Early Adopter Woes

I came across a job description today that I wanted to apply to, but I couldn’t. It seems that it requires resumes be sent in only by fax.

How many people own fax machines at home? EFax is a subscription (that I’m not about to pay for to send 1 fax) so that’s out.

I found some free software that came with my all in one printer that sends faxes, but sadly it requires that I plug it into a phone jack.

That’s my next question… how many people actually have land line phones? I don’t! There’s no need for it.

Is this company far behind the times, or am I just crazy to expect companies to have at least one newer way of receiving information?

May 14th, 2007

Income Vs Richness

I’ve been reading The 4 hour workweek by Timothy Ferriss and although I’m only through about 3 chapters I think I could do about 20 blog posts on some of the ideas he presents.

Right now I want to talk about a fallacy that many Americans hold. That is that income determines richness.

Let’s look at an example out of my life: In one of the first jobs I took out of college I made $36,000 / year but left my house at 8:30 and was home by 5:30. I worked from 9-5 Monday through Friday and took a 30 minute lunch.

A later job paid me $50,000 but I left my house at 7:50 and got home at 7:00. I worked from 8:30 until 6, and took a 30-45 minute lunch often at my desk.

Which me was richer? the $36,000 me made about $17/hour…. while the $50,000 me….also made about $17/hour.

At the end of the year, I had more money in the bank working the $50,000 job but I also gave up a lot more of my time.

Sure, money is good – but what good is money if you can’t spend it?

Think about why you want to make more money and you’ll probably list many things you want to do.

What if you could work less AND get those things done? That’s what this book is about. Check it out, it’s certainly been very interesting so far. I’m sure it’ll inspire me to write more in the future.

5 comments May 11th, 2007

Recipe: Mini Chicken Burritos

I haven’t gone grocery shopping in a while, so today’s lunch was more of a “this is what I have in the fridge, how can I turn that in to a meal?”

I have to say that I came up with some really awesome chicken burritos.

Here’s what you’ll need:

• 2-3 cans of canned chicken meat (I usually buy this stuff for the cat, but it’s made for humans)
• 1 package Lawry’s taco seasoning
• 1 package of flour tortillas
• a little bit of parsley
• white rice
• Colby and Monterey jack cheese – shredded (Kraft sells this in a bag)

First cook up some rice. Then add a little bit of parsley to the rice. This just adds some texture to the overall burrito (I stole this idea from Qdoba).

Next, grill up the chicken until it’s all stringy and falling apart. Then mix in water and the taco seasoning (I know this is for beef but trust me it tastes awesome on chicken… I stole this idea from that old Wendys southwest chicken salad) Let it boil until most of the water is gone. (you may want these to be a little juicy – your call)

I grilled the tortilla shells on my George Foreman grill, but you can just put them in the microwave too. The key here is to get them nice and hot so the shell sticks to itself when you fold it into a burrito.

Insert chicken, cheese, rice into burrito and fold it over. Enjoy!

That was my lunch today. It tasted good so I thought I’d share it.

May 10th, 2007

The Best Job Search Sites

If you don’t read my blog often, you might have missed the fact that I Need A Job. So before we get into it, if anybody needs a LAMP developer or SEO expert, please let me know.

Because of this, I’ve been looking at almost every place possible for a job. Some sites have been good, others not too good. Here’s the ones I’m going to review:

1. Monster
2. HotJobs
3. CraigsList
4. ComputerJobs
5. Dice
6. MichWorks
7. MotorCityHelpWanted
8. Hidden Network

Ok, On to the reviews:

Monster.com

When it comes to job sites, Monster is probably the first one people think of. Thanks to their advertising, a Monster ad seems to be everywhere you look.

PROS: Monster has TONS of jobs on it. By far, it has more jobs than any other site I’ve mentioned here. It also lets you upload your resume for employers to view and contact you.

CONS: The interstitial ads for university of phoenix and other online colleges are annoying. They’re also confusing. When clicking “Apply” for a job, you might see a form asking for basic information like name, address, etc. Only after filling it out and getting to the bottom do you realize it’s an ad for information about college – NOT the actual employment offer.

