Good Day Google+ (Episode 7)

Public, and we are live. So hey there, it's good day Google+ and it's another great day in Florida. I'm having a wonderful time down here in Kissimmee enjoying the beautiful sunshine and the great weather. So I'm happy today and my guests today, let's go right across. I have Craig Fifield.

How you doing, Jeff?

Good, thanks for being here. Larry Fournier, Fournier, I always get your last name a little That's okay, Chef.

I'm here.

Caribbean cooking and the master chef of Google+. Let's just leave it at that then. And we have Mark Vang here today. Hi, Mark.

Hello, how's it going, Chef Dennis?

Great, thank you. And Melanie Hall is here with us today too.

Hello.

We have a great show for you. We're just going to start off and let everybody do a little talk about what they do on Google+ and how they enjoy it and things that they do. And then we're just going to have some interaction between each other. If you've seen it before, you know know how it goes. If you have questions, ask them in the comment bar. We have the comment tracker on and we will get to your questions as soon as we can. So let's start off. Craig, I'm gonna let you start since you're first in row.

Alright, so my background— I started back at the end of 1995 developing websites. Quickly realized I preferred marketing websites, so I got into the SEO field really before SEO even existed. Uh, did that for a year, got hired by a local startup developing web marketing products for them, and we were successful enough that a year later we were bought out by Microsoft. From there, I worked for Microsoft for 10 years developing web marketing apps, um, for them, and I think it was 2007 I just went back on my own doing social media SEO consulting from home. That's it.

So you've been enjoying yourself then, pretty much?

Quite a bit. I refer to it as a quality of lifetime.

Absolutely, absolutely. Larry, it's all yours.

Hey, well, Chef, we kind of came on here at the same time back in 2011. And I just brought my passion, which is cooking and food, Caribbean food to be more specific, which is something— well, I live in Trinidad and Tobago, which is part of the Caribbean. So I just brought that on to share it with the community at large. And it's been fabulous. It's been great. I do the HOA shows, the Cooking Caribbean. And I've also introduced other foodies who like me had passion, had a passion for cooking, like Stacy Fraser, Diana Fontaine, Serena Bland, who also does Caribbean cooking. And my latest involvement is with helpouts. I'm doing a series of helpouts with, again, with the Caribbean recipes that I'm sharing with the world now.

How have you found the helpouts to be so far, Larry?

Well, this is the third day, and so far people are just pretty much kicking the tires, like everything else is new, and it's getting a lot of traction. Google has done some promotion, but they— I know they have an advertising campaign that's coming once they work out all the little bugs in the Helpouts system. Not that there are many, they're, you know, just small things to— little annoyances, but for the most part, it's pretty good. And the community that we have, the Helpouts community, It's very vibrant and the folks are in there helping each other. If they have a question on customers, they post it and, you know, people in there to help. So it's— so far the experience has been good.

Great, good to hear. Thank you. Mark, I'll turn it over to you.

Okay, well, I'm involved in what we're calling social media optimization, and one of the fun things was I used to drove truck for about 6 or 7 years. And when I left the trucking profession, I got back into computers and was very interested in social media. So I started investigating, you know, all these different things and learning a lot about them. And so one of the first things that I had to deal with was, what is it that I do? What do I call myself? Because I looked at what I was interested in, and if you're familiar with any tech fields at all, there are always all kinds of buzzwords and everything. And of course in social media, I think we excel at that because, you know, you have social search engine marketing, you know, social media marketing, social media optimization. I won't even bore you with them. But so the first thing I had to do was figure out what it was I actually enjoyed doing and what I was good at, which is important too. And that's social media optimization. I enjoy the social media side of building search engine rankings for websites. On the other side of that, you know, you've got search engine optimization and stuff like that. I also find very interesting, but I just don't have the deep background in that kind of, those types of things. I'm trying to learn as much as I can from David Hammerlund and Mark Traphagen and those kind of guys, but it's kind of hard to keep up with them. And Eric Eng as well, kind of hard to keep up with all that, so I just learn what I can. But that's, that's what I'm interested in. That's what I do on a day-to-day basis. I spend a lot of time on Google+. I have a small community where I help people try to sort out how things work, like Hangouts and using Google Drive and stuff like that for all kinds of nifty little things. There are all kinds of cool tools that Google gives us, so it's very, very interesting to, you know, I focus my time here instead of a lot of other networks. And that's kind of it in a nutshell. So Thank you for having me on again, Chef Dennis.

