Cre8tive Flow

As founder and administrator for Cre8asiteforums, I announced two days ago to our Members that the moderating and site administration staff were taking time off, away from their daily duties. It seemed appropriate that after over 5 years of dedication, it was time to set aside some time for a little break.

As stated in my post, Cre8asiteforums Staff Taking Time Off,

Each of us is more than our work. Our passions are as varied and unique as ourselves. The moderators and I are growing in our awareness for how our work affects our world. Our business practices, for example, reflect on our respective industries. We understand that our best practices beliefs apply to how we interact with our world and everyone we meet.

As if his fiance, Geraldine, hasn’t had to pinch herself already after being asked to marry Rand in front of half the planet, she now gets to faint for Oprah. Well…that’s what I would do. She’s much braver than I am.

Well-known SEO, Rand Fishkin, of SEOMoz.org and his lovely Geraldine, fly out soon for a taping of the Oprah Winfrey show. The topic? LOVE. It’ll air on Valentine’s Day.

Wedding plans are in full swing for these two. Can’t imagine how Rand is going to top this!

Cre8asiteforums discussion - Rand Fishkin On The Oprah Show! (really!)

In keeping with our passion for “Building Better Web Sites Together, For A Better World”, Cre8asiteforums has launched its second new forum today. This one is called Cre8tive Tomorrow and is sure to be “geek heaven”.

Our moderator, Pierre Far, leads the way on this journey. He writes,

Only a few short years ago, very few people have heard of AJAX and the promise it brought with it. In the time between its inception and wide-spread adoption, we saw many great failures and many great examples of how to implement AJAX. It seems that the trajectory AJAX followed was filled with more trials and errors than simple successes.

The first of several new projects for 2008 has begun at Cre8asiteforums. Our new tagline, posted late last year, is “Building Better Web Sites Together, For A Better World”. While most online forums in the search engine marketing and web development space are focused on support and teaching, we decided to take it up a notch to explore “Why” our roles and practices are important.

Today, Bill Slawski starts off with one of our new forums. This one will explore non-profits. We want to learn how they market themselves. What issues do they face in search engines, marketing, branding, competition, credibility? What is a non-profit site? Where do site owners network? Are there usability concerns unique to non-profit design vs profit?

Cre8asiteforums announces that Ammon Johns is stepping out of his role as Forums Administrator. He was one of the original team that helped Kim Krause Berg turn a Yahoo! club on Web Site Promotion into what became one of the most popular forums in the search engine marketing industry.

His departure was done quietly and privately last week, where he was able to say his farewells to the forums moderating team.

Ammon later addressed the Community himself, in Hanging Up The Admin Hat, Stepping down from Admin role. Five years of volunteering with Cre8asiteforums, as an Administrator and Moderator, and over 9000 posts to his credit, the marketing industry dynamo and respected teacher, known to many as “Black Knight”, is moving on to new endeavors.

Considering the reputation of the sometimes outspoken, delightfully raucous one minute and seriously brilliant and remarkably stable minded the next, practitioners from the Search Engine Marketing industry, it should come as no surprise that they have an SEO Related Lyric Contest going on.

Dreamed up by Canadian based Search Engine People, the rules are simple. You pick a song and change the words to something “search related”. People vote on it. If you’re a song writing lyric genius, you stand to win $1000.

We think it’s open to everybody. We certainly hope so, as the Cre8asiteforum moderators have been singing their fool heads off in the forums “Back Room”.

We watched and read all week about the reaction by Digg membership to a decision made by its owner. As an Internet community, Cre8asiteforums can relate to the situation on many levels.

Moderator, Chris Winfield, a strong support of Social Media, and Digg member himself, opened up discussion with What Are Your Thoughts On The Digg Hd DVD Scandal? Some of the comments are thoughtful and important, as we discuss, try to understand and learn from this.

I think Digg just shot themselves in the foot. They “hear” a vocal part of their community that wants to toss a part of the Digg TOS, and then they cave. What’s next? Porn as free speech? Hate as free speech?

RSS has ruined my life. It really has. Everyday, right in my inbox, I get a stream of stuff begging to be read (I use Opera’s excellent built in RSS reader and mail client, which integrates email and RSS).

What originally started as a good way to keep up to date without having to go look nowhere has turned into 300+ posts a day clogging my inbox. Going through all the feeds now takes up so much of my time that it is almost worse than spam. If, heaven forbid, I take a day (or week) off, clearing the backlog becomes virtual torture, as I am forced to sift through yet another post about Yahoo’s new NOYDIR robots directive metatag.