What’s Up Joe Duck?
It’s always annoying when folks say how busy they are when – almost always – - they are involved in many hours per day of unnecessary TV watching, Facebooking, gaming, making your own hair gel, hobbies, gardening, etc. Nothing wrong with all those things but it’s not the same as “being busy” doing things you MUST do because of work and other “essential” committments.
That said, I think I’m into the “busy” realm now with more projects than I can possibly complete for some time. It’s been a good motivator for me, but it’s a little intimidating too.
Here are some of them:
Retire USA Retirement Information. This is a big project with four other partners where we’ll showcase retirement options in all 50 states. States and cities are online and I’m building the connections to the 5000+ category records now. We’ve had an Oregon retirement website for some time and a retirement blog for some time but will be revamping that soon to include more information from more writers and many experts in retirement.
US History, US History Blog, Online Highways Travel, Travel and History. These are the sites managed mostly by my business partner but with some input by me, especially at our two travel blogs US History and Travel and History. I LOVE travel blogging and wish I had even more time to travel and blog, but blogging is playing mostly a weak supporting role in my internet projects. I still need to get my Vietnam trip of Feb 2011 integrated into Online Highways as well as create more opportunities for small businesses at the site.
House Remodel. My son Ben and I bought a house for him to live in when he leaves home. It was a good “REO” post foreclosure deal but it needs a huge amount of work to become a great place. We’ll get some contractor help but do a lot of the work ourselves. After a few days of pulling up flooring I’m sure glad they invented Ibuprofen.
The QuickAid.com Airport Information Directory. This project started me off over ten years ago as an internet entrepreneur. I bought the website and data from another company and revamped it to include advertising. However after good initial success I fell victim to Google’s changing algorithms. They seem to be liking QuickAid again so I’ll be posting to that blog more often and revamping some of the old content about airports all over the world.
AirportCityCodes.com This is my Airport Codes database of Airports and world airport code and airline code information that also needs some attention.
Twitter. @JoeDuck I still love twitter but not quite sure how to use it to business advantage. I’m setting up individual accounts for many of my websites, but it’s hard to keep engaged with them all.
…. to be continued …
One makes millions, millions make $1. CES 2012 and the decline of Journalism
Here at CES Las Vegas you can feel the energy of the thousands of bloggers, all of whom hope to spawn their own success stories. I like bloggers and blogging a lot, but I think much of the early promise of blogger as citizen journalist is getting co-opted by commercialization – the need to eat creates a challenging relationship with sponsors and content. Not a huge surprise, but I think the era of “citizen journalist” is probably going to be short lived as we transition to more of a combination of commercial and/or groupthink models of journalism.
Very few will be able to make it big online doing their own thing, or even make a living here. That’s OK – capitalism and journalism are a game of survival of the fittest, and most people aren’t fit to write quality stuff, even by sometimes pathetic blogging standards. Even those who ARE good writers are unlikely to make much money online, and then only when they work for large well capitalized sites.
Many silly articles suggest otherwise:
guardiantech Guardian Tech …The writer who made millions by self-publishing online bit.ly/wdgj0J
A more relevant story would be how millions make very little rather than how one makes millions, but that story is not as interesting….which brings us to the challenge of journalism in general, especially commercial journalism.
Here at CES there are about 6000 “press”, many in young blogging teams writing for medium to large websites covering the show. That’s great in one sense but in another it reminds me of pro sports, where millions with *some* talent are filtered to a few thousand who actually make it to the big time and a few hundred who actually make it big. Again, that’s a virtuous cycle in one sense, though I will smack you if you suggest that the success comes from quality writing or true innovation. There’s some of that online, but in terms of online journalism its mostly a race to the bottom where gimmicks and garbage will triumph. Again, that’s OK and inevitable but its somewhat unfortunate that we’ll see seasoned good thinking journalist folks replaced by ditzy kook celebrity gossip.
