Derek Scruggs

For those of you confused about what and how to use RSS, here’s a great demo of exactly how to use it.

Sorry, Max, but I’m with Chris on this one. You can’t have it both ways. If your blog is not about sales leads (as you say in a comment to Chris’ post), then whey are you bragging about how many leads it generates (“two prospects have called me this way purely based on my blog”)? If search engine results aren’t important, then why are you bragging about that?

I’d much rather be ranked highly for “marketing strategy,” for which I could expect at least 30 visitors per day from Google compared to less than 1 for “IBM marketing strategy” or “BT marketing strategy.” You say that:

“Unlike many companies, I achieved this not by spending vast sums on search engine optimisation, but simply by publishing my opinion on the marketing strategies of the above companies online using this weblog.”

What exactly did you achieve? After the Super Bowl I was briefly number highly ranked for “Go Daddy girl” and “Candice Michelle” mainly because of this post (and also because, just for the heck of it, this one). That was kind of neat, but it didn’t translate into anything in terms of new business or influence in the marketplace.

Not that I’m knocking blogging for it’s less-measurable qualities. Writing in general is a good habit, and the more content you put out there with regularity, the more weight Google gives it as a “fresh site.” But I’m not gonna brag about my effortless, zen-like SERP results either.

Every now and then I see this meme of “search engine optimization doesn’t matter,” usually by bloggers who’ve never seriously investigated it for themselves. While good, relevant, regularly updated content can be a good SEO practice all by itself, don’t dismiss detail SEO out of hand. I know people who make millions – yes, millions – of new revenue thanks to good SEO. It’s not for everyone, but in some markets SEO can be the difference between success and failure.

At the lower end of the food chain, I know someone who’s boosted her personal take-home from AdSense by several hundred dollars per month just by optimizing her web site and blogging on topics that draw free search traffic.

(By the way, I’m not an SEO consultant, so this post isn’t an attempt to boost my business.)

It appears that even Google uses SEO practices, some of them rather questionable.

Make sure you read this great series about the InfoSpace con from the Seattle Times.

I remember reading about Naveen Jain back then and thinking he was the consummate asshole. He used to brag about how smart he is. Not exactly a Level 5 leader.

He was predicting that InfoSpace would be the first trillion dollar company doing silly content stuff with cell phones. When I was at MessageMedia, one of my projects was to investigate opportunities in the wireless market. Back then the buzz was about WAP, which attracted a skillion dollars in investment. I played around with it at an HP lab in Grenoble. The experience was, to put it mildly, crappy. You didn’t have to be a genius to see the emperor had no clothes. Meanwhile, Henry Blodget et. al. got paid millions for admiring the quality of the cloth.

Seth’s next book is called All Marketers are Liars. I haven’t read it yet (though I did download the free chapter ), but the name alone is testimony to his brilliance as a marketer. Who wouldn’t want to read that? I’m sure this will be another best seller. Like all great brands, he just keeps hitting ‘em out of the park.

This is cool – go to Google and type “weather: [your hometown]” to get the weather from Google. Here it is for Boulder.

Since I use Quick Search (scroll down to “Internet Explorer 5 Web Accessories” – specific Google instructions are at the bottom of this page), I just type ctrl-o to get the “Open file:” dialog, then type in the search query.

Quick Search is a really useful utility – I search Google probably 30+ times per day and I don’t even have to use a mouse to go to a toolbar or click a bookmark. The only downside is that I never see Google’s home page, so I miss the clever holiday logos.

Hat tip: John Hesch

I use NewsGator as my aggregator – have been since version 1.0. Until about a month ago I took a “channels” view of the information. In other words, I would expand my “News” folder and see something like this:

Using it this way, I might see that A VC has a new post in it. So I would click on the folder and read the post. Repeat this process for every feed. This works fine for a couple dozen feeds, but it doesn’t scale into the scores or hundreds very well.

The problem is that most of the time a majority of the feeds don’t have any new posts, but in order to learn this I have to expand the News folder. (I could just leave it expanded, but that doesn’t work well for me because I have other folders that show up below it.)

A while back Dave Winer posted about the River of News approach to reading content. This is how the Userland aggregator works.

Initially I didn’t like that approach because I had some vague notion that blogs should be organized like the newspaper – a sports section, a business section, the arts etc – except that the “sections” are a 1:1 correspondence with blogs.

After reading Dave’s post, I decided to try something different. NewsGator actually comes with a “River of News” interface, but the early versions were buggy and slow. But the latest version is very nice. Here’s a screen shot of that it looks like in Outlook:

I much prefer this approach. It only shows me new posts, and I can quickly see whether a given post is likely to interest me. If so, I either open it up and read it or I move it to my Inbox to be later processed using Gettng Things Done (aff. link) techniques.

Addendum: And by the way, I always delete all posts when I’m done skimming them. If something is worth holding on to, it gets moved to my Inbox or a special folder called Reference. As a result I rarely feel overwhelmed by information.

Before Getting Things Done I had the tendency that most people have to hold on to messages and feed items with the vague notion that “someday I will respond to this.” Getting Things Done taught me to always ask “what’s the next physical action I should take with this item?”, decide what that action is, then get it out of my inbox.

The subtitle to Getting Things Done  is The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. I can’t emphasize enough how taking control of the river of information that flows into my life every day has lowered stress. The thing is, it’s less work than before, not more, so don’t take the attitude that you’re going to have to work to “maintain” the system. The system takes less work than you’re already doing.

Every now and then I fall off the wagon and don’t practice all the principles like I should, but even then I’m still way ahead of where I was before, and getting back into the groove is usually not hard at all.

I downloaded and started using BlogJet about a month ago. I put it head to head against w.bloggar and BlogJet is the clear winner. The main thing is true wysiwyg editing. I do a lot of HTML coding, so I’m not a non-techy who’s afraid of getting under the hood. but BlogJet makes, saying, embedding a picture in a post as easy as copy & paste.

It has a few bugs, and I think there may be a a bug in WordPress (not BlogJet) in the way it generates permalinks from posts submitted by BlogJet, but BlogJet has definitely made my life easier. I have it in my startup folder, so it’s up and running from the get-go and I can write a post as quickly as an email.

Today my free trial period expired, so I dug deep for the $39.95 and am now legal.

I thought it was funny, but it also reflects on the quality of my content lately.

If Karlheinz Stockhausen or maybe Terry Riley were beginning their careers today, maybe he would’ve come up with something like this.

And if Mom & Dad are reading, the inscrutable composer references prove that my insanely expensive music degree was worth every penny.