New Theme…Sorry for Any Issues

Please be patient over the next couple of days if things get really screwed up when you’re trying to view this site. I’m going through my first attempt at developing a WordPress theme, and I’m sure there are plenty of things I’ve missed and will change.

I’ve done a few things that I hope will make this site more convenient for the regular readers and a little more organized and easy to navigate for new readers. Most of these changes are due to some really good information I’ve gotten from sites like Copy Blogger and things that I like/dislike when browsing around myself:

* Larger text for posts
* Moved to a “double wide” single column in the left margin so you don’t have to look between two columns to get to the meaty content
* Separated colors for content columns from navigation/ad columns to make the content stand out a little more.
* Integrated Google Ads into the site a little better. Hopefully this will not only make the site flow more easily for regular readers, but result in a better CTR for new visitors.
* New graphics for comments, header, etc.

Please let me know if you guys see anything I’ve overlooked (I’m sure there’s plenty) or anything you’d like to see done differently!

My Newest Feed — MyBootsNMe

Although I encourage EVERYONE to subscribe to my RSS feed (it’s free after all), I’m generally pretty picky when choosing to subscribe to a blog. Yesterday was an exception. I came across MyBootsNMe and browsed a little. I was pretty impressed and subscribed immediately. Great photos, great writing, and a pleasure to read. Check it out.

It is rare that I will subscribe to a single blog like this. Usually, I’ll have my interest in something peaked and subscribe to 10 or more new feeds on that topic within a couple of days. Invariably, most of these don’t stay on my list for more than a week or two because I’m either bored with them or they aren’t putting out much good new material.

That reminds me of another reason Google Reader is great. It provides you with stats that actually tell you how often a feed is updated and how many of the items you are actually reading. It makes it pretty easy to decide what should stay and go on your list. I try to keep my list of feeds pretty short while still spread across subjects I’m interested in.

Free Market at Work in the Blogosphere

There is quite a soap opera going on at Just Another Pretty Farce regarding Mrs. Coble’s issues with JL Kirk & Associates.

Here’s a quick synopsis:

  • Mr. and Mrs. Coble felt ripped off by an employment agency, and she blogged about it.
  • JL Kirk & Associates got mad about that, and one of their employees posted some comments on to her post on Mrs. Coble’s site (that was stupid). These comments were rather nasty, especially coming from a company trying to defend itself publicly.
  • Mrs. C. has now received a letter threatening a lawsuit if she does not remove her post(s) about JL Kirk & Associates as well as all associated comments. I suspect this has little to do with their desire to eliminate her original post, and more to do with the venemous comment one of their own employees left there.
  • Countless people will now read the account of what happened, most of whom probably would not have read the account had she not been sent a threatening letter and had it picked up by the blogosphere.
  • Many more people will view JL Kirk & Associates as scam artist jerks than ever would have before. Whether they are scam artists and/or jerks is beside the point. They’ve gone a long way through their comments on Mrs. C.’s blog and by sending a letter to give that impression.

Their own actions will hurt them significantly more than Mrs. Coble’s ever could have. You have to love the free market.

Here are some highlights of the comments left by a JL Kirk & Associates employee in her original post:

And by the way, in Mrs. Cobles’ [sic] case, we would recommend (free of charge) to further her writing “career” she learn to spell “wizardry” and polish her grammar and punctuation skills.

Well, couldn’t we all use a little help there now and then? But free of charge? That’s going above and beyond helpful!

…Mr. Coble has had difficulty with sustained upward mobility.

Is the writer trying to stoke some sort of class warfare fire?

That comment is simply stupid.

This could be broadly applied to most comments on most blogs, but usually isn’t what one says when trying to win over an audience. I seriously doubt you’ll hear that in a presidential debate, although it wouldn’t be untrue.

Mrs. Coble’s spiteful meanness precluded her from asking me about it.

Mean and spiteful? I like Mrs. Coble!

Do a Google search on Katherine Coble! She is an angry, opinionated basher of many things

I don’t need to do a Google search. This statement sold me. From this day forward, I vow to be a reader of Katherine Coble’s blog and to never do business with JL Kirk & Associates out of fear that they will send certified junk mail to my house and an unprecedented amount of traffic to my blog.

