Category Archives: blogs

2007! Where did 2006 go?

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It sure is frustrating how fast time flies when you get older. As a kid you can’t wait to grow up and hit the road, yet as an adult you long for the carefree days of childhood.

Luckily the freewheeling internet business lifestyle doesn’t trap me in a 9 to 5 purgatory though, and I get to meet a lot of interesting folks and travel more than in the past.

2006 was a fun year for USA travel as I got to California’s Silicon Valley several times, Boston, Virginia, Las Vegas twice and Minnesota for Thanksgiving with my great in-laws.   I am due for a big international trip and I’m hoping I’ll make China happen this year.

Elfyourself – have yourself a virally marketed Christmas

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Know any coffee and art lovers?   Give them The Coffee Calendar 
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Viral marketing approaches (not to be confused with computer viruses) take clever little online ideas and try to make them spread by online “word of mouth” which usually means friends emailing other friends.

This year’s big viral winner may be ElfYourself, which is showing nothing less than stunning traffic over the past few weeks – looks like it’s beating out many major sites and might even approach the top 100 sites this week as it spreads. [nope – looks like it peaked near Christmas at about site 250 per Alexa measures].

My friend and neighbor Ilana sent me an Elfyourself and within 30 minutes I’d sent out one myself even though I usually avoid sending people anything “fun” online to avoid cluttering up their boxes.

Expedia vs Elfyourself traffic per Alexa. Alexa is not very reliable but it’s good for generic approaches like this. Note that it’s “today’s” measure rather than the three month average that is of interest here since the site just startup up a few weeks ago: Alexa traffic comparison

Merry Christmas to all!

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 James Kim Search Discussion – Click here | Mount Hood Climber Search

Wishing a very merry Christmas to all my friends young and old, old and new! Here is hoping that 2007 brings this world more joy, less sadness, and much greater prosperity to those who struggle every day just to feed their families. As for the rest of us I hope we work harder to make this world the wonderful place it could be, and should be, and will be.

Blog Tag Game

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James Kim Search Discussion – Click here | Mount Hood Climber Search

Aaron Shear tagged me to share five things people don’t know about me. It’s tempting to make up some some impressive stuff (but I won’t lie!) since the other folks are all very interesting, namely Google’s Adam Lasnik, International SEO Consultant and speaker Joseph Morin, Search Engine Watch Forum’s Jessica Bowman, and Scottish SEO/SEM Scott Boyd.

Here are five things from my little world:

1) My lab, Chico the Wonder Dog, has been working hard to nab the top Google spot from a Chihuahua by the same name. I told him NOT to buy any links or I’ll sick Matt Cutts on him.

2) A recent blog post about the Kim Family Search here in Southern Oregon now has over 1000 comments and has spawned a new project that will combine blogs and a database to help facilitate future search and rescue info coordination.

3) For a time I was a good Touchscreen Kiosk guy, working in the 90’s on a US Forest Service/Tourism project that had multimedia kiosks in travel spots all over the state. I now volunteer on the project I designed that replaced that one, with internet connected stations at the state welcome centers and other travel spots.

4) I can talk like a Duck. No, not the stupid way, the good way. I started talking duck so I could tease my sister by swearing at her without my parents understanding the conversation. I still feel guilty about it, but time shall heal this.

5) I have a double major in Botany and Psychology from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. I don’t know why. Therefore, naturally, I do travel internet publishing and blog about most anything that pops into my head.

I’m tagging these five bloggers because they are all very interesting AND educational folks:

Missing at sea in Oregon

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Today (Sunday) a fishing boat has sunk off the Oregon Coast and a few days ago a Catamaran washed ashore with nobody aboard. I’m looking for more detail now and I’m getting a bit paranoid as it seems Oregon is rapidly becoming the US capital of missing people.

