The U.S. has removed Internet sanctions applied to Iran, Cuba and Sudan. This means that restrictions for popular Internet companies like Facebook and Twitter are no longer in force and can be served to the said regions.

In a Senate hearing last week on Human Rights and the Law, a key issue discussed was the lack of access to U.S. Internet based applications.

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WordPress has just given a great, new feature to the over 10 million blogs it hosts on WordPress.com. The new feature, called PuSH, short for Pubsubhubbub, is a protocol to speed up RSS feeds and new posts.

From now on, when new blog posts are published, they are “pushed” to RSS feedreaders like Feedburner, instead of waiting for the reader to “ping” the blog.

Here is something controversial and risky. For some reason, the Pentagon has allowed social media within its military ranks, claiming that Twitter and Facebook among others outweighs security concerns. Though this may be indeed beneficial, especially for the young service men, looming information leaks and security threats are feared from the said decision.

The new policy says commanders will still need to defend against cyber-attacks and block access to online pornography, gambling and sites promoting “hate-crime related activities.” Would this move be a wise one or just another bonehead idea?

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So I was reading up on some new utilities and that for bloggers, and I discovered that, get this, there’s actually a way to animate your blog headlines.

We’ve talked at length before about the importance of making your headlines stand out from the crowd and really get people’s attention, but before, we were largely limited to just using words.  Snappy wordplay, surprise sentences, bricks out of nowhere–that’s the kind of thing we were working with before.

But now, thanks to Google Feedburner, it’s actually possible to turn that chunk of text into an animated scrolling banner.  Here’s a quick treatise on how to use it:

Just paste a HTML code whereever you can. I can suggest popular forums but this banner may be used in email signatures too. To find Headline animator log in your Feedburner account, click on Publicize and than click on Headline animator. You will see many options here. Do not be afraid to change these settings because you may use default settings but I offer you to make your banner as catchy as possible.

So with that, you can turn your headlines from boring blocks of text (even the best ones are merely elevated to “blocks of text” instead of “boring blocks of text”) to a hugely attractive, eye catching display.

Most of you have probably answered that question already, so I’ll go ahead and answer down here so as to give you my insights on the topic.

Plain and simple, it’s emotions that hold attention better, and they’re not connected.

Look, we’ve all seen advertising and blog posts that are just long skeins of facts building up to one central conclusion or theme.  They’re great and well reasoned and everything, but for crying out loud, they just don’t hold water when it comes to attention.

But when you go after people’s emotions–you tell a story, you make them laugh, you make them cry–suddenly you’ve captured a whole new high ground that defies every convention you might expect.

Remember yesterday when we talked about Pennzoil?  They took an intellectual appeal route, and it collapsed under them.  Meanwhile, when I talked about that Snickers bar the other day, people took that ball and ran with it.  You taste the Snickers bar, you remember how good you felt when you ate it–you didn’t consider the caloric value of the components or how valuable nutrients are found in peanuts.  You went the emotional route.

So remember that when you write a blog post–grabbing attention is at the emotional level.

Back in the deep dark depths of 1996, back before Titanic was destroying the box office and well before the death of Chris Farley would make sure the world would never be the same again, Pennzoil came out with a big ad campaign that had this for a tagline:

“Pennzoil is the only leading brand of motor oil to meet the 1996 SAE requirements two years early.”

How many of you know what that even MEANS?

And if you know, how many of you care?

Pennzoil shelled out millions of 1996 dollars–more by today’s standards–to tell us all something we neither understood nor cared about.  And as a result, Pennzoil lost a whole lot of money on an ad campaign that did absolutely nothing to sell its own product.

This all relates back to the main headline, who cares, or why no one reads your blog.  Are you telling people something they don’t care about, like Pennzoil did?  If you’re wondering why no one reads your stuff, ask yourself if they have any reason to.  And if you find that they don’t, start thinking about what you can do to MAKE them care.  If you do that you’ll find yourself greatly ahead of the game.

Admittedly, this is not a problem we have around here.

Our readers are so spectacularly awesome that they CONSTANTLY leave comments on our threads, and it’s not easy to keep up with them all!  Seriously, you guys are comment MACHINES, and we love you for it.

Seriously, we do.  Nothing makes blogging feel better than to know you’re doing some kind of good somewhere.  If your humor blog is making people laugh or your philosophy board is making them think or if your blog mechanics board is giving people new and useful ideas that they want to try themselves, the whole process just FEELS better.  You’re doing good in the world and that’s quite a reward.

But if your comments are falling off, what do you do?

You could try asking questions of your readers.  What would you like us to cover? is a great one.  What do YOU want to know?

Don’t tell anyone about this, but this approach serves two useful purposes.  One, it gets people engaged, and telling you what they want.  This in turn gives you a great excuse to PROVIDE it.  And when you provide what people want, you not only never have to find a blog idea again, you also make a whole lot of people very happy.

So next time you write a blog, be sure to ask your readers what they want.  It’ll give you ideas you never dreamed of.

And just to take my own advice–what do YOU guys want me to talk about?  Just hit the comments section and tell me what you want to see here!

Way back when, when Congress outlawed the use of sound to promote cigarettes, there was a popular jingle roaming the country, and most people born before 1960 probably still remember it even fifty years later.

Seriously, try it some time.  Go up to your parents and see if they can complete this: “Winston tastes good like a…”  and chances are they’ll come back with “cigarette should”.

There’s a reason for this.  As it turns out, things you SEE stick in your memory for about a second, while things you HEAR stick for a full five seconds.   Now, how can you take advantage of that quirk in memory?  Well, these days it’s a bit easier–ever since podcasting came on the scene it isn’t quite so difficult to insert audio clips into your blogging to mix things up a bit.

So next time you’re left wondering if your readership is paying attention, try slipping a little audio in there.  Sound is intrusive and sound memory is fully five times longer than sight memory, so you can take advantage of that unusual quirk in the human brain for your own benefit.