large, comments are unmoderated. Registered users are able to edit their posts after-the-fact.
While I can't be held responsible for how readers comment in a blog post, I reserve the right to delete:
If you feel any post on Brainshrub.com has been unfair to you or your organization, here are the steps you can take:
Last edit: 07/12/2007 @ 22:44 EST.
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It's been awhile since I've written a Tips For Political Bloggers post, so to make up for lost time I have three, yes, THREE tips for you today.
All together now:
"Ooooohhhhhhh."
"Ahhhhhhhhhhh."
1) Make your blog's theme/template look as politically "neutral" as possible
The "Bush Countdown Clock" or the "Cross-eyed Hitlery Clintoon" jpeg might be funny to people who already agree with you; but if you want your blog to go up in the rankings, avoid turning off readers before they've had a chance to read your work.
There used to be large "Drinking Liberally" and "Carnival of the Liberals" banners in the side-bars of this blog. On a whim, last month I removed them to see how it would affect traffic.
Since I made those minor changes to the template, I've noticed that visitors are now more likely to leave comments, link to Brainshrub on their own blogs even if they disagree, submit my articles to social networks like Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon, and, people tend to spend more time searching this site.
I'm not suggesting that you try to fool people into believing you're something you're not. It's just that first-impressions are important, and folks are more likely to dismiss what you've written as quackery if you wear an ideology on your sleeve.
2) Respond to Comments.
One of my sins through most of 2006 was that I didn't usually respond to comments. It wasn't that I didn't value reader's opinions, but I mistakenly assumed that it was a more productive use of my time to write new material, rather than respond to comments in old posts.
A month ago I started responding as promptly as I could, and I've already noticed more "community" feel on this site than ever before. If you want a popular blog with good traffic: Content may be king, but "community" is queen.
Also, when a blogger leaves a comment, you should immediately go to that person's site and reciprocate with a comment of your own. It doesn't have to be detailed, just something relevant. This simple habit will make your blog's community grow exponentially.
3) A good way to get boosts in traffic is to be linked on the front-page of an A-list blog. This is not as difficult as it sounds if you know who to send links to. Here is a partial list of people I email a material to about once a week. DO NOT SPAM THESE PEOPLE WITH CLICHE ARTICLES. Only send links that provide new information about a relevant topic.
I apologise to my conservative readers that I don't have list for you. Since Brainshrub is a leftyish-blog, these are the people I've naturally developed relationships with. However, please share your lists in the comments.
So there you go; three suggestions to tide you over to the next Tips for Political Bloggers post.
Tags: Blogging - Community - three - Tips
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Breaking news: There was a sex scandal in Washington DC this week!
100 years from now the first sentence of this post will still be relevant. Sex scandals are to politics what hangovers are to college fraternities. This week it's about Foley having sex with underage pages; a decade ago it was about Clinton getting oral pleasure from an intern, and, 2000 years ago, it was rumored that the Roman emperor Octavian got to his position by being on -ahem- "intimate" terms with Julius Caesar.
Therefore, the moral hypocrisy of a dirty old man in congress does not interest me all that much.
What is new is how the Foley scandal has given us an excellent opportunity to start taking about ethics, or lack thereof, in political blogging. Specifically, revealing the identities of people on your blog who would have preferred to stay out of the public eye.
Here's what happened in case you missed it:
When the Foley scandal broke, ABC appears to have left the AOL screen name of the alleged underage congressional page on it's website. A quick-thinking blogger named William Kerr, (aka "Wild Bill") of the blog PassionateAmerica, deduced the identity of this person and then posted the information on his site: Complete with a picture and where the individual was currently employed
Here is a link to a short news cast about the incident.*
It's easy to condemn Kerr offhand if he were a reporter.
But guess what?
Kerr is not a reporter, and PassionateAmerican is not a formal news-gathering organization.
