If you live in the Northeast US, you'll know that yesterday was one of those perfect spring days. I would bet that Office Productivity dipped significantly yesterday as people dazed out their permanently welded shut windows knowing that something miraculous was happening on the other side. Business men and women everywhere took long lunches wandered the park and played hooky in throughout the afternoon bringing back memories of lounging by the river skipping Mrs. Kimski's English Literature.
The wonderful thing about being part of the telecommuting work force with flexible work hours was that I was able to take hours in the middle of the day and enjoy nature -- without guilt . The hours that were put in at my virtual office were as or more productive than ever. Obviously this takes discipline that corporate boss types want middle management to believe doesn't exist in the American work force. Trust me the discipline is out there the real trick is keeping the employee morale high and the productivity can sore.
For my two hours of glorious commune with Mother Earth, I planted a tree, I loved every minute of it. If Al Gore is correct I not only had a productive day in and out of work, but I helped save the earth.
Kevin Lee Asks:
Is Java still considered "the language" for speed, robustness and scalability, or are coders moving to new languages like RoR?
My Response:
Superstars coders are those that can bring a myriad of tools to any problem and the experience to know which tool is going to be best for the job. Experience and fluency are key to making the right language decisions.
I think Java is looked at as a great Enterprise language because you can bring many programmers into a project and the language requires a particular style of work flow that makes it easier for large scale collaboration.
If you are looking at rapid prototyping, RoR allows you to build a web 2.0 site in an afternoon, but if you actually have a successful endeavor (a recent example is twitter.com) you will most likely have major scaling problems as the interaction between database and code has been obfuscated for speed of design not efficiency.
Elaborating on David Moore's comment on programmers being polyglots, most projects now require that multiple languages are used. I am currently working on a community centered website where web pages are built in PHP but all most interaction with the users is done with AJAX and many design actions are accomplished through Javascript.
Even then Language that is chosen for each component still only solves half of the issue -- without proper database design or in my latest project the use of memcache there is no language or hardware that can handle heavy load.
I was making an observation with my last post that the some well known Web Entrepreneurs have been making waves in the SEO community and it is my opinion that they should continue.
The post concluded with a very vague statement that people have asked me to elaborate on.
Some underlying truths need to be defined. Based on random calculations that I've made looking at average click cost, and number of searches (where ever I can find the data) , it is my belief that as much as 45% of Google's revenue comes from 'Branded' search terms. And possible as much as two thirds of that comes from clicks to the paid link where the top Paid and the top Natural URL are the same.
Obviously there is nothing more relevant for the search term AT&T than www.att.com. www.att.com is the number one natural search term and has enough supporting search data for Google to automatically fill in popular destinations with the www.att.com domain.
All that SEO goodness "googlejuice" or whatever you like to call it is isn't enough to keep AT&T from having to pay $1 or more a visitor to make sure their competitors don't steal customers away from them on the Brand Traffic that they've already spent billions to build.
It's a nice job if you can get it Google, how about giving a little back to the users and the advertisers fattening your market cap.
I may be the only person with the distinct privilege of having worked for both Jason Calacanis and David Pasternack. If you know anything about Search Engine Optimization you should already know why I'd combine these two entrepreneurs in this post. Both of these individuals have been very successful because of their ability to spot trends surrounding the growth of the 'Search Engine' and both have made waves recently in the SEO community.
Let this Post serve as a call for both of you not give up the cause.
Jason you are right content will always be King, and if you have to say SEO is BS to get people to pay attention then shout it out (however you'll probably not get invited back to SES).
Dave you are right SEO is not Rocket Science, and the contest only proved that there are still underhanded dirty tricks that only Black Hat SEO (snake oil salesmen) would resort to.
Search Engines need to be accountable for what gets ranked highly and transparency combined with education on how to use their tools should be the number one concern of Google, Yahoo, MSN, and anyone else who is captalizing on the brands that companies spend billions of dollars to create.
I noticed a new link at Google this morning called photos. I'm still one of the minority who doesn't have a flickr account, so I thought I'd try out Google Photos -- what can it hurt.... Well signing up for that, they got me with a promotion for Picassa, what the heck I don't have a good image viewer on my PC -- click .. click. Now Picassa is searching my entire hard drive for pictures.... 20 minutes later I''m surfing a timeline of photos I haven't looked at in years.