… end rant … Gotta go find Justin Beiber here at CES and get an invite to the SOUL Headphone party by Ludacris !
CES 2012 Wednesday – Fox news reporting from CES
CES 2012 Wednesday – Fox news reporting from CES
Originally uploaded by JoeDuck
Here is FOX news reporting (I think live) from CES 2012 here in Las Vegas. As always the show is a sea of consumer technology and people. Some 125,000 (approximate) attendees, 6000 press and 2700 Vendors. This appears to be Microsoft’s last CES and there’s som buzz about the show facing challenges, but my guess is that CES will remains the key tech showcase for the world and that we’ll see Asian companies take up the slack for Microsoft and others who opt out of the show. The costs here for exhibitors can be staggering with the larger players like Samsung and Microsoft spending more on exhibits that the smaller companies here make in several years. Yet generally the small vendors tell me they are happy with the show – for many their big event of the year in terms of meeting buyers and showcasing their stuff.
CES 2012 please … wait … for …. me!
Well I should be reporting live from CES 2012 right now rather than the Medford Oregon Airport where fog kept me from leaving yesterday for CES Las Vegas, the world’s premier consumer electronics show held every January.
I was supposed to be reporting live over at our Retirement blog from this morning’s keynote at the Silvers Summit, the CES Venue for the intersection of retirement and technology.
If I DO ever manage to get out – we’re not going to make our new 9:15am departure – I’ll have a lot of new pictures and technology content a several of the blogs:
CES 2012 at Technology Report will be the main tech reporting from the conference.
CES 2012 at the Retire USA Retirement Blog will feature some of the technology of special interest to those over 50. Over 50 is hardly a “senior” in my view, but that’s the cutoff for AARP and the Silvers Summit. In fact I think we need a new name for those of us over 50 and I don’t think “seniors” or even “silvers” is really the right angle here. What’s next, the “Ripe” generation?
I’ll also be posting a bit at Las Vegas Blog, LasVegas1. I’m staying downtown at the Golden Gate Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas’ oldest venue at One Fremont Street. Looking forward to the history as well as the relaxed feel of the downtown area, which has undergone a fair amount of rennovation and remodelling over the past decade in an effort by the downtown hotels to capture some of the shiny luster of the strip, which has been ”the” Las Vegas for most tourists for some time now.
Testing WordPress QuickPress Home page form
I’d hoped to use this “QuickPresss Home Page form” for my reporting from CES 2012 but just lost a nice detailed post.
Update – seems to be working OK now. I’m wondering if maybe I lost connectivity here at the Rogue Valley Airport while writing the post leading to its untimely death? In any case, I think I won’t be trusting it for long posts yet…
QuickPress MAJOR fail!
I’m a big fan of WordPress but QuickPress just burned me after I penned a LONG CES 2012 Post that simply vanished after saying “you forgot to write something”. So, I tried it and I hate it so far … Use caution if you use the “QuickPress Home page form”
Retirement Information at Retire USA
Wow, I’d forgotten how hard it is to build and troubleshoot a huge website, but things are finally coming together at Retire USA, a project I’ve got going with three other partners. The plan is to showcase retirement options across all the states in the USA.
Although comments about this are welcome, you’ll find things still a bit rough and there’s lots of data (thousands of individual records) yet to be linked up to state and city pages, though some of this can be found via the Google custom search engine which will seek out Retirement information at our site, combine it with ads, and post the results.
By tonight all the state pages will be active, most with links out to city pages. Much more to come … soon!
Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware District of Columbia Florida GeorgiaHawaii Idaho Indiana Illinois Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan MississippiMissouri Minnesota Montana Nebraska New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York Nevada North CarolinaNorth Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee TexasUtah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming
Google Custom Seach Engine = Brilliant! CSE Troubleshooting Tips
The Google Custom Search allows a simple addition of code to your site that creates a customized search engine run by Google. This is often added via your adsense account (under ads / search) and it is a brilliant way to add search to you site that helps monetize your peeps with google advertising placed next to a list of your web pages.
