Last night I won the Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound Green Party of Canada nomination meeting. That means when the next federal election rolls 'round, my name will be on the ballot. This is the speech that I gave last night at the nomination meeting. And this is the audience that's already starting to make the world a better place:

One of the amazing birthday presents that I got this year was a kit from Badge-a-minit to make 1.25" buttons. I was inexplicably excited about it. But immediately drew a blank of what to put on my buttons.

Skip ahead nearly two months.

Tonight was the first Green Party meeting where myself and the other nominee (Lynn Morgan) were asked to speak about why we decided to become politicians. I'm one of those crazy process people who wishes that more people would care about politics. I wish more people would vote. And I wish more people would pay attention to the decisions other people make that affect everyones' lives. I get excited when I can make a difference in someone's life---when I can enable them to find their own voice and participate in their chosen community.

This week I am almost completely consumed by search engine optimization. It's the topic for chapter in my new book on building Drupal Web sites and the topic for an SEO class that I'm teaching at the beginning of August. I've been comparing search results for phrases like "php drupal" and "php drupal help." I've been obsessing over click through rates and conversion rates and I've been studying the competition. And then I got side tracked. Using the little built-in Firefox Google search (so that Mozilla could get a few fractions of a cent from my search) I looked up the following terms:

• free graphics application
• free graphics software
• free graphics program
• free graphics editor

If we do a little comparison against these four terms we'll see most people use the term "software" with occasional forays into "program" most people have been using the term "software" and that the most popular regions for any combination of these terms are from India, South Africa, New Zealand and the UK. GIMP ranks well in all four search phrases, but only the first link yields a top-ten result for Inkscape. What's up Inkscape? Why aren't you top ten how can we make you do better? SEO to the rescue. Before you get covered in hives and think that SEO is just for marketing wonks let's take a look at how all projects, products and businesses can benefit from a little bit of site optimization.