This morning, we're returning to Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum in Washington, DC to check at least one exhibit - How Things Fly. After last week's great visit to Exploring the Planets and checking out Black Holes: The Other Side of Infinity, Raphael interest is shifting toward flight. "Daddy, how does the plane fly?" And fortunately, there happens to be a great exhibit on exactly that at the Museum! The following description is from Smithsonian's Web site: 

How Things Fly

How does an airplane stay aloft? How can something as insubstantial as air support all that weight? Why do you become "weightless" in space? How can you propel yourself there, with no air to push against? These and many other questions are answered in How Things Fly, a gallery devoted to explaining the basic principles that allow aircraft and spacecraft to fly.

The emphasis here is "hands-on." Dozens of exhibits invite you to push, pull, press, lift, slide, handle, touch, twist, turn, spin, bend, and balance. Here you can discover for yourself answers to things you've always wondered about flight. You can explore the nature of gravity and air, how wings work, supersonic flight, aircraft and rocket propulsion, flying in space, and more.

This exhibition is on view in Gallery 109

We also intend, if we have time to check out:

Apollo to the Moon

When President Kennedy committed the nation in 1961 to landing a man on the Moon, America had sent only a single astronaut briefly into space. By the time the Apollo program ended, it had taken the efforts of more than a half-million people, produced the largest and most powerful rockets ever built, and sent humans farther than they had ever gone before.

The great achievements of the Apollo program rested upon many small ones, upon thousands of technical innovations and boundless ingenuity. The heart of Apollo to the Moon is its unparalleled display of artifacts from Apollo and earlier missions that bring this sweeping endeavor down to a human scale. Displays range from a huge F-1 rocket engine and a scale model of the Saturn V rocket to space food and personal items that astronauts took into space. The gallery also displays some of the Museum's great treasures: space suits worn by Apollo astronauts on the Moon.

This exhibition is on view in Gallery 210

Lastly, we're going so early so we can grab free tickets for the following show at the Albert Einstein Planetarium:

The Stars Tonight
Journey through the stars, constellations and celestial highlights of the current night sky with a Museum staff member using the Albert Einstein Planetarium projector.

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The following article is reprinted from the December 2008 Plugged In column of Society of American Florists' (SAF) Floral Management Magazine. SAF's Floral Management is distributed to more than 11,000 SAF members and is the floral industry's premier floral business practices publication.

Consider us your online pit crew, always there tinkering around with ways to put your Web site's search engine ranking into overdrive. Last month, we ran a basic search engine optimization (SEO) tune-up, by concentrating on basic keywords, <meta> tags placement and source coding.

Now we're going NASCAR on you and your online vehicle. While the basics may get you on the first page of Google search, why be the ninth or tenth listing when you can be in the top five? This month, we get under the hood, where the body text of your Web site is just waiting for keywords that will catch the attention of customers - and Google.

Local Content Separates You From the Pack

Generic keywords in your <title> and <meta> tags serve the purpose of making your Web site a large target for Internet shoppers who use search engines to find flower shops in your area. You can equate this to fishing with a net. If you've done the SEO basics, your site will likely turn up in customer's net when they go online. But if they want a specific type of shop, you need to make sure they catch you. It's a big ocean -and your competitors exploit this. When you stock your site with loads of local content, customers will easily snag what they want.

Unlike order gatherers, you have specific local knowledge, can elaborate on your shop's unique qualities and invest more time in loading your Web site with this information. Shoppers will choose you because they're confident you're local.

Last month, you gathered specific names of funeral homes, country clubs, hotels, hospitals, reception sites, etc. and a list of the cities/towns to which you deliver. Grab that list. Then, make another list of all your Web site's subpage labels that feature your business specialties such as weddings, special events, sympathy business, etc. Now let's add some high-octane content to your homepage.

No Place Like Home

Like most florist Web sites, yours likely has a product catalog featured prominently high on the page with no text. That's a waste of prime real estate. Let's use the virtual frontage to draw in local shoppers with the paragraph of text below as a template:

Real Local Florist Offering Delivery of Fresh Flowers in Fairfax, Va. [Your shop name] is a real florist located in the heart of Fairfax since 1965. We offer one-of-a- kind, spectacular floral arrangements and gifts for everyday occasions, weddings and special events [this should match your subpage text labels]. Prompt delivery gets fresh flowers, floral arrangements and roses to all areas of Northern Virginia, including Fairfax, Vienna, Springfield, Burke and Centreville.

