His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action. And it was no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals –
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER
over and over again, filling half a page.
He could not help feeling a twinge of panic. It was absurd, since the writing of those particular words was not more dangerous than the initial act of opening the diary, but for a moment he was tempted to tear out the spoiled pages and abandon the enterprise altogether.
He did not do so, however, because he knew that it was useless. Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference. Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed — would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper — the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed for ever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
It was always at night — the arrests invariably happened at night. The sudden jerk out of sleep, the rough hand shaking your shoulder, the lights glaring in your eyes, the ring of hard faces round the bed. In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.
George Orwell’s 1984
Tag: blogging
Blog SEO: 5 Simple Techniques to Start Doing Now
1 – Easy-to-Read urls
Use urls that indicate the subject of each post, not numbers. Deep-linking (linking straight to a page) may be bad for security on some portals or throw off your conversion funnel analytics in commerce, but a blog should represent an interrelated series of ideas.
Pro Tip: This probably makes your urls so long that they are hard to properly Tweet. In Social Media, use Buffer, Hootsuite, or SproutSocial to shorten the url and auto-schedule the timing of your post.
2 – Link to Your Old Posts
Anytime you write a new post, think of how it relates to at least one previous post you’ve written, and link to the previous post within the new post. This means you need to know your blog contents. It is nice that a Blog can let you explore new topics on the tangents of your profession, but if you can’t create some sort of emergent cohesion, no reader and no bot or spider will do it for you.
Pro Tip – If you are a member of a team that manage a blog with a TON of posts, read a new post from months or years ago each day. React to it, link to it, write about it.
3 – Link to Your New Post
Anytime you add a new post, find an old post that is related and insert a link to it. The easiest way to do this, naturally, is to use the post you linked in #2. It will be better for your readers if there is a logical place to include it within the content of the previous post, but adding a “Recommended reading” section at the end of a post can help as well.
4 – Tags and Images
The easy thing here is to make sure you start naming any images so that they have meaning independent of the image. Using headers to organize the content of a post should be a no-brainer as well. If you’re bootstrapping and crunched for time – its never too late to start doing it better going forward with more discipline. If you’re a big business with a massive site, an SEO consultant who can dive into your code is a useful ally. What may not realize is most SEO experts will give you a fair amount of information for free. Just ask!
5 – Have Fun!
Okay but seriously, the most important thing that will improve your SEO is to create content you care about. Take pride in the topic. Take the discussion with you into the real world. If the blog is an authentic “shadow” of who you are or who your organization strives to be, people will find it interesting. Find interest groups on Twitter and Snapchat and LinkedIn – then CARE. If you don’t care about your craft, no one will. If you don’t love blogging about your craft, no one will care about your blog.
Keener Strategy 