Our Long Island home before we bought it (Yuck). The vaious projects we've started.. Vacations .. my daughter growing up. Then there was this Shelter Island chart, and on a dreary, sloppy, sleaty day nothing warms my heart more than thinking about the open water and full throttle headed for the Gut.
'X Marks the spot' where the Bunker had come up into the bay last Fall right before one of the hurricanes passed by. The calm before the storm was like no other I witnessed in 2006. The sea was glass and the tell-tale signs of Menhaden being corralled to the surface by hungry Bluefish and Bass got my heart pumping faster than the strongest Starbucks bold with an extra shot. It was a site I hadn't seen since Rob Scott and I went fishing in late October 2001.
This is truly borrowed time in the North East of the United States. I love to garden, and one of my biggest complaints is the length of the growing season. Perhaps this year we got a reprieve from the harsh winter winds. I worked in the backyard more in December this year than most Octobers.
Two of my 4 vetegable beds are already turned over and ready for spring, I thinned and replant my Strawberries, I cultivate two empty garden beds and have already begun using last years leaf mold as mulch around the Raspberries and Hellebores.
I often think about moving south, but if this is global warming at it continues, I'm staying right here.
I'm not sure how much subconsciously I knew that Owen Alexander Wood was going to be a huge baby when I wrote my last post about my toys. But the title turned out prophetic. After days of labor and exhaustion, Owen Alexander Wood was born Monday tipping the scales at 11 lbs. 5.2 oz. Mom and Baby are happy and healthy. Thanks for all of the help and support, especially Susan and Christine.
The first season of the Grady is officially in the books. It wasn't a record breaker as far as fish caught, although I might have racked up a new record in the 'hours fished' category, and certainly an all time high in gas consumed and $$ spent :) If I had the means, I would get rid of the swiveling captains chairs, put in a bench and T-Top. Maybe next season.
Speaking of next season I only ended up with a few first mates this year, taking applications now -- squidding season starts in 5 months.
Is airtravel the first step to the US becoming a police state ? I surely hope not, but a couple of items in the news of late have got me concerned.
A women was kicked off a plane for breastfeeding. I don't know all of the local laws in each state, but I'm sure the majority of the United States, certainly New York there are laws making sure women have the right to do what nature set them up to do. Current laws don't allow you to bring bottles on Airplanes, is the next step to check womens breasts to make sure they aren't lactating?
Couple arrested for kissing. Evidently the couple faces upto 20 years in prison?
I certainly don't feel any safer on an airplane because the security has been federalized, I deal with it because I don't fly that often. At first I refused to take my shoes off - mandatory feel up during security - some fun.
I can't resist. A real old school treat. WARNING: adult language .. if you care .. nothing my four year old hasn't heard, but I still had to stop playing the video when she started singing " ... it's for the children ... " Nice job by 13tongimp.
Spent some time this weekend redesigning my hobby site Atariace.Com. The site is now much more SEO friendly, much easier to navigate and gives the user 3 different display styles, Notecard, Postit, and List view. I think the entire code base is probably less than 3000 lines of code. It is the version of Atariace that I've been dreaming to build for about 3 years. The site is almost exclusively CSS, tableless design. However my CSS coding is not all it should be and I resorted to tables twice, it is definitely hard to teach an old dog new tricks, I've been building tabled designs since 1995, I guess it was time to switch.
The good news is sales have tripled this week, no question the page load time of the old site was costing my father and I serious viewership. Take a look if you get a chance and let me know what you think.
6 Years ago when I was working fevorishly at trying to keep a doorway page SEO business afloat, I started working with Excite's free content distribution network. They had some weather applets, a news feed with different categories, and some sort of search results gizmo. Their service didn't last long, but like some many early internet failures, it paved the way for RSS and IFRAME content. Recently I've heard some hype about an upstart search engine (maybe you've heard of it) distributing Google Gadgets so spammers (and myspace hacks) the world over can instantly load up useless pages with nifty content.
