I run this joint. Don’t know where to start? Let me show you around:
Not only is he on Technorati’s 100 most popular blogs ranking 22nd, Jason Kottke is apparently a model for Defunker Tees (pictured left). They guy is all over the place despite averaging only a few posts a week to his blog and making a livelihood off contributing readers.
Welcome to 2006.
As if professional sports weren’t bad enough, tennis went out and bought instant replay. Starting this year, the game will have a challenge system and ready to use instant reply that will only make tennis players that much more snoby. From the article: “Oh, there will be some technical glitches. And no one will grasp the challenge system, which bears similarities to the NFL’s model of contesting officials’ calls, for the first few months. But it sure beats the alternative.”
What alternative is that? Leaving human error in an imperfect game that makes it more personable, exciting, and keeps it just a game. Heaven forbid, we still have human error and mistakes in this world.
Another reason why instant-replay-free baseball is still the best (minus the roids, of course).
My former partner and still great friend Robert Bradford posted one of the best articles I’ve read in a very long time. He writes: “I have lots of opportunity and lots of choices. Some are harder to make than others–especially when it’s deciding between two good things. But I’m grateful to have options.”
Very inspiring read on options, and I look forward to many more posts of this caliber from you bobby.
Our DVD player died a couple of weeks ago. It’s still dead. We’ve had it for right about two years courtesy of my little sister Sara as a Christmas gift. She’s been a good one, but we really need it to work for our Seinfeld DVD fix and Baby Einstein DVD’s that Sadie’s Nanna bought her for Christmas. That’s where Walmart comes in.
Here’s to the next two, hopefully 4-5 years of “divida” madness.
During the Christmas break, I was driving behind what was obviously a plumbing service truck. On the back of the vehicle read the following:
“We’re number 1 in the number 2 business.”
Now I’m sure there are a thousand plumbers with this tagline, and I’m not one for clever slogans, but If I were a plumber, that would be my motto. I couldn’t help but laugh.
It’s been a really great year. Learned lots, had a baby, and grew in my marriage with the wife. It’s been almost two weeks since a Smooth Harold update, but I’ll be posting a year in review in the coming days citing the best of the site along with my favorite posts.
Hope all had a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
The King Kong story hasn’t aged well. It was originally released in 1933, and it shows. The film has very little dialog, and the story seems as primitive as the movie’s protagonist. Director Peter Jackson is ambitious and does a fine job with the presentation, albeit a couple of hours too long, but he just didn’t have a story to work with. Shouldn’t the story be the foundation of a good movie? That being the case, it’s hard to score the production on any type of scale. “IN” for incomplete would better suite it. Jack Black did pull off a very convincing and greedy producer though.
Best part of the movie: Watching my little daughter’s eyes follow the big screen and sit quietly for mommy and daddy during the whole 3.5 hour ordeal. What a little trooper (she’s only 2.5 months old).
Bloggers are a daring bunch. Many can’t decide whether they host a non-profit or for-profit website, using both strategies in an effort to maximize their income. Problem is, by using both strategies simultaneously, they are more likely hurting their take-home.
For example, many bloggers place ads on their website. This is an obvious for-profit strategy that works well given high site traffic. But many of those same sites also solicit donations or contributions via PayPal for the sole purposes of “investing directly back into the site for hosting and maintenance purposes.” Wait a minute. You mean you can use your ad revenue to do that and then subtract your costs from revenue to get your profit? That’s like Google making money off their ads but still asking people for donations to help with their costs.
Here’s an idea bloggers, pick one. Either go the kottke.org route and ask for donations only (non-profit), or go the ad route (for-profit) and make money that way. It doesn’t work both ways, and you’re only fooling yourself if you believe individuals can’t read between the lines.
I got sick late yesterday afternoon. It’s either a really bad cold or a mild flu. Regardless, I’m not feeling on top of my game, but I’m thankful for the human body principally the whole fever bit.
A fever is the body’s reaction to disease or infection. It is a self defense mechanism. The body raises its internal body heat in an effort to kill off the infection. It obviously can get dangerous when reaching high levels, but usually the fever will break.
Mine broke early this morning at about 5am. Other than waking up soaked in sweat, I felt extremely better. I have no idea why a fever finally decides to “break” or if it’s just a wives tale, but I’m grateful for the human body and its inherent defense mechanisms. Now back to sleep…
The mullet: “All business in front, nothing but a party in the back.”
(Source: VH1 – I love the 80’s)
Sao Paulo, Brazil is ginormous. Though it’s ranked second in population only to Seol, Korea from the world’s largest cities rankings, I’m convinced it has the most number of skyscrapers. They may not be the biggest but they go on forever.