Oh, my pleasure. I'm so glad you could join us. And yeah, it seems like more of us are really getting more involved with Google+. And I know I've left my other social medias. I still go on every now and then, but they don't get anywhere near the time that I provide for G+. Seems a lot more interactive. All right, Melanie.

Hello. Thank you, Chef Dennis, for having me here. You're welcome. Hello, gentlemen.

Hey.

Hi, Melanie.

I'm Melanie Hall with Big Uptick Social Marketing and small business entrepreneur, and it's going really great. I have a strong— well, I actually have a degree in logistics and supply chain management where I worked for a huge corporation for almost 6 years in their supply chain division. Supporting the contract side. And, you know, just didn't get a chance to move up with 15,000 employees there. So then when I left, the marketing side of me, the true marketer in me, said, do what you want to do. So I went to work for a small company, and that was with the— as a social media director. And that's where It was just fabulous. So now I'm on my own and I'm able to shine as bright as I want, or as dim as I want. And it's just, it's a fantastic journey meeting great people and I absolutely love it.

That's good. I know Google+ has really provided us with a great medium for meeting different people from all over. Absolutely. You know, I think sometimes some of the ones coming on get pigeonholed in whatever direction they're heading in and they miss out on the big picture of meeting all, you know, great people from all over the place and with different interests. And you really have to just put yourself out there and try and meet more people. Larry, you've done a great job with that. I mean, you're just all over there, you know more people.

Well, the thing is, Chef Dennis, Helpouts is the tool that afforded me to do that. And if, like you just mentioned, the folks who are coming on, if they would just take a little time and explore the helpouts— not the helpouts, sorry, the hangouts.

Hangouts, yeah.

I have helpouts on the brain. The hangouts, sorry. You know, take a little time and explore the hangouts. You meet incredible people, you know. And I think Martin Shervington He was doing— when he first came on, he was doing kamugling on Saturday mornings, where we would open a series of Hangouts and just meet new people. People just come in, and that's how relationships build, and that's how communities are formed. So if the folks would just take part in some Hangouts, it would it will really pay off in the end.

Yeah, I agree with that for sure.

Yeah.

The Hangouts have really been a marvelous tool. I know somebody was saying today that they keep getting more invitations for events and they don't want them. I said, well, you know, it's not really that big of a deal. You know, I'm guilty of sending out too many probably, but just click it off if you don't want to go, that's fine, you know, but don't get all upset that you're getting too many because these are, these are great opportunities you're missing out on. You should go to some of them. You know, maybe you can't make them all, time doesn't permit, you know, but when you can watch some, you should.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

Alright, so how's everybody finding this new searchable— with our posts being searchable and hashtags being searchable? I know we talked a little bit about Hummingbird last time you were here, Mark. Anything else happening in this world? Anything else changing?

Well, I've seen a lot of talk lately about images and how they're going to start working into search too. And I've had to rethink— I get a little lazy when I do my blogging and stuff. If I put an image on my blog, I just— it could be named image123.png. And that's horrible, horrible stuff I'm doing. I know, I know. But just to be fair, I don't do website SEO optimization. So I'm only screwing up my own website when I do these things, not somebody else. But it just seems, you know, before that was a best practice mainly that, you know, you need to tag your images properly. And, you know, so I was just being a sloppy webmaster before, but now it's really, you know, I'm seeing a lot of prominent individuals talking about how important images will become to search. So once again, we have something that that maybe we weren't really focusing on that is going to become very prevalent in search. And so I've kind of shifted. I really need to kind of up my game. Once you do these things, I think, once you do them, make it part of your daily routine when you're updating your blog, it becomes a habit. It's not that big a deal. But we all have to learn good habits and have to keep track of what Google says the good habits are now, I think, too. That's kind of what I've been picking up on the radar there is images.

I forget where I read it, but someone recently mentioned images as a whole new visual language. So with that in mind, you look at Pinterest and all the social media platforms, I think for sure we're going to see it surface a lot more in search. And another factor that I like to kind of point out to a lot of Google+ users is you really want to be careful what you're +1ing and sharing. Because you think it might just be a casual share, but that's going to show up in Google image search forever. I actually watched a great video that was— it was basically an action movie that someone made on YouTube. But the screenshot, the still shot on the video, was a little bit provocative. And I wanted to +1 it really bad because the video was good. But I second-guessed myself and said, nah, because that little screenshot will show up. So you need to keep things like that in mind with search ever expanding.

Yeah.

That's a good thought there.

I know we have to be careful. Go ahead, Larry.

I'm sorry.