Monster also doesn’t seem to remember that I’ve click no to an ad. Over the past week I must have told it about 30 or 40 times that I’m NOT interested in getting an online degree – yet they still ask every time.

I’ve also noticed that some spammers are using the resume database for emails. I used a new email address for my job searching and I’m getting spam on it. While many of these emails I consider spam are actually job offers, they’re offers for ridiculous jobs like talent search agent, model scout, mystery shopper, etc. They’re nowhere related to my resume so I consider them spam.

HotJobs

HotJobs is Yahoo’s foray into the job search market.

PROS: The search feature is easy to use and the sub options on the left can prove helpful if you get a lot of results.

CONS: I’ve already did a post about this but the biggest problem with HotJobs is SPAM! Most of the jobs it returns for me are all the same “mystery shopper” job advertised for every city in Michigan – Every Day! See the post linked above for a screen shot.

Craigslist

Craigslist is perhaps one of the least known about job search sites out there – but it shouldn’t be. (I’ll get to this in the CONS section) In fact, if you clicked the link above you’ll notice that the Craigslist founder Craig Newmark even stopped in to talk about job spam. Hopefully he’ll stop back for this post too.

PROS: Craigslist offers a feature that no other job board offers – User flagging. It doesn’t have the spam problem that HotJobs has because users can flag a posting as spam and have it removed. I’m not sure how many flags it takes, but it does do a good job of removing spam. I’ve noticed by checking back that most things are caught within a day of being live.

Another pro is that everything is done by Email. If you want to apply, you’ve got a link to send the poster an email. It doesn’t make you jump through all the “create an account and password, upload your resume, login” hoops that some of the other sites require. That’s a big time saver.

Another thing I love is that there aren’t any ads at all on Craigslist. Craig makes enough money simply by charging to post jobs and it seems that he’s happy with that. It would seem that Craigslist cares more about user experience than maximizing profits – that’s a lesson that Monster could learn.

CONS: Not many people know about it. Before I got laid off my secretary asked me where a good place to post jobs are (little did I know she was posting a want ad for MY job). I ran through the usuals and when I got to Craigslist she said “what’s that?” Because of this there aren’t a lot of jobs posted. Take the Internet Engineer category for Detroit – only 6 jobs in 7 days this month.

ComputerJobs

Computerjobs.com is another little known job site. Instead of focusing on all jobs though, it tries to only focus on computer related jobs.

PROS: The narrow focus of computerjobs makes it great for IT professionals looking for jobs. Searching for HTML here as opposed to Amazon doesn’t return jobs like secretary, personal assistant, mystery shopper, or model talent scout. The search feature also offers tons of options, and there aren’t any annoying ads like Monster. The spam level appears to be non existent as well. The job descriptions are well organized making it easy for me to skim to the salary, requirements, or contact information.

CONS: While I like the way the search feature is laid out – it doesn’t work! Do a search for PHP Michigan and you’ll see results in Florida and Boston. After doing a search, the first thing I see is a list of 10 featured jobs that aren’t relevant to what I searched for. This is great for a front page feature – but it doesn’t fit after I’ve searched for specific jobs. I can see it confusing many users.

Dice

I Like Dice. Like ComputerJobs, Dice is also focused toward technology jobs. That saves time.

PROS: The layout of Dice is clean yet professional. The search box is right in the middle where it’s the first thing I see. It also offers what I think is the most crucial feature of an online job search: the ability to sort by date. When I click on a job description, the apply button is located both at the top and bottom. This makes it easy to find and saves me time if I’m coming back to a job I already viewed. As far as the amount of spam goes, I haven’t been able to find any yet on Dice.

CONS: There aren’t that many jobs jobs on DICE as compared to other sites. Also, the job descriptions aren’t standard. While the summary at the top seems to be the same, the various sections like requirements, about the company, etc aren’t standardized. This makes it hard to skim a job description for various information without reading the whole thing.

