Tag: Douglas Karr

  • My Local Heroes

    I’ve previously written about my media heroes, my ceo heroes, top entrepreneurs, and bulldozers, but today I wanted to talk about my local heroes, the ones who live in or around Indianapolis who have influenced me in some meaningful way, are hubs of influence in Indianapolis and who I have recently been able to meet:

    Douglas Karr – Author, designer, programmer, speaker, and social media guru, I first ran into this CEO of DK New Media and Founder at Marketing Technology Blog in my search for a coworking facility back when Doug met regularly at The Bean Cup. He has been the Vice President of Blogging Evangelism at Compendium Blogware, Director of Technology at Patronpath, and a Product Manager at ExactTarget. He is also active in Smaller Indiana and the Southside Smoosier Tech Club. He has been an inspiration to me as a blogger, web designer, and social media advocate. He packed the house at Blog Indiana 2011 with his session on 40 tools and he continues to be a valuable resource to our community.

    Robby Slaughter – Author, speaker, and productivity specialist, like Doug, I ran across Robby in my search for coworking in Indianapolis. Robby is a Principal at Slaughter Development and a member of the Speakers Bureau at Rainmakers. He has written his own book, Failure, the Secret to Success, and is a frequent contributor to the Indianapolis Business Journal. As a business analyst, author, and business owner, I look up to Robby for his acumen and professionalism in his field. Robby recently spoke at Linking Indiana’s September 2011 event and, like Doug, had a session at Blog Indiana 2011. I enjoyed hearing Robby speak on Social Media at Linking Indiana as I did not get to hear his session at Blog Indiana. (more…)

  • Comments Sense

    There are as many ways to run a commenting system as there are ways to comment. In this post I talk about some of the main strategies and how common sense sometimes doesn’t apply.

    There are main choices to a comment system:

    1. Turn comments off or don’t use them.
    2. Turn comments on with a website, but filter for spam.
    3. Turn comments on, but if a website is added, don’t allow.
    4. Turn comments on, allow all comments with or without a website.

    Michael Hyatt, a popular blogger and public speaker, uses Disqus for his comments system and encourages people to not just comment, but to backlink as well. This means that he falls into the 4th category of allowing all comments with or without a website. Michael knows this helps the commentor with their SEO and yet he still allows it.

    Douglas Karr’s site, DKNewMedia also uses Disqus for it’s comment system, but he falls into the 3rd category which doesn’t allow comments with a website. Doug is a social media guru and knows a lot about SEO and blogging so he probably doesn’t want his Google juice spilling out all over the Internet’s floor.

    I don’t use Disqus, opting for the standard-issue WordPress commenting system. I use Akismet to help filter for spam and I manually approve or decline comments. I will allow links to websites in comments as long as they are relevant and not obscene. This puts me in the 2nd category.

    And instead of giving an example of the 1st category of no comments at all, I wanted to mention Ed Dale‘s commenting system of choice: Facebook comments. Ed believes in the transparency that Facebook comments provides. He likes knowing exactly who is making the comment. In Facebook comments you don’t have the opportunity for a website backlink, just a link to your profile. (more…)