Back from a great trip over to lovely Yachats, Oregon where we stayed at the beautiful Adobe Resort for two nights.
The big Oregon storm is well over and the weather was cold but clear, with beautiful surf. On Saturday night we headed north to Lincoln City for a a spectacular dinner at the Bay House, a new fine dining restaurant overlooking the sea. It’s one of Oregon’s finest restaurants for good reason. My dinner? Seared scallops with a rabbit confite accompanied by a light pinot gris wine.
[crackle-crackle-ssssss=pfffffttt!] … we interrupt the technology ramblings AGAIN to bring you EVEN MORE mildly shameless promotions of friend and family projects ….
My brother-in-law Ricardo Levin Morales is an artist in Minneapolis who has roots deep in the fertile coffee-bearing soil of Puerto Rico. His Coffee Calendar is a vibrant, thoughtful reflection on the history and culture of coffee over the past few hundred years and would be an excellent gift for any coffee enthusiast. My wife has been showing the calendar to some coffee shops here in Southern Oregon and the response has been great.
Check out the Coffee Calendar online and if you like it … order a few for Christmas Gifts.
Pipo Nguyen-Duy is another artist I know with a unique and provocative vision of the world. Check out some of Pipo’s work here: Pipo teaches at Oberlin College in Ohio but lives here in Oregon and is the top player at our Ashland Oregon Table Tennis club.
[crackle-crackle-ssssss=pfffffttt!] … we interrupt the technology ramblings to bring you mildly shameless promotions of things I have some interest in. Also, of course, these blog posts help me understand how blogs are ranked for various phrases and words in search engines …
Oregon Retirement is an excellent project by some friends of mine who are very familiar with the Retirement landscape in Oregon and across the country. I’m going to partner up with them as we create a national site about retirement in the USA. We’ll be covering both as a site and as a blog many issues relating to retirement and also featuring retirement communities across the country as well as great cities in which to retire. The site will feature an extensive database of retirement places, a social network, and a blog. More about this in future posts.
Wow, I’m doing some research for an Oregon retirement website and just learned that according to recent survey the 2004 book called “Retirement Places Rated” out of hundreds of retirement areas in the USA two of the top ten places to retire in the USA are right in my back yard – one of them actually includes my back yard because it’s the Medford / Ashland area here in Southern Oregon. The other is Florence, Oregon – number one in the survey of over 300 places. I travel there often and personally prefer this area due to much better weather and our abundant big-city amenities in a small city, but Florence Oregon is a really nice place too and it’s the home of Oregon Coast Magazine and our Online Highways websites including this great Oregon Travel section in case you are planning a trip to Oregon. Our Travel Blog is here and I’ve posted a few good Oregon travel references as a warmup to the big blog I’m starting this month that will cover the entire state of Oregon. More on that later.
Locals call this the “Rogue Valley” and historically our wonderful region does very well in national “best places to retire” and “best places to live” surveys. I’ve lived in the East, Midwest, several California cities, and here in the Rogue Valley and it’s hard to imagine a better place to raise a family or retire. The houses are relatively expensive and the economics for a wage earner are the most challenging aspect here which may be why the population remains modest, though growth in some of our areas has been dramatic.
Pipo Nguyen-duy is one of my table tennis pals, but Pipo is also a great photographer who teaches art at Oberlin in Ohio. Like many new sites, Pipo‘s website is not appearing first as it should for the query “Pipo Nguyen-duy”. Other sites that *reference* Pipo’s art appear before his because Google’s algorithm still faces challenges when it tries to determine the best site for the query, which in this case clearly should be his own website.
Here the SEO problem likely relates to the ranking weakness of a new site vs. an old one, plus the fact Google cannot easily “know” that the site pipo nguyen-duy.com is actually the official site for the name Pipo Nguyen-duy. There’s also a title tag change needed over at the website, but this post should start fixing the problem by providing some authoritative links to Pipo Nguyen-duy ‘s real website using anchor text that matches the query we are targeting and a lot of text rich in the query term. This technique is known as “white hat SEO” because it’s “helping Google” properly index and get the right site ranked for the query. Generally Google approves of this type of SEO tactic if they see it as something that makes indexing work better and does not deceive users.
| Wow, Coldwell Banker is reporting these stats on the most expensive vs cheapest USA markets for a comparable 4 BR house. I’ve been wondering about this for some time and this indicates clearly the truth of the old maxim in real estate “location, location, location”Looks like here in southern Oregon we are near the national average of about 410k for a 4BR house.
