Has upgrading to WP 2.6 made it suddenly impossible to wrap text around images?

Here’s the ‘mu:kaumedia PIG-simple guide to what’s probably happened (many thanks to Otto42 in the WordPress Codex):

WP 2.6 has a new image uploader.

This creates different code (or something technical and complicated) for aligning images than the old one did.  If your blog theme’s CSS file was written for WordPress 2.5 then it won’t recognise the alignment instructions given by your new image uploader.

Result? Text won’t flow around the image no matter how many times you click the alignment buttons.

Solution?

Go into your Theme Editor in your dashboard and copy and paste the code shown in the pic (right) – available to copy and paste here - into the end of your theme’s ‘style.css’ file and save.

Magically, your images will fall into place and the text will behave itself just like in the good old days.

Online libel, slander and your reputation

As more and more people express their pleasure, frustration or anger at our products and services online, more and more of us are going to find ourselves wondering about the difference between legitimate criticism and defamation.

You may well find yourself dealing, at some point, with an vengeful individual who has made it his/her business to tell the world that you’re a cowboy and should be avoided like the plague. Negative criticism like that can seriously damage your reputation, there’s no doubt about it.

So where does the line fall between someone’s right to express their opinion and defamation?

Let’s make some distinctions first.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation defines defamation as “a false and unprivileged statement of fact that is harmful to someone’s reputation, and published ‘with fault’, meaning as a result of negligence or malice.” Slander is spoken defamation, libel is written defamation.

In plain Inglish, defamation against you is: A false statement, presented as fact either deliberately intended to harm your reputation or as the result of negligence.

Three things have to be proved to win a day-to-day defamation claim:

1) The statement was published to at least one other person apart from you

2) The false-ness of the statement

3) That it is understood a) to concern the you and b) intended to harm you

However, if you happen to be a public figure, you have to go a step further and prove actual malice.

So there you go. If you find someone saying nasty things about your business on their blog, measure it against those guidelines. If you think you’ve been defamed, it’s going to cost you time and money to prove it.

So far as online reputation management is concerned it’s pretty much academic whether or not you win a defamation case a year later because the damage is already done. By the time you emerge victorious from the High Court it will be history and the only person who will care about it will be you.

The lesson here is that you’ve got to keep in mind that online reputation management isn’t about proving ‘the truth’ to anyone. It’s about hearing what’s really being said, assessing the threats and opportunities that arise – and most importantly, responding in a way that builds your reputation instead of damaging it further.

By all means take it to court but first, take it to an online reputation expert to help you chart a course through the difficult time ahead.

The latest bit of Goggledegook to enter the popular lexicon

Listening to the masses, you would be forgiven for thinking that ‘Latent Semantic Indexing‘ was some kind of new, sophisticated SEO technique you should be applying to your site.

The term came to my attention again this week in an email from someone who put ‘LSI’ in a list of strategies he was considering for boosting his site traffic.

If fact, latent semantic indexing describes a process by which a search engine might rank your page by evaluating the semantic ‘context’ in which your keywords appear.

Thus you can’t just fill your website or blog with the word ‘Tractor’ and hope to sail to the top of Google when someone searches for ‘tractors’. Latent semantic indexing provides the search engine with a pool of other expected and ‘semantically’ related words; so you’d better think about including “farmyard”, “collie”, “chicken”, “combine”, “set-aside” and “huge EU subsidy” to name but a few.

If you’re thinking of paying some handsome young thing a hefty wedge of money to apply ‘LSI’ to your site to increase your page rank, dont’ bother because there’s a much cheaper and far more effective way to ensure the semantic integrity of your keyword placement.

Just write real stuff for a real audience to read.

The alternative?  This. It’s beyond irony.

Plain Inglish Guide to Google

People think that this whole Google search engine thing is vastly complex. Millions of eyes glaze over at the mention of reciprocal links, latent semantic indexing, keyword density and countless other bits of confusing jargon.

Behind all that stuff, it’s very simple – in the way that behind the exploded diagram of a Haynes manual the way that a combustion engine works is essentially simple: it explodes petrol and air and uses the force of those explosions to turn some wheels. Ok. Got that.

Google began as a programme for indexing online documents based their content, allowing it to retrieve those documents when a user typed in a search string that matched. Nothing too magical there; it’s what computers do best. But of the millions of documents that might match a search term, how does a computer decide which should appear first?

This is the problem – the opportunity – that Google seized and capitalised.

It was obvious to Google that online information had to have some kind of weighting or value – something that it doesn’t intrinsically have in digital form. Without that value, we can’t make sense of anything but more importantly, ‘the top of the Google search results’ doesn’t mean anything.

It also became clear that the more robust that weighting system was, the more valuable the first few pages of search results would become as online advertising real-estate.

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