WordCamp 2008

This past weekend I was fortunate enough to attend WordCamp 2008. The event was hosted at the University of San Francisco Mission Bay Campus and was just a perfect set up for such an event. There were roughly 450 attendees and 16 well respected presenters. There were two separate tracks for the event; one for the users and one for the developers. I remained in the user track for the entire event even though there were a few speakers in the developer track I wished I could have heard, so perhaps next time.

The schedule itself was fairly fast past and intense yet the flow managed to work well. Below were the topics and list of speakers I heard from.
• The Future of Education and Wordpress – Alan Levine
• SEO Mistakes Most Bloggers Make - Stephan Spencer
• Open Source Business Models - Stephen O’Grady
• Andy Skelton - A musical performance
• LOLcats and the Secret of Virality- Ben Huh
• Wordpress & Microformats: Past, Present, Future- Tantek Celik
• Switching to Wordpress Painlessly - Lloyd Budd
• 260 Ways to break Wordpress - Lorelle VanFossen
• Hassle-free Upgrades - Sam Bauers
• State of the Word - Matt Mullenweg
• Get Friendly with BuddyPress - Andy Peatling
• Democratizing the Web through Global Voices - Jeremy Clarke
• An interview with Om Malik
• Riding the Crazyhorse - Liz Danzico and Jane Wells
• A musical performance by Chuck Lewis aka SEO Rapper
• Kicking Ass and Creating Passionate Users - Kathy Sierra

Alan Levine kicked off the event speaking about the future of education and WordPress or primarily blogging and education. The most amazing part of his speech was really just hearing how intricately involved the internet is with our education system and that blogs are really becoming a very powerful tool for educators. Edublogs is just one of the sites referenced in which students and/or teachers can manage a blog for projects, curriculum and the likes. Edublog uses Wordpress multi user installations and has had thousands of sign up thus far, truly a promising response.

Stephan Spencer was impressive to hear as he discussed SEO Mistakes that Bloggers Make and ways to easily correct them. A few techniques he mentioned to help improve upon your rankings were to include tag clouds, tag pages, and tag conjunction pages. Stephan mentions that title tags are arguably the most important of the on-page factors for search engines. He developed a plugin to aid this process and optimize the title tags across your WordPress blog. You can read more and download the SEO Title Tag plugin that Stephan developed here.

Stephan O’Grady of Redmonk.com discussed how open source business models can bring in money and he described several methods in order to make them profitable. You can see his presentation here. Andy Skelton (who is much more than a musician) performed a few songs as well which really allowed for some nice downtime.

Ben Huh of LOLcats.com was by far the most entertaining as he included hilarious photos from a few of his comical sites to really make his topic on the Secret of Virality speak volumes. Once you see one of his sites (ex: LOLcats.com) you would know the type of Viral Marketing capable there. He described virality as people’s willingness to send content to another. Seeming pretty simple, however there are a few rules really that seem to come into play, which basically he described as “not being a dick”. Quality invitation virality is sticky and sustainable which is ultimately what you want versus spammy invites which at some point will only lead to failure.

Tantek Celik, an amazing gentleman whose knowledge really seems endless, spoke about WordPress and Microformats: Past, Present, and Future. Prior to his talk I have to say I was somewhat unfamiliar with the concept of microformats. His presentation gave quick light to the topic and understanding about how valuable being able to utilize and access semantic data is as most site now employ this type of open data format.
He referenced the hCard as an easy method in distributing and gaining contact information of users over the web. Using the hCard, with your contact information already stored, makes signing up for social networking sites, event sites, and more super simple. To learn more about the hCard or create your own hCard check out the hCard creator. In order to best utilize this system Tantek recommends installing Operator for firefox which leverages these microformats.

Lloyd Budd spoke about switching to WordPress painlessly which in all reality these days has been made very simple with several backup plugins along with a few simple redirect pieces to ensure nothing is lost including data, traffic, and comments. Lorelle VanFossen spoke about being able to push WordPress as far as it can go to ensure that it is the most sophisticated open blogging platform available. It was really refreshing to hear her speak with such a passion about doing more with WordPress, to push it and improve its platform among the different browsers, operating systems, and hosting companies. Sam Bauers spoke about hassle-free upgrades which again I feel has really been made simple with the automatic upgrade plugin. In less than 1 minute you can have the newest version of WordPress on your blog.

