Archive for March, 2008
Monday, March 31st, 2008
Alright, this blog is for the ladies. We have been dreaming about a place to get all the wonderful guidance and tips from the love goddesses and geniuses around the world all in one place. Well, guess what?! We finally have it. The only catch is that everything from love tips to dating advice is all manufactured by the geniuses at Yahoo!. (We will take what we can get right?)
So yes, Yahoo has a search engine specifically targeting women. You can find anything from healthy living to steamy celebrity relationships. Its the Cosmopolitan of the internet. Finally a search engine that has all the pertinent and important news that women want to know and read about. Not only just gossip but also tips relating to women and the work place, money and finance all centered around a women’s world. Fancy that!
Get inspired ladies because Yahoo! Shine has our back. Check it out: http://shine.yahoo.com/
*Note: I hope that you catch my intense sarcasm in this post.
Monday, March 31st, 2008
No, I’m not talking about fishing, (although I wouldn’t mind being there right now.) I’m talking about social media marketing. All advertisers have bait or subliminal messages right? They need to grab your attention so you look at their product and hopefully they get a sell out of you. Ever wonder why you have to lean down to see what cereal you want? That is if you don’t eat the healthy stuff like Fruit Loops, Lucky Charms etc. The delectable cereal is at the average height of a child. The children see it, bug their parents to get it, and you don’t want your kid kicking and screaming on the floor, so…caught ya! You end up purchasing it. (You know you like those colorful marshmallows too!)
Here’s a little tid-bit/reminder regarding Social Media and the importance of “baiting” from doshdosh.com. “All social media funnels are fueled by your proposition, your bait, your attention magnet; things that captivate interest and pull visitors into the heart of your site. You are responsible for the evolution of visitors from a mere prospect to an engaged opportunity (interested reader) and possibly a closed sale (loyal supporter).” Sometimes your target may need a little nibble before you snag them up, but make sure that nibble is delicious, and remember if you want to reel ‘em in, don’t forget the bait! Here fishy, fishy!!!
Monday, March 31st, 2008
The Indigio Blog has been upgraded to WordPress 2.5. This is a significant release with the most visible enhancements contained within the Administration interface. For more details on the changes see this post:
http://wordpress.org/development/2008/03/wordpress-25-brecker/
Some of my favorite changes are the improvements to image file upload and management. I think most WordPress users will enjoy these enhancements. I created some screenshots as I went through the new interface this morning.
Read the rest of this entry »
Thursday, March 27th, 2008
As an ASP.Net webdeveloper, one of the most annoying aspects of my job relates to finding and fixing bugs related to inconsistencies between my development platform and my production web server platforms. One of the most basic differences is the fact that on XP pro I can only have 1 website configured under IIS. This means that every website I work on locally has to be mapped to a distinct virtual directory under the default web site in IIS.
Luckily, the small windows application XP Pro IIS Admin that man handles IIS into allowing multiple sites to be setup and configured in XP pro. You can still only have one site running at time, but it is a simple matter of switching between them. The best thing about this app is that it is totally free. I highly recommend it to anyone developing on a windows machine with the built in stripped down version of IIS.
Thursday, March 27th, 2008
Social Media is all the rage right now. Everyone is talking about it and using it for that matter. I am more or less new to all of it and I am still finding my way around different sites like Digg and Stumble. The list of Social Media sites could go on for quite some time. Well even after spending a few weeks browsing and discovering articles in Digg a thought occurred to me, “Who manages and controls the quality of stories, articles and or events that end up on the front page?” I mean do we want quality and credibility in the things that are on the top Digg list every day? Or do we merely want to enjoy and share things with others regardless of what it is. Maybe thats the point of Social Media. Maybe Digg or Stumble or Del.icio.us would not be the same if someone was controlling or in a sense censoring the type of things people share. Digg is even getting to the point where there are items on the front page that only have 26-30 Diggs and really have no reason to be up there. Tell me if I am wrong, but I believe people would rather be reading something that got over 100 Diggs than something that only got 20-30. Who controls what goes up there? Who says this is worthy of being notices. We do, us Social Mediaites. So the final questions arises. Being that we are the ones doing the Digging and controlling what is good should we take more of an active role in censoring what is Digged or not? What do you think? Would censorship completely go against everything that Social Media stands for?
What do you think?
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
Or le Muxtape, as it were.
Check it out: http://muxtape.com/
P.S. Mine is still in progress (http://xaraboo.muxtape.com/)
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
Online relationship management. That’s what I think about it. More so your relationship with yourself than anything else. Social media today makes me assess how I differentiate what is online and offline, so let’s just separate the two and take a look. I had a bit of an experience on Twitter earlier this evening, and I wanted to share how the results of the experiment can support how online relationships can be just as important as those offline and vice versa.
How many people know you, or follow your life stream? How many people do you know, and follow their life stream? And at some point, who cares–what are you getting out of it compared with the amount of time you spend messing with it? Right? Tonight, I got all emo and threatened to quit Twitter. 4 out of 80 people following me replied and said, “dude, why?” I defended my stance by saying:
”What happens when you supposedly create your own community and feel you’re not accepted? Are you not contributing enough? The only reason I’m asking is because I haven’t felt the Twitter love lately, and it makes me feel as if I HAVE to do something. Screw that…it may be a consequence of what I’ve made my experience to be, but the people I care about don’t seem to give a *&%# about what I say…seriously considering quitting Twitter tonight.”
I know at heart we all value the whole Twitter because it IS great. Like @garyvee says, we are damn lucky to be worried about using things like Twitter. Such a privilege to be living like this, and just GETTING (I mean understanding) it.” But the point of my test was to see how people value their online relationships vs. their offline ones. Obviously many of the people that were following me wouldn’t care if I fell of the face of Twitter. “Who cares, if I need to find him there are other vessels (MySpace, Facebook, uh email?)” But how would that type of message translate to the real world? Would I seem suicidal? Would more “friends” (term to be used loosely–no offense, but that term should be used loosely in web communities”) step in and intervene? I value my online relationships. Someone said to me after the whole fiasco: “You should expect less of everyone.” That’s fine, I can deal with that. But what if I expect MORE of everyone? I think that would only contribute to a better community. Not such a bad thing.
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
The Omniture Summit this year was fantastic. I had the good fortune to meet some very interesting people, like this guy:
He was a little intoxicated but assured me that he’d beat someone up if they tried to hurt me.
Read the rest of this entry »
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
Happy Birthday to Indigio’s own Wonder Twins - Heather Sharp and Dale Gloude. Both were born on March 26th and according to Dale they were even born on the same year. Wow, Dale looks great for 34!
For those of you unfamiliar with the Wonder Twins obscure reference: Read the rest of this entry »
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
Last week, my colleagues, Tim Higgins and Becki Dilworth, and me attended the SES (Search Engine Strategies) show in New York City as exhibitors. It was a beautiful sunny day in New York City when when we arrived. The conference took place at the Hilton in Times Square where we set up the booth in the Expo Hall then promptly attended SEMPO’s networking happy hour followed by a St. Paddy’s day pub crawl. (Speaking of the booth, Becki and I are now experts on how to deal with minor booth set up mishaps…)
Tuesday the expo hall was packed with attendees and we had the opportunity to meet a really diverse set of visitors ranging from members of the health and legal industries, travel and dining sites, yellow pages and publishing, sports and recreation as well as alternative lifestyles. The fact that we were giving away an iPod Touch (as well as some really yummy candy and nice looking promos) probably encouraged people even more to stop by and find out more about us. But we’d like to believe it was because we differentiated ourselves as one of the few full service interactive agencies attending specializing in not only Pay-Per-Click and SEO but also site design, analytics and improving the overall user experience to drive online conversions.
Speaking of the iPod Touch, Richard Chu of NGC Worldwide, Inc. was the lucky winner. Richard is responsible for all things online for NGC which has been the leader in scientific golf and fishing equipment for 25 years. If you are looking to improve your swing, fix your hook or really impress your friends on the fairway check out their site. They also specialize in fishing equipment including some really cool lures to improve your bass fishing. They work with inventors and all of their equipment is tested by pros. Richard attended the show to find out more about how to grow audience and track conversions and as an added bonus he won an iPod Touch. Thanks for stopping by everyone and congratulations Richard!