Yeah, I guess— well, I'm glad Mark brought up the point with images and tagging them correctly, because I am not good at that. And as the raw image comes up, whatever number it is, I just You know, put it up. So that's a good point, though. That's a real good point. Moving forward, as far as search is concerned and semantic search and all those new things coming up, I guess I have to be more mindful and, you know, make sure the content is as pristine and as presentable as possible.

Well, I have a suggestion how you can begin to tag. I have a suggestion if you want to have just an easy system to start tagging. At the very— do you know what the pipes are? The pipes? Instead of commas when you name things, when you name files.

Oh, put a pipe.

Yeah, that's that straight up and down line. Yeah, they call that a pipe. P-I-P-E, like you smoke a pipe. And instead of putting commas or semicolons when you're building your string, like you name your— you would name your picture of what it is, like if it's, um, but you name it to what topic it is. If it's a clown holding a balloon but your blog isn't about a clown holding a balloon, don't call it that because you want it to be for your blog. So if you have a picture of a clown holding a balloon but your blog is about state fair food, then you should— your first part should be state fair food to match whatever your blog is about. And then the middle part can be something else that, that you draw from that article. And then the last part is the name of your company. And so you should have, you know, One phrase pipeline, another phrase pipeline, and then the name of your company. So if you get into that habit, that would work.

So the pipe becomes a separator then?

Yes, yes.

Is that in the description of the picture then, or is that in the tags?

That is in the— you can put it in the description, the meta tags, if you use WordPress. I guess I should clarify that. If you use WordPress and you're going through your meta description, because you also still have the option, remember, to use your snippet capabilities. So that's a separate process altogether. And what's that? That is where you go through the, the backside of the, of your web tools, webmaster tools in your Google Analytics side. So you go down to Webmaster Tools and then you'll find Labs at the bottom on the left-hand panel. And when you click in there, you'll see Snippet Data Structure. So that's when you go in and you, instead of making Google decide what they want to draw out from your, from your content, you pick out what you want to be seen on the Google page under the description. So they call that a snippet. So that's where the semantic search is really going to shine a lot, because if you have actual sentences in there along with your pipes, you know, your pipes that highlight your keywords and your main content, you'll— it'll, it'll do so much better for you.

Good to know.

Chef Dennis, there's a question here from Esther.

I see that. Let me pin it. Okay, Esther wants to know, can you say something about the use of images from Google searches and image searches and paying for them? Some of the images sourced are not connected to a photo shopping cart. Are we free to use them? That's a good question because we do get a lot of problems with people just using images. Anyone like to chime in on that, or—

Well, I'll chime in on that. I've had a couple discussions about that in my community. I would say that if you can't trace the source of an image, if it's something that's been shared or is so diluted in Google search that you can't find out really who created the image and it looks like a professional photography image, you might want to avoid using it. I mean, Just personally, you know, I like to give attribution to the original creator of any type of art, whether it's photography or artwork. There are sites you can go to where the individuals upload artwork or photographs, and you're allowed to use them under a Creative Commons attribution where you just say, "This photograph by such-and-such," and you're good to go. You can use it on your website or blog. But if you just come across something that's really cool and you want to use it, and you do an image search and like 20, you know, 100 different websites come up, that means that it's been shared so many times you probably can't figure out who to attribute properly. So I would avoid it, but you know, different people kind of deal with those things differently. I mean, there is copyright in the United States, so you might want to watch out. Somebody finds you using their image, they might have their lawyer give you a little tap on the shoulder and and tell you to take it off your website.

So, yeah, and images are one of the few things that are really copyrighted, that the person that took it owns. So I know with food bloggers we run into that a lot of times, and people don't know, and they'll just use our pictures on their, their blogs. You know, they take recipes too. There's not a lot you can do about that, but the pictures belong to the person that took it, so you have to be really careful about reusing them without permission.

I have a suggestion. The, the, the site that is very reliable for me, that I— the source rather, that's very reliable for me is called freedigitalphotos.net. And what that is, it's totally free, royalty-free, and, and the only agreement you have before you download that, the image for you is that you have to attribute to them somehow. But if you use them all the time, you can just have, have that link, freedigitalphotos.net, as part of your footer to attribute that this is where you're getting your photos. In my case, on our website, we have a whole page devoted to behind the scenes, so that way you don't have to mention it all the time. And then of course, the other suggestion is It's wonderful if you know a young person who is taking photography and wants to do that as a freebie just for experience. You know, you can give them— you can go to a high school student that's just, you know, or college student that's taking pictures and say, hey, I want to have a picture of such-and-such. Do you think you can come up with something? And then you can, you know, work it out. And then so it's win-win for them because they can get the experience and follow assignments, and then it's a win for you because then you get what you want.