Matt Mullenweg who was gracious enough to give Search Feature an interview spoke on WordPress’ past and current state. He spoke about the large growth in members of the WordPress community for both .com and .org. He spoke about the number of releases in this past year (approximately one per month) and he spoke about the huge increase in downloads this year as compared to last year which all just proves how much WordPress really means to the community, to its members, and to businesses worldwide. For 2009 he mentioned how important upgrades will be and how the WordPress platform will continue to lead the way towards bigger, better, and stronger growth for those that use it.

Continue Reading Post…

Search Featured: Joel Comm

MD: Joel, first of all welcome to Search Feature. I understand that one of your first sites was http://www.worldvillage.com/
Was that the one project which helped you get started with your adsense ventures and what did you do to help it kick off? What mistakes did you make and when did you finally get the hang of it?

JC: I launched WorldVillage.com in 1995, but AdSense didn’t start until 2003. By that time, I had several established sites. The one that was my greatest AdSense earner was http://www.DealofDay.com, a site for people wanting to save money on their retail purchases online. I made a ton of mistakes, including using the wrong ad blocks, wrong ad colors and wrong page placement. Around April 2004, I “cracked the code” and started making substantial revenue.

MD: I understand that Thor Schrock was a contestant on www.nextinternetmillionaire.com and later on became the producer of www.TopAffiliateChallenge.com which just ended. You were predicting that the show would fail because of the video editing job done. Shoemoney and John Chow were team leaders and you had Ken McArthor as well. Pepperjam and Market leverage were sponsors. The blogosphere was full of people writing about the show, so tell me what you believe you should have done different.
Would doing a show live reality show style be the most effective way to teach people?

JC: I didn’t predict failure. I said that he was biting off more than he could chew. While not a commercial success, the show did boldly go where no one had gone before and I applaud Thor for that. I discussed this on my blog at http://www.joelcomm.com/the_top_affiliate_challenge_in.html . It is hard enough to produce a show to be aired later. Add to that the pressures of producing an episode each day and I think you need a significant budget and team to pull it off. The other criticism was that there wasn’t much teaching. When you are doing reality programming, it has to be entertaining and engaging first, educational second. TAC had a problem doing either well.

MD: My sources tell me that one of the people you have been learning from was Mike Filsaime who also became a mentor on The Next Internet Millionaire. You then created http://www.secretclassroom.com/ where you sell copies for $500.00
Kris Jones from Pepperjam, Brad Fallen and Mark Joyner are part of the team as well.
And crazy Marlon Sanders.
What do those guys add to the team? How did you choose those guys and what are you looking for in team members, I mean which criteria do you use to pick someone to join forces with?

JC: I selected a dozen Internet millionaires who would be willing to come and teach our contestants their best content in a brief two –hour session. Each one of them over delivered and equipped the contestants with incredibly valuable information. We call The Secret Classroom a seminar so exclusive that you couldn’t buy a ticket for it! We do offer it for $497 and regularly hear great feedback from our customers. It’s a great comprehensive course for Internet marketing.
I take your word that video is a major tool most web marketers ignore and fail communicating well with their audience. What else do you believe is something you should pursue in order to get your messages across better?
Most marketers are not using social media properly. Twitter, Facebook and other sites allow so much opportunity to interact with people. I think it is easy to get lost in technology and forget that our online business is still first and foremost about people. It’s about relationship. When people lose site of that and just focus on sales, they are going down the wrong road.

MD: Your main blog has been redesigned and it seems to have improved communication with readers. Do you believe you spend enough time answering questions on your blog and social networks or do you think that it’s something that should be and stay on the back burner importance wise? I see that Twitter has become one of your favorite spots now. What is it that you like about it so much? And when will you create some sort of social network yourself?