On second thought…

Google’s PPA Program

Search Engine Journal has a great article on this program, which is still in beta–typical Google.  This should be a huge boost as a money maker for bloggers, and provides even more incentive to push good, original content.

More content should mean more links and more money.  Site owners will have the ability to create text based blogs, just like the ones you can create as an Amazon affiliate.  This will allow the ads to be integrated right into the content instead of as a separate section of the site, so it shouldn’t be as difficult to draw the reader’s attention to the ads.

Younanimous

Only a month and a day after posting this, I come across younanimous.com, which bills itself as a social search engine.  Results are based not only on traditional search engine results that it retrieves, but also on user recommendations.  Check it out, pretty cool!!!

Ten Reasons to Ditch MySpace and Start YourSpace

1. ARE YOU SMART AND/OR INTERESTING?

If you are smart and/or interesting, you can easily create your own site. On your own website the possibilities are endless. You can blog all you want, add huge galleries of photos and videos, private message boards for you and your friends to contribute, etc. People who want to visit your MySpace account (and actually care about what is there), will come to your private site as well.

If you are smart, you don’t even have to be interesting to start your own site. I have lots of friends who fall into this category, and proudly count myself among them. Even if we’re not that interesting to most people, at least we’re interesting to each other. The last thing I want to do is advertise what a boring dolt I am to a bunch of “cool people” (like those on MySpace)

If you are interesting, you don’t have to be smart. Use your charisma to get one of your smart friends to help you out.

2. PROXY SERVER WASTELAND

Your personal time at home is too valuable to waste browsing around MySpace. If you can’t do it on someone else’s time, don’t bother. Unless you are living in 2006, MySpace is probably already blocked by the proxy server where you work. If not, you may want to consider looking for a job…the guys in your IT department aren’t well managed, and the whole place is going to hell in a hand-basket sooner or later.

Of course I’m joking. You should work while you’re at work, and work on your own stuff while you’re at home. I was just kidding (but not really).

You will more than likely be able to access your own site from work. This will allow you to continually keep up with what your friends are saying about you, what photos of you have been posted, and what other people are saying about your content. Sounds like MySpace, right?

One other plus is that you can set up your own webmail account on your site that probably will not be blocked by your proxy at work. Even if your company blocks most webmail (gmail, hotmail, etc) they’ll not be on the lookout for your site.

3. HOW BIG WAS YOUR LAST CHECK FROM MYSPACE?

Just for the sake of argument, let’s say you are smart and interesting, but just not famous (yet)–you have no book to pimp, no movie coming out next month, no album you recorded in your basement, and no calendar that features you in provocative poses with arctic animals. What exactly are YOU getting in return for providing MySpace (News Corp.) with all of this content about someone as original and cool as you?

If you notice, MySpace has ads all over “your” page, but they aren’t leaving messages asking where they can send your share of the revenues, right?

Set up your own site, throw a couple of AdSense ads up there and see what happens. Worst case scenario, you will get exactly what you’ve been getting from MySpace, maybe even 2 or 3 times as much. 😛

Best case, you’ll write a few interesting things that get picked up on bigger sites, and tons of traffic flow your way.

MySpace, along with other sites that are nothing but user-provided content, makes millions of dollars a year off of what YOU write and post! Don’t give it away for free! Keep it for yourself.

4. MY SO-CALLED FRIENDS

I’m willing to concede the fact that every now and then you will find someone, or they will find you, on MySpace that you’ve lost contact with over the years. But those years are probably before 1995 or so. At this point, do you really care? I mean REALLY care? Sure, it’s nice to catch up, but you aren’t friends anymore, otherwise they wouldn’t have had to look you up on MySpace to find you.

Your real friends are the ones that send you a message when their email address or phone number changes so that you don’t lose touch. You may not talk to them on a daily basis, but you feel it’s worthwhile to maintain a point of contact with one another. You don’t need MySpace to keep track of your friends.