The text in bold is considered the header and should be encapsulated in <h1> and</h1> tags in the source code. This is crucial as the search engines place high value on text within the <h1> tag, the words in the paragraph's first sentence and content of the first paragraph of the page (in that order). The keywords should match your base keywords in your <title> and <meta> tags.

Now, about that relocated catalog: Put it at the bottom of the page, followed by this template text:

Service and Delivery to Northern Virginia Businesses and Residences [Your shop name] offers service and delivery of fresh flowers, fresh plants and custom arrangements to Fairfax Hospital, Arlington Hospital, Centreville Hospital, Fairfax Funeral Home, Burke Funeral Parlor, Fairfax Country Club, St. Leo Catholic Church, Fairfax Baptist Church, Burke Lutheran Church... We deliver to Zip Codes 22030, 22314, 22312...

Ditto for Subpages

Apply the same method to your subpages. The keywords on subpages should match the unique products and services you offer. The example template below talks about your sympathy business.

Sympathy Flowers, Casket Sprays, Memorial Arrangements Delivery to Fairfax, Va. Funeral Homes and Cemeteries [Your shop name] offers delivery of sympathy flowers, casket sprays and memorial arrangements to Northern Virginia funeral homes and cemetaries including Fairfax Funeral Home, Burke Funeral Parlor...

Apply the <h1> tag for the header and repeat on all subpages. Search engines potentially rank subpages as valuable as your home page, especially if the content is unique and you apply the same methods to make it distinct. The more pages with high ranks, the more chances that search engines lead folks right to you.

Renato Cruz Sogueco is SAF's chief information officer and a regular contributor to Floral Management. E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

SIDEBAR: Is My Content Catching on?

The key to writing unique content is to be creative, detailed, honest and comprehensive. If you've snagged local awards or been voted best in town, add this information. Have an exclusive "metro pick" - like a Red, White and Blue Beltway Bouquet or a Bloomington Blooms? Get it in your online mix. Add customer's locations to online testimonials. Once content is in place, tweak the text depending on the keywords used to find your site. You can find out using a tool like Google Analytics. Don't make wholesale changes but keep adding content, tricking out your site with new content to build the rich layer that competitors can never match.   - R.S.

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Like many associations, the Society of American Florists (SAF) keeps tabs on technologies that affect its industry through a standing technology committee. But despite meeting twice a year, the stunning pace of technology innovation would have the committee reeling from the tech onslaught unless it was all written down. Hence, SAF's Technology Whitepaper.

To identify various technologies and recommend their adoption (or not) among floral businesses, SAF's technology committee uses a simple "bus" analogy, with three categories:

• The bus has left. If you're a floral business and you're not using technologies in this category, then you are almost certainly losing money and/or losing efficiency in your business processes.
• The bus is here. If you're not using "the bus is here" technologies, then you are missing out on potential revenue opportunities and/or on processes that can likely improve efficiency.
• The bus is coming. If you adopt one of the "bus is coming" technologies, you may be spending too much time and/or money on technology without proven results.

When the committee edits the whitepaper, the members talk about each technology and discuss whether any updates to its status are needed based on adoption and successful implementation by floral businesses. Technologies in the whitepaper will naturally jump from one category to another as time passes and early adopters find success or new technologies become standard fare. Much of the movement happens in the "bus is here" and the "bus is coming" categories. For example, in the latest edition, the following items were deemed to have "arrived" and moved from "bus is coming" to "bus is here": remote backup service, voice over internet protocol, and biometrics. The committee believed there has been enough implementation with these specific technologies to no longer label them as future tech.

This style of categorization is applicable in any industry, of course, but it's important to keep your specific industry's needs in mind. Every industry adopts technology at its own pace, and some technologies that may be useful to one industry will be irrelevant to others. For instance, in our last meeting, the committee added laptop computing and digital photo editing software to the "bus has left" and "bus is here" categories, respectively, because they were obvious omissions. A totally new technology, online reputation management, was also added to address the growing requirement for floral businesses to monitor the blogosphere, chat rooms, and feedback sites for references, good and bad, about their shops. Meanwhile, two technologies were removed from the list altogether: virtualization and video game consoles. While virtualization is hot among medium to larger businesses, a majority of floral businesses simply aren't large enough to need it. Also, the committee believed video game consoles should no longer be included because the members see no clear business value for florists.

To check out all the technologies SAF's Technology Committee has identified and how they're categorized, click here.The original Whitepaper post can be found here.

Renato Cruz Sogueco is the chief information officer at the Society of American Florists in Alexandria, Virginia. Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

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