Pitos Blog

We’ve been on an SEO binge over the last 4-6 weeks. I’ve been educating myself by listening and reading to everything I can find my hands on.

What’s SEO anyway? It stands for “Search Engine Optimization” and it refers to the science and art of getting your site to come up when people are searching with Google or one of the other search engines.

As I tell the story to many people, I summarize what I’ve learned by noting that it’s all more or less common sense, once you hear it. But for some reason common sense isn’t always so common. The source that I have learned the most from (and where I’ve learned to really appreciate educational podcasts is the “Beginning SEO podcast” from Neo1Seo.com.

To illustrate common sense, here is how you can put a subtler and deeper interpretation to the above sentence.

LEVELS of SEO ENLIGHTENMENT.

SEO is the science and art of…

1. …getting your site to come up when people are searching…
2. …getting your site to come up when people who have never heard of your site are searching…
3. …getting your site to come up when people who have never heard of your site are searching and getting them to look at it…
4. …getting your site to come up when people who have never heard of your site are searching, not any time but specifically when they are in a mindset to act, and getting them to look…
5. …getting your site to come up when people who have never heard of your site are searching and in a mindset to act, and getting them to look, and then actually place an order, sign up, or whatever it is you want them to do…

If you bother to actually read those repetitive sentences, each one is a logical and common sense step beyond the preceding one, but many people - including me, pre-enlightenment, never get beyond level one. There’s a whole lot more to it than that of course but even that little bit may be a profound insight for someone who never gave it any thought.

So what about that email signature? Well one of the episodes of my favorite podcast talks about the other things you can do to help people to actually come to your site, in a mindset to act, and then doing whatever you want them to do.

And this one is so common sense and yet for years now I have not done it.

Starting today, everyone who I correspond to in email will have this friendly little signature line at the end of it:

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Check this out: http://www.blogbridge.com/look

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Check out this post Chefs and Editors from Dilbert.com Blog:

And that’s your future of the Internet. The cost of content, such as this blog, and my comic strip, will continue to approach zero. The art will happen with the editing. Others have made the obvious point that editing will be important for the future of the Internet. All I’m adding is the notion that most editors have skill, but few are artists. The world of print publishing is driven by editors who are exceptionally skilled. But they aren’t artists. Newser is edited by an artist. He or she isn’t giving me information; he’s adjusting my mood. That’s art. That’s the future. (from: Chefs and Editors)

And in general, read Dilbert.com Blog!

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You may not have followed the discussion that ensued when Ray Kurzweil was reported to ‘not understand the brain‘, but it’s pretty fascinating. Here’s what PZ Meyers said:

“There he goes again, making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality. Ray Kurzweil must be able to spin out a good line of bafflegab, because he seems to have the tech media convinced that he’s a genius, when he’s actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti.” (from PZ eyers)

Ouch!

Here’s a typically articulate and persuasive rebuttal from Ray Kurzweil:

“Myers, who apparently based his second-hand comments on erroneous press reports (he wasn’t at my talk), goes on to claim that my thesis is that we will reverse-engineer the brain from the genome. This is not at all what I said in my presentation to the Singularity Summit. I explicitly said that our quest to understand the principles of operation of the brain is based on many types of studies — from detailed molecular studies of individual neurons, to scans of neural connection patterns, to studies of the function of neural clusters, and many other approaches. I did not present studying the genome as even part of the strategy for reverse-engineering the brain.” (from Ray Kurzweil)

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Ok, that’s my own curious headline for this interesting article in the New York Times:

“What, after all, is a more recognizable symbol of the capriciousness of life than a deck of cards, out of which your fate is randomly dealt? And yet here the deck icon is only superficial. At heart it’s not a random-card generator but the opposite: a highly wrought program with a memory, an algorithm and a mandate to keep children in the game. An app posing as a spatiotemporal object.” (from The New York Times)

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Check this post iPhones Help Cops Solve Crimes By Capturing Everything You Type, Do from The Consumerist:

Cops love finding iPhones at crime scenes because the phones carry so much priceless data about your usage habits, or as the cops call it, evidence. That email you typed months back about feeling stabby when you drink? It’s still there because there because the iPhone captures everything you type to help fuel its spellcheck abilities—even emails you thought you deleted. And that’s not all. (from: iPhones Help Cops Solve Crimes By Capturing Everything You Type, Do)

Read the article; do you think it’s true? Snapping a screenshot every time you exit from the Mapping application? Sounds far fetched? Capturing all the text you type in to improve spell check? Hmm.Not that I have anything to hide

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Check this post iPhones Help Cops Solve Crimes By Capturing Everything You Type, Do from The Consumerist:

Cops love finding iPhones at crime scenes because the phones carry so much priceless data about your usage habits, or as the cops call it, evidence. That email you typed months back about feeling stabby when you drink? It’s still there because there because the iPhone captures everything you type to help fuel its spellcheck abilities—even emails you thought you deleted. And that’s not all. (from: iPhones Help Cops Solve Crimes By Capturing Everything You Type, Do)

Read the article; do you think it’s true? Snapping a screenshot every time you exit from the Mapping application? Sounds far fetched? Capturing all the text you type in to improve spell check? Hmm.Not that I have anything to hide

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I think I might be entering a new phase in my music listening. I listen to a ton of music, on my iPhone, on my computer, in my car, all the time. And up to now it’s always been downloaded (purchased) music that I organize manually within iTunes.  From time to time I’ve had subscriptions to eMusic and similar services.

As a result I have a huge number of tracks on my computer and on my iPhone. And as my music taste develops, and I discover new artists and composers, lots of those tracks are listened to rarely.

The alternative services like Rhapsody, which has been around for a while. But I didn’t like the idea of paying $10 per month to ‘rent’ music to listen to. Without owning it I would ‘lose’ the music if I ever cancelled the subscription. I would be tied to this $10 subscription forever.

Lately I’ve been trying the various streaming products like Rhapsody, Rdio, Mog, and various others. From those that I’ve tried I still like Rhapsody the best. Rhapsody is the only one that organizes music into genres so that I can browse through for example, 20th Century Classical. The other ones seem to be focused more on current popular music, which I don’t really listen to.

And I feel a sea-change coming in my own listening. I am really liking Rhapsody. I am playing more variety. Yes, even among my 10,000 or so tracks on my disk I was finding myself repeating the stuff I liked best. With Rhapsody I can go spelunking through a category I don’t know that well (e.g. Jazz Blues) and discover new music. I can have a playlist playing all afternoon of music that I like that I never heard before.

And who cares about ‘owning’ a track anyway?

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It seems like nowadays, to be a cool, 21st century kind of application, you need to allow me to use my facebook, or google, or yahoo, or twitter, or … account to access a site. Ok, sounds like a fine idea, don’t you think?

Here’s the problem. I go to one of the zillions of sites out there that I use, and it asks me to log in. Now, not only do I have to remember a username / email, a password, but I also have to remember if I used Google, Facebook, OpenId, or whatnot, to get in.

I guess I should set a policy for myself to never use anything other than the built in username/password. That’s probably a better policy for security as well.

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I never realized this and I am surprised that BlackBerry and Research In Motion advertising have not made a big deal out of it. According to this article BlackBerry communications travel over a highly encrypted channel, not the open internet:

“Other smartphones, like the Apple iPhone, are not tied to one e-mail service. In general, that means e-mail to and from the devices mostly travels over the open Internet and can be relatively easily monitored.

But the BlackBerry uses highly encrypted data that is received by wireless carriers’ towers and is immediately routed through a closed, global network operated by the company. To enforce the ban, the carriers will stop forwarding that data.” (from New York Times)

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