Search, Marketing and Whatever

SearchEngineWorld, the site that originally hosted the forum that would become WebmasterWorld is back online. 

I had seen articles and video on WebmasterWorld with the SEW name and logo attached to them for the last few months but this is the first time I have seen that the site is live. Since there hasn’t been any real fanfare (yet) it appears that SEW is either being rolled out quietly or we’re getting an early sneak peak.  Regardless, Search Engine World looks like it will be a very worthwhile resource offering both print and video news content on Search and related technology topics.  Continue reading →

When it comes to music my taste is pretty eclectic. One musical style I have become fond of over recent years is acoustic music particularly some types of folk, blues, etc… An example is Little Willies and while they have a famous lead singer in Norah Jones (the multiple grammy award winner) the general public is not overly aware of them. I did a search on Little Willies today looking for some online examples of their music to share with a co-worker. I decided to try Ask.com who has been making a lot of noise about how “helpful” their search results offering images, songs, maps, and more tied to the search query of the user.

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Dad, If you fart a lot then you’re healthy, and I fart a lot!”

Shaye (Weasel Boy)

While recounting this story to family members (some of whom have worked in the medical field for a number of years) I was surprised to hear one of them say, “that’s true, a lot of gas is healthy”.    Continue reading →

I have been awol here for the last 6-8 weeks and there’s a pretty good reason for it.  Okay actually there are 3 good reasons.

1. Kid’s soccer takes an amazing amount of time for parent’s who choose to help the coach during practice.
2. My wife’s grandfather went into the hospital because of a brain tumor 6 weeks ago.  This was a very slow growing tumor that they knew about but it suddenly started growing quickly and created pressure on his brain.  He survived surgery (he was only given a 15% chance of making it) but until just recently has required a lot of help from family members even while he was in the hospital.
3. My wife’s mother was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer within a week of her father going into the hospital (he with the brain tumor).  She was operated on immediately and has recovered fairly well from that but now comes chemo therapy.

Needless to say the above took a lot of time away from my normal day to day life.  I am just now coming out from under a siege of emails, etc… and finding time to relax just a bit.   Granted, our family won’t be too relaxed for some time as grandpa and mom are going to be longer term concerns.

 Speaking of health concerns.  Given the tough news we’ve had in the last couple of months I have spent some time trying to research what we’re up against and/or just what the heck those doctors were saying.  In general I found that medical information on the internet fell into one of two general categories.

1. Useless superficial information - This is the most prevelant brand I found.  What made it particularly irritating was finding multiple high ranked sites with essentially the same information, sometimes verbatim.  Apparently Google has put it’s “trust” in a few of the wrong sites as there is a plethora of very basic copied information residing on medical pages/sites.
2. Useless technical information - Not nearly as prevelant as #1 but no less useless to me.  I’m researching colon cancer because I didn’t fully understand what the doctor said when he tried to dumb down the explanation to an average joe (me).  That probably means I’m not prepared to read research papers on colon cancer written by doctors for doctors.

Yes, I’ve seen the commercials for WebMD and looked at a ton of other supposedly great health sites as well.  But in my experience they came up lacking, seriously.

Yesterday I was doing some research on auto related websites for a client and ran across a respectable looking ecommerce site that I swear I will never purchase from.  The reason?  They weren’t respectable sounding! Continue reading →

I’m sitting in SEOClass in New York and Brad Geddes just made the comment “Google actually sucks at SSL’s”.  Aside from enjoying it when people say Google sucks I was amused because the example he showed is something that I run into quite regularly. Continue reading →

If you are a webmaster and a facebook member you need to check out the new WebmasterWorld group that was recently created by Sugarrae.  The group has over 60 members and has been up for less than 24 hours so you know this is going to be a fast growing group.   Continue reading →

Nielsen/NetRatings recently stated that Wikipeida (the online user generated encyclopedia) is the top online news and information destination after adding roughly 20 million unique monthly visitors in this past year.  While Wikipededia’s value as a “source” is hotly debated what shouldn’t be is how they added such a large number of new visitors.  The answer to that is quite simple, Wikipedia is Google’s new favorite toy much in the way that blogs were a few years ago.

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