That's a good suggestion.

Yeah.

Alright, so, uh, Larry, you have, uh, the Pirates Pub too. Are you still using that?

Well, the Pirates Pub, that is, uh, between George Sepic and myself. Okay. And, uh, he, he's the captain of the ship. And right now we are on a slight hiatus, and we should be back hopefully, hopefully, if not by the end of this year, by early 2014.

Okay, I hadn't seen anything in a while, so I was curious about that.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, alright, is anybody else planning on using some Hangouts? Craig, I think you might be muted.

Yeah, I've been— I've actually The Hangouts, I mean. The Hangout keeps stalling on me.

Okay.

Yeah, I've noticed ever since they came out with this new interface, just to— I'm not entirely happy with it because things keep flipping around. I don't know what you guys are seeing, but it seems to be generally more laggy with me. And I like to mute myself when I'm not talking, and the way that little control bar keeps sliding away from me has kind of added a couple extra seconds for me to respond to things. So I'm always trying to anticipate and get that out. So anyway, I didn't mean to jump on you there, Craig. But I'm finding it a little funky too.

Yeah. So today for me, it just seems like the connection— something's wrong with my connection. I keep losing it. But in regards of helpouts, I'm looking to not necessarily use helpouts. I have a few friends. And family members that might be able to use it. But in terms of Hangouts, I'm looking to maybe start one of my own. Like you guys were saying earlier, I think it's where the party is. It's where you get to meet everybody. It's where you get to really share and learn. I just think it's awesome, especially the way it automatically pumps over to YouTube. That's really great. And then from there— I think it's really wise to consider extracting the audio and making it a podcast.

Yeah, yeah.

Now how is the quality of the sound when you do that? I've talked about that before with other people and they say that the sound is really important and you don't always get good sound that way.

I'm not sure yet, I haven't tested it myself, but I bet that it's not going to be that great, but I think if you take the time to optimize it a little bit it might be good enough. I just love the idea of being on essentially 3 platforms. And if the quality degrades a little bit, it does. But it's still a great way to get started. And then if you find out, hey, this is working and I have an audience now, you can take other steps to make the podcast sound that much better.

That's something— I had Ryan Hanley in one of my community Hangouts.. And that's something that I believe he's done, is he stripped the audio from a Hangout. So, and it's very clever because, you know, people are tied to your website for the video or for the blog post, but the sound, you can upload it to SoundCloud or something like that. So now you're portable. So now they can listen to your content while they're out jogging or whatever. So there is a bit of a quality issue, but I guess if you got kind of a a core group of people that had decent mics and didn't have cockatiels in the background, you could get a handle on that. There's actually a setting in Hangouts too where you can select a studio audio setting, which I fooled with a couple times, which even though it says it's not for voice, I've used it for voice a couple times and it seems to help out. So I haven't really dialed into the whole Hangout the new Hangout Helper thing— no, that's Ronnie Benson.

Helpouts.

Helpouts.

Helpouts.

I've looked at that and I'm already kind of doing something similar where I've set up private forums on my own website. So I'm not quite sure what the difference is that Google adds. Maybe they add some promotional muscle to it, but I've also seen, you know, you have to agree to their terms to do certain things and your transaction goes through them. So I'm a little leery about just jumping in. It might be good to do a few free ones just to get familiar with it, so I intend to do that. But as far as accepting them as a way to deliver commercial training, I'm a little leery because once you start looking at multi-page terms of service agreements and, you know, Google becomes your business partner in your online training venture, you know, I don't know, I get a little nervous. So I'd be interested to hear, you know, feedback from other people as they get into that a little bit more.

Well, what I think you should— sorry. I think the way you should look at it is just another marketplace for your services. So it doesn't need to cannibalize what you're doing on your own. You can't upsell from there, but you might as well just take a listing in there and see what kind of business you get from it. Because with the marketing push behind it and the built-in audience that they'll have eventually, you might get clients that wouldn't have found you otherwise.

Yeah, Craig is absolutely right. Um, and the way the helpouts are set up now, it's only one-on-one. So essentially what Google is doing, they're taking folks who are asking questions or searching for answers, and they're linking them in with an expert in that particular field that they're looking for the answers in. So right now it's just one-on-one, and I do a free— free, um, I have a free listing just to get people in to talk about what I'm offering as far as my other menus, that if they want to have a one-on-one session with me, I will set up a schedule with them and they can come in at their time, at their convenience, and we cook Curry Chicken or something, but which is a paid service. That particular one is similar to what Chef Dennis Littley does with Chef Hangout.