When Kerr investigated the AOL screen-name he was writing about the story. When he went with the decision to publish personal information without taking into consideration the privacy of the individual, he became the story. An editor at a reputable newspaper would not have allowed Kerr to do this - but becoming the story is standard practice for many political bloggers.
Ignoring the legal consequences for Kerr of this, if indeed the page was 17 at the time of the IMs, what are the ethical lessons we can pull from this incident?
Ethics do not usually come into the equation for bloggers because the blogosphere is so new that no one really understands our role. Therefore in cases such as this the brickbats or laurels go merely to whomever posts first.
Here's an example of a brickbat Kerr got from conservative blogger Michele Malkin:
I refused to link to the blogger then and even though the Drudge Report has plastered screaming headlines about the blogger's scoop, I refuse to link to it now. There was absolutely no good reason to expose the former congressional page's name and identity. Seizing on ABC News' redaction failure and reporting errors (more on that in a moment) to play gotcha in a feeble attempt to avenge Foley is not a sufficient reason to obliterate the young man's privacy. The young man was the prey, not the predator.
It's interesting that Malkin would write this because seven months ago, in April of 2006, she published the names and phone numbers of people whom she disagreed with; people she knew to be students, possibly underage.
The point here is that A-list bloggers, who should have known better, have been just as guilty of not thinking about the privacy concerns of the people they report on as smaller blogs like PassionateAmerican.
Sunday night I contacted Kerr via Yahoo IM, and got his point-of-view directly. Kerr believes that the IMs ABC published on their site were from someone who was at least 18 years old at the time. He also believes that although he never talked with the person he claims as the author, the individual is now 21 years old... so he hasn't harmed a minor.
Therefore, he sees no ethical breach.
I disagree. Even if Kerr is 100% correct that the page was 18 at the time of the IMs, in the world of politics having your name associated with a sex scandal can sink a career even if you aren't the one with political power. Ask Monica Lewinsky.
Furthermore, the IMs Kerr references are not the only evidence that ABC had that Foley was acting inappropriately.
On the other hand, what would you have done if you suspected that ABC was giving out false information, but the main proof required a breach of someone's privacy?
Personally speaking, in this case, I would have kept the identity of the page a secret, but still posted how I came to my conclusions. I would have pushed relentlessly to hear from the page himself to confirm, deny or at least give me a "No comment." (In Kerr's case, the former congressional page worked nearby to him; Kerr could have easily driven over for a visit.)
Bloggers are, first and foremost, attention hounds. We live for the hit counter, and I believe that is what motivated Kerr more than anything, and he may wind up regretting it.
This is why we bloggers should look internally and ask ourselves why we blog, and, what kind of ethical standards we should hold our sites to.
I look forward to input from other bloggers on this topic.
Read counterpoint here.
Tags: blogging - blog ethics - standards - ethics - journalism
Note: Special thanks to BlueGal who edited this post.
* (Off topic footnote: What's with Amy McRee's eyebrows? Is it now the fashion to look like a blonde Vulcan?)
Last edit: 10/10/2006 @ 12:00 EST.
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I'm going take a few moments to share with you the "content checklist" I've developed over the years. These are attributes I try to embed into each post on Brainshrub.com.
In the long run, the material that drives the highest amount traffic to this site are not the most ironic, partisan, sexy or timely: Instead, they are the ones that match the content checklist the closest.
Where's the funny?
Unless the subject involves children in pain, there is a nugget of humor in every situation. Find it.
Subtle humor is better than sarcasm because it rewards the reader for paying attention.
50/50 rule = Timeless vs relevance.
It's easy to rant about a particular politician, but a decade from now who's going to care?
Your posts should be relevant to what is going on in the world AND have a timeless quality so that years from now people will still identify with it.
One way to accomplish this is to reference one, or more, of these timeless qualities: Love, joy, social struggle, justice, birth, hope, triumph, child-rearing, community, sharing and grief.
Engage the senses.
In blogging, this does not only mean describing smells and touch with words - it also means using multi-media such as images, videos and sound clips.