HOWEVER I just spent a bit too much time fixing a simple problem so I thought I’d start a list of Google Custom Search Troubleshooting tips:
ONE: It’ll only show indexed content so be sure to create a sitemap for Google. Also a good idea to place some links to your pages from other sites so Google can find them more easily.
TWO:
be sure to add *.* to the specific URLs you want to custom search. For our RetireUSA retirement custom search I needed to add this to the URLs box to make sure it picked up all of our indexed content:
http://www.retireusa.net/*.*
http://blog.retireusa.net/*.*
Check out our Retirement Search tomorrow at RetireUSA.net
Merry Christmas to All
Wishing everybody a merry Christmas. May 2012 bring peace and prosperity to you and yours.
Affiliate West Summit Contest from Shoemoney
Dear Staff of Shoemoney (SOSs), Shoemoney, and fellow Affiliate Americans -
Honestly you probably will not and probably should not choose me for the Shoemoney Affiliate Summit West Contest.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a pretty good guy, fun to hang out with, and fairly well informed. Heck, I might even have a few tricks of the trade you haven’t heard about, although I’ve always been impressed with Shoemoney’s well informed, no-nonsense, experimental approaches to internet marketing, particularly his very clever experiments with Facebook advertising a few years back that were very cleverly written up in a powerpoint for, I think, an Affiliate Summit conference.
I also appreciate how Shoemoney and other world class search marketing fellows like Aaron Wall, Dave Naylor, and Todd Malicoat will share a lot of valuable insight and information both at conferences and online, even to those who don’t buy their stuff. These are smart and clever guys and prospective internet marketing folks should listen to what they have to say, though they should also be aware that “hype” is very much a part of that business and very few people are able to make a good online living regardless of their approaches. Most of the folks who do have been around a long, long time and benefit from old websites with high authority and the free Google traffic this provides to them. Before you spend much money on advice you should read the free stuff, especially the single best source for search optimization and search penalties – Matt Cutts blog. Matt is a great guy and is Google’s spam cop. You cross his search optimizing advice at your own peril. Believe me, I know this from a lot of experience with many sites over many years.
So even though I’m well aware of Shoe’s great personal success I’m generally skeptical that his good advice will transfers well to the degree others need to make enough money online to drop the day job. You’ll be hard pressed to convince me otherwise which is probably the main reason I should NOT win this contest – however it shakes out I’ll blog the results honestly.
Another reason is that I’m already scheduled to fly to Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show – CES 2012 – on the 9th. I’ll be reporting that conference for my tech blog “ Technology Report ” as I have been for several years. Of course since I’ve never been to an Affiliate Summit I would change my flight to a bit earlier to hang with the Shoemoney Man. I have a lot of questions for him about my modestly successful internet projects and some upcoming ones and how affilations (vs Google Adsense) might help improve our bottom line.
Another reason I’m a bad choice is that I’m already doing pretty well with my online ventures. Nothing amazing yet, but we do OK with a US History website, US Travel site, and a really neat new Retirement planning project I’m finishing up right now. As much as I’d like more advice from Shoe and his clever staff, it might be better used on somebody who is just starting out.
Oh, there is ONE reason you SHOULD choose me for the contest. If I win I will consider Shoemoney’s expert advice enough reward for me and I will donate *all* the proceeds to my favorite charity “Room to Read“. They build libraries and schools in poor countries and are simply an awesome way for those of us lucky enough to live here to give back a little and help make the world a better and safer place.
This donation will include any blackjack winnings. All I’d ask from Shoe and the great Shoemoney gang would be to help me promote Room to Read however he sees fit.
So, there you have it! Good luck to everybody with the Affiliate Summit Shoemoney contest and, win or lose, I hope to see you in Vegas baby!
Joe Duck / Joe Hunkins
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