Michworks

In order to get unemployment in Michigan you have to list your resume with Michworks.org. Since I had to do this anyway, I figured I’d review it.

PROS: Michworks is a state funded site so there aren’t any annoying ads like Monster has. They don’t have to worry about turning a profit and that’s a good thing. The distance from city in the search is useful too. It allows me to enter my home city and make sure it only returns jobs with a 25 mile commute or less.

CONS: The search needs work. Most notably, searching for PHP returns any job that links to a .php file. One of the first results I get is for a truck driver job because it has a link to http://www.driverfinder.net/jobads/job.php?cw=1&jid=1898 for people to apply.

The other big downer is that you have to have an account to apply. I don’t like that. I don’t like creating accounts anywhere.

MortorCityHelpWanted

I saw this site on a billboard in Detroit the other day so I figured I’d check it out.

PROS: Sadly, I couldn’t find any pros with this site

CONS: I can’t find the search box on the main page. It’s just not there. The “find a job” tab seems to be already highlighted – leading me not to click it – but it’s the only way to make the search box appear. It took me 3 visits to the site and about 20 minutes before I figured this out.

Aside from being very slow, the search just plain sucks. It has “sponsored listings” at the top that aren’t related to what I’m searching for, and some of the results aren’t relevant.

Worse, trying to apply for a job is like pulling teeth. Applying for this job took me to a list of more jobs on topusajobs.com. Clicking the “Apply” button there took me to a search page on employmentguide.com. Doing the same search there, I was unable to find the original job I tried applying for.

It seems this site just takes you in circles without actually letting you apply for a job. I’d avoid it at all costs. Looking at the setup, it would seem that they have similar sites around other metropolitan areas; I’m not going to list them though.

HiddenNetwork

Hidden Network is that list of ads you’ll see on some blogs. Check out Worse Than Failure or Jeremy Zawodny’s Sidebar for an example.

PROS: The search results are great. No ads, no hoops to jump through, no hassles – just a clean table of results. I can change what I see, I can change keywords, locations, etc.

CONS: You have to find the ads on somebody’s website. If you go to the hiddennetwork.com homepage you can’t search for jobs. I don’t understand that. Also, the list of keywords is limited. I have to choose from a preset list instead of searching for specific words I’m interested in.

If you live in one of the technology hubs like the Bay Area you’ll find some interesting jobs here with startup companies. If you’re looking in a place like Detroit you won’t find anything.

Summary

The top 3 in terms of spam filtering or least spam:

1. Dice.com
2. Hidden Network
3. Craigslist

Best Search Functionality

1. Dice
2. Monster
3. HotJobs

Best User Experience (no annoying ads, registration, etc)

1. CraigsList
2. MichWorks
3. Dice

Best Overall:

1. Dice
2. Craigslist
3. Monster
4. ComputerJobs
5. Hidden Network

Other Observations

There’s one other thing I wanted to get off my mind. Another annoying thing I’ve found is companies that require registration before you can apply for a job. I applied for a job with one company today and they made me fill out 5 or 6 pages of web forms before I could even send in my resume. I had to create an account and a password and security questions and everything. To me, that’s just overkill.

Here’s a better example. In 2004 I applied with Quicken loans for a job. I didn’t get it, but I still had to create an account and everything. Now in 2007 I tried applying for a different job. I couldn’t remember my username or password and there wasn’t a feature to request it by email – so I had to create another account with them.

Conclusion

So there you have it. That’s my 2 cents on job seeking sites. I’ve learned a lot about how to improve a job website, but I haven’t found a job. The fact is, there just aren’t that many jobs in the Detroit area. I’m afraid I might have to move.

If anybody else knows of any jobs sites out there that I missed, please leave them in the comments and after I look for a job myself I’ll add my review.

8 comments May 7th, 2007

Thoughts on Twitter

I tried to avoid it as long as possible, but I don’t think I’d be able to call this a blog about Internet culture if I didn’t talk about twitter at least once.