Your real friends will be delighted to visit your site.

5. SPAM

MySpace is mostly spam. I’m not talking about the “buy viagra” or “xanax at wholesale prices” spam. I’m talking about the people and bands you’ve never heard of and have no interest in knowing asking you to be their friend all of the time. The biggest clue that you are being spammed is to check out their MySpace page. They will have at least 3,000 “friends” along with a page full of witty comments from their friends like “thanks for the add!” or “what up baby girl?”

Invariably, each of the ass-clowns who left a comment on their site have a thousand or so friends themselves. It’s like there’s some sort of contest to see who can get the most links from desperate people they don’t even know.

Put up your own site, and you won’t have to deal with this–at least not at the same level. Yeah, you’ll get some spam on your blog if you have comments enabled. Just make sure comments have to be approved before they are posted and you are safe.

Again, if you are even a little interesting and have a squirrel’s brain, it’s time to leave the world of “thanks for the add” and put up some real content. Even if you like the stupid side of MySpace, make it your own.

6. JANET JACKSON SAID IT BEST–CONTROL

If you have your own site, YOU control who gets on, what content is displayed, who gets a link, what kind of ads to run. Although there are plenty of people who will have a hard time navigating anything that isn’t exactly where they think it should be, you’ll have complete creative and editorial control on your site with layout as well.

7. STALKERS

Quite frankly, I’m tired of all the chicks using MySpace as a launchpad in their quest to meet me. I’m taken, and I like it that way. So give it a rest.

If you’re like me (and I’m sure you are), build your own private haven from these psychotic impudent strumpets.

8. A HARD PILL TO SWALLOW

Let’s face it. MySpace just isn’t cool anymore. Ever notice when you log on you can always see links to the “cool new people”? I hate to be mean, but if someone is just now getting a MySpace account, they may be new, they may be smart, and they may be interesting. But they definitely aren’t cool.

In fact, most MySpace accounts created any time in the last year or so were created by people who are not cool. since more accounts are added every day (about 230,000 according to Wikipedia), MySpace is becoming less and less cool by the minute.

Based on Wikipedia’s numbers, in the last year alone, 83,000,000 accounts have been added. I don’t know about you, but my tipping point for cool in a group is about 66.67%. If 1/3 of the people in a group aren’t cool, the group isn’t cool.

Start your own site, and only let cool people–at least let people you think are cool–hang around.

9. PUNK ASS KIDS

The older I get, the less tolerant I am of all these punk ass kids. In reality, it isn’t so much that I’m less tolerant as much as it is that I’m jealous that I can’t be a punk ass kid too.

Whether it’s annoyance or envy, I don’t want to be around them unless I’m making them run at rugby practice. I don’t want to be their friend. And I especially don’t want them finding out about how cool Tom T. Hall and Bobby Bare are. Everyone knows that once a punk ass kid thinks something is cool it is only a matter of time before it sucks.

If you are like me, this is a great reason to start your own site. You can talk about boring things that already suck like reading books, politics, or earning a living and building wealth. These topics are sure to scare off the punk ass kids. They’ll never come close to finding you if you’re on your own.

10. TRADE-IN VALUE

It never fails…as soon as something great come out, something greater comes out a little bit later. As they say at my place of employment, “take good and make it better.” As our ADD lifestyle in this country says, “yeah, it was good last year, but it sucks compared to (insert thing that will suck next year here).” If you don’t believe that last sentence, re-read this article.

By going out and staking your claim on the web, you’ll be prepared to handle the next big thing–or not–it’s your choice. You can keep all of your content and work and version up when the time is appropriate. When something bigger and better comes along, take your assets with you instead of starting over.

When you are using someone else’s asset, like MySpace, you are subject to the whims of the people running the company and changes in the market.

For example, lots of us had Yahoo! mail accounts and thought they were great until Google came out with Gmail. Now Yahoo! mail sucks. Actually, it doesn’t, but that’s the perception.

The bottom line is that by going out on your own, what’s yours is yours. You are in complete control of everything and are able to change and upgrade with the times.