The Coast Guard is asking that anyone who may have seen the Catamaran in transit from San Francisco please contact Coast Guard District 13 Command Center at (800) 982-8813.From Oregonlive:

On Rogue River, rescuers find boat owner’s survival suit
A U.S. Coast Guard helicopter and rescue boat renewed their search today for three crew members from a 43-foot fishing vessel that sank Saturday at the entrance of the Rogue River.

The commercial vessel’s crew, which included owner Robert James Ashdown, 44, of Port Orford sent a distress message about 3:40 p.m. Coast Guard Air Station North Bend picked up the signal and initiated an air and sea search.

A life raft, spotted near the river’s entrance by a crew member who apparently did not go out with the others Saturday, contained no members of the crew, said Shawn Eggert, a public affairs specialist with the Coast Guard’s District 13 public affairs office in Seattle. The life raft is in the custody of the Curry County Sheriff’s office, he said.

Debris from the boat, including some survival suits identified by Ashdown’s family as belonging to him, also were found.

The vessel capsized as it attempted to cross the Rogue River bar in Gold Beach, where it encountered extremely high waves and a strong surf, according to the Curry County sheriff’s office. Witnesses said the boat had just crossed the bar when it was slammed first by a wave that knocked it sideways and then by another, which turned the craft over.

The sheriff’s office said it was not yet releasing the names of the other two crew members.

[Note that about 70 miles upriver from the mouth of the Rogue River lies Big Windy Creek Canyon where James Kim died last week, only about a half mile from this same Rogue River.]

Time’s Person of the year … is YOU!

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 Time Magazine 2006 Person of the Year

Time gets it right naming you, me, and everybody else in the exploding online community the person of the year.   The power of the community internet aka “Web 2.0” is the big story now and for many years to come as millions more flock online every week to surf, buy, blog, meet, marry, and much more.

Unlike the initial thrust that brought millions of ‘techno centric’ folks to the digital water coolers and watering holes of the early web the “new web” has almost no barriers to entry, a far more robust broadband infrastructure, a global reach, and will soon capture all but the most stubborn luddites.

Online community isn’t just big news, it’s great news.

Bill Gates and the Bloggers

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James Kim Search Discussion – Click here | Mount Hood Climber Search

Some very high profile and clever folks in the blogging community got to head up to Microsoft HQ and meet with Bill Gates yesterday to discuss the future of the internet, especially ways to make the upcoming MIX07 conference relevant to the needs of those attending.

I missed meeting Gates at MIX06 earlier this year but I know several of the bloggers that were invited so I’ll have to settle for one degree of separation. I’m a huge fan of Bill Gates’ superb global health initiatives though not at all a fan of many of his “old style” ideas about computing and the internet. I think he, and MS at large, continues to view the internet as primarily a technological rather than a sociological development (clue: it’s 80% sociological, 19% technical and 1% electrical)

The reports are starting to come in:

Mike Arrington

Steve Rubel

Ryan Stewart

Niall Kennedy

Liz Gannes

Todd Bishop

David Boone search in Southern California

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James Kim Search Discussion – Click here | Mount Hood Climbers – Click here

David Boone, missing hiker in California

Map – click here

A family organized search is today, Friday December 15. Details in comments section.
Here’s a blog post from a searcher

Official search was called off after one week. Authorities seem to feel he could not have survived this long.

Based on this and the few other posts I’ve done so far about missing people I think there is a lot more volunteer potential than most normal search and rescue operation even try to coordinate. That’s what we are up to with the DangerData.com blog which is coming soon.

Another discussion is over at City-Data.com (free login required).
Search for “Foothill Ranch” to find that thread – not much there as of Friday Dec 15.

David Boone appears to have become lost during a walk in the “Whiting Ranch” area of Foothill Ranch, CA where he hikes almost every day.

Map – click here.

