Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution

<p><a title="Sign Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution Petition" href="http://www.jamieoliver.com/campaigns/jamies-food-revolution/petition"><img src="/sites/gregoryheller.com/files/JOFR-badgeLg.gif" alt="Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" hspace="10px" vspace="10px" width="135" height="120" align="left" /></a>Anyone who knows me well enough to have eaten over at my house, or had me cook at theirs knows that I am a bit of a Jamie Oliver nut. I've got nearly all of his cookbooks, have watched all of his shows (Naked Chef, Jamie's Kitchen, etc…) and I've been talking about his <a href="http://www.tedprize.org/jamie-oliver/">TED Prize</a> since he won it.</p> <p>If you haven't heard, Jamie's TED Wish is: <em>“I wish for your help to create a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, inspire families to cook again and empower people everywhere to fight obesity.” </em></p> <p>He has a new show called "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" on ABC which premiered last night.  I watched the preview on Hulu earlier in the week.  It is really powerful stuff.  If you care about the health of America, and especially if you live on the west coast, or the north east, you should watch this show to see what is happening in the rest of the country.  Pizza for breakfast in school cafeterias!</p> <p>Jamie is trying to do nothing less than start a revolution in America, a revolution in the way we relate to food.  I'm part of it.  I've signed the <a href="http://www.jamieoliver.com/campaigns/jamies-food-revolution/petition">petition</a>, of course, but more than than, I'm making food from scratch, I'm starting my vegetable garden, and I'm trying to teach people around me about food.  Not everyone can plant a garden, I understand that, but you can sign the petition! And you can watch the show!...

Six Tips For Writing Better Web Content

This article covers some common tips to improve the quality of your content both for your audience and for search engines.  It expands on our earlier Content Strategy and SEO Strategy articles. Before You Start Writing Identify Your Audience Before you begin to draft new content for the website, identify the specific audience for the content. You may wish to refer to the user personae you’ve prepared and actually presence the individual or individuals that you are writing for. Think about what they will get out of the content you are writing, and what they might search for (which keywords they may enter into either a search engine like google, or the onsite search). Identify Keywords Select the keywords that are most related to your subject matter.  You may wish to write them on a note card to keep in front of you as you are writing.  It is reasonable to have a few keywords or keyword phrases for each piece of content.  Usually these keywords will be related, or perhaps synonymous. Writing There are a number of things to consider while you are writing your content, we will go into more detail on each below.  The following components of your content are ranked in order of both ease and impact.  For example, if you can do nothing else, you should optimize your title, as more time allows, you can move down this list optimizing other components of your content. As you get further down the list, the effort increases, and the impact decreases some, with the exception item 6 on the list, Linking. Linking has a high impact,...

Thomas Friedman Doesn't Get It, Clean Coal is Impossible

<p>Sunday's NYT brings with it (nearly every week) <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/opinion/07friedman.html?em">Thomas Friedman's column</a>. Each week an opportunity for me to get frustrated and angry at Friedman. I've often joked that I am going to start critiquing every column, calling attention to his mixed metaphors and verbose prose.</p> <p>While I haven't gotten around to the weekly critique, every few weeks I do get frustrated enought to send a letter to the editor, and this is one of those weeks.  <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/opinion/07friedman.html?em">Friedman's column, "Dreaming the Possible Dream"</a> is another one of those doozies where he takes two particular case studies and tries to build a hypothesis about something way bigger, and usually unsubstantiated by the evidence presented.</p> <p>Let's ignore for now the case he tries to make, because frankly I'm not sure if it is: <strong>a)</strong> Immigrants have not given up during this bust cycle and continue to innovate, or <strong>b)</strong> A price on carbon is necessary to unleash a raft of creative solutions to climate change and investment in renewable energy (which would seem to be disproved by the two cases he presents of innovative solutions despite a price on carbon emissions). But I digress. </p> <p>The issue that I am pissed about it "clean coal".  Most people recognize that even if you can reduce or eliminate the CO2 emissions caused by burning coal, and reduce or eliminate the the other post combustion polution, you still need to get coal out of the ground and to the power plants that burn it.  In the United States coal companies have figured out the easiest way to do this is to blow the tops...