What does it do?

In short, Scribe is an SEO analysis tool that provides a full report on a Wordpress post or page once you’ve written it. So rather than suggesting that you build a page around a set of keywords, Scribe analyses you writing and tells you how search engines will see it — indexing keywords based on position and frequency, rather than relying on you inputting keywords for it to analyse.

This review gets a 95% score for SEO purposes!

Scribe’s unique approach might take a few passes to get your head round. I analysed the same page seven times making minor tweaks so I could see how it worked. And admittedly, some of it still doesn’t make sense to me. When looking at my own marketing, I changed the page so that “freelance copywriter” appeared as a keyword more often than any other phrase. Yet it still insisted words like “creative” and “London” were more important. Maybe I haven’t got the hang of it yet, but therein lies the biggest problem. It’s a subscription service and you only get so many reports per month.

The flaw: A limited subscription model

Yes, it’s relatively cheap — $27 will buy you 30 reports a month, but $97 will buy you 300. At a dollar a report, it’s pretty steep. But if you’re a professional buying in bulk, 30 cents seems like a good deal considering the quality and depth of the analysis Scribe provides you — at first. But how much value will does Scribe really give you?

I used up most of my ten free tries making very, very minor tweaks to my copy. Infuriatingly, Scribe charges per report, not per page — so even though I was perhaps only changing a word at a time, it still counted as another report. So it’s probably better to get value for money by writing two or three very different versions of your post, and comparing those. But copywriting can often be a tweak-by-tweak process, especially when the client gets involved. Personally, I’d be a lot happier seeing an unlimited reporting option — or are the folks behind Scribe really trying to tell me that it costs them nearly 30 cents every time I request a report? I’m willing to bet that the marginal cost of each additional report is next to nothing.

OK, so I’d have to write one blogpost a day and analyse each one ten times to run out of pre-paid reports, but I can imagine quite a few pro bloggers doing just that, if they’re ‘tweakers’ like me.

I guess this is a very back-handed endorsement of Scribe.

The Scribe SEO plugin is easy to use, valuable, and I can see myself using it, a lot. There’s really nothing else like it on the market at the moment, and a web version and MS Word version are on their way. But the pay model doesn’t sit well with a tweak-by-tweak approach to writing. Which is, obviously, the best way to learn.

I think Pat O’Brien’s review of Scribe says it best:

“I think the intro price [$27 for 300 reports] was great, but the full price may be a bit much for some. But that’s true about a lot of products.”

I’ve got some very keyword heavy blogposts to write this month for some of my clients, blogposts that are purely for SEO optimization purposes. I still say that original content and linkbuilding should usually come first when blogging, with on-page SEO coming a distant second. SEO copy frequently looks lifeless and clumsy. Scribe is better, because it analyses your copy after it’s written. But it’s still more important to write copy that actual people, not robots, will read.

I’ll be using Scribe to double-check my posts this month. But as a pro blogger, I’m scoring 95% first time — so how much use is this software going to be to me in the long term?

Scribe wins bonus points for

• being very user friendly and easy to set up
• showing you how a search engine is likely to see your page
• providing reports in plain English, not tech-speak
  
• offering helpful suggestions to improve your copy, title and meta tags

but

• it may be hard for beginners to understand why certain changes improve or worsen SEO
• …without requesting a lot of reports with only minor changes
• …which cost at least thirty cents a time.
• …and pro users already skilled at SEO best practices might not learn anything new.

Is it a game changer? Probably not.
Is it good for intermediate users? Yes.
Is it worth the price? That’s for you to decide.

In actual fact, it’s been a mixture of both this time. I’ve been doing a lot of copywriting, but I’ve not felt as if I have a lot to add in terms of sharing my thoughts with the world. There’s my random musings on Tumblr, of course… but I’ll spare you those here.

The most interesting thing that’s happened for me recently is the milestone that says more money is spent on online advertising than is spent on TV advertising. It’s linked to what I’ve been saying before — the web is fast becoming dominated by social media and viral video, and these are the two areas every company and advertiser needs to be looking at in terms of securing their online presence.

But this is something you should already know. Unless you’re living in a cave, of course.

Most of my work these days is for tech clients, is writing on the web. Even my offline product launches, the work I do for my “real world” clients in the Home Counties, involves websites and web-work.

The internet has changed everything, and social media and streaming video have changed it again. I really think we’re heading towards a day when other forms of media will be obsolescent. Television — destroyed by Youtube, Megavideo, BitTorrent. Radio obliterated by Spotify. Newspapers — available online through RSS feeds, Kindle readers and syndicated web portals.

It’s a brave new world. What I want to know is, why aren’t more digital design agencies modernizing to support it?

Most web agencies seem to think it’s enough to build websites,
or promote them, or provide content.

