What Cheer, Netop?

What Cheer, Netop?
Photo-A-Day #1555

Today was the second annual Roger Williams Paddle. I went out with members of the Ten Mile River Watershed Council, The AMC, and the Rhode Island Blueways Alliance. My friend (Netop) Keith Gonsalves is one of the driving forces for this paddle and he invited me to go last year. I had such a good time, and he must have liked my video last time, that I decided to go again. The paddling was fantastic and the weather couldn’t have been better. I have a ton of photos and video from today that I want to get put together to show you and I will do so very soon. But for now I have to sleep. You can check out all my updates from the day via Twitter and Zannel. Also you can see some of my past adventures with Keith in my Wired Kayaker videos. You can find them on the sidebar. I’ll have the rest of the photos and video up asap. Here is one more that I took using my Xshot. I loved having the Xshot with me on this trip, I used it as often as I possibly could.

Using the Xshot on a break

BTW: What Cheer, Netop? is probably the equivalent of What’s Up, Friend? What cheer is short for “What cheerie news do you bring?” Netop is the Narragansett word for friend. This was the greeting that Roger Williams hollered to a group of Narragansett over by what is Gano street today. When I got out of my car and saw Keith I hollered over to him, “What Cheer, Netop?” He got a kick out of it.

Workout on Friday, Blog Well on Saturday

Something that I have noticed every Friday when I workout is that I’m always the only person in our gym. No one is working out on Friday. I also notice that bloggers post a lot of their fluff on Saturday. The thing that I realize is that not everyone reads blog posts during the week. Many people save their reading for the weekend so why not give people something worth reading. That is one reason why decided to call my weekly post about SocialSpark, SocialSpark Saturdays. Saturday gives people time to read and digest extra detailed posts and try to follow step by step instructions. I’m more focused on the weekends because I’m not trying to read blog posts and get back to work all day through. On Saturday I can sit down for a solid un-interrupted hour and concentrate.

I guess the point of this is that if you are bucking the trend a bit you are going to see some results. By working out Friday when everyone else is sleeping in (and I want to sleep in) I can focus on my own workout more intensely. The same thing with blogging, write some of your best stuff on the weekends and share it with everyone on the weekend and you just may build a bigger audience.

So, for today’s SocialSpark Saturday let me introduce you to something that not a lot of bloggers take the time to learn about and that would be Sparks. Sparks are wonderful things because they allow you to write about many different topics and receive links back in return. Anyone can create a spark but you have to create an advertiser account to create a Spark. However, anyone can create an advertiser account.

I created a Spark yesterday to help promote the http://imnotafamousblogger.com blog. On that blog I interview the great bloggers from the “I’m Not A Famous Blogger” IZEA Insiders Crew. The Spark can be found here. It is a little different because essentially the blogger will write their own post for my blog and they can include their own links of choice as they promote themselves and their blogs.

My Spark is not the only one, there are many good choices and I encourage bloggers who have not yet gotten their blogs verified to take Sparks, meet other bloggers and build up their post counts and link backs. I’d also say stay with the BlogYouBack ones as they benefit you and make sure you write something quality. It might be just the thing to write on Saturday.