It also describes how you lay out the page. See this post about that very topic.
New information.
Repeat after me: "If I have nothing new to add, it isn't worth blogging about."
This is the hardest part of blogging for many writers. What can you tell your readers that they can't find somewhere else?
One way to do this is to find a niche, and expand from there.
For example: it is better to become the to-go-to blog about an obscure district race, and grow your audience out from there, then be a "life and politics" blog that doesn't appeal to anyone.
Orwell neutral
You should strive to write so that even your ideological polar opposites are not turned off by your writing. This means abandoning empty phrases like "fascist", "communist", and using long words where simple ones will do.
Read Orwell's Politics and the English Language to understand what I'm talking about
No "I"s, Lots of "you"s
Get rid of as many references to yourself as possible.
Don't tell the reader what to think, your writing should be like a mirror where the reader sees herself.
Don't be cruel.
Always take the high-road. Even if the person you are writing about is a complete jackass, don't say so. Simply report the facts, insert a bit of humor and let the reader come to her own conclusion.
The above list is what I've observed works best for a political blog - but they are not law writen in cyber-stone. They are a good guide, however.
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Today we are going to discuss "blog-taxonomy" and its importance. If you understand the concept, it will increase your site's traffic and repeat visitors significantly.
"Taxonomy" is the study of classifying living things. "Blog-taxonomy" is the study of how to organize your blog for the only two types of readers there are on the internet:
1) Humans.
2) Search Engines.*
For the sake of this discussion, let's break down a blogs taxonomy hierarchically into three parts:
Just because you don't have your blog organized neatly does not mean that search engines won't refer traffic to you. These days, the most important factor in determining your blogs relevance is by counting the number of people who link to your blog. These are known as an "inbound links".
So, for example, if a user is looking for information about "BBQ" and 10 bloggers have linked to the site "BBQ-for-dinner.com", as opposed to one link for "BBQ-barn.org" - it's likely that the first site will get more traffic referred to it by Google.
If inbound links are the primary determiner of search engine ranking, why bother with blog-taxonomy in the first place?
Because categories and tags help search engines put your work into context, and, make your site easier to navigate. If inbound links could be imagined as gold, then tags and categories can be thought of as silver and pearls.
To use this blog as an example, let's say you are intrigued with this post and you want to peruse the rest of the "Tips For Political Bloggers" series. Instead of slogging through an archive, all you need to do is click the category at the top of this post - and bam - the entire series is now available.
Or, suppose that you would like to see all the posts on Brainshrub.com that are categorized under "Democrats". Go ahead and look in the upper-right hand corner of this page, and you'll see a "site map"... notice how this blog is broken down on the site map category-by-category.
Some categories have nothing in them. That's okay, I'm giving search engines context as to what this blog is about. Besides, inevitably those categories will get filled with something.
Search engines love site maps the way credit-card companies love college students with wealthy parents; they spend a lot more time with them.
But site maps are not the only things categories can do.
Suppose you want to see what this blog spends most of it's time talking about. Note that just under the top banner of this site there is a tab called "tags". If you follow that link, you will be brought to Brainshrub.com's "Tag Cloud". The more bold-faced and larger the font is, the more often that category is mentioned.
Now would be a good time to say that tags fulfill many of the same functions categories do. (In fact, it's more common to see a tag-cloud broken down by tag, rather than category as is done on this site.) It's just that categories are more general, were tags are specific. For example, a blog post categorized under "Drugs" might have "Aspirin, Alcohol and Ritalin" as tags.
You'll note at the bottom of most of the blog posts on Brainshrub.com are a series of Technorati tags. They are represented as hyperlinks to the Technorati search engine. You don't need to use Technorati for your tags, but I chose to do so because it's currently the most popular tag-based search engine.**
By using Technorati tags, you can encourage people who use that search engine to visit you. As an added bonus, if you register your blog with them they will generate a cool stats page for you. Like this.