If that isn’t convincing enough, New York City is ranked as the largest metropolitan area in the world with just over 20 million people. Having been to both New York and Sao Paulo, the former looks tiny in comparison to the latter. This is mostly due to Sao Paulo’s lack of distant suburbs and its compressed nature. The city redefines the word vast, and is truly a sight to see.
CMO Magazine has a nice introduction to anyone new to search engine optimization (SEO) . All-in-all, the article does a good of explaining the basics. Juan Perez writes: “SEO is the attempt to modify something about your website to improve the quality of your organic or algorithmic rankings at the big search engines.”
If I may add my two cents, SEO has nothing to do with meta tags, link building, or even pay-per-click advertising. In short, it’s coding your website in a manner than computers can understand and better archive your site content for searching.
(Source: CMO)
From the article: “According to circulation figures, newspaper subscriptions are declining. Logically, the Web gets much of the blame. However, a closer look indicates that this is part of a twenty-year trend – quite a bit longer than the average person has had easy Internet access. Some industry analysts believe the real culprit (or at least the one that started it all) is twenty-four hour cable news. Others say changes in the rules governing telemarketing (the means by which major papers gained up to 65 percent of their home delivery subscribers in the past) have had the greatest impact of all.”
Lindsey and I get nearly all our news via RSS feeds and an occasional website. How has the internet changed your news and do you think it’s killing newspapers, or changing them?
(Source: WXP news)
Two of my very talented sisters, Summer and Sara, met/hugged Will Smith backstage at his concert in Atlanta last night. Strike up another Snow Family celebrity citing. For the full story including dialogs, follow the jump.
Summer meets the Prince of Bel Aire
(via Busy Nothings)
You’ve heard my rant on so-called disruptive technology, but that’s not the last of bad business cliches and buzz words to wow venture capitalists. Smithsonian Magazine writes: “Business people have a lot to learn from the animal world. But there are at least two problems here: one is that they trot out the same tired analogies over and over. Their companies spend millions developing iconic logos and otherwise polishing the corporate image, and then they go around prattling about lions, foxes and sharks.”
What bad business cliches make you roll your eyes?
(Source: Smithsonian Magazine)
It is 9:30 in the morning and a very chilly 16 degrees here in Provo, Utah. The heat is on full blast but is still having trouble ridding the place of the cold. My desk is by a window so that only makes matters worse.
*looks at beach travel packages on Expedia*
My wife Lindsey obviously “gets it.”
(Source: Leezy Lindsey)
Busy Nothings writes: “Do you want to know the ten companies that eschew the “Christmas” word? Best Buy, Dell, Kroger, Lowe’s, Office Max, Penney’s, Sears, Staples, Target, and Walgreens.”
Find the companies that aren’t afraid to offend anyone, because virtually no one gets offended. Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, and with all due respect, MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!
On a side note, one of the blogs I write for has a large international readership. I recently posted an article related to Christmas shopping, and several international readers commented on how silly Americans look with this whole “Christmas/Holiday” debate. Many laugh at the entire ordeal and poke fun while sarcastically correcting their use of Christmas. Take it for what it’s worth.
(Source: Busy Nothings)
I have felt extremely inadequate on many occasions in my life. Usually the feeling arises from undertaking a new endeavor like a job or new project. Still to this day, when something new comes up that is slightly unexpected or challenging, these feelings return. I, for one, encourage them. Here’s why:
Feeling inadequate is what moves individuals forward. In many cases, it can cause a person to actually be more mindful, precise, and careful with what they are doing. I would be more concerned about not feeling inadequate while engaging in something new as this could result in complacency and/or lack of passion.
So if you’re involved in a new business venture, career, school program, or even parenthood, embrace the inadequacy. You’ll be better off because of it, and you’ll learn faster. That’s a Smooth Harold guarantee.
An anonymous slashdot reader writes “Google’s advertising sales vice president, Tim Armstrong, said this week in an interview that 2005 was the turning point for online ads. Older businesses went from trying out the internet as an advertising venue to investing full-on.” From the article: “‘The experimenting and testing phase begun in the 1990s has ended. Corporate ad buyers are investing now,’ he said. Jupiter Research estimates the U.S. online advertising market will grow 28 percent over last year, to $11.9 billion in 2005, moving to $13.6 billion in 2006 and $15.1 billion in 2007.”
Now’s the time ladies and gents.
(Source: Slashdot)
The dot com bubble was based on hype, but the premise behind that hype was legitimate. At $38 per monthly site visitor (the average for recent deals) good site traffic is worth good money. I’ve recently started running ads on some sites of mine that have very little traffic, but I’m amazed at the little money I make of them. Once traffic grows exponentially, which it does, decent traffic can explode into great traffic, which equals healthy ad revenues.