They don’t seem to understand the importance of what they’re doing –
targeting potential customers, selling them something…
even if it’s just an idea.

Just as the web is slowly making traditional forms of media obsolete, so too I think the big advertising agencies will make smaller design agencies obsolete. They’ll be squeezed out, at the very least — big clients will want big packages, and total solutions, targeted at their customers. They won’t just want beautiful websites.

I’m not trying to be a web guru here, sometimes I get it wrong. I remember being blown away by the launch of Facebook Lite (because it meant no more mafia wars) but going back to full Facebook 24 hours later when I found I couldn’t put rich content into my links. Having said that, I reckon I still know a good product when I see one. I’m still using my King of Shaves razor, and Frassy seems to go from strength to strength.

But I do think even a blind man can see the changes on the horizon, the changes that increased spending on advertising on the web is bringing — not just to the web, but also to design agencies, and to branding consultants such as myself.

These are exciting times. I think there’s a lot of money to be made out there — if you’re good at what you do…

I blogged the General Election, back in 2005. Blogging was different then. We were mostly ignored. My blog was just an irreverant look at the campaigns, you wouldn’t have come to it for news.

Yes, we all know blogs are going to be important this time around. We’ve got Guido, Iain Dale, Conservative Home, and even a few offerings from Labour — which are nowhere near as widely read, which I thinks says a lot.

But in the hoo-hah about blogging, it’s easy to forget that the internet is much more than just the political blogosphere.

It’s not just blogs that have gone mainstream in the last five years. It’s viral video.

Dan Hannan’s searing attack on Gordon Brown went viral. Two and a half million views of his “devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government” speech. The blogs have given us smeargate, the ousting of Damien McBride and Derek Draper by Guido Fawkes. That’s a much more powerful story. But when it comes to general elections, campaigns get quick and dirty. Viral video will be the blitzkrieg tactic of choice for both sides.

Not all the videos will be sanctioned.
Many will be sanctioned. Secretly.

All the main players know the power of a good attack video — both political parties, and their supporters. Five years ago, to reach voters visually, you were limited to a 5 minute party political broadcast, a few a month, at set times, with strict limits on what you could say.

What’s interesting is that, today, the electoral commission has come out and said that in this battleground, there will be no rules. None. At all. They cannot police viral video.

Expect things to get down and dirty, very quick.

A couple of examples —
Guido uses his blog to simply demonstrate Gordon Brown caught in a lie. He doesn’t even need to pass comment.
The unofficial ConservativeHome produces a blunt attack video to highlight Gordon Brown’s broken promises.

I for one would love to know which agencies are handling the digital accounts of the main parties, and their supporters. Viral videos are cheap to make, incredibly powerful, and totally without boundaries. The next election campaign will be like none we’ve ever seen before. Whoever makes the most memorable attack video will probably make the same name for themselves that Saatchi & Saatchi made in 1979 with the slogan ‘Labour isn’t working‘ — probably the most memorable British political campaign of all time.

This is an exciting time for advertisers willing to get their hands dirty in politics. Reputations will be won and lost. The direction of British politics decided for maybe a decade, or more.

The Internet: still the World’s Wild West.

I’m a busy man. Just give me the information.

Facebook lite promises to roll back the clock four years and give us the slim, streamlined social networking tool that made MySpace look ugly, primitive and unintuitive. I’ve had a ‘lite’ profile for a while now. No pictures. No surplus user information for third party apps to harvest. No quotes of the day, no videos, just my contact details, alongside the ability to message me and see what I’m up to.

My facebook is just my LinkedIn at play. I wouldn’t want it any other way.

It isn’t perfect yet. It’s still in beta. The text is too big, and I’d like it to be more customizable — there’s some information on the big facebook I might still want to access.

But what interests me is seeing just how many people will switch to Facebook lite once it’s done. I think takeup may well be over 50% — if they can get the interface and integration right. There’s a lot of us who carry on using services like Facebook on sufferance, because it’s there, because it’s the only way of keeping in touch with our friends. We’re the sort of people who grit our teeth and look away in despair, as if a silent fart has drifted across the room, every time you mention Mafia Wars.

We’re the silent majority.

The implications for social media, even if takeup only hits, say, 20%, are obvious — and huge. It means a massive number of users are rejecting the bloatware that’s been foisted on them the past few years. It also means that any links they do share, anything that does go on their profile, will be much more valuable, from a social networking perspective.

Make no mistakes. Facebook Lite isn’t a pioneering project to reduce bandwidth in third world countries, whatever they may say. It’s a system that proves what many of us have been saying all along — when it comes to social media, less is more. Sure, some people twitter every hour. They’re probably the same people who post a dozen quizzes to their Facebook wall every day. But the person who posts just one thing a day, maybe even just one link a week, or even a month — they’re being selective. That makes the value of that post is far greater.