Many CMS*** have tag makers, other don't. This blog, which runs off Drupal, does not. I make my tags with this tag-maker: Life In Bush's America tag Maker.
Just type in the keywords, then generate the HTML you need for the tags.
I've done my best to explain blog-taxonomy... it took me a long time to grok why it's so important and how to implement it into my blog posts. If you don't understand anything I've written, simply post a question and I'll do my best to elaborate for you.
Tags: blogging - SEO - tags - categories - taxonomy - technorati - tag cloud - site map
* This could also be called "SEO", or, Search Engine Optimization. However, I'm only going to focus on why it's important to organize your blog well, and not other things you can do to make your site friendly to the search engines.
** There are other's like IceRocket, and certain CMS*** have their own tag systems.
*** CMS: Content Management System. A web-based application that allows you to create and post to a blog. Examples are Blogger, WordPress or Mambo. Brainshrub.com runs off the Drupal CMS.
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Today we are going to talk about Bandwidth Theft and how to make it work for you.
Bandwidth Theft (aka "Inline linking" or "leeching") is when a someone posts media on the web that uses the bandwidth and hosting services of an unwilling party.
For example, if you right-clicked on the picture above this post and looked at its properties, you would notice the following URL address:
http://www.brainshrub.com/media/pictures/tips-political-bloggers.jpg
The owner of the domain (In this case, me.) is the one who foots the bill for hosting this particular image. By simply copy-and-pasting the URL into an IMG tag, you could post this blue banner onto your blog, and I'd be stuck paying for the privilege.
To illustrate how easy this is to do: Right-click the wine-glass and look at its properties. Notice that the source of the image is coming from athomeasheville.com. I am, in effect, "stealing" that blog's bandwidth.*
The reason most webmasters and bloggers don't appreciate media-leeching is because it potentially slows down the original site, and bandwidth costs money.
There are a number of different strategies to deal with bandwidth theft. If the webmistress of athomeasheville.com objected that I was using the picture, she could tell her server to block all requests for media that are not coming from her own site. Or, she could simply change the name of the image and then the wine-glass would show up as a broken link here at Brainshrub.com.
Still another strategy is to host your images on a free 3rd party service such Flickr or Photobucket. In that case, you may not need to worry about the cost of bandwidth at all.
However, I have learned that you can harness the power of rude web-surfers to increase your site traffic and blog-brand: The secret is to create a watermark for pictures you host on your site.
If you look through this blog, you will notice that most pictures have a watermark and a dark blue border.
By doing this, anytime someone takes a picture from this site to post on their own blog or forum, whether they use my bandwidth or not, I am getting low-cost advertising.
Don't get me wrong: I would MUCH prefer that people would not engage in bandwidth theft. But since I can't stop people from doing it, I might as well profit from the practice.
Watermarks are easy to generate and customize in Photoshop. Simply create a text layer with your site's name, then tweak the blending options by right-clicking on the "layers palette" with the text:
Warning: Never put a watermark on an image that you do not own the copyright to or is not part of the creative commons. If you absolutely must do this, place it next to your own comments and not on the picture itself. You shouldn't be posting copyrighted media on your blog to start with, however this is a legal gray area on the blogosphere that we'll talk about in another post.
Another benefit of bandwidth theft is that it gives you an opportunity to punish people who take your images out of context.
For example, a year ago a poster from the conservative website FreeRepublic.com took an image from my photo album to "prove" that Andy Stephenson was exaggerating his illness. (More details on the Stephenson story here.)
At first I was upset, but then I got creative and added some text to the image:
Dear Freepers, Andy's disease came on suddenly. This picture, taken 01/20/2005, cannot be used as a tool for diagnosing illness anymore than a heavily edited video can diagnose brain death. Peace be to you all. Brainshrub.
Since the editing period had passed on that forum, there was nothing the bandwidth-thief could do short of asking the FreeRepublic moderators to remove the whole post.