Chef Hangout, yeah.

Right, and with Chef Hangout you have multiple folks in there, whereas with Helpout it's just one-on-one. So Mark, you could try it like Craig says.

Yeah, yeah, I'm definitely gonna give it a shot. I didn't mean to come off too negative on it, but I always read a lot of these. Maybe I'm inferring too much. Of course, a lot of these terms of service are written to cover everything and everything from the corporation view. It's written by lawyers, and a lot of it's not really stuff to worry about. But I was looking at, for example, they seem to have a clause in there about if you, getting clients through the help out, through the, help out, yes, help out, and but then billing them separately or something like that. Anyway, I, you know, I'm definitely gonna check it out and see what's going on with it. Yeah, because as you got— as Craig points out, you know, you've opened yourself to another market. Sure, right. As well.

So, but for this— but for the service provider, you have to wait to be invited, or you just can't? Like, it's not where you jump in there and do it yourself. You have to wait to be invited by Google to do the helpouts.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

At least, at least right now, right? And I would imagine they're probably gonna open it up, but you'll still have to pass the review process.

Yes, you still have to be vetted because in Google's eyes, what they're putting out there is quote-unquote experts. Yeah, right. Alright, so you have to go through some vetting levels before you're, before you're even approved as well as your listings.

Well, I mean, I just made my custom URL, Mark Vang Loves Google, so I'm good to go. I'm expecting that checkmark and shield to show up on my profile. I've made my love, professional love, public.

Got a lot. I know I was looking for a license plate in Florida to see if I could get something custom, you know, but, uh, most of the good ones that I tried were taken, so I didn't know about just putting Google on it. Google One or something, you know.

What about Chef D?

I tried that already, Larry. That one was taken up. I did. That was my first thought.

Chef DL.

There you go. I'll have to look on that one. Speaking of custom URLs, has everybody— I know some of us had them before— has everyone got them? Was everyone sent by Google the thing for it, or did any of you have to go through the process on your own?

Google sent it to me.

Okay.

Yeah, I have two. I have my personal one and then the business page, and my business page came with the custom URL about 2 weeks later.

Okay, because I had a friend of mine asking, David Leet. I don't know if any of you have heard of him. He's a really incredible culinarian, and he has a— that's the name of his blog too, Leitz Culinaria. And he was asking me, he hasn't received his yet, and he was out sick for a little while, so I thought he might have missed his invitation, but I didn't know if there was another process for getting that, if anyone knew.

I wonder if it takes longer for some people because Google has to do the research to make sure there aren't so many duplicates, you know, like for those who have common names. Or my name isn't really common, so— and probably Chef Dennis Littley isn't really common either.

I actually got sent one from my original account because it was just Chef Dennis, and then about a month into it, Google sent me a thing saying, oh, you can't use that name, it has to have your last name or we're gonna just bump you off. So I actually just got an email, I'm going, what are they trying to do, change my thing? And then I realized that this is the old account account that must still be active and I'm afraid to delete it. You know, it's that paranoid about everything else would go away too.

So I just leave it there.

It's not hurting anything.

I mean, I found that the first one that got the invite was my business page and I'm probably in the same boat that a number of people who have registered a domain name as their name because I'm MarkVang.com, I'm the same name as my company. So my business page got first dibs at Mark Vang for the URL and I thought about that but there are no options with the first time around. It's like the first time that you get +MarkVang or you can say no. So I thought about it and I was like, well, what's the harm of people looking for me come to my business Google+ business page? So that's definitely not a minus anyway. And also there's more than one person named Mark Vang so strategically I had to go If I say no now and wait till they give me the option to change things, I might lose plus Mark Vang. Totally. So then it came up, you know, it was weird. It was like a week and a half or two weeks later I got the personal thing on my personal profile to do it. Of course, but I had already taken Mark Vang, so I had to add something, and I couldn't think of, you know, if I do Mark Vang, Virginia, what if I move? You know, this is permanent. This is like, according to Google, this is more permanent than marriage. Which you can never change. So I had to put a lot of thought into it and finally I thought, you know, it's a Google+ account so if I say Mark Vang Loves Google, you know, it's not like I've named my LinkedIn account Mark Vang Likes Google or something goofy like that. You know, it's a Google account anyway, I might as well commit to it and you know, it will be unique, it will be memorable and not something like Mark Vang USA or Mark Vang VA or something that I might not like later. So I might hate Google later, but if I do, I can always delete the account.

