Merry Christmas (a day late) and Happy New Year (five days early).
I’m on vacation and will not be posting to bizhack for a week or so.
(Unless I am hit by some burning inspiration that cannot stay inside.)
[tags] hiatus, vacation, bizhack, john koetsier [/tags]
No, this site has not been hacked, and no, I have not decided to change my sexual orientation. Rather, this is a cautionary tale on the foolish choosing of domain names.
There exists, unfortunately, a company called Pen Island. Said company wished, unfortunately, to have an eponymous domain name: penisland.com. Said domain name, unfortunately, is easily misread by those with dirty minds. (That’s you, gentle reader.)
The problem is that not only is the domain name suseptible to conflation with rather more prurient proclivities, the content of the website is too.
Not only can you get them custom-made:
They’re also guaranteed real, not imitation. No pumps here.
Whatever your taste, Pen Island has something for you:
Even the advertising fits the theme. After all, this is a pen lover’s paradise:
Not sure what you prefer? Take a free sample for a test drive:
(OK, I know I’m going to regret this post. Probably just as soon as I hit the Publish button. Ah well – what’s life without a little pushing the envelope?
Last note: yes, I know the site is a fabrication. Check the category links … this is not a real company’s website.)
[tags] pens, island, funny, john koetsier [/tags]
Nicolas Koenig recently posted ModernCaptcha, a comment spam protection technology inspired by Seth Godin that is far easier to use than most captchas.
On the one hand, this is great because captchas suck. Hard. They’re difficult to read, annoying, slow down the user experience, and make people feel stupid when they can’t get them right.
In Koenig’s implementation, all you have to do is match a well-known logo to a web address. Simple – right? Probably – if you’re a reasonably savvy web user. Maybe not, however, if you’re not an English speaker or familiar with major tech companies.
But the biggest issue I have with any form of captcha is that they slow down the read-write web. They’re web 2.0 friction. And there’s a better way.
Crowdsource your comment spam problem
Akismet is a simple idea implemented amazingly well: use collective intelligence from all over the web to identify comment spam on blogs and other social spaces online.
It works amazingly well – capturing well over 99% of the comment spam on this blog. That’s about 30,000 comment spams in the past year or so.
What this allows you to do is outsource your comment-spam-control problem. Or, to be even more buzzword-compliant, crowd-source it.
The best captcha is no captcha at all.
[tags] captcha, seth godin, Nicolas Koenig, modern captcha, comment spam, john koetsier [/tags]
Working at home today … we’re getting all the windows in our house replaced.
The installers follow a sort of factory assembly-line model: first they take all the old windows out; then they put all the new windows in.
Which means, of course, that I am freezing my (insert random body part here) off.
[tags] windows, home, work, telecommuting, john koetsier [/tags]
Have you seen the Million-dollar blog post yet? It’s not a money-making scheme, it’s a money-giving scheme.
Post your wish – one dollar will be donated to charity for each wish posted.
Here’s mine:
My one wish is not for “others” to be better, or for faceless governments to change policies, or for NGOs to make a difference, or for organizations, groups, categories of any kind.
My wish for the world is that I will be a better human being, and so doing, will be more, do more, and give more to those in need.
(Bonus wish: that you – yes you reading right now – would do the same.)
[tags] one million wishes, million dollar blog post, john koetsier [/tags]
I’ve been working through a lot of product identification and differentiation lately, and this Seth Godin post really hit home: the story always matters.
The most important point:
“A commodity is only a commodity if you treat it like one.”
So: are we going to treat our products as commodities, or will they be the pages we write on to deliver interesting, compelling, remarkable messages to the people who buy and use our products?
It’s only a commodity if we are so bored (and boring) to treat it as such.
People want to be excited. People want to be motivated. People want to be captivated. People want to be passionate.
Are we allowing, providing, creating, inventing, hiding, showing, and building those possibilities into the things we create? What’s the story?
Let’s make it a good one.
[tags] stories, marketing, products, seth godin, john koetsier [/tags]
OK, maybe not lots. But some – Google proves it. (Yes, this is about a recent post.)
Google has 509 results for “snaining.” And the urban dictionary, bless it’s electronic little heart, has an entry for snaining.
That horrible combination of rain that is not quite snow…but soon will be.
Basically, it’s airborne precipitation that fluctuates mid-drop, and can’t seem to make up its mind whether it’s rain … or snow …
Only problem? Apparently the word was invented by a Stephanie Tyler of Eaton Township, Ohio. And here I thought I had had the privilege!
[tags] snaining, john koetsier [/tags]
OK, I still don’t get it:
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday ordered his staff to begin revising the California’s lethal injection procedure to allay concerns raised by a federal judge that condemned inmates are being subjected to unnecessary pain. (Full story.)
I posted on this months ago: We’re only going to kill him if it doesn’t hurt.
It’s not the pain … it’s the killing that matters!
Sure, pain is not nice. Pain is not good. Pain is, well, painful. But it’s a very small thing, really, compared to being dead, toast, BBQ’d, poisoned, beheaded.
Pain is temporary. Death is forever.
I think those who are in favor of the death penalty think it’s easier to convince others of the rightness of that position if they can say it’s a painless process. To me, that’s nonsense.
(And I happen to agree with the death penalty in some cases.)
If you can do it painlessly, great. Fine. But don’t defend the morality of capital punishment by saying it’s painless! Conversely, don’t say that capital punishment is wrong because it causes pain.
That’s just missing the point.
[tags] death, penalty, pain, execution, Schwarzenegger, capital punishment [/tags]
Blogging software: $0
Hosting account: $20/month
Half-decent Technorati rating: $very expensive (in time!)
Spammers spamming anti-spam posts: priceless
(Make sure the page you’re linking to works.)
