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Spider-Man Family: Back In Black Digest: Back in Black Digest v. 1

Heroes – Graphic Novel: Volume 1

Entertainment News! 1/21/10

Brooke Mueller

Yesterday the only news out there about Brook was that she was in intensive care for oral surgery. Most of us would assume that was a crock to delay a court hearing or due to some type of injury. More details were released today. Apparently, Brook had emergency surgery to remove her wisdom tooth and her mouth became infected. The infection spread and she now has pneumonia in both lungs. This poor woman- will it ever end? The hearing that was scheduled to take place tomorrow may be postponed until February 8th due to her illness. Brooke’s attorney Yale Galanter filed an emergency motion allowing Sheen to visit her in the hospital.

Conan O’Brien

Conan’s last show will be Friday. Many of us are sad about this but I think Conan will be just fine. Not only is he going to receive a severance pay of 32.5 million dollars, he is now for sale to any other network that wants to scoop him up and will get paid regardless of whether or not he finds a new gig. The Tonight Show staff will receive a severance of $7.5 million and the executive producer will get $4.5 million. I haven’t seen Conan’s show in so long because I’ve been too busy to stay up that late but I’ll have to check out the last one on Friday. I’m sure it will be great but a little sad for his fans.

Two and a Half Men in Danger of Turning into 1 ½?

Actor John Cryer alerted authorities that he thought his ex-wife hired a hit man and was planning to have him murdered. The FBI has been on the case and John is starting to feel more comfortable that this was merely a threat. Wow. Charlie Sheen beats his wife and Cryer’s ex-wife wants him taken out. Cryer has been involved in a custody battle with his ex for some time. If the threat is valid, perhaps he and Brooke Mueller should run away together and hire a boatload of bodyguards to stand outside their house until these people are out of their lives for good… just a thought.

Celebrity Child Beater

Markice “Kesan” Moore previously on the MTV reality show From G’s to Gents is out on bail after being accused of beating his one year old daughter and breaking her bones. This guy is out on $20,000 cash bail and living it up after hurting a helpless child. Come on people. Put this scumbag in prison and feed him to the wolves. Let him get a little taste of his own medicine. How do abusers like this get to walk out of jail? Moore was taken in because he was accused of breaking both of his daughter’s arms, three ribs and her collarbone but claims he is only accountable for her wrist breaking because she “fell out of her bed”.

Pants on the Ground

Larry Platt who auditioned on American Idol and sang his original song Pants on the Ground is getting a lawyer. He is happy that his song became popular and that people everywhere are singing his catchy tune but now that it’s popular, he wants to make some cash out of the deal. Platt never copyrighted his hit so he is attempting to do so now. Platt likes Brett Favre’s rendition of his song and is interested in getting together with him to record a duet of the song.

Twilight

The Twilight craze doesn’t seem to be slowing down any time soon. Stephanie Meyer, the author of the novels is joining forces with a group of graphic artists to create a series of comic books with the first of the series being released on March 16, 2010.

Lindsay Lohan

It seems Lindsay’s hot date for the Vienna Opera Ball coming up next month will be no other than 77-year-old Richard Lugner. Huh? Lugner is notorious for dating younger women and in the past has been seen with stars like Paris Hilton and Nicolette Sheridan. I don’t know how this guy does it. It must be that he is a huge society figure and these women just want to maintain their spot in the limelight because if you’ve seen this guy, you’d have to agree that it probably has very little to do with attraction.

Simon Cowell Charity for Haiti

Simon will be producing an album that will be on sale and the proceeds will be donated to the earthquake victims in Haiti. He was asked to do this project by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown. We don’t have the entire lineup of singers for the album but so far Susan Boyle and Leona Lewis are involved.

Lady Gaga Rocks New York

Gaga has hit the road after recuperating from her spell of exhaustion and impressed her fans with her Monster Ball Tour concert Wednesday night at Radio City Music Hall in New York City. Madonna was seen at the concert accompanied by her daughter Lourdes as well as Donald Trump, Sting and more celebrity fans. It looks like Gaga is the new Madonna sporting unique and risqué outfits of her own and pumping out hit after hit, not to mention putting on affordable concerts that are sure to entertain! The proceeds from the concert will be donated to earthquake victims in Haiti.

Celebrity Quotes:

The following celebrities are included in the long list of those who have donated money to Haiti.