Of course, the new Facebook Lite interface is a lot more like twitter — it does after all focus on status updates. But it remains to be seen if people will use it like twitter. After all, isn’t there already a service called twitter for people who want it?

Anyone who uses social media as a marketing tool should be taking notes.

I’m actually in awe of Facebook for doing this. They’ve differentiated their product for users like me, who are busy and just need the basic facts, from the people who use it for “fun”. My only question is, why didn’t they do it sooner?

Are they worried about the competition? With Twitter on one side and LinkedIn on the other, the answer is almost certainly yes. Facebook lite appeals to users of both.

It’s a stroke of genius.

“Oh, we don’t test third party applications or hardware, so if they stop working, that’s not our problem,” Apple cry. It strikes me as pretty obvious that this is deliberate.

As a Mac user for almost all of this decade, I’ll just come right out and say this. Apple have been in a steady decline the last few years. My old iBook G4 was built like a tank. The two year old MacBook I’m writing this on is full of holes. Literally. The flimsy casing is cracked, the dual core processor whines like a mosquito buzzing about your head, and the fans sometimes growl like they’re about to give in.

Apple have come a long way since their 1984 advert pitching them as the plucky underdog taking on the bland masses.

Unfortunately news like today’s is just the latest in a long line of disappointments from Apple. If people want to use a product that isn’t the iPhone with iTunes, let them. It’s better to lose a few sales to another product than lose a lot of sales when your brand’s goodwill evaporates.

Apple are no longer the plucky underdog. They’re just another faceless corporation grubbing for your money. They’ve become the epitome of style over substance, of branding a lifestyle that’s shiny and white but hollow inside. The iPhone is the apogee of this. It’s nowhere near as useful as a Blackberry. Yet still people buy it in droves, despite the fact that until the latest version, the iPhone didn’t even have a cut-and-paste function!

How is this possible? I saw an advert on the TV exclaiming the wonders of the new “cut and paste” iPhone and I couldn’t believe the bare-faced-cheek, marketing something so simple as an innovation. Heck, my seven year old Palm Treo could cut and paste. And the battery lasted longer than a few hours, too.

I happen to like OS X. I’d pick it any day over Windows Vista. This, for me, is the only reason I’m still buying Apple. But I’m doing it grudgingly. Yes, you have my money. But you no longer have my goodwill. The second a better product comes along, say, the new Google Operating System or even Windows 7, if it turns out to be any good, I’m gone.

Right now Apple strikes me as a lesson in how to have everything and throw it all away. Short term profit at the sacrifice of the values that put them where they are in the first place.

Think different? Right now, Apple’s managers aren’t thinking at all.

There are plenty of exceptions to this of course. Sometimes I love nothing more than grabbing a cup of coffee and writing while I watch the world go by — the busier the cafe the better. I’ve even been known to take my laptop out to the woods and work sitting on an old felled tree. You never know when or where inspiration might strike. Changing your surroundings really can change your frame of mind.

But one thing I find very hard to deal with is a cluttered desktop. No, I’m not talking about the usual six or seven cups of writer-fuel (that’s coffee, folks, not whisky) that pile up around my desk over any given day. I mean my Windows desktop.

I’m actually a Mac user — I have been for years. But when they brought out dual-booting, I started using a clean install of Windows with Word on it and nothing else because it reduced clutter. Moreover it kept the temptation of my music and videos at bay. But Word itself is still pretty cluttered.

In the past when I’ve felt the need for simplicity I’ve booted up my old Sharp FW word-processor — no internet, no graphics, no music, no colour. Just a monochrome screen and a keyboard. And it’s worked.

But it’s hardly convenient. The thing’s an unmoveable brick. This weekend I discovered Q10. And suddenly everything changed.

Q10 is a basic word processing interface for Windows that mimics an old-style word processor, only with a few modern twists. It’s fully customisable — you can change the font size, the colour of the background, the colour of the text and so on…

But the point is, it’s totally minimalist. It is a fullscreen interface for you and your words. No windows, no start bar, no pesky Microsoft Messenger bugging you every ten seconds. Back to basics.

I’ll not ramble on when a screenshot tells you everything you need to know:

As you can see I wrote this blog post using Q10. But since it’s the weekend I’ve mostly been using it to batter out a bit of fiction and I absolutely love it. Everything flows brilliantly. I feel more in touch with my words than I have in years.

As a writer, it’s absolutely vital that nothing gets in the way of my words. No mess, no distractions. Q10 has doubled my productivity overnight.

If you’re a writer — casual or professional — and you’re suffering from desktop overload, you should check this program out. Mac users needn’t fret, either. There’s a similar program called Write Room here.

A hearty thanks to Q10. It might sound like hyperbole, but this incredibly simple program really has changed my life. But don’t take my word for it. Try it out for yourself.