JC: It’s impossible to answer all the questions and comments people direct to me. Between Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, email, AskJoelComm.com and my blog, I can’t do it all. We have created our own social network that comes as an exclusive membership with our Top One Percent Report at http://www.toponenetwork.com . We’re also working on a new social network that I am not at liberty to speak about yet, but it will put me and my team one step closer to world domination.

MD: I hate to do this, but here is an early video of yours.
What did you think about it when you saw it and how did you approach things differently afterwards? I’m sure that you don’t like watching this, but tell me how much your impact has changed thru an increase of the quality of your videos? And will you keep using http://www.ustream.tv/ ?

JC: When you sent me to one of my videos, I was thinking “Oh Lord, what have I done?” But seeing this video doesn’t embarrass me at all. If it did, I would take it down. Actually, I should probably take it down just because the offer is so dated!

With The Next Internet Millionaire, we positioned me as a Trump of the web. I had the suit and tie, was pretty formal, etc. I decided that I want to be more approachable from now on. I’m just a regular guy who has found success online. I want others to know they can experience the same thing if they just apply themselves to principles of success. If anything, my videos have gotten goofier and more fun!

MD: When you are on top of your own industry, what is your ambition? Is there anything different that we can expect from you in the future?

JC: Always! One of my goals is to always do new things. We are developing products and services that are going to continue to boldly go where no one has gone before. I’m excited about new projects and you’ll be seeing a lot of new stuff from me and my team soon.

5 Things You Can do to “Green” up Search

I know you all sit around everyday wondering how little old SEO Bobby can change the world, so I figured I’d take a couple minutes and throw together some tips from the good guys over at www.greenlivingtips.com. Below are a few things everyone can do to help lighten up their carbon footprint.

We have green home builders, green automobile manufacturers, green rock stars and a green politician Nobel Peace prize winner – why not have a few Green SEOs?

1. Send your clients an invoice via email and tell them not to print it out with the following tip!

“Worldwide, paper and pulp is the single largest industrial consumer of forests and the fourth largest industrial consumer of energy.” (Fernandes, Louella, The Green Print for Paper Saving)

2. When you are finished making your site user friendly and promoting it against Google’s guidelines, err, diligently,  switch your computer off, and unplug it from the wall. By doing this, you will successfully avoid standby power electricity consumption. You will not only save the planet, but you can shave up to 10% from your electricity bill.

3. Pimp your office SEO dungeon with CFL light bulbs, or better, LED lights; you can save money and trim some carbon dioxide emissions too.

4. Buy an ebook and learn your way to SEO greatness as opposed to filling the ground with another hard, or paperback book that you - will not - read twice. Producing one sheet of paper uses the equivalent of 60 watt-hours of energy. If you must have a hard copy of your book, try picking up a used book … maybe you can get a nice novel from a reformed black hat. I’m just saying..

5. CD’s and DVD’s are developed using different lacquers, aluminum, goold (what’s that?) and polycarbonate plastic;  they’ll last in a landfill far longer than any of your rankings. It looks like burning them won’t do any good either, why not give them to charities, friends, families or if they are that bad, your SEO nemesis. Another great option is to locate a free DVD and Recycling center near you and send them off for recycling. I would offer some search tips, but you will need a lot more than my tips if you can’t search your way to some information.

It has been said many times that this Earth is all we have, why not put a little effort into keeping it around for the next generation of SEOites*.

*not really a word

SEO Rapper

He will perform at the Wordpress 2008 convention in San Francisco which Elle Nissen will cover for Searchfeature.com
Stay tuned!

Social networking is just a phase … yeah right!

I am not looking for an online date. I think the internet is a great thing to have when you don’t feel like being social, but don’t want to be alone either.

I have never really had the problem of finding people to talk to online, since I have always been a big networker, but today I have decided to look a little more into social networking and how the average user might see it.

After adding a bunch of people I have known from domain and SEO forums for years, I got that warning that I cannot add any more friends or my account might get disabled.

Ouch!

So instead I checked out an application on Facebook called Are you interested? and what you do is choose yes, yes anonymous or skip on pictures of girls back to back.