I recently tried Twitter but had to quit using it because it was just way too slow to be usable. The AIM support rarely worked, and often I’d have to wait until FireFox timed out and retry logging in 2 or 3 times.

Scoble loves Twitter. But why do you use Twitter? What’s the point? What’s the benefit of sharing tiny little bits of information with people?

Sure, I understand that people said the same about Instant Messaging before it took over email, and then we all said the same thing about Blogs before they revolutionized the web. Is Twitter next?

Personally, I don’t think so. Let me explain.

It’s neat to see what your friends are doing in real time, but I could just text or IM them to find that out. There’s really no new features here that IM and text messages don’t offer.

More importantly, I can’t figure out the business advantage of using Twitter.

With IM, I could have conversations with people in real time. It helped me at work because I didn’t have to get up and walk to the office, or bother with email.

With blogs a business could share useful insights, articles, testimonials, and whatever else they needed to establish themselves as an expert in their field.

If there’s a way a company can harness twitter to its advantage, I just don’t see it. Anybody have any ideas here? What am I missing? Or is it really just a fad?

4 comments May 7th, 2007

How To NOT Get Reciprocal Links

If you run a website, you no doubt get several emails like the following:


Mr. Webmaster
Hello, my name is Mrs Website Owner; I work for www.keyword1-keyword2.co.uk/ and I saw your site http://www.txt2day.com/ and I would like to make a link trade with you.
Our policy is to only work with a 3-way link trade. If you are interested in become our link partner please reply me. I will be waiting for.
If you are in agreement to adding my link to your page
please add my link to the site with this specifications:
Link text: unlock nokia
URL: http://differenturl.co.uk/
Description: unlock nokia
Thanks for your time


Seems ordinary right? It’s a related link so many people would be inclined to accept but there’s a few problems:

1. This is a very generic auto generated email. It tells me that you didn’t even look at my site and you have no idea what you may be linking to – that’s not very helpful to your users. Know how I know? Because txt2day.com doesn’t even have a links page! Also, please don’t call me Mr. Webmaster. Mr. Webmaster is my dad – I’m Ryan, or Mr. Jones.
2. The 3 way link trade tells me you’re only interested in PageRank. Again, not very helpful to my users. This makes a flag go off in my head saying “I’m probably not going to get any traffic from this link.”
3. Your link text and description don’t make any sense. A link that just says “unlock nokia” and nothing else doesn’t tell your potential visitors anything about the site they’re visiting. Remember visitors? Some of them don’t come from Google.

Now, let’s look at the actual websites you’re proposing I trade links with.

The first thing I see when clicking on the link in your email is this:

Cellular Unlocking | Unlock Nokia | Nokia Unlock | Unlock Cellular | Unlock Mobile | Unlocking Nokia Mobile | Unlocking Nokia Phone | Nokia Cellular | Nokia Unlocking

These aren’t links.. it’s just text at the top of the webpage. How is that helpful to anybody? It looks like keyword spam to me.

The biggest problem though is that there isn’t a links page. I clicked every link on your homepage and didn’t get to the links page. I searched some of your sub pages, but didn’t see a links page either. If I couldn’t find the links page what makes you think somebody who’s NOT looking for it might stumble upon it? Is it even connected to your site?

When I clicked the 2nd link I saw even bigger problems. Both sites are the exact same text with just different images. In fact, you seem to have 3 sites all with the same content. The content is so good though that Anna H. managed to write in to all 3 of them with the same testimonial!

If I were you I wouldn’t worry about trying to find more reciprocal links. The reason your sites aren’t showing up in Google is because of things like spammy keywords and duplicate content. Your service is something my users may be interested in, but there’s no way I’m going to give you a link until you clean up these other problems.

May 5th, 2007

Free SEO Work

For a while now I’ve been thinking about dabbling in doing some freelance SEO work. See, all my SEO experience comes from doing it for the companies I worked for or by doing it for my own sites. That’s all good except when somebody asks for examples of my work. I can’t give them examples of other people’s sites that I did as part of my old company, and something doesn’t feel right about using my own sites.

