Yesterday I was up in Grand Rapids talking to folks about Google Calendars. I hadn’t used them for a while and I have to say they were even easier than I remembered to set up, post on your web site and share. I thought some folks might be interested in the presentation I gave and the cheat sheets I made.
I also got a few good tips for maintaining a community calendar from Denise in Minneapolis, who maintained the Minnesota Sesquicentennial calendar:
Add items every day.
Make it easy for people to add events by asking the right questions.
Don’t require people to add all info to submit events.
Let people add a link to even web site for more details
Make sure to check links.
Just a super quick byte this week.
http://premium.pdfonline.com/BCLOnline/PrintOut.aspx - this is my new favorite site for converting Microsoft items into PDF. So far I’ve only tested Word Docs. You upload and they convert, you download and save.
Have a great weekend!
Other people’s articles are rarely the impetus for the Bytes – but I ran into a great article today that I really liked: Google won’t remove pages about you: http://tinyurl.com/aqka4s
I occasionally get calls from people wanting to have info removed from Google. Well, as Google says, they don’t own the Internet. (Though I think they’d like to.)
So what can you do? Google (http://tinyurl.com/dalm6q) suggests that you contact the web site owner and ask her to remove the content or put “don’t index” code on the site to prevent the search engines from finding the info.
If they do remove it, I suggest you submit that new page to Google immediately: http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl – that will help remove the info from the Google index.
If you can’t get that info removed, you best bet is to flood the market with other info. So that the unflattering web page gets bumped from the first page of search results to the bottom of a long list. You can do that by simply creating more info on you online. Don’t link to the unflattering info though! Once you link to them you help them with the search engines.
From Google’s page it looks like they might consider action if the site you want removed includes social security and/or credit card details. Short of that you’ll have to work it out yourself.