So you really did name your account that? I thought you were kidding.

Yeah, I shared a little picture. I put little hearts and stuff around my picture, and I shared my new— plus Mark Payne underscore loves underscore Google is my URL.

The possibilities.

That is a classic.

We do have a question here I'm gonna put up too about— see if we can get some help on this. JD wants to know, what are the differences between WordPress and Blogspot? She uses Blogspot. How can I integrate all of these into my blog? I'd like to add music clips too. I can connect Hangouts, Helpouts, and Blogspot. So who knows anything about Blogspot? It's been a while since I've been on it.

I can start answering the question. OK. Blogspot and WordPress are both just blogging platforms. The difference you need to understand there is there's WordPress.com and WordPress.org. WordPress.com and Blogspot are very comparable. They're just self— they're hosted services that you just sign up and you use to run your blog. WordPress.org is where you really want to be. That's where you have to get your own hosting account and set up WordPress on your own to run your blog. And the big difference there is you have a world of opportunities there. It's very flexible. You have plugins that can allow you to add your music and do pretty much anything you can imagine, whereas Blogspot and WordPress.com, since they're hosted by, you know, the companies that own them, you're a lot more restricted in what you can and can't do on those platforms.

You're going to get more search engine real estate, what I call search engine real estate, from the WordPress.org. And with the WordPress.org, you can go with— they have free themes as well, but I would always choose a paid theme just because it's more secure.

Well, I think you'll probably see people in social media or in any of this talking about the difference between rented property and property you own in reference to your social sites. Any of these external services like WordPress.com or Blogger, you're renting space. You're actually sitting on top of somebody else's hosting platform, and you have a certain amount of flexibility. I mean, there's certainly benefits to that, and in some cases WordPress is free, but if you start buying things from WordPress, like you want a custom URL, you know, you want your domain name, you want to do this, that, those expenses can add up very quickly. So if you know, especially as you can, and you know, they're recurring expenses. So a lot of people kind of shy away from registering a domain name and setting up, but you own that, okay? I mean, you can still deploy WordPress. Most hosting services have like one-click scripts that will let you deploy your WordPress site and you can customize it. You own the platform based on what your hosting plan is allowing, but you have a lot more flexibility and you don't have to worry about some, you know, when you're sitting on top of these other microblogging services, even Google+, you know, they might decide to change how something works, and that's it. Whatever they've decided to change, good or bad, is going to affect your entire, you know, everything you built on top of that. So that's something to consider if you're really going to get into blogging seriously and you want to get the search engine results out of it. You should look at a couple hosting plans and either deploy a WordPress site— I use Drupal is the content management system I use. So do a little research and you'll get a lot more out of it and you'll own the results. You'll be able to manage it directly. So that's my advice. It is more work. You have to kind of keep up with maintenance, but you're not going to get the reward if you don't build it like that, I think.

Right.

I would add that the hosted services are a great place to kind of play and test things to see if you might want to be a blogger or just test the waters. But what you have to remember is even if that's easier for you, if you take the technical hurdle in the beginning and go with your own hosted service like WordPress.org, you're not going to have to make the transfer later. So if you end up growing pretty large on Blogspot, at some point almost everybody I've known wants to transfer to WordPress.org so they have the full control., and that process can be a lot worse than just setting up WordPress.org from the beginning.

Oh yeah, as someone who did do a transfer, I can attest to that. And you want to make sure you have somebody that knows what they're doing too, because it can be a real nightmare otherwise. But, uh, we— I transferred to WordPress about a little over 2 years ago, and it was a long process. Even just updating it— I just updated it recently, and that was still a pretty good process, only not quite as traumatic as the first move.

Something you probably don't think about, but when you try to go from WordPress.com to your own self-hosted WordPress site, they have a fee that they'll charge you to handle that for you, which is over $100 last time I checked. And there really isn't any easy way to port that site yourself, so I agree that it's great to get started for free. I've had a— I actually have like 3 or 4 WordPress.com sites while I was getting my, you know, getting my feet wet in blogging and learning how all this stuff works. So it's definitely something you should probably look at before you start putting money out. But when you realize that it's going to be part of your business, or if you're starting a business, you should make that commitment because trying to change it later, you're going to destroy all the link juice that you might have built up, and it's going to be a huge. You might lose some content that you had set up. So you want to really think about that. Think 6 months or a year down the line where you're going to want to be.

