Letters Remain

Month: November 2010

  • A Beginner’s Guide to SEO

    SEOmoz has done a lot for my perception of SEO companies: before I became aware of them a number of years ago, I was wary of the entire sector (with good reason, many would say). To help us all understand the world of legitimate SEO a bit better and to provide a primer on how…

  • Language’s Influence on Culture

    I’ve written before about Lera Boroditsky’s fascinating research into how language affects thinking, and a recent article by Boroditsky in The Wall Street Journal covers similar ground, asking Does language influence culture? The answer, it seems, is yes: Russian speakers, who have more words for light and dark blues, are better able to visually discriminate…

  • Stephen King on Writing Successfully

    It took Stephen King ten minutes to learn how to have a successful and financially rewarding career writing fiction and he believes he can teach us the same in ten minutes, too. King–author of countless novels and the much-lauded book on the craft, On Writing–starts with a short story of his youth followed by twelve tips professing…

  • The Advantage of Busywork: Happiness

    “We are happier when busy but our instinct is for idleness”, says Christopher Hsee, a researcher at the University of Chicago who has been studying the link between busyness and happiness. What this means is that work conducted merely to keep us busy (so-called busywork) can actually increase our happiness, despite what conventional wisdom suggests…