Part II (of many) on SEO, Google, and Content–Technology Moves, Build For Change

First of all, I can’t take credit for all of these ideas. Lot’s of them have been borrowed from guys like Steve Pavlina who are basically saying the same thing I am.

One of the more important points Steve makes is that your content should be timeless. What he means by this is that if your content is only pertinent only to what is going on today, there’s not much reason for people to want to look at it tomorrow. This is especially important as you try to build momentum for your site traffic over time.

Early on, your site will not be highly listed on any engines. With Google, you’ll be stuck in the “sandbox” for quite a while. While you may be providing great content that is extremely relevant for the day, week, or month it is published, your potential readers will never find it, at least from a search engine. Down the road, you may be lucky enough to be bumped up to a high ranking for the search terms, but it’s likely that no one will be searching for it.

Of course, there are exceptions. For instance, I maintain a site for my rugby club (www.knoxvillerugby.com) that contains scores and information about the club for the last few years. While the score of last Saturday’s match will get the majority of its traffic in the week following the match, there is a good chance that old guys who want to relive the glory days will one day come back to our site, possibly through a search engine, and read about what happened way back when. But, like I said, the majority of the traffic is going to come in the first week. This traffic is not search engine driven. It is driven by the fact that the site is reliable and updated in a timely manner. Not only do members of our club check our site regularly, but members of other clubs whose place in the league standings are tied to the results of our match check it as well.

So what do I mean by “build for change”? One could take that statement as a call to build in scalability and flexibility. While these are certainly important attributes to consider for your site, this actually isn’t what I’m talking about at all. The basic idea of what I’m saying is, don’t focus your efforts on search engines. Don’t focus on trying to get people to link to you. Don’t focus your energy on driving loads of traffic to your site today.

Focus on providing your customers with exactly what they want–good content that they want to come back for. All the rest will follow.

The biggest problem with relying on technology to drive your traffic is that technology is always changing. In 1999-2000, the .com boom, I was doing some work for a company who was selling its services to European companies to boost their rankings on search engines. Back then, Yahoo! ruled the roost, but they didn’t have nearly the market share that Google has now. People weren’t focused just on getting ranked highly on Yahoo!, but every search engine. We were monitoring rankings on over 100 different search engines as well as checking for links on the highest traffic sites on the web. Our goal was to get our customers rated highly on ALL of these engines. In much the same way that Google’s Page Rank system works now, each customer was assigned an indexed ranking based on their listing in the engines and the number of links to them that existed on high traffic sites.

Not exactly rocket surgery, but useful at the time. What wasn’t foreseen by my employer was the fact that one company was going to come in and basically take over the search industry. I was constantly asking, “what do we do when the situation changes?” I’ve long since parted ways with them, but I can imagine that their customers aren’t very thrilled with their Ask Jeeves rankings being in the top ten if their Google ranking is 97. I’m sure they’ve adjusted their product to account for this, but there are factors they didn’t see coming that I’m not sure they’ve dealt with. I would guess the most difficult problem they had to addres is that not only did the dominant players in the game change, but the technology changed as well.

The way search engines worked has drastically changed since 2000. Search engines are smarter (especially Google). Search engines are better equiped to handle rapidly changing sites. Most importantly, search engines are constantly changing and improving going forward.

Ironically, one of the tasks assigned to me way back then was to develop a “keyword generator”. Literally, those were the specifications I was given–“develop a keyword generator”. Now, my idea of a keyword generator and my boss’s were completely different, and frankly, my idea was a little ahead of its time.

My boss was very disappointed when I proudly showed him my software. He was expecting a tool that prompted the user enter a few keywords, then spat back these same keywords with the <meta> tags around them.

He was actually a little angry when I demonstrated my app that spidered three layers into a site and returned suggestions for keywords based on frequently occurring words and weighted based on the page on which they occurred and their placement on the page.

Which sounds like it more accurately addresses how search engines work nowadays?

The point isn’t that he wanted me to write a tool with very little functionality (and there were a million of these already available). The problem was that he had no inkling that search engines could ever change or evolve and refused to consider it when confronted.