At first nobody or only 5 in an hour after clicking yes on like 100 and was like, wtf. But then a girl emailed me and suggested to put my real pic up there instead of my logo (cause they automatically think you are ugly if you don’t have a pic), and it worked.

Where was this when I was 16 and my mom grounded me?

This crap is addictive. To say the least.

Like most of the people who read this I joined those networks to network and promote.

Now I have like 20 messages from girls who want to know more about me, but needless to say, this is the time to pull the plug.

A lot of people have made statements that social media is only a phase. That is 100% wrong. Social media is only in its infancy and I believe there will be a lot more advanced applications which make connecting with likeminded easier.

being able to connect is a need everyone has, and the younger you are, the more active you are in persuing it.

Mainly I recall the interview with Doug now who made that statement. It’s good to be happy in your life, set in your ways and have no need to have more friends. but the young generation growing up with this will be instantly addicted.

but what would this post be without a shameless plug of my profile so you can add me as a friend?

Nothing!

So here it is

http://www.new.facebook.com/home.php#/profile.php?id=531697008

Oh and if you hit up any of my female “friends”, I will find out and whoop your ass

Oh and here is some advice for the women who think they don’t have the right look to have their pic in their profile. Just do it! You think all the guys there are hot?

Mike Dammann

Search featured: Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress

Matt Mullenweg is the creator of Wordpress :

MD: Hi Matt, first of all thank you for the interview. I have seen that you guys have been working on previous security issues. What has been the biggest obstacle when it comes to making wordpress blogs more secure and what have you learned from recent attacks?

MM: Well in the past year we haven’t had a security issue that wasn’t already fixed with a release by the time it was announced.

Now nothing is 100% secure, and I’m sure there will be issues at some point in the future, but I think as we’ve matured as a software project and so many thousands of people have reviewed the code, issues should become less frequent and severe.

So we have a good track record of getting updates into the hands of users before they’re at risk, so now I think the main focus has to be making upgrading easier — it’s way too hard right now. We’ve got a half a dozen things in the cooker right now for that.

 

MD: How much effort do you spend on search engine ranking related issues and are you working on making your platform easier to spider or whatever else you can do to ensure that your users get the right recognition by Google.

MM: I think you have to remember that the point of Google is to connect their users with the best information in the world. So rather than targeting how Google may or may not work today, you should focus on creating the best resources for their and your users. WordPress does very well in search engines thanks to its structure and clean URLs, but long-term it’s the content on your site that will make it valuable to searchers or not.

 

MD: Your Open Source iPhones application has been the hot new thing
http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2008/08/05/july-wrap-up-2/
Give us a glimpse on what new we might be expecting from you next?

MM: We’ve been thrilled with the adoption of the application so far. Basically we want to make writing and managing your blog on the iPhone easier. In the future I think you’ll see landscape keyboards, comment moderation, stats integration, copy and paste, better galleries, maybe even some light HTML editing.

 

MD: In order to satisfy the need that people have to connect to people, which social networks out there do you believe have it right and what are you planning to do to keep people from wondering away from good old fashioned blogging? Do you believe that internet users’ attention spans will become shorter and shorter and less and less will be blogging the old fashioned way?

MM: People have been predicting the death of blogging for longer than WordPress has been alive. I think that blogging is more vibrant than ever. It’s evolving to include richer forms of media, be available in different mediums, even something like Twitter you could look at as short-form blogging. I think blogging has more legs long term, after all Friendster, Six Degrees, and a dozen other social networks have fallen by the wayside, but Blogger is still around.

 

MD: Give me an idea on what the wordpress team consists of. How many people work there, are most of them programmers? Who comes up with new ideas and how much of an impact do users’ suggestions have on decisions that you make when it comes to upgrades?

MM: For the core WordPress.org software it’s a team of volunteers, we had over 90 people contribute to our 2.5 release. I would say almost all of them program, though just as important is the large teams of people who contribute to our documentation Codex and help people on the support forums.