[tags] adwords, google, ads, john koetsier [/tags]
Here are a few things that have caught my eye lately. Usually these types of articles hang around in Safari tabs for days until I stick ‘em up on del.icio.us. Maybe I’ll start just blogging them, link-blog-style, from now on …
While any compelling Internet service can benefit from word of mouth exposure, not every compelling consumer Internet service possesses the proper characteristics to rely on viral distribution. I’d like to propose a new definition for what qualifies as a viral Internet service. A viral Internet service is one where each new user must involve friends to derive personal value from the service.
Many companies want to get involved in social media. Some see the promise of building closer relationships with stakeholders (customers, employees, partners, etc…). While others are excited about new marketing methods they must try. The novelty of social media is wearing off. That’s a good thing. Now we can get down to what it is really good for …
I was reading Brad Garlinghouse’s Peanut Butter Manifesto about Yahoo’s strategy having been spread too thin across too many opportunities. Quoting the memo:
I’ve heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular. I hate peanut butter. We all should.
Social-networking sites may be sprouting like weeds, but none yet operates as a bona fide marketplace, with members buying and selling their own creations as much as they blog, link, and post. Breyer, who sits on Wal-Mart’s board, is interested in backing an international network for indie artists, musicians, filmmakers, authors, designers, and other creative types from dozens of countries.
[tags] links, quickies, john koetsier, business, web2.0 [/tags]
OK, I am Judge Glenda Hatchett, am black, female, a lawyer, a judge, and would love to come speak at your next corporate function for $35K.
Please send me all your inquiries and requests for help. After all, everyone else does.
Ahhh … the “wisdom” of masses …
[tags] judge glenda hatchett, john koetsier, funny, stupid [/tags]
Well it’s the morning after and I have to decide if I can still live with myself.
Yesterday, of course, I dipped my toes in the (murky?) waters of paid reviews with Review: Search Engine Marketing Glossary. Today I see that my review has been accepted and I’ll be paid $30.
A buck a minute isn’t too bad – it sure beats Google AdWords – but how do I feel about writing a post for money?
Short answer: I’m not sure yet. It definitely feels different … frankly, it feels a little frightening. Am I OK with this? Is it right?
I don’t think paid reviews are unethical when there’s full disclosure. I think the ambivalence that I’m feeling rises from the fact that my blog, my space, my stake in the cyber-sand, which I have only used so far for personal and professional thinking out loud, now has a commercial feel to it – more than what you’d get from AdWords or banner ads.
I’ll have to think this one through a little more …
. . .
. . .
Some other thoughts:
[tags] reviewme, paid content, paid reviews, google, adwords, john koetsier [/tags]
This is a paid review. More details at the end of the post.
SEO is a bit of a black art to me.
I mean, I know all about the generalities of search engine optimization, and I think you’ll find a few of them reflected here. URLs of all my pages contain keywords; titles of all post pages have the title first, then the bizhack station ID second; and I try to be a good linking citizen – linking to those who are useful and good and interesting, and hoping to be linked to in turn.
But SEO is one of those topics that you can seemingly delve endlessly into. Everyone has different ideas, everyone has different strategies. Just to make it more interesting, SEO is an ongoing arms race between Google et al and the SEO practitioners … who are always looking for a new way to game the system.
When it comes right down to it, the best SEO strategy is probably to:
With that as background, I was asked to review the Search Engine Marketing Glossary … a compendium of SEO terms and definitions compiled by Aaron Wall, the author of the SEO book. A little expensive, at $79, but it’s recommended by Seth Godin, which is high praise, and obviously any reasonably proficient SEO optimizer would cost you far more in consulting fees.
In any case, the Glossary is simply that – a list of SEO terms and their definitions. Here’s the funny self-referential point … the glossary of SEO term is actually a major SEO effort to improve the SEO ranking of the SEO book so that more people who search for the term SEO will find it and, perhaps, buy it. Now that’s the essence of SEO!
With that said, I can’t say that I found a huge amount of value in the glossary. Most of the definitions I either know or don’t have a huge interest in. One that was interesting was an actual revealing of the Google PageRank algorithm:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
PR= PageRank
d= dampening factor (~0.85)
c = number of links on the page
PR(T1)/C(T1) = PageRank of page 1 divided by the total number of links on page 1, (transferred PageRank)
Of course, that’s the purported PageRank algorithm. The real, current PR process may or may not have a huge impact on Google listings today, and probably bears little relationship to whatever Larry Page and Sergei Brin wrote up in a Stanford paper years ago.
I don’t really understand why PDF is in the glossary, and as far as I know Safari is a Mac web browser, not a “measure of how frequently a keyword appears amongst a collection of documents.” But hey, words have multiple meanings.
Overall, I’m sure there’s plenty of value for newbie SEO optimizers, and even some for those who understand a little more about SEO.
Most of the value, however, is in driving potential clients to the SEO book.
Paid Review
Since I like to keep in touch with all the new forms of blog monetization, I signed up for Review Me’s paid review service about 2 months ago. I’ve had a few requests to do paid reviews that I’ve turned down; this service seemed to be one that was up my alley of interests enough that I probably would have done it anyways, paid or not.
I haven’t said anything simply because I’m being paid for the review, and frankly, the content of the review is very likely not what a person or organization using paid reviews even cares about. What they’re paying for is the link, primarily. At least, that’s my assumption. (The amount, if you’re interested, is $30.)
In any case, I’ve done this mainly as a test – to see what it feels like, and to see how it works on this blog. If you have any comments, flames, criticisms, or any reaction at all, please let me know!
Ho hum, it’s snaining here in Langley, BC., Canada.
(Snow and rain mixed together, for the uninitiated.)
[tags] snow, rain, snain, snaining, langley, bc, john koetsier [/tags]
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
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