And also—

go ahead.

And also, as your business grows, you always have more time in the beginning than you do when you're 6 months or a year in. So you want to get all that learning curve under your belt rather than having to shift, having to have such a disruption in if you're really have a good momentum in your business, then you've got to take this other thing aside, and that could upset your apple cart.

I just stuck up my picture since you guys don't seem to believe my URL. If you can pop that up there, Dennis. So there it is. I've committed publicly to my relationship.

Excellent.

I love it.

I love it.

Oh my gosh.

So one more point on For the Blogspot users, I would recommend if you are on Blogspot that you go out and buy the custom domain if you haven't. And the reason for that would be if you're running on Blogspot without your own domain, all the links that are coming into you are going to be coming to the Blogspot domain instead of your own domain. So if you go to transfer in the future, you would lose all those links by transferring to like a WordPress.org setup. But if you already have your custom domain set up on Blogspot, which isn't very expensive, you can then make your URLs match exactly on your WordPress.org blog so you don't lose all that valuable link juice.

I never thought of that. Yeah, it's only like $10 a year, I think, to get your domain. And here's a question too from JD again, and it was the same thing. It was like, so even though Blogspot is a Google product, you're better off with WordPress impressed. And yeah, you would think you wouldn't be, and with everything else they do, they don't seem to have put as much time and effort into blogs. But although they have made some improvements in it, it's just not— you would think that with them being the surgeon, that would be the number one, uh, platform to use.

Yeah, it's a nice service, but you just don't— in the end, you just don't have the freedom to do what you want. Yeah.

Let's get back to some food for a minute. Larry, what have you been making lately? Let's talk about some food.

Tell us about something you've made that's Really, something that I made that was really good, I posted it on G+ was some callaloo, and I got some requests to— they want to know how to make it, and it's very easy. It's essentially a vegetarian— you can have it vegetarian, or if you're a meat lover, you could put even bacon in it.

Or pork.

Yeah, yeah. So Basically, it's one of those comfort foods here in Trinidad, and it's been around, you know, before I was even a gleam in my daddy's eye. So it's taro leaves, or if you don't have taro leaves, you could use some spinach, okras, pumpkin, garlic, onions, and something we have here called seasoning peppers, or you could use serrano peppers if you want. Cut everything up, put it in a pot, add some water, let it, let it come to a boil. As it comes to a boil, you add some coconut milk to it, maybe a cup of coconut milk to give it a little sweetness. Add your little salt, a little pepper, and then when it's done, which is about maybe 45 minutes later, You take a hand blender and blend everything. It basically comes out like a soup. It's very comforting and you could have it as a side dish even, which we normally do have as a side dish to rice and chicken if you want. Yeah, so it's very healthy, it's very good for you, and like I said, it was kind of a kind of a hit.

Sounds like it.

Is the pumpkin cooked already?

No, no, no, you cut up the pumpkin, everything is raw and you put everything into the pot. And the beauty about it is it's a one-pot dish.

I like that. That's my style.

And I know it's getting cold up in North America, not by you, not where you are, Chef Dennis Littley.

No, but we did have a cold front come through today, it was 75.

Yeah, it's cold up here for sure.

Could you do that same process in a pressure cooker? Do you think it would have the same consistency?

Yes, we've also— you could also prepare it in a pressure cooker. The cook time will be much faster, as you know, and when it pressurizes, you uncap it, and of course you use your hand blender. But we, before hand blenders and before blenders were were invented, we had something called a swizzle stick. Let me see if I could find one for you guys. I have one in the kitchen. Hold on.

Sure thing.

I remember that as like some kind of candy.

I think they used to call it for mixing bar drinks too.

All right. Bar drinks, for sure.

This would probably be something good for a crock pot too, I would I think.

Yeah, you could put it in a crock pot, it'll cook all day, and by the time you get home, again, it'll be soft, but you have to blend it. And if you don't have a hand blender or regular blender, use Swizzle Stick.

Oh wow, I've never seen that.

And you just put it in and swizzle it by hand.

How about that?

And there's also the wire one. The wire version.

Oh, cool.

That just breaks everything up.

Yeah, just breaks everything up.

How about that? So that was, that was the manual labor blender before there was blenders.

Exactly. So when I was small growing up and Granny had callaloo, we normally have callaloo for Sunday, on Sundays. My job was to cut up the coconut and— or grate the coconut, sorry, to make the milk because we didn't have canned coconut back then. Everything was from scratch. And then after it's cooked, I would have to blend it. Actually, actually, this was her original hand blender, manual hand blender. This is my granny's.