User suggestions drive 99% of our development roadmap, and people seem to like that as every version we release breaks new records for downloads and usage.

 

MD: To those of us who do not know you, tell us what else you’re a part of, what drives you and if you actually benefit from wordpress financially. I know that it has great value, but it’s a free platform after all. I don’t normally ask people about income related stuff and am not asking for anything specific, just wondering if there is an end goal so to speak which you may have set before you started out with wordpress?

MM: WordPress was started purely because I wanted better software to use for my own blog, and there were a few other people I worked with that wanted the same. It was never created with any broad goals or ambitions.

I think most people who contribute to WordPress do it for the karma rather than the cash. There are plenty of people who make their living from it, and in fact my entire company Automattic contributes to WordPress in many forms, but if all you want to do is make money you should be an ibanker or something, not contribute to Open Source.

 

MD: Think about any question you can ask any internet celebrity out there. Something you have always wondered. Name the person and state the question.

MM: I would like to ask Jeff Bezos what he has in the labs. Apparently things like the Kindle were under development for 4-5 years before we found out about it. I can’t imagine what’s in their labs today.

 

MD: Overall speaking, what do you believe the internet is lacking. What will be the shift that users and bloggers and also site creators go towards?

MM: I think ultimately the internet abhors closed systems, and finds ways to route around them. The way that many social networks and web 2.0 sites work today is somewhat of a roach motel for data, it should be easier to get your data and preferences out of a system than it was to put it in.

Open Source will be at the core of this.

 

MD: Will there be more search engines similar to Google?

MM: I hope so!

 

MD: How will the online behaviour change now that people grow up using the internet from as early as age 4?

MM: This is the generation that will take blogging mainstream - they’re so comfortable with publishing online.

 

MD: At what age do you believe a kid should start blogging?

MM: In the womb.

 

MD: Do you believe that the internet is becoming safer and do you recommend a certain age at which blogging and opening yourself up to the world is secure and not a good idea before that?

MM: I think the world in general can be unsafe, but that parental guidance and a healthy dose of common sense can protect you from 99% of what’s out there.

That said, I don’t have any children (I know of) so perhaps my views will change when I do.

 

MD: OK last but not least, I am clueless about anything technical, yet I want a blog and no domain name that is any good can be found. Give people who want to brand themselves some hints on how to do it efficiently and name a few mistakes to avoid.

MM: I think WordPress.com is a great place to start blogging. Get a domain right away, and if or when you want more features or customizability it’s easy to move your posts, comments, and everything else to a self-hosted install of WordPress.org. From a user point of view the two are identical in many ways, so moving between them is pretty effortless and since you have your own domain all your links will stay the same.

Never invest too much time in a subdomain that someone else owns.

Search featured: Anil Dash

Six Apart is responsible for Moveable Type and Wordpress blogs?
Of course, the one thing you will think about now is nigritude ultramarine or however that was spelled. And many of you have no clue that Anil is a part of the New York team of geeks responsible for so much more.
Anil Dash has been a speaker at many technological conventions and in light of the danger for anybody using a Wordpress blog these days (*looks around, under the bed, peeks with on eye thru the curtains*), I personally have decided to give Moveable Type another chance after having been too retarded a few years ago to install one by myself.
Anil Dash is one of my old buddies, so clueless me stumbled on yet another great interviewee by accident.

Enjoy this one!

Mike

Mike Dammann: Anil, you have been on the map for a while, but one of the things most people will remember you for is your victory in the first SEO contest ever. How has this popularity in the SEO world affected your regular work and do people still ask you for advice because of it?

Anil Dash: These days, very few people ask for my feedback on SEO, because it’s
been a number of years since that contest. But being aware of search
engines is still a big part of my job, trying to make best practices
automatic on our platforms, so that people don’t have to be aware of
this stuff if they just want to share their ideas or promote their
efforts online.

Mike Dammann: In the past few years you have been responsible for quite a lot of innovations online. Being a part of the team creating Typepad and Moveable Type is one thing that comes to mind.
It seems to me that blogging is what really your passion is. How has blogging changed your life, business and private and what do you recommend taking into consideration when creating an online persona per se thru a blog?