“I cannot stress enough what a human disaster this is and idle hands will only make this tragedy worse. We must act now.”- Wyclef Jean

“It is incredibly horrible to see a catastrophe of this size hit a people who have been suffering from extreme poverty, violence and unrest for so many decades. We understand the first response is critical to serve the immediate needs of countless people who are now displaced from their homes, are suffering trauma, and most require urgent care.”- Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie

“I am heartbroken by the catastrophic events of the past six days in Haiti.  It is important in times like these that we come together and find ways to help in any way we can.”- Gisele Bundchen

“Small loans make an enormous impact on the lives of Haitian women currently living on less than $3 a day,” the actress said. “And now, more than ever, Haitian women need these capital inputs to help themselves recover from this tragedy in a sustainable way.”- Natalie Portman

“Haiti’s still suffering… I was in New York during 9/11 and the level of disaster isn’t in the neighborhood of what is happening in Haiti, but I just remember feeling nobody really understood. And I worry that young people don’t know enough about what’s going on there.”- Lady Gaga

By: Frank Bilotta

The Garfield Address Book

Okay, you have a website setup to promote your books, music, and other products you wish to sell. With a bit of Internet savvy, you have created an attractive design to catch the Internet user’s eyes, and with your expertise on the subject at hand you are able to provide thoughtful, provoking content. You are confident your site is optimized for good search results, with a good saturation of keywords in your content. Your site is simple to navigate, fun to read, and yet informative enough to be highly regarded by engines. You are ready for the world!

Yet, you feel as though what you are doing is not enough. Perhaps you enjoy a steady increase in traffic through traditional online marketing means, occasional tweaking of metadata and e-mail advertising. Offline advertising is not in the budget right now, and you want to try other, cheaper alternative before delving into pay-per-click advertising. What else is there to do?

Have you considered creating an RSS feed for your website? If you are in the business of promoting and selling many products and services, having an RSS feed attached to your website may be beneficial in attracting new visitors to your website. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication, and it is a specific format for aggregating news and information to other websites and Internet users who read news through special aggregators, or readers.

Think of RSS as a distant cousin of the news tickers you see on your favorite 24-hour news or sports network. As new information is made public, the wires pick up the story and syndicate the content to interested third parties seeking information to distribute. An all-sports network, for example, would select only the most recent sports news from various syndicates to put on television. RSS works in a similar way.

Not sure how? Next time you log onto the Internet, take a look at your start up page, if you use My Yahoo or My MSN or anything similar. What do you see? Maybe you have updated news bytes from Associated Press or Reuters, daily comic strips, weather and horoscope, and so on. You know, of course, that such pages can be customized to show only what you want to see. If you’re interested only in entertainment news, you would adjust your page so you only receive movie gossip and reviews, and news from the top entertainment magazines, right? All of this information is syndicated, and your start up page acts as an aggregator, collecting only the relevant information you want it to collect and display.

Now, stay with me, because here’s the fun part: by creating an RSS feed, you can become a syndicate! Say you are a romance author and offer a series of passionate stories you know romance fans will love. You can create an RSS feed using news about your books and information related to writing, the romance genre, and the publishing industry to create usable content for aggregators. With proper promotion and distribution, users interested in romance novels can either add your feed to their private readers, or even their websites, thereby increasing your exposure. This in turn can increase traffic to your site, and account for more sales!

Sounds like something you want to do to further promote yourself on the Internet? If so, great! But if you are new to the concept of RSS and are not sure how to start, don’t fret. Once you learn the basic of creating and promoting an RSS feed, you will find it is as simple as creating a website. Here follows a basic step by step for creating a simple feed. Once you get the hang of RSS content and wish to work with something more advanced, a good instruction manual on Real Simple Syndication can help you achieve much more for your books, music, and products.

For now, though, let’s get the basics down pat.

1) Content

Before you even think about messing with RSS software or hand coding the proper markup language, you need to consider carefully the type of content you plan to use for your feed. Syndicated content in this context will differ from standard website content in that it needs to entice readers to click through to your website and buy your books or take advantage of your services. If you give too little, readers may not be interested enough to visit your site. Give too much, and readers may be overwhelmed, or think they don’t have to click your links.

Study RSS feeds that typify what you plan to distribute. Especially if you are trying to promote a book, a CD, or other items, you want to look at shopping RSS feeds in particular to see how they are executed. Think of your content as a 30-second commercial: depending upon the types of aggregators used to collect your feed data, users may see only a headline first, so think of one that grab attention. Use easy to understand language in your content: sharp, peppy and to the point. Emphasize the purchase links and any sales or discount incentives.

Some RSS aggregators accept code for images, so take advantage of that. Display your book or CD cover, a picture of your product, or your logo. For readers that don’t aggregate images, be sure to use the ALT option and describe the item.