Foothill Ranch Map- high detail

More Tech Memes

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James Kim Search Discussion – Click here

Yikes – I leave town for a few days and can hardly keep up with all the interesting tech news items. In addition to the fun Jeremy v. Matt copycat debate we’ve got:

Jason on Digg Rigging This is just a tiny part of the HUGE number of upcoming stories which will showcase how complex the relationships are between SEO, social networking sites, and …. money.   I actually contacted the Digger Jason is effectively accusing of abuse and it does not appear to me he’s taken any money at any time.   Here’s a great summary of that “Digg Ban” case.   But his innocence does not suggest to me that there is not a huge and growing issue with Social media SEO uses and abuses.  At PubCon many were discussing how powerfully social networking can help with organic optimization as well as straight traffic generation to a site that gets “dugg” or creates a compelling (including stupid but popular) YouTube video.

Jim at Microsoft apologizing in a very web 2.0 way. Scoble would be proud of this “naked conversations” approach to corporate blogging. Too bad Microsoft didn’t see how making Robert the semi-official corporate blogmeister with the huge salary increase he deserved for “getting Web 2.0” before the suits did (most MS suits don’t even get it now) would have returned 100x on the investment.

… and speaking of “getting Web 2.0”. Yahoo does but can’t seem to get the mileage they deserve for retooling the corporation as a community internet extravaganza. This set of leaked Yahoo internal documents about the potential Facebook aquisition provides a fascinating glimpse into how big deals are analyzed. As a Yahoo shareholder I think they should save the billion and just get their stupid ass in gear with the excellent social network stuff they already own like Flickr (which should be the template for other social applications, Del.icio.us (OVERHAUL the INTERFACE and yes, you can rename this URL monstrosity! ), Yahoo Video, Yahoo 360, Answers, groups, etc, etc. As I’ve noted before Yahoo suffers from giving people so many options they tire of the decision making and go to Google’s simple interfaces, search, and simpler suite of choices. Google expects us to act like the sheep we are. Yahoo expects us to do too much mental work choosing how we relate to the internet.

Going Techno Postal?

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James Kim Search Discussion – Click here

OK, I’ve really missed ranting about technology things for the past few weeks so I’m going to take a look at what’s going on over at TechMeme.

Jeremy over at Yahoo is always very honest about Yahoo’s shortcomings so it’s good to see him get to take a shot at Google even though the transgression is not exactly earth-shaking, more just a funny oddness that gets internet people all worked up. Google copied Yahoo‘s IE7 pitch page. (It was changed to this today or last night). Here’s a great graphic which shows the smoking gun evidence: http://chir.ag/stuff/yahoo-to-google.gif

Matt Cutts is a totally stand up guy and this is not his department but he’s Google’s ambassador to the blogging masses so it fell to him to address this. Now, you don’t dis Google or Matt may go Inigo Montoya on you. Matt’s lackluster “apology” sounded more like an attack on Yahoo’s own copycat behavior even though he noted that it was Robert Scoble‘s excellent advice – which was totally not taken – that led him to post about this. Robert suggested the Google peeples take out the Yahoo peeple for a fancy lunch in a limo, which would have been a neat PR gimmick.

This is superficially trivial but actually has deeper significance as a measure of the overall online sentiment about Google. Google is still in the driver’s seat with respect to most things internet but I’d suggest that we are now seeing a tendency for the knowlegeable users to reevaluate their relationships with Google, Yahoo, and even Ask and MSN. This reminds me in some ways of the days when Yahoo was totally in the online driver’s seat and Google – with clearly superior search – started to eat Yahoo’s lunch but still had only a tiny market share. Had Yahoo bought Google back then, rather than just using their search algorithm and helping to make Google the online behemoth it is today, the online landscape would sure look different. I’m glad they didn’t though because Google’s new approaches and “techno centric” business models have arguably done more to change the way we all do business than any other recent global business developments.

Ironically in this little debate is the fact that when Yahoo FINALLY figures out how to effectively copy the gist of Google’s contextual ad matching systems (adwords and adsense) we could see a huge change in the online search game as publishers would have more choice in who they align with.

Disclaimer: I’ve got some Yahoo Stock so I root for them to succeed even though I try to post honest comments about what’s up.