I’ve been blogging for about two years now and I have to say that I love blogging. Blogging is one of the few things that we can all do to help each other share thoughts, gain more knowledge, and maybe make a couple of bucks.  There are so many ways to do a blog, and things to blog about that I wonder why everyone doesn’t have a blog already. In fact, I’m so happy blogging that I run 4 personal blogs, as well as half of dozen blogs for my company.  In addition, my company is seeing the value of blogging and they are letting me set up even more blogs to help generate viral marketing on the web.  Blogs can be about anytime and everything.  The best blogs are the ones that really have good content and not just some collection of random posts and articles that a person gets off another site.  True bloggers know that the only way to build an audience to put out unique original content that is thought provoking and relevant. (more…)

Here We Go Steelers - 2009 Pittsbugh Steelers Fight Song

I thought this was really good, and I’m getting really excited about the game on Sunday, so I had to make a post with my favorite Steelers hype.

‘Twas the Night Before the Super Bowl

‘Twas the night before the Super Bowl, when along the gulf shore, (more…)

I’m currently putting together thoughts on a new book about social marketing.  In doing so, I’m trying to figure out if the title should be very technical sounding title for the savvy-minded, or if it should be a more common sense approach to socializing and how it relates to every day people.  The book will cover the many new emerging social networks, how they work, which ones to be one, and for what reasons, as well as it will touch on how to apply those to various strategies on the web today.

I had a couple of thoughts about the title and I’m going throw them out here. It would be nice to hear from some of you about which ones you like or if you have a suggestion of your own please feel free to write a comment. (more…)

I just got finished updating my personal website and portfolio, and I put some cool new UI features on it.  I’m ready to officially launch the new personal site and look forward to some input.  I think the effects are pretty interesting and made are strickly with CSS and Javascript features, and that should make some people think and hopefully play with it once or twice.  I personally like the fold out effect on the home page.  When the personal div opens there is an option that says “Are you done with me”, click on that option and watch the cool effect that takes effect.  None of the page effects were done with flash or animation, and were all done with CSS and Javascript, with all data still being rendered on-page for search engines.  It’s a personal goal of mine to make sure all necessary data gets indexed by the engines.  It’s not that I don’t like flash, but I like to see how much I can do without it.  I really like the fade in a fade out effects as well.  How about the slide in navigation bar.  It’s a way of keeping data out of the way, but still have it available.  I’m going to be working with more effects on the site over the next few months, so stay tuned for more fun! You can visit the new site at SalSurra.com.

I’ve been using various UI libraries over the past couple of years and the thing that I’ve learned most is that it’s better to use them then try to re-invent the wheel. I personally like to use Yahoo’s open source platform called YUI. It’s a great library of tools that can be downloaded and installed on any directory. It makes for setting up pages and having great UI a snap. They have tons of pre-set configurations and you can do everything from menu-building, page-building, interfaces, pagination, and other various effects that can give a website sticky content. You can find YUI at http://developer.yahoo.com/yui.

Socializing with relevance makes social sites relevant.

I’ve been using social sites for the past couple of years now, and find them very useful in my daily life.  Yes, I’m one of those people that one would be called a twitter-holic, or Facebook fiend, but in truth I get more information and stay current with more things than I ever got from traditional media and networks.  In the past, the I would use newspaper and television to get my current news, but today I can use my social networks to see what things are making news at that very moment and the ones that matter most to me.  However, I find that many social sites don’t have the ability to weed out irrelevant content, but some have found ways to keep the most relevant content upfront.

In order to truly take advantage of these networks I think it’s a good idea to exchange one’s ideas freely across the networks at the same time.  What this will do is make each site more relevant by making the content the driving force for one’s social persona.  This means that because I’ve got all of my sites linked together I think twice before posting something that I don’t think is somewhat relevant or useful to the majority of people in my network, versus just socializing things because they are there.  For example, I have a Digg, account, but I’ve got my Digg feed linked up to my Friendfeed, which posts to my Twitter, and then goes to my Facebook.  (more…)

Here I am.  I’m finally opening my personal blog and wanted to start by saying hello, and welcome.  I’ve been running blogs for a couple of years now, and have been talking about starting my own for awhile, but just never found enough time for it.  However, I’m finding more and more that it’s important to keep a personal blog, journal, or whatever form of written thoughts a person wants to keep, and share it with the world.

Why?  There a lot of a reasons for it, but for me it’s a matter of getting out thoughts that I keep inside of my head, or things that I want to share, or ideas that I have, or items that can helpful.  In today’s world it’s getting less and less personal and getting to be more interpersonal.  The reason is that we are building ourselves virtually everyday on places like Facebook and Myspace, but while doing so we are looking at ourselves and taking more time to think about the things that make us tick. (more…)