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Earlier today, while playing a PC game called Port Royale 2, I encountered a passage in the game that explained some of the history of scurvy, the infamous disease that afflicted many sailors during the Age of Exploration. The segment of text from the game claimed that the treatment for scurvy had not been discovered until the time of James Cook (1728-1779), who had been able to successfully prevent scurvy on his long voyages by providing his crew with fresh fruits and sauerkraut. I was somewhat skeptical of this claim because I remember reading in some history texts (and also in references from other seafaring types of PC games) that the cure for scurvy in the form of citrus fruits and their juices had been used a century or two before Cook’s voyages. After digging into this subject a little further, it turns out that I was at least partially right; treatments for scurvy had been discovered and used before Cook’s time, but it was not until the latter half of the 18th century that the prevention and treatment of this disease became widely known or standardized in any way.

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In the book titled What They Fought For, 1861-1865, James McPherson draws on an abundance of primary source material in the form of soldiers’ letters and diaries in order to examine the issue of what the soldiers of the Civil War believed they were fighting for.
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Google has officially renamed Froogle, its search engine spinoff for shoppers that was launched back in December 2002, to Google Product Search.
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The online focus group that I had been participating in over the last three days has apparently closed a little earlier than expected.
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My adventure through the world of paid surveys continues with my recent participation in an online focus group. Last week, I took another one of those market research surveys that was supposed to be only five minutes long. The stated topic was “Banking”. After navigating through a few screener questions, I managed to get invited to a focus group about “banking problems and solutions”.
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One of the key issues that many of us struggle with as newbie bloggers is the topic of post length. Is it better to write longer, more detailed posts or to keep them short? Like a lot of things in life, the answer seems to be a resounding “it depends”. After scouring the Internet for clues and doing some thinking on this topic, I have discovered five important considerations that should be taken into account when deciding how long your posts should be.
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Creating better quality content is arguably the single best thing you can do for your blog. In order to create better content, you need to be able to use the written word effectively so that you can connect with your readers and maintain their interest over time. Here are ten things that you can do to make better use of your words.

1. Use strong keywords in text and links

Although it is always a good idea to write for actual human readers instead of writing only for search engines, using well-chosen keywords that are relevant to the topic of your article is still one of the best ways to improve the overall visibility of your blog. You can use some of the free keyword research tools offered by Google AdWords, Overture, or Wordtracker to get ideas for good keywords and then refine them to suit your specific needs.

2. Get to the point quickly

Many people who scan blogs, feeds, and search engine results do not have the patience to read past the first two or three sentences unless they see something interesting. Therefore it is important that you capture their attention by telling the reader what the main point of your article is within the first two sentences. If you ramble too much in the first paragraph without getting your message across clearly, the reader is very likely to click away from your blog instead of reading the rest of your content.

3. Edit your post for clarity and relevance before publishing

In order to translate good ideas into good writing, editing is necessary to clarify the exact meaning of your words. This includes not only adding relevant content to support your ideas but also removing unnecessary and/or irrelevant content to increase your post’s power and effectiveness.

4. Create content that stands the test of time

Although difficult to do in the case of news-oriented blogs, it is always useful to write articles that contain the kind of enduring wisdom that maintains its relevance with the passage of time. With the exception of a few major historical events, most current events and fads will not be remembered 20 or more years from now. But solid advice on finance, lifestyle, personal growth, and other similar topics never goes out of style.

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In organizing a campaign for public office, there are many steps that a candidate may take, and many of them depend on the kind of office that the candidate is seeking.
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American Blind & Wallpaper Factory, a reseller of window blinds, is suing Google for abuse of trademark rights because it wants other companies to be blocked from advertising on the AdWords network when Internet users search for its name.
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This is an essay that I originally wrote back in 2003 as part of an English assignment for one of my brother’s college courses. As an experiment, I posted it to a few different forums after the end of that semester just to see if the forum readers thought that I could write well enough to eventually pursue a career as a freelance writer. The essay proved to be controversial; some of the replies were rather unfavorable, but none of the critics ever offered any constructive suggestions. Now that I have my own blog, I figured that I might as well post it here since I could probably stand to spice things up a bit.
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As I mentioned at the end of my article about simple SEO strategies, duplicate content can be a real problem for websites and is definitely something that you should avoid whenever you can. Much to my chagrin, I have discovered that Wordpress blogs seem to have their own particular issues with this.

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Although joining Top-Dollars.com is certainly a great way to get paid in cash for taking surveys online, after a few weeks you may run into a slight problem.

Because the Top-Dollars.com program contains so many paid survey companies, if you actually follow their instructions and register with the first two or three groups of recommended companies, you may eventually discover that you are receiving more surveys than you can handle. This can lead to a condition known as paid survey burnout, which sometimes causes people to complain about not getting paid enough cash for taking online surveys based on the time that it takes to get through them all.

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If you are a new webmaster who is trying to gain good rankings in the search engines by looking into SEO strategies, then you have probably figured out that this particular area of website development can become quite complicated. In order to simplify things, I have briefly listed below ten simple strategies that you can use in order to optimize your site for Google’s search engine algorithm.

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My membership at Top-Dollars.com really seems to be paying off. Earlier today, I received a check in the mail for $53 from one of my paid survey companies for several surveys that I had completed last month.

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In a follow-up to yesterday’s post about the Fair Tax debate, here is a summary of what I have been able to determine are the major pros and cons of the Fair Tax (or national sales tax) as it is currently written:

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