Anil Dash: Blogging’s impacted every part of my life, from being the base of my
career to connecting me to some of my closest friends to helping me
the couple that introduced me to my wife. I think if you consider it
just another communications medium like email or the telephone, but
with some unique powers for reaching a large audience, you can
immediately think of ways to take advantage of it.

Of course, the potential for reaching that audience has some risks as
well. The key thing to keep in mind is that the things you say will be
online forever, with your name attached. I probably was a lot more
antagonistic when I was younger and hadn’t quite learned that lesson.
Similarly, those of us who run sites are responsible for them, and it
makes sense to make sure your authors and commenters are being
accountable for what they publish online.

Mike Dammann: Moveable Type version 4.2. Tell us a little bit about what to expect and in light of the many hack attacks on wordpress blogs, what sort of improvement in blog security can we expect to see?

Anil Dash: Well, Movable Type’s long had a history of really strong security.
This is where I think we really benefit from having a dual-licensed
platform. Many of our best security improvements have come from
submissions created by developers in our open source community, and
then of course our own team of developers has done extensive work on
security as well.

The key thing is, this isn’t about some competition between two
successful blogging companies — this is about what’s good for the
web. It’s a serious danger when there is potential for a huge number
of sites to get hacked or even to be silently attacked and taken over
by malicious coders. It’s just as terrible that so many people who
*don’t* use Movable Type are at risk of having their content removed
entirely from search engines if they get hacked through no fault of
their own. That’s basically facing an SEO death sentence, and it’s
largely avoidable by using tools that don’t have that history of being
insecure repeatedly.

Mike Dammann: How much attention do you yourself pay to seo these days and what are some of the best new things you have learned in the past let’s say 6 months?

Anil Dash: It’s interesting, I’ve kind of changed the way I look at SEO. I think
my initial introduction to it was from some of the worst black hats
kind of defining the space, and there’s been a great evolution as the
importance of regular best practices starts to be the focus. I mean,
if you’re selling enlargement pills, maybe you need to be super
aggressive with what you’re doing, but for 99% of publishers and
businesses, they’d do well just to follow a few simple rules and not
having to know all the tips and tricks.

So the thing I’ve mostly been trying to pay attention to recently is,
how can we at Six Apart (as a company that makes publishing tools)
make it automatic that a lot of the fundamental SEO rules are being
followed, so that regular people don’t have to even think about such
things.

Mike Dammann: Looking at http://www.movabletype.com/blog/2008/06/movable-type-a-history-of-secu.html I need to ask you what you are planning to do to help make it easier to install Moveable Type. And also easier for not so tech savvy bloggers to get security updates without having to hire anybody. Can we expect something new on cpanel anytime soon? Which are some of the new features coming up and also: Do you believe that the majority of recent attacks on Wordpress blogs came thru plugins and is it true that themes aren’t code, so they can’t have security bugs? I have also noticed that when a MT database goes down due to high traffic from Digg or whatever, you can actually still access the content of your blog. What else is there that makes MT unique and better than WP?

Anil Dash: There’s a few different issues all tied in together here, but at the
highest level, we don’t focus on our competitors who make software, we
try to focus on what’s good for the web as a whole. So, we can do
things like making TypePad AntiSpam the only totally free, open source
blog spam prevention system. Of course, the competitor in my points
out that it works better than Akismet, but we’ve made it freely
available for people whether they’re using WordPress or Movable Type
or anything else, because we think it’s good for the web. Same with
our Blog It application for the iPhone or for Facebook, which work
with any tool out there.

With that in mind, though, there’s still a lot we can learn from other
platforms out there, and installation is a good example. By its very
nature, MT does a lot more out of the box than most tools, without
needing third-party plugins, and partially as a result of that,
installation can be tricky. So we’re making available
completely-configured systems with MT in formats such as virtual
machines and Amazon machine images for EC2. That means we’re
definitely interested in working with the Cpanels and Fantasticos of
the world about integrating Movable Type.

