Terence P Ward's Blog

Posted by Terence P Ward

Be-a-Magpie is a German service that allows you to insert sponsored tweets in your Twitter stream. The tweets are selected based on what your followers are saying, and there are several ways you can customize the ad content:

• Frequency of tweets can be tweaked within limits
• Screening may be turned on for ads, allowing you to decide which of the potential sponsored tweets you'd like to see going out to your followers
• Editing is possible for some ads to make them sound more like your own writing
• Identifying of sponsored tweets is an option, not a requirement. The identifier, if selected, defaults to starting the tweet with "ad:" but I decided instead on ended my paid tweets with the hashtag #ad.

Magpie has a tool for predicting how much you can earn based on your number of followers, @replies, and tweets; each ad also has its own payment criteria: per view, per click, per purchase. I have earned a fraction of a pound (all denominations on the site are in the British currency) thus far, and alas, my account has been suspended.

The email I received told me that I need to cut back my automated tweets to less than fifteen percent of my total, so either I need to start posting links to my articles manually or start talking a lot more about the great parking space I just found.

Posted by Terence P Ward

It's not something that I'm very proud of, but I'm a guerrilla proofreader. Wherever I go online or off, errors just pop out at me and beg for correction. I'm not so bold as to spray-paint over signs that, for example, confuse it's and its, but it's much more difficult to stay the quell my inner editor when I see a blog post or news article that refers to "this data" when a quick glance at the rules of peculiar plurals show that these data are plural, but this datum is singular.

But the one that is most likely to get me to send an unsolicited comment or email is the phrase "ATM machine" and all of its brethren, as they show that the writers are using acronyms without actually knowing what they stand for.

I wish I could stop this uninvited correcting that I do, because English is a tough language and even native speakers need some slack cut from time to time, but my Little Voice invariable pipes up and tells me that in this way can I keep the language from descending into madness.

I don't entirely agree, but I'm helpless to stop. I apologize to any reader who has been thus stricken, and offer some additional tips to stay my uninvited editor's pen:

• Proofreading and editing tips to catch easy errors.
• Using Yours and Theirs Correctly
• Purdue's Online Writing Lab

Posted by Terence P Ward

Today I published my one hundredth article on Suite101, a review of a book about Google, and it got me to thinking about how much Google influences my own life. It's definitely the first place I usually look for information (with Wikipedia coming in a close second), and I know I"m not alone in this. I learned in my marketing class that the median age of the person who reaches for the Yellow Pages before looking up a number online is in their mid-seventies. Much of the reason this is possible is because of Google's search power.

I do most of the marketing for my business writing by building an online presence via Google. My income from these articles is based entirely upon Google's ad network. Indeed, my collected business book reviews wouldn't get much traffic without the mighty Google. The SEO industry rises and falls on the search engine's mysterious algorithm. The company wields tremendous influence and has gigantic sums of cash. It will certainly be interesting to see what Google does next.

Posted by Terence P Ward

The microblogging platform Twitter is a uniquely transparent way for a writer to do research. When I was learning about subtleties of the service from hashtags to branding, I did so by interviewing my subjects via Twitter - a "Twitterview." In fact, I learned first learned about hashtags from comments inspired by such an interview.

There is a time and a place for everything, and twitterviews are not appropriate if when I need to keep the information confidential. However, since Twitter keeps every "tweet" (post) ever made, these public conversations can generate interest in my interview subject, which is a value-added bonus.

For local work I still prefer face-to-face conversations, and connectivity issues can make a twitterview all but impossible to accomplish. Those challenges aside, there's something to be said for a publicly-available transcript of the entire interview. Each of mine can be found on Twitter by searching for the hashtag #tpw. If you're interested in being interviewed yourself you can read my interview guidelines; if you just want to see how I use Twitter feel free to follow me.