Here’s a great article on monetizing web traffic: High Traffic Monetization [Business 2.0]
This post is a follow up to The Crazy World of Domain Real Estate from a few days back. Here’s some helpful hints for those wanting to get into the domain name game and strike it rich (or die trying).
There you have it! Good luck brokers…
(Source: Business 2.0)
This one is very relaxing and very cinematic. Great use of filters and with the Peter Pan ending, it’s one great music video. At least someone is making forward progress with the medium.
[via Don Loper]
A very cool thing for one of my favorite websites.
Happy Thanksgiving to all you SH readers out there. Some things I’m thankful for on this day of thanks (In no particular order, sort of):
May the turkey be juicy, and may you kick off the holiday season with a bang!
(see also, Wikipedia)
I’ve been a Business 2.0 subscriber for over a year now, and it is by far the best business magazine out there for entrepreneurs and for soaking up new ideas, remotivation techniques, and entertaining news bits. Other than being the best business magazine, it’s also the cheapest. You can pick up 12 issues for a cool $6.99. This months issues along has a half dozen great articles. Usually I might find 1-2 articles I like in other magazines. This one is filled with them month in and month out.
I don’t pitch a lot of products like this, but the writing, information, and presentation of this printed mag is top notch.
What do you do to stay young at heart? I’m not talking about some boring adult answer, I’m talking about something you do that makes you feel like a kid that might make you embarrassed to talk about.
I for one play video games. I’ve recently been playing Mario Kart for the Nintendo DS. It’s a great little game that let’s you race anyone in the world via a wifi connection. It’s fast, it’s easy, and it’s fun. I also enjoy watching baseball. Sure lot’s of adults do this too, but it reminds me of my childhood, so I watch it faithfully, without all the silly baseball cards.
So what do you do?
With the rise of identity theft, it is now legal to get (3) free credit reports per year, one with each of the major credit bureaus. Never pay for a credit report again and know what’s on your report.
Business 2.0 has an insightful article on “Domainers” and “type-in” traffic. A domainer is an individual that buys up domain names, and then monetizes them by referring the type-in traffic to advertisers. A type-in is simply someone that manually types in a desired search phrase directly into a URL.com rather than going through a search engine. Type-ins are said to make up about 15% of internet search.
From the article: “I have one laptop, no employees, and no product whatsoever — none! This is magic. Magic, he claims, that’s earning him $2 million a year.”
(Source: Business 2.0)
AOL’s got problems. Even with the huge boost in ad revenues by purchasing Weblogs Inc (who I write for), the online service can’t stop people from heading to the exits. They have lost more than 300 subscribers per hour over the last three months. You have to be doing something wrong to loose than many customers per hour.
(Source: Light Reading)
Many of you know I’m big on blogging. I started last April and have never looked back. At the time, I was reading a lot of business books, articles, and magazine editorials, and was soaking up a lot of good information. Smooth Harold then become my breeding ground for thoughts, ideas, understandings, and everything else I care about.
Blogging has really become the networking of the 21st century, at least for me that is. It has provided me with opportunities I’d never dreamed possible. I’ve closed business deals by blogging. Just recently I landed a multi-phase consulting project with a local company. One partner found my site through a comment I made on another business blog and liked what I had to say about disruptive technology. The rest is history.
I’ve even recently been hired by Weblogs Inc. (an AOL company) as a freelance writer which has always been a dream of mine. It will give me the opportunity to become a better writer and work under a great editor and writing team. Very exciting times.
You don’t have to start a blog to benefit from them. Just read them! It takes time to update a blog, and it takes timely updates to keep people coming back. So if you can’t do that then at least post comments on other sites/blogs that link back to your website or email. If people like what you have to say, they will trust, like, contact, and want to associate themselves with you. It takes time, but it pays to blog.
Say hello to Google Analytics. Say goodbye to Site Meter.
Lindsey, Sadie, and I went to the mall this evening. Though our family already has a cell plan, {sarcasm}I couldn’t imagine how difficult it would be to find a cell carrier kiosk in the mall. They should really think about adding more kiosks.{/sarcasm}
Seriously, I tend to exaggerate but I kid you not; there must have been 12 different cell phone stores and kiosks at Provo Towne Center. Are people really buying this many cell plans at the mall? And who goes to the mall to buy a plan anyway?
And don’t even get me started on wearing a shirt and tie to sell a phone…
If you don’t already know, here’s a great definition of what the old technology packaged as new is. AJAX enables advanced features like drag ‘n drop, dropdown menus and faster performance capabilities in website databases.
I’m really excited about the things my company has starting doing with this technology and the client sites we apply it to. It’s the next step to take web applications even further and far superior than the always sticky Flash.
