As I shared in two earlier posts, I spent a prior life editing article titles for a suite of self-help websites. My job was to turn your real internet searches into cheesy articles, at $0.04 a title, and I easily made $15-20 an hour while living in a third-world country,…
With some trepidation, I made this blog publically searchable last year, just as I was starting to publish cultural pieces in other venues. Now, I’ve just found a list of the search terms that led people to this blog. Below I’ll share the oddest searches, with the number of times they…
“In weekly visits to my American public library when I was young, I had a vague idea of how it all worked. A bunch of numbers, and you’ve got to search along the shelves of books until you come across a sudden area with books on Greek mythology, as…
It’s begun snowing quite a lot in the past week, and it’s getting colder. But according to a recent news article, local architects are interested in building a giant dome over the government and financial area of Kazakhstan’s capital. The article claims this is already being done in Houston, where…
I’ve briefly covered this before, but Aitys (“saying-to-each-other”) is a classic style of Kazakh musical performance, where two court wits dual out a commentary on society, while strumming a two-stringed dombira. Eva-Marie Dubuisson has written all about aitys, if you’re into that sort of thing. I’m not sure what ancient aitys would have looked like–but…
Don’t know how I ever became the expert on this, but over the past year, I’ve spent lots and lots of time on the international hiring committee for Atameken* library. Our mission, of course, is to convince unemployed young librarians from the US to come to the cold steppes…
Yes, yes, yes! Ruth Ann Dandrea writes here about the writing tests her 8th grade students are obliged to take each year. I’d be curious to know more about the 150 page info packet that’s given to teachers, but I can tell you from experience that students and teachers…
I don’t normally watch TV much, but house-sitting for a friend recently, I found the blur of channels, sports and American dramas to be completely engrossing. Below are some rough notes of what you can expect to find if you visit me, and, being the good guest you are……
This is part of a series on my work as a title editor for Demand Studios. As I mentioned last time, I’ve developed a collection of rather absurd or unexpected google searches — anything that’s caught my fancy. Some are discussed below. So… one of the largest categories of…
About a year ago, I read an article in Wired magazine about Demand Studios. I was intrigued. Here’s an online company that pays experienced writers terrible prices ($15 for a well-researched article) to write detailed “how-to” articles for eHow and LiveStrong. The writers take titles and keywords from Google searches and…