In conclusion, bandwidth theft is annoying - but by adding a watermark you can promote your site and increase your site traffic.
* I got permission from www.athomeasheville.com to do this, so I guess it isn't really stealing - but you get the idea.
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Occasionally you come across a study which backs up with science what you've learned through trail-and-error.
Over the past year I developed something I came to call "The Magic F". The word "magic" may sound silly, but it was the only way I could explain the observation content organized in an F-shaped pattern appeared to encourage people to spend more time on Brainshrub.com, and, they were more likely to return later.
Last month, I finally found someone who had studied and described this phenomena in detail: F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content.
Go read it now, then come back here and we'll discuss a few extra thoughts on the matter.
Well? What are you waiting for? Shoo! I'll be here when you get back.
...
All done?
Good.
Web surfers rarely read entire blog posts. Instead, they scan them for relevant information before moving onto another site. Therefore, your goal as a blogger should be focused on making scanning rewarding, so readers are encouraged to return day after day for more information.
My experience has been that this pattern works best for reader retention and return visits:
The red areas are where you should place the main points of your blog entry. The blue areas are ideal spots for pictures, graphs or bullet points that reward the human eye for scanning the page.
One of the most common mistakes writers make with their blogs is that they forget that the internet is not printed with ink. Unlike paper, computer screens are a strain on the eyes. Very few people have the patience to read 1,500 words of text on a monitor, no matter how well-written or astute the essay is.
If you want a blog that will help create social change, you have to be able to get your message across first. To do this on the blogoshere, work within the limitations of the medium: Reward the reader with images, keep your posts to under 500 words and make darn sure that your main points are written within the red zones of the "Magic F".
In blogging, how you lay out your text is more important than the quality of your writing.
Make the Magic F your friend, and you will be richly rewarded.
LAST EDIT: 05/23/2006 @ 08:30 EST.
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Brainshrub's Tips for Political Bloggers (TPB) is a new series for this site. The "Political blog with counterpoints" format is going to remain the primary feature of Brainshrub.com, however I'd like to start giving back to the blogging community and share lessons I've had to learn the hard way.
TPB will explore SEO tips for political bloggers, ways to write effectively on a blog, tutorials on software applications, discussions on ways to measure effectiveness of blog campaigns, and, pretty much anything that has to do with blogging as a tool for political activism.
The inspiration behind this series was yesterday's post, which got me thinking about how bloggers can maximize and measure their impact during elections. I've been doing something like this on my journal at the DemocraticUnderground (DU); however, writing new content for this site prevents me from updating the DU journal regularly.
By incorporating a series about political blogging on Brainshrub.com, I can justify the time necessary to make this a quality blog project. I will cross-post TPB entirely on the DU Journal so you'll be able to follow this feature on either site.
So without further ado, here is the first TPB:
Back in high school I used to work as a waiter. I remember overhearing two business people having a conversation over lunch. An older gentleman was giving advice to a younger man who was planning to buy a company that wasn't doing very well. They were discussing who should be laid off and who should stay after the acquisition was complete.
I wasn't privy to the whole conversation, but I do remember one comment that the older man told his friend:
"Take each person aside and ask h/er to describe exactly what they do. If the employee can't sell you in two sentences or less, they are superfluous and should be fired."
As I've gotten into blogging I have to admit that the old man's statement, while shocking to me at the time, is especially good advice to writers working to build traffic to their blogs.
From an SEO perspective the most successful blogs are not the best written, or the most frequently updated. (Although that certainly helps.) The blogs that do best in the long term are the ones that know their subject matter and stick to it. These bloggers can tell you, in one or two sentences, what their blog is about - and how it's different from most other sites on similar topics.
Knowing what your blogs subject matter is going to be is deeper than just coming up with a catchy slogan; it involves deciding what you are going to give to your visitors in exchange for their time.