Here’s the thing, though: A five-minute install doesn’t save you any
time if you’re having to repeat it every other week for a new security
update. With MT, it’s very common for a major release version to be
completely supported and secure for a year, during which time you
don’t have to touch your system at all. So the biggest thing we can do
for security is to reduce the upgrade fatigue that makes people not
want to stay up-to-date with their software.

We also make some smart choices with the application itself. While
we’ve supported dynamic publishing for years, we still are huge
advocates of publishing static pages, because then you don’t have to
worry about that Blue Screen of Death, the dreaded “Database
Connection Error” that other tools always show when a site gets Dugg.
In the past, static pages had a tradeoff in publishing time, but MT
4.2 is several times faster in publishing and supports some really
smart caching abilities by default, so a lot of that wait time is
gone.

And Matt Mullenweg himself placed the blame for most security bug
reports on the WP community’s theme developers and plugin developers.
I’m not sure if that’s true, or if it’s fair, but I think it’s hard to
expect all plugin and theme developers to be completely secure all of
the time. As a result, the vast majority of what people would use a
plugin for on WordPress can be done using native, secure, tested
Movable Type template tags instead.

Mike Dammann: Where can we see you next? What is new in your personal life? Share something readers may not know and give a few more words of advice for anybody who wants to be successful online.

Anil Dash: I’m actually taking a little bit of time off from travel for a while,
though I’m usually running around nonstop speaking at conferences. As
a proud New Yorker, I’m really looking forward to the Web 2.0 Expo
coming to New York this fall.

In my personal life, I’ve just been enjoying being in the city in the
summer. From the great food to an infinite number of things to do,
summer in New York City is still a pretty magical thing.

As far as advice goes, I’m not sure I’ve got any insights that people
wouldn’t figure out on their own. But what’s worked well for me is to
pick something that I genuinely love, even when people thought it was
crazy and there was no money in it. And I’ve just stayed focused on
that for nearly every waking hour for a few years now, even long after
people said “oh, that’s old news” or whatever. And as a result, every
opportunity or achievement I could have aspired to has opened up to
me.

I’d like people to remember that I don’t take myself too seriously,
and that I really appreciate that I get to have so much fun and have
such a good life.

Cuil. Is bigger better?

The first time Cuil came to my attention was when I realized that it is my second biggest referral of search engine traffic after Google.
Lateron I saw a tweet by Matt Cutts about it and then the articles on Sphinn about it.
Cuil.com markets itself as the search engine with the biggest database there is and my question is if size really matters.
The management team seems to have some great credentials, one of them was the Google designer (Google has a design?).
There are some features which other search engines do not have. When you type in a keyterm like jaguar you can specify if you want jaguar parts or information about the animal. In the Founder’s note they mention that it took a team of only 30 people to get this engine built and from what I read, I believe those are some hardcore tech people who mean business.
Seems like Cuil.com has the respect from the tech industry and should be getting a nice kickstart because of that!

Search Featured: Guy Kawasaki

This is the shortest interview ever, took me 5 minutes to write the questions and got them back 5 minutes later. Guy Kawasaki is one of the people who teach marketing, advertising ideas, how to use search engines the right way and how to make the most out of your web presence. Garage.com and Alltop.com are sites of his which he is known well for.
Here is the interview:

Mike Dammann: Guy,  first of all thank you for being the first interviewee on the hot new
Blogger Talk. Tell us a little bit about how you got started blogging and
share the core prinipals which you stand by to increase readership to your
blog.

Guy Kawasaki: I started blogging about three years ago after people kept pounding on me to
do it. I was very late to blogging because I thought it was inherently
arrogant–that is, that you had to believe cared what you thought about
everything.

Mike Dammann:  How many blogs do you yourself read on a daily bases and what criteria do you
use to make a blog one of those you visit from time to time.

Guy Kawasaki: I read only one blog per day and that only started a week ago:
Neuromarketing. http://www.neurosciencemarketing.com/blog/ I scan hundreds
of blogs using Alltop, however.

