Maegan Ortiz, aka @mamitamala and publisher of Vivir Latino, was here this past Monday and one of the things we were remarking about was the fact we have to write in English on account of our audiences.

I was born in NYC but I was raised in Puerto Rico and lived there until the age of 20. I spent all my formative years in Puerto Rico. In my house we only spoke Spanish. I attended the University of Puerto Rico in Río Piedras for two years before transferring to New York University to get what I thought would be a better opportunity to continue my studies of Latin American politics, economics and history.

I've written this somewhere in the blog, but let me repeat it here again: Writing, especially in English, didn't click for me until I was well into my 20s. I couldn't write a decent paper during my college and even graduate school years without a lot of gnashing of teeth and rending of clothes.

Essays would leave me emotionally exhausted.

Yes: I couldn't write well, neither in English nor in Spanish, until I hit about 25 years of age. And it wasn't really until I started blogging almost 10 years ago that I actually became insanely prolific to many of my readers.
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The diversity of professionals and therefore topics that happen on my twitterstream is staggering. Every day I learn something new from any number of people who I follow on Twitter. Which is why I ended up writing this post.

This morning I was trying to follow one of my twitterinos. She's a finance expert and everything she had to say seemed not only interesting but important. Yet I grew frustrated trying to follow her writing due to her unfortunate use of shorthand and abbreviations. They may have been clear for other finance professionals following her, but they were completely lost on me.

I do consider myself a rather good writer and twitterer. I love "talking through text" and it's something that I've become rather good at by sheer volume of practice, practice, practice. I live, breathe, eat not just "writing" but "writing for the web".

Let me then share with you some tips on how to make your twittering better:

1. Don't abuse shorthand, abbreviations or acronyms: OMG, OMFG, BTW, IAWTC, SFM are by now part and parcel of forum, blog and chat speak. Yet if you are using AMA for "American Medical Association", hashtag it (#AMA) so people understand it's a "special" phrase or term


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I am getting that seasonal antsy feeling. I need to shake things around with my writing and bring more variety. About a month ago I suggested to my peeps David and Michael that I'd love to give each day of the week a theme. I don't necessarily need other contributors to enter the fray --am down with everybody posting whatever they are good at. Yet I am finding that I personally need more structure in order to introduce more variety ... and I hope that makes sense.

Anyhow, here's what I will be experimenting with during the next few weeks :
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• Market Monday : Anything and everything having to with economics, finances, sales, marketing... I'll even sneak in some product development if need be.
• Tech Tuesday : All tech all day. I have been trying to get more technology writing in the blog, and this is going to be the day I do that.
• Feature Wednesday : Anything exciting or worthy of a change of our banner will be featured every Wednesday. It's time to bring Barack's mug off the blog and that's going to happen this Wednesday.
• Thirsty Thursday Yes. Booze, coffee, tea, juices, and the food to go with these libations. Anything liquid in bounty or in crisis as in "The Worldwide Water Crisis". I've found out through my blogging for Kenneth Cole there's a HUGE water crisis all around the world and that most of it is not related to global warming but to natural resource poaching by big corporations like Coca-Cola. I am definitely using Thursdays to focus on the water wars happening around the world.

Well, our internal statistics for 2007 are finally tallied and we have some interesting data and insights about our work.

Most people who stumble upon our site are not looking for articles on politics. It seems like most are trolling for a sexual thrill --or so it seems by the keywords and phrases people have used to stumble upon our site.

I used to think it was funny but after years of looking at the site's stats and knowing that we don't write pornography, all I can think of is that the search engines definition of "optimization" is what we would call in the real world (and if we were talking about real people), plain and simple prejudice.

Search engines (and I am mostly referring here to Google), have decided that this site deals with a certain kind of material and thusly pushes our content up the top of pages that they have decided to have our site ranked in "with prejudice". Meaning that, the better our ranking in a search page, the more prejudiced or biased the search bot learns to be towards our site.

I am not one to believe that software, especially software that presumes to mimick human thought processes (but only faster) are above malice. After all, code and the software that is created with it is the product of the human mind. It is just another form of expression, another language.

Searchbots are meant to find pages relevant to the strings of text "fed" to them by web surfers. At no point are they meant to make sense of the search string based on the context of a site.

I could go on forever on this one and will eventually.

In the end, what I find incredibly interesting about these search strings is that, especially when there are several strings "tied for the same ranking", when read together, they sound like really bad emo poems.

The top 10 rankings for search keywords and/or phrases
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Mi silla en El Alambique, Isla Verde (Puerto Rico)

after i come back home from going home, i get this melancholy limbo of a feeling : that i have left a home behind in search of a home that is not there and yet is familiar and welcoming and soothing and incomplete for the lost years and the lost house because i have no real place to be home but the few couches and extra beds to crash on my families places and even my mother's house is this foreign, mold controlled zone in which my lungs collapse, my heart stops with the toxic molds that makes me feel unwelcomed and pushes me into the asceptic living of hotels with their climate controlled hells drowing the sound of coquis and the rustling of platain and palm trees in the middle of the night and making my body remember how to go to sleep.

after i come back home from going home, the place i come back to is so familiar and yet so removed missing the little bit of heart and soul and pain and laughter i left back in spanish with its ay benditos and ave marias and its tu sabes and its bochincheo with arroz con gandules and alcapurrias and habichuelas and sancocho de medio día and el cafecito para empatar.
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