As if Google Maps wasn’t cool enough, you can now play online Risk via the mapping service. This is made possible by Google’s maps API (Application Program Interface) that is just a fancy way to say programming framework.
Very clever indeed and one great classic boardgame. Maybe even better than Axis & Allies.
(Source: Risk via Google Maps)
JPigford writes “The Apple Blog makes claim that Apple sabotaged the success of the ROKR so as to sway public opinion of MP3 cell phones in general…ultimately to drive more sales to the iPod. By mandating a 100 song limit on the ROKR and having the product flop, Apple was able to put a bad taste in the mouths of consumers so that not only do they drive more iPod sales, but they keep competitors from fighting back with their own MP3 phones.”
Are you buying?
(Source: Slashdot)
The following (2) articles offer a very pragmatic approach to:
Have at it.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies are more superstitious than South American culture. You’ve heard them all but here’s a first person experience to debunk some of the most famous ones:
It’s getting ever so difficult to stay ahead of the game so here’s the real truth on search engine optimization: have many sites, most importantly respectable ones link to your site via articles or a reference. If you have descriptive page content that cuts through marketing jargon, you’ll be off to a good start. Remember, it takes time to build a credible business in the real world. The same holds true for building a credible website.
Forbes has a nifty little Email Time Capsule that will let you send an self addressed email at a 1-20 year interval. I guess we’ll still be using email in 2025…
Note to self: Remember that you got through the tough times as an entrepreneur, that your first daughter was born this year, and you’re wife is the best thing that ever happened to you.
(Source: Forbes)
Naming consultants, free of charge. You’re welcome.
(via Igor)
1946: Voted his country’s best all-around school athlete, Fidel Castro from the University of Havana, tries out for a place on the Washington Senators baseball team. The twenty-year old left handed baseball pitcher is turned down, which leaves him free to follow another career path…
(Source: The Left-Hander’s Calendar)
This post goes out to all you designers and/or people with an eye for fashion. Need a new color scheme for a website, brochure, poster, or living room? Color blend it for some wizard like assistance in color matching.
(Source: Color Blender)
The guy who invented Ctrl + Alt + Del explains how and why. This is a very funny clip about the cultural icon that is the 3 button shortcut for dealing with finicky PC’s. The guy’s one-liner at the end is probably the wittiest thing ever said about computers.
I’m a big advocate for Wikipedia and use it all the time. It’s fast, accurate, and the most comprehensive encyclopedia in the world. It may also be coming to print for those in developing countries where high-speed internet is not readily available.
This is great news for information junkies and the open source community. Power in numbers is a great thing.
(Source: Yahoo!)
I don’t know why it’s fun to monitor the search, er, I mean advertising giant but here goes. First off, it’s rumored the company will take on traditional advertising companies that have made Madison Avenue famous. The NY Times reported that Google has plans to replace “creative salesmanship with cold number-crunching” for both print and TV ads.
Second off, they will start hiring programmers to work on OpenOffice.org, the open source and FREE response to Microsoft Office. While Google has supported open source initiatives in the past, the is the first time they’ll start hiring programmers to work on a public project.
If you haven’t already realized, Google is in the advertising not search business. Advertising is all about traffic, and by building the best search engine in the world, Google can guarantee the best online traffic in the world.
(Source: CNET)
It’s a great day to be a witch, vampire, ghost, or nerdy Star Wars dude. Even better, listen to Seinfeld’s classic Halloween skit of what it was like to trick or treat as a kid.
Get candy. Get candy. Get candy.
Google is preparing to release an online consumer database. The system will allow any user to create they’re own public database including descriptions of a party planning service, articles or current events for a website, selling a car, and whatever else you can think of.
This should be major cause of concern for the always popular craigslist.org and eBay. Google is getting even closer to indexing everybit of information they can get their grubby digital hands on. It should be interesting to find out more about this service.
As a young boy, I used to dream about being a shoe designer for Nike. Something about “tennashoes” always fascinated me. I loved sports and I guess I really believed or wanted to believe that my kicks could help improve my athletic performance. So I drew shoes.
I entertained and acted upon that dream from grade school to my late middle-school years. I would seclude myself in the corner of my shared room and draw shoe mockups with only a pencil. I must have gone through dozens of notebooks. Finally, when I was about 11 or 12 and through my own initiative, I decided to look up Nike’s corporate address and send them my work.
Straight from arguably the best business publication in existence, Business 2.0 has a nice little article on what goes into naming and renaming companies. A great company name can never compensate for an excellent product and company management though.
From the article: “Whatever the reason for the renaming, engineering a successful name change is hard work, and it can cost a bundle. Many companies enlist the expertise of a branding agency — a service that usually costs between $30,000 and $150,000.”
I’ll rant on branding agencies later.
(Source: Business 2.0)