Once you've decided what your topic is going to be, and how you plan to deliver it, stick to an 80/20 rule. For example: If you decide to specialize in Black Box voting issues, 80% of the posts should be about Black Box voting - or at least somewhat related. It's okay to occasionally post a picture of the tomatoes in your garden, or comment on a sporting event - but the moment your tangents take up more than 20% of content, it's time to change your blogs subject matter to be broader in scope.
People visit sites that cater to specific tastes. It's unpleasant to visit a blog about cars only to find every other post to be about kittens.
To use an example outside of blogging: Most people would be disinclined to return to a dining establishment that advertises itself as a Chinese restaurant, when 30% of the food is Italian. While it is true that a chef can break new ground with a "Chinese-Italian" fusion - it's a tremendous risk that rarely works out. (Which is why you don't see many restaurants engage in this strategy.)
No counterpoints for PTB
Tags: SEO - political blogging
LAST EDIT: 05/11/2006 @ 12:30PM EST.
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So you just caught a public figure doing something unethical, illegal or just plain stupid on the internet. Perhaps you found a bigoted comment on a forum, perhaps you researched a mislabeled photo, or, perhaps you discovered a webpage where the public figure in question is attempting to pick up a date from teenagers.
Congratulations! Welcome to blog journalism in it's purest, most raw, form.
You may be excited - but what comes next? How should you preserve the evidence so that you can maintain your credibility if the public figure denies everything?
The first step is to save the page to your computer by clicking File --> Save Page As on the browser.
However, what you really need to do is get a good screenshot so that people can see what the page looked like before you exposed them. Google's cashe can be cleaned a lot faster than you think if the webmaster knows what she's doing.
As a case study, we are going to use the Kaloogian incident. This site was one of the few that remembered to get a good screen capture before they changed it. (Thus illustrating how important it is to do this quickly and correctly.)
I will be using the Firefox browser because it offers a number of features that help with getting good screen captures.
The basic way to get a screenshot is by hitting Ctrl + Print Screen, then open your favorite image editing software and hit Ctrl + V. (On a Mac you can grab your entire desktop by hitting Apple Key, shift, 3 or by selecting a window Apple Key, shift, 4 or using a camera on a window Apple Key, shift, 4, then spacebar.)
Before doing so take the following steps:
A: Keep the screenshot under 500 pixels across so that people will be encouraged to post it to their blogs and forums. An actual-sized screenshot takes a long time to load and may ruin the layout of the page. What I do is click the "Restore Down" button on the upper-right and adjust the edges so that the window is approximately the size it needs to be. Then I move the window to the bottom-right for the time-stamp. (See step F.)
B: Place a watermark on the page! If the story catches on, you want people to know it was your blog that broke the story.
C: Make sure the entire URL can be seen.
D: The tab feature in Firefox gives you an extra opportunity to promote your site. Use it.
E: Resize the text in the browser so that people can make it out clearly BEFORE you take the screenshot. Resizing web text in PhotoShop is hard on the eyes.
F: In order to have a time-stamp for the image, hold your mouse over the clock in the taskbar so that the date shows up.
G: Showing the taskbar gives an extra assurance that it is a real screenshot, and not a PhotoShopped job. Screen captures can be faked; I subliminally acknowledge this fact by displaying the PhotoShop icon with the screenshot. It forces people to ask themselves "Is this real?" before they are told what to think by their favorite pundit.
H: A concise description.
There is an extension in Firefox that you may also find useful. It's called: ScreenGrab, and you can download it here: http://andy.5263.org/screengrab
ScreenGrab allows you to take a picture of the entire page without the scroll bar. That long orange bar to the left of the steps is a re-sized version of Brainshrub.com's entire frontpage that I made with ScreenGrab.
While the thin bar seen here may be too tiny to read, it would make a great image link to a full-sized JPEG of this page. (Which I didn't do because that would have been a waste of bandwidth.)
I hope you found this tutorial educational. If you have anything to add, please do so in the comments.
Tags: Screenshot - blogging - screen capture - blog tips
Credits:
No counterpoint today.
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