With that said, I’m looking for a site that wants some free SEO work done.

Here’s what you’ll get:

• A keyword research report
• An initial search engine traffic report (You’ll have to let me install analytics or give me access to yours)
• Copy writing suggestions
• Linking suggestions
• LinkBait suggestions

You’ll notice I said suggestions here. That’s because I’m not actually going to do the coding – that’s up to you. I’ll simply suggest ways to get you to rank better.

Ideally, I’ll find a site willing to perform some of the changes I recommend and then we can measure results in a month or so.

Here’s what I’ll get:

By doing this, you’ll agree to let me publish your initial traffic stats, every suggestion I make, and your post traffic stats. If I publish it online, I’ll give you a link. Regardless, you give me the rights to use your domain as an example in a website, resume, book, article, or whatever else I choose.

The Ideal site should:

• NOT be related to Porn, Gambling, anything illegal, loans, pills, or any other topic that’s semi-spammy
• Preferably not have done a ton of SEO work already. I’m looking for something that shows the value of doing SEO.
• Not compete with any of my sites or targeted keywords.
• Not be a thin affiliate – for example an auto loan site whose form takes you to another domain.
• Must have contact information or contact form on the site – I’ll use that to get ahold of you

Of course, if it’s a non-profit, charity, informational, or useful site that I like I’ll give it more preference in choosing.

This will be the only mention you’ll see of this on my blog, and I may or may not ever post the results on dotCULT. That’s up to me at a later date.

If you’re interested go ahead and leave your URL in the comments here. Make sure the URL you post is to the home page, but also make sure I can find the contact information or contact form on the website as well. Please don’t leave contact information here – the blog spam spiders will get it.

2 comments May 3rd, 2007

Devolution Back To META Tags

Back in the beginning of search engines there were META tags. By today’s standards the 90’s search engines were piss poor at determining the relevance of web pages so webmasters relied on META keywords and descriptions to tell the search engines what they were about.

Since the “relevance” of a website was determined by the webmaster it didn’t take long for any popular search to be deluded with porn and auto loan websites. Something needed to be done.

Google jumped in with PageRank and hasn’t looked back since. Clearly all search engines are thousands of times better than they were in the 1990’s. Unfortunately, that doesn’t stop people from trying to game them.

Whenever SEOs figure out a way to game the engines the engines usually fight back. Not too long ago all the search engines got together and came up with the rel=nofollow tag – sometimes called the link condom. rel=nofollow gave webmasters a way to say “hey, I’m linking to this but I don’t support it; so don’t give it any link juice.

As far as the web was concerned it was the first step away from “relevance by majority” back to “tell me what your site is about.” It was also the first time that search engines like Google encouraged webmasters to do something with regards to the search engines not the users.

The Google Webmaster Guidelines constantly preach to Make pages for users, not for search engines Clearly rel=nofollow doesn’t help the user viewing the web page. It was a step away from this guideline.

Today Yahoo took another step away from this guideline by introducing robots-nocontent. robots-nocontent is a CSS class that users are supposed to use to tell Yahoo that this content isn’t important to the search engine – only the user.

To me, it seems like we’re devolving back into the “tell me what your site is about” theory of the 1990’s META tags. Is the future of search going to rely on the past of search? What do you think?

What’s worse is that I can see this css class causing lots of problems. For one, it forces the webmaster to spend time making changes that won’t help the user but could potentially hurt his own rankings. I can’t see many other webmasters doing that.

Additionally, what happens when a webmaster leaves out a closing tag or improperly nests his HTML tags? Does it cause Yahoo to think that everything after the robots-nocontent tag isn’t important? Can a webmaster accidentally tell Yahoo his whole site isn’t relevant?

1 comment May 2nd, 2007

Amazon SEO

Reading the usual SEO posts today, somebody mentioned why there isn’t a market for Amazon SEO. That’s a good question.

What is Amazon SