Working for an Ad company myself, I decided to go to the discussion with Michael Walrath of Right Media and Sergio Monslave. The web is becoming more and more fragmented. How do advertisers target such a fragmented market. I think the answer is pretty controversial. Data mining. As web consumers read blogs, connect on social media, check out videos on youtube, this data will end up being collected and ads delivered to the end user on the topics they have been visiting. Ad networks will know who you are and know what you want before you even know it. It’s controversial, but it is the way the markets are going.
I personally think it will eventually work like this, but it will come under legal repercussions at first. Eventually the strong will survive. People don’t really care about their privacy as much as one may think. Just look, I got a blog with my name one it.
Posted on: October 17th, 2007
After a long day of travel, I am finally here at the hotel. On a recommendation from Patrick Moorhead, I am staying at the Hotel Palomar. The hotel is extremely nice and modern. The rooms is great and they offer free WiFi. It is right in the middle of San Francisco. I took a little walk around the city and ended up at the Cigar Bar and Grill. The place had some good food and great service.
Does anyone have any good places they could recommend? William Flaiz told me to get an In-N-Out Burger with some Wild Fries. I’ll have to hunt one of them down.
Posted on: October 16th, 2007
I’m in the Philadelphia International Airport posting my first ever Moblog. I am heading to San Fran to the Web 2.0 summit. There are close to 100 top speakers there. I’ll be posting photos and comments throughout the conference. I got to go, they are calling my flight.
Posted on: October 16th, 2007
After 8 months bulk aging in it’s carboy, Jeff Louella Malbec 2007 has finally been bottled and labeled. The must was created from Winexpert’s 100% Argentinean grown Malbec grapes. The fermentation went great and the wine came out nice. I just bottled today. They say the wine needs to become bottle conditioned. I put less than the average amount of Potassium Metabisulphite, so the wine may not age for 10 years, but then again, it is not full of chemical preservatives like commercial wines are. It will be at it’s best in another year and should be prime for the next 5 years.
Posted on: October 14th, 2007
For some reason I am addicted to the news. From international affairs to celebrity gossip, I end up reading and watching news hours a day. I think I am in the search for the truth, but it’s so hard these days to know what what is really happening out there. Here are two stories on the same bit of information that lean two different ways. They are both correct, but it just leaves me confused at the end.
First Story: Foreclosure Filings Nearly Double
Second Story: September Foreclosures Fall
Posted on: October 11th, 2007
Over the past 12 or so years, I have worked on the web. First, I started off as a designer. I never went to school for design, but back in the mid 90’s, most graphic designers worked in print and could really care less about the web. The web wasn’t taken seriously yet. It was still very primitive compared to today. This was great for me. I owned Photoshop and learned to mimic other peoples designs. I wasn’t great, but I got the job done.
My skill set didn’t end at design. Again, the web was new. There was no such thing as front end or presentation layer developers. So I had to become a master of Netscape and Internet Explorer HTML display bugs. I could nest tables and use spacer gif’s better than most. The company I worked for at the time was getting a ton of work and I would pop out about 2 sites a week, sometimes more (they were more like micro-sites). The web was taking off. Good Times.
As the web got more respect and design schools focused on the web a little more, I realized I was no where near as qualified to call myself a designer as these fresh kids out of school. I wasn’t familiar with typography or color theory. I mimicked others enough to know what looked good, but struggled to be as creative as I wanted. So I decided to move into programming. I had the front end development down, but working with databases and functions was pretty foreign to me.
I worked in Microsoft’s ASP VB, Access, and SQL for about 4 years, building small to mid level CMS’s and web form submissions. Though I wasn’t bad at what I did, I was competing with programmers that had received their masters in computer science from prestigious schools. This whole industry was just a hobby to me that eventually turned into a career. At times I laugh how it all started.
I once was a sales person at Best Buy in the mid 90’s, when a customer came in to buy a first generation digital camera. This was before megapixel cameras were even out. He told me it was for a web company he just started. Long story short, I convinced him I was a web designer and developer and he ended up hiring me. That is when my web career started.
Well another milestone is about to take place for me. I am leaving the world of IDE’s and Photoshop behind. I am moving into more of an analytical role and attacking the web from another angle. What am I analyzing? A web sites ability to be searched. As of November 1st, I am transitioning into a role as an Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Engineer. Being a developer for a while, I had learned a lot about search along with accessibility and web standards. I will be using these skills to help my clients rank better and get their sites noticed.
Sometimes I just feel like I need a change, but I can never go too far from my roots. Wish me luck and get ready for some rock’n articles on black, blue, and white hat SEO techniques, link popularity, and keyword research. I bet you are all excited.
Posted on: October 10th, 2007
Over the years, I have acquired a love / hate relationship with politics. I love the debate on how best to run this country, but I hate that that’s all it is. Nothing ever gets accomplished. I tend to sign up for politicians newsletters to see how they play the game and what ideas they are pushing. One person who has appealed to me lately is the Republican Congressman out of Texas, Ron Paul. Ron Paul is a huge long shot, but has acquired a huge Internet base of supporters. Ron Paul is actually in the lead on many online political polls. Though he is a Republican, he is breaking down barriers on both sides with his Libertarian viewpoints.
Republicans like John McCain are freaking out on the chance that Ron Paul may actually beat out most of the field. To combat that, it looks like John McCain and Barack Obama are trying to ride some of Ron Paul’s Internet success by running Ad-Word campaigns through Google. Below is a snap shot of my GMail account with a letter from Ron Paul. Notice the Ads to the right. I love an under dog and especially one with a minimalist government platform. To bad I am not a registered Republican to vote for Ron Paul in the Primaries.
Posted on: August 8th, 2007
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