We are facing a movement today that I predict will drastically change the game again. Social networking sites are becoming more popular by the minute as a way to find information. “Rankings” on sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, etc. are driven completely by the users. Relevance and quality aren’t being decided by algorithms at all, but by actual people. So when 1,000 people “digg” your site, you better believe that there are thousands of others who are going to sit up and take notice of it.

As more and more people discover these sites and see the value in them, high rankings on these sites will become more and more important. Some people are well aware of this situation and are already coming up with ways to try to “game” these sites by falsifying user recommendations, and they are responding by banning domains that try to beat the system. I think a better approach is to focus on providing good, original content. You will not only increase your chances of finding good, loyal users, but you’ll also have built for the future.

We don’t know for sure what tomorrow will bring in search, social networking, or technologies that are still in their infancy. What we know for sure is that the goal of these technologies is always going to be finding and categorizing the best content out there.

Build quality into your site, and you can rest easy that you’ve also built for change.

Part I (of many) on SEO, Google, and Content

I’ve been reading up a lot lately on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), marketing, monetizing a blog, sandboxes, traffic generation, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

From what I’ve read, what I feel in my gut, and what everything else I’ve done in life has taught me, I’ve come to a pretty simple conclusion–you gotta work for it, at least as far as content driven sites go. And just like everything else, if you put in the hard yards and take care of what you can control, the rest will take care of itself.

I’m doing a little experiment, which I’ll discuss in a seperate post, to determine how much a very targeted SEO strategy can help impact a site that is basically without content. In contrast, I also have this site (not an experiment), with I plan on providing an abundance of relavant, original content that is focused on, well, nothing in particular. As I said, more on that later.

I’m not saying it doesn’t pay to be smart about SEO and to be aware of the existence of search engines. You would be stupid not to use keywords that are relevant (the important word here is relevant) to your site, and it is probably worth your while to do some research into the most common searches that occur for your target market. But in the end, the free market will determine whether or not your site is successful, not Google. Why? Because not only is your site market driven, but Google is market driven itself!

Maybe I’m a simpleton who isn’t looking at all the angles, but here goes…

How Google’s Market Relates to Your Market

Google’s goal is to provide its customers with relevant search results. The reason Google is the top search engine, and the reason everyone wants a high Google ranking, is that it actually does a good job at achieving this goal. People’s trust in Google to give them what they are looking for was brought about by Google’s ability to sort through the junk and provide relavant results. Google’s continued dominance relies on being smart enough to know which sites deliver relevant content and which sites are simply trying to trick the user into visiting the site in hopes of selling them something they aren’t looking for. If Google fails to perform, someone else will jump in and provide this service.

That’s the beauty of the free market–if it is technologically possible, the demand will be met. In fact, the technology actually drives the demand in this case. So Google not only has to worry about providing their users with a quality product right now, but they also have to work to continue to provide a quality product in the future or risk being upended by someone with better technology who does a better job.

In other words, if Google’s search engine is dumb enough for you to trick it placing a crappy, irrelevant, get-rich-quick site high up the rankings, no one will want to use it anymore. If no one uses it anymore, what good is it for you to be ranked highly there? At that point, Google is no longer able to effectively connect you to your market.

I Called This One a Looooong Time Ago

Google entering the corporate software market.  Actually this is a step toward what I’ve predicted will happen.  Currently, Google’s model is to host all of the information on their site.  Some companies will have an issue with this, which is reasonable. 

I’ve predicted Google’s ultimate objective will be to sell an appliance that runs inside the corporate intranet.  The hardware will be bought/leased from Google, and no corporate information will get past the company’s firewall.  Google will maintain and patch the appliance from Mountain View, so users will always have the most up to date versions with the latest patches.  This will free up IT departments to deal with other issues, like keeping Microsoft patched and secure.

The big gotcha here is that all the users need to run the software is a browser.  Enter simplified versions of opensource OS’s that do nothing but run a browser.  Google can take a big bite out of Microsoft, not necessarily by stealing market share, but by eliminating a large part of the office suite and operating system markets entirely.