Plan ahead for your feed. An RSS feed should be treated as a regular newswire. So if you feel you do not have enough content to necessitate a regular feed, consider supplemental information related to your site and map out when you plan to add new items to your feed. Once you have a working schedule, now you can into the work of creating your feed and having some real fun!

2) Creation

If you are completely new to the idea of RSS and have only moderate skills where website development is concerned, you can still build an attractive, effective feed for your site. Before you do, bear this one thing in mind:

An RSS feed is a file hosted on your server, identified by either a .rss or .xml suffix rather than the .html extension. Most updates to browsers will allow visitors to see the feed as it is supposed to look should a link to your feed be clicked. Don’t panic, however, if somebody clicks on your feed link and claims to see “gibberish.” They are likely seeing only the raw code.

Now that you are ready to create a feed, it is highly recommended to use software designed for this purpose. An Internet search for “RSS freeware” or “RSS software” will point you in the right direction. I personally use RSS Builder to create my feeds. It is user friendly and simple to install. As you learn more about RSS, you may want to test a few programs before deciding on one to use regularly.

Choose a name for your feed that is indicative of your products or site. The romance author may want to use romancenovels.rss or romancebooks.rss, while a freelance consultant may want to try consultingnews.rss. There’s no guarantee having such a name will boost search referrals, but to have a relevant keyword in the filename may help readers in their search for content to aggregate.

Check your RSS program to see if there are options to input metadata, or your feed’s description. This is important, as the metadata in a published feed helps RSS spiders determine the relevancy of your feed against various searches. As the Internet grows, so does the ability for search engines to mine things like blogs and feeds for data, so you want to be thorough in this respect. If the metadata options ask for a URL and an image logo, provide them.

Now, depending upon your program, you have the options to add and delete topics, set times for their publication, and to order them by appearance. This is the heart of the feed, where the information goes. If you approach this part of RSS creation as would with a weblog, you will find it remarkably simple.

Each topic is a new post. Depending upon the volume of news you wish to distribute, you can create new topics daily or several in a day. Don’t give away too much information in your posts. Enticing text should prompt readers to click through to your main site, where the action (and point of sale) is. Use keyword rich text to attract those spiders that mine data from RSS. As your catalog grows, as you write more books or take on new projects, you will have more material for your feed.

3) Distribution

Once you have a few entries in your feed, now you can upload your RSS file for readership and distribution. Depending upon the RSS building software you are using, you may be able to upload directly to your site using the software. Otherwise you may need to use an FTP program to do this.

Make sure you know your ID and password for your website, and make sure the file for the feed is correctly named with the .rss or .xml extension. Once it’s live on your site, check the file in an RSS aggregator or in a web browser that reads RSS to make sure it is working to your satisfaction. If so, congratulations! You have just published an RSS feed.

But, you are not finished yet. In order to help site visitors know that you have a feed you need to do things. First, you need to place links on your website indicating that you have a feed. You would do this the same way you would create a hyperlink to another URL. In the HREF anchor tag, indicate the full URL of your feed with a note saying “Subscribe to our RSS feed.” You may also want to use a small graphic to bring attention to your feed. Many sites use a small, orange rectangle with RSS or XML in white letters, to direct visitors to feeds.

To direct RSS aggregators and spiders to your feed, you will need to place a LINK REL tag in the HEAD section of your HTML code. It will look like this (just places carats before and after the tag):

link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS” onClick=”javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview(’/outgoing/article_exit_link’);” href=”Your RSS URL goes here”

This lets the spider know there is RSS content available.

4) Promote

Once your feed is active, you can actively promote it. A quick Internet search for “RSS Search Engines” will led you to many resources where you can submit your feed information. You would submit your feed the same way you would submit a website, just make sure to provide all necessary information.

In addition, you may want to consider some viral marketing of your feed. Include the feed URL in your e-mail signature, or contact other websites of relevant topics and let them know you have content for distribution in RSS. Websites similar to yours looking for material may wish to aggregate your feed and place the content on their sites. You, in turn, get free exposure and increase your chance for sales.

5) Ping

If you know where to look, there are websites and software available designed to notify, or “ping,” RSS directories and search engines when a feed is updated. This is believed to expedite the updating process on their end. The sooner they know new information is available, the sooner they will mine your feed for data. A quick Internet search for “RSS pinger” will lead you information on how to regularly notify users of updates to your feed. Some sources will let you notify several engines at once, and it can be a helpful tool in your promotion.

From writing content to publicizing your products, using RSS feeds to enhance your website can be very helpful in increasing exposure to your books and music, services and products. Syndicate your content and watch your site traffic, and sales, grow.