When we go into a greengrocer’s shop (or a supermarket) and see tired, dried-up fruit and vegetables, we usually pass by and go in search of a store with fresh produce. Well, if your web sites, blogs or other forms of online presence serve as shop windows for your business, it’s important to make sure they’re as freshly dressed as any food shop.

That’s not to say it’s always easy when you’ve got a million other things to do, but it’s good practice to remove or alter out-of-date information or offers and to correct anything that is wrong, such as prices.

The more we change our ‘shop windows’, the more passers-by are likely to take notice, not to mention search engines and the non-human agents at work on the internet.

It needn’t take long and is more a discipline than anything else to note down everywhere you have a presence – not just your own site and blogs, but profiles and other information on networking and other sites.

And just to prove that we’re practising what we preach, that’s what we’re doing at the moment.

Robert Zarywacz

How many people are bursting with new content to publish as the year changes from eight to nine? How much of it will be of any value? How much of it will be read? And how much ignored?

Whereas we used to hear of information overload, we now hear about ‘noise’: the noise of trillions of words broadcast by the minute on the internet, on web sites, on blogs, on social networks and micro-blogging sites.

We can’t read every blog, so we have to filter content. I think we’ll be filtering a lot in 2009.

This means that if we want a target audience to take notice of us, we’ll have to think even more carefully about our message, how we write it and how we ensure it reaches our audience. And it won’t be just one communication, but series of related broadcasts, each requiring a strategy.

As technology makes it easier to publish, will the frequency of broadcasts increase? Will it shorten attention span?

And what about the the loss of jobs: will it result in fewer people blogging more, more people blogging more to find work or just more people blogging all round? I can’t see a reduction in blogging: yet.

2009 will be an interesting year.

We’ve been doing a lot of proofreading lately, which brings to mind just how useful a corporate style guide for writers can be.

It’s quite common for businesses and other organisations to have visual style guides, but the actual content is often forgotten until a proofreader points out all the inconsistencies.

A style guide can be as simple or as complex as you want: covering basics from always writing brand names in capitals – or not – to whether specific words are hyphenated.

Once simple rules are written down, it’s much easier to remember them when you come to write a word and think “company policy is to hyphenate this word” or “we write that with a capital”.

The result is greater consistency, more effective communication and less time spent ironing out inconsistencies every time you want to publish a brochure or web site content.