City |
Price |
| Greenwich, Conn. | $2,018,750 |
| Santa Monica, Calif. | $1,785,000 |
| Newport Beach, Calif. | $1,617,500 |
| San Mateo, Calif. | $1,498,023 |
| Boston, Mass. | $1,381,250 |
| Most affordable markets | ||||||||||||
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Wow, Talent is for sale these days as hundreds of houses go onto the market at prices that appear to be coming down, down and I predict down more now that the winter doldrums are approaching. Under normal real estate circumstances people would be pulling houses off the market now, but the sub prime mortgage fiascos have put a lot of folks in the terrible position of “having” to sell their house or lose it. I’m not clear when we’ll hit the bottom but I think this winter will be a great time to buy and a bad one to sell.
I’ve got two friends now working the Talent Oregon Real Estate market. Dave doesn’t have a site up yet but Jack’s Talent Oregon Real Estate website is a good resource for some local information and houses. Jack also covers Ashland Oregon, Jacksonville Oregon, and Medford Oregon Real Estate. However best to email or call him directly for the latest information since the market is changing rapidly around here.
Here’s a great post from Scott about SES San Jose. The Portland SEM community is growing fast and I wish I could get up there more often and attend some meetings and hang with my fellow Oregon techno peeples, but Portland is almost as far away from me as Silicon Valley, the undisputed capital of … well … most of the really neat stuff happening online these days. In fact my frequent trips to Silicon Valley may be skewing my perception of how fast things are changing. For example very few people I know here in Oregon, and few of my hundreds of close relatives back east are on Facebook or Flickr. It’s even tough to get people to join Flickr so they can see pix of themselves I’ve taken. Ludditism is no longer the problem for most people, rather it’s just silly human stubbornness about technology.
In any case I do want to plug Scott and the SEM PDX conference coming up in March of 2008 –“SearchFest 2008”.
Here is the blurb from the SEM PDX mail I just got:
SEMpdx Presents Searchfest 2008
When: Monday, March 10, 2008
Where: Portland Zoo
Format: All Day Event with Dual Tracks
Confirmed Speakers (to date):
Rand Fishkin, SEOmoz
Matt McGee, Marchex / Small Business SEM
Jeff Pruitt, SEMPO / ICrossing
Stoney deGeyter, Pole Position Marketing
John Andrews, Competitive Webmastering / Master of Sphinn
Marshall Simmonds, New York Times
Paul Colligan, The Affiliate Guy
Dan Harbison, Portland Trailblazers / Iamatrailblazersfan.com
More top speakers to be announced soon. Stay tuned!
I’m hoping to get my Oregon Travel blog going soon with tips and tricks about great vacation stuff here in Oregon. One of the things I *always* notice after travelling is how nice it is to come home to the great cultural and outdoor attractions within a few hours of my house here in lovely Talent Oregon
We’ve got some good basic detail about Oregon at the Online Highways Oregon Travel section but I’m hoping to do a more personalized version of this. Some will appear at the Online Highways travel blog but that travel blog will be focusing more on destinations around the globe and not digging into Oregon in great depth.
Oregon is home to several great regions. The state defines them like this but I’m going to be a little more precise at the Oregon Travel blog and try to focus in on more of a single city or destination basis.
I’ve already covered some Oregon Travel information in these Travel Highways and History posts but I have quite a bit of information, pictures, and adventures to share in the future. Oregon is one of the few places where you can enjoy skiing on peaks over 2 miles high, smashing surf and sea, and a round of golf all in the same day. (No, it would not be a relaxing day!)….
Here in Southern Oregon we’ve got a lot of outstanding professional and community theater action going on. The Children’s Musical Theater of Oregon is no exception. We just enjoyed their excellent performance of Peter Pan, complete with amazing flying effects, great costumes, rich sets, and some outstanding performances by very talented young people.
CMTO is the product of Rhonda and John Taylor’s enthusiasm for working with theater and with children. Rhonda teaches school and John is a very accomplished musician and director who has worked with many musical luminaries as well as two years at the Las Vegas Bellagio as the musical director and keyboardist with Cirque du Soleil’s “O”.
One of the benefits of living here in Southern Oregon is having great professionals in theater, music, movies and television who bring their expertise and enthusiasm to our community.
More about Peter Pan from Mail Tribune
Joe Duck 