 Mike Dammann: Looking at some of the main blogs out there, not just the less read ones, tell
me some mistakes high profile bloggers are making that keep their blogs from
making it to the biggest league?

Guy Kawasaki: I don’t have an answer for this for two reasons: first, as I said, I don’t
read that many blogs. Second, I’m not an expert in this stuff–I just “let
it rip” in my own blog. You need to ask Neil Patel or Darren Prowse about
this stuff.

Mike Dammann: When you look at Social Media sites, do you believe that what we have is the
end all be all? What else do you see coming up to really get the social media
phenomenon cranking up hard?

Guy Kawasaki: Hate to admit this too, but I spend very little time on social media sites.
The other day I went to my Facebook account for the first time in months,
and there were 2,211 pending friend requests. I can barely handle email plus
the marketing of Alltop. I’m not trying to find more soul mates at this
point in my life.

Mike Dammann:  Where do you find inspiration other than marketing? What helps you come up
with ideas to blog and also ideas to market your site further?

Guy Kawasaki: Every day I get up in the morning and ask God to give me ideas for my blog.
On some days She answers when a handful of friends suggest great topics. If
God fails me, then I use StumbleUpon and http://science.alltop.com/ to find
blog ideas.

Mike Dammann:  Is there any certain formula that you can share which could apply to all
bloggers?

Guy Kawasaki: Sure: your blogs actual traffic is 10% of what your server logs tell you.

Mike Dammann:  Guy, lastly, tell us something you have never shared online. Like, what is it
you are inspired to do next that you have not started yet and which you may or
may not be doing in your lifetime.

Guy Kawasaki: Between my blog, speeches, interviews like this one, and tweets, I have no
more secrets. I am truly Open Source.

Build an authority site and leave no dead ends.

In case you are wondering what an authority site is, it is one of the sites which ranks for whatever you build content on it. A few examples would include Amazon.com which ranks all over the place, definitely wikipedia and then there are sites like Digitalpoint.
Authority sites are built over time. Authority sites have 2 things in common and those are
1) A ton of content
2) A lot of natural incoming links.
You may have a niche and wonder what it takes to become bigger. The way for you to do that is to never leave a dead end.
Look at your stats and pick a few keyterms that are somewhat related, but not something you yourself offer.
Let’s say you have a website about Costa Rica real estate and Costa Rica Construction is one of the terms people find you thru.
My advice to you would be to add a page about construction companies and add some reviews. Costa Rica construction laws, and whatever else you can put on there delivering information that people want.
This serves several purposes. For once, you will stay on your visitors minds, even if you don’t offer construction services yourself.
People talk and the next time someone will ask about a good realtor in Costa Rica, your site might be mentioned if it helped someone find out something else they needed info about.
It also serves as what the SEO community has branded as the term “linkbait”. Not everybody has the time to put together information, and those who don’t are likely to link to your info page from their own sites or show it off in other communities when questions arise.
Then there is this one thing I have no proof for but am convinced that this is true due to years of observing what works and what doesn’t in Google:

In addition to Latent Semantic Indexing, Google spiders will also follow the outgoing links and if those links go to sites providing information related to what you offer and also contain content related to keyterms you already rank for, you will benefit from that.

You cannot achieve that status thru shortsighted link buying.  You must connect the dots in  a way that common sense tells you to. Focuson turning your site into a powerhouse providing almost everything that every visitor is looking for, and if you cannot offer it, have it one click away. This strategy will work in the long run, and if you havea low budget, you can make up for it with time, passion and energy.

Many of the big authority sites out there have gotten started with a very low budget and from one day to the next started enjoying the benefit of the owner’s hard work.

If you have a high budget, but no time, then hire quality writers, experts in the field. Then focus on doing whatever you can to get your website’s name out there, online and offline.

You need to work with Google on this one. Whatever you rank for and don’t have anything to match it on your site, add it and you will eventually be able to rank for a ton of terms related or semi related to what you have to offer and can dominate your industry just by offering variety which is something that Google has been trying to do from day one.

They have that saying “be like Google and Google will love your site” and generally speaking, I have found that to be very true!

Mike Dammann

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