That's cool. I know sometimes we don't appreciate or think, or some people don't remember the old ways and how, how our grandmothers made things. I had my grandmother's old mortar and pestle for the longest time, the stone one that she used to grind corn in when she made tortillas by hand.

So you don't have it anymore?

I know my brother has it now.

So it's in good hands.

It's in good hands.

Not that he ever uses it. I think it's a paperweight for him, but that's okay.

I would think that your food would mean a lot more to you too when you have to use these more manual tools rather than just clicking a button.

Yeah, and you know, especially too, well, I am so accustomed to eating fresh because everything down here is from the garden to the table or from farm to table kind of thing. I have a couple cousins who are farmers and every 2 weeks they would, on their way to market, they would stop by here and bring melon or you call it eggplant, all my vegetables, carrots, you know, the only thing I buy really is some protein because I have chickens that I rear. So I get eggs from my chickens and when I want to have one of the chickens, I— well, you know what to do.

Do you do the twist thing?

Yeah, the twist thing and then you put them under a bucket so when they start beating up, they'll be contained. I didn't want to bring that up, Chef.

That's alright, I remember vaguely my grandmother. We had gotten some for one Easter. They used to sell them in the supermarkets when I was little, and I think they even dyed them different colors. And my grandmother took them to raise them because we didn't have any place where we were. And, but then they went to some farmer for a happier life at some farm. And we had chicken that night too, by the way. Yeah, my mother told me that later and I was like, oh my God.

That's why you never name your food.

No.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Not a good thing to do. Don't get on first name basis. We just had a nice comment here from David Amerland is watching.

Yeah.

And Chef Dennis Littley interviews are never anything less than riveting and I love the approach Mark Vang has taken in terms of his work and he's right, it's incredible. Incredibly difficult actually working and keeping up with everything. Boy, ain't that the truth.

I was just thinking of David when we were talking about images earlier, and he has an entire new book he can write now, so he's all set. He just finished his semantic search, and now he can— I don't know what's your semantic image search? I don't know what. He gets to come up with that, so he's all set.

Well, that would be good. We could use it. I have a semantic search, so I could use a semantic Image Search as well. Anything he tells us is pretty important. Well, it's been a beautiful day here. Guys, anything else anyone would like to talk about before we call it a day?

Happy Thanksgiving.

Yeah, that's coming up right around the corner. Do you celebrate Thanksgiving in—

It's funny you bring that up.

Well, I thought of it with the birds, you know.

No, we don't. No, we— We don't celebrate Thanksgiving here. It's pretty much a US holiday. When I lived in the US, yes, I used to celebrate it, but now I'm back home, we don't celebrate it here. However, we do turkey around Christmas.

Hmm.

So, um, are turkeys local? Do you have wild turkeys?

We don't. Um, some of the— most of the turkeys have to be imported. But we do have some small turkey farms, but again, they're not enough to supply everyone because Christmas, like I said, turkey is big as well as pork.

We have turkeys everywhere here.

Oh wow, that's interesting. So, so to Larry, turkey is like caviar, you know. It's imported, uh, rare imported food, right? You know, yeah, here in the US we have 5,000-acre farms filled with 10 million turkeys.

Yeah, and the beauty about it is, you know, turkey is like real cheap around now. What is it, like 59 cents a pound or something crazy like that?

Well, there are times I literally have to wait for them to cross the road, so they're really cheap.

Yeah, I've seen them here. We just passed some the other day in Florida too. There were turkeys out there, so— not to mention other kinds of birds. We've seen some very interesting wildlife so far.

Well, in the city I see different kind of turkeys.

Oh, hmm.

That's a whole other issue.

Yes.

Although I always remember— I don't know if anyone ever saw WKRP when they decided to drop turkeys from the helicopter.

Oh, yeah.

And the guy swore he didn't know turkeys couldn't fly. With Les Nesman going, oh my god, the turkeys are hitting everywhere.

That's funny.

One of my favorite episodes. Well, guys, thanks so much for being on today. It's been a pleasure.

No problem.

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

I'm glad to be here. Chef Dennis Littley.

Oh, my pleasure. Thanks everyone for stopping by. We've had fun on Good Day Google+. Make sure to stop by every Friday. We're on at 1 PM Eastern Standard Time. Now I'm coming to you from beautiful sunny Florida. So we're going to have a good day Google+ and see y'all real soon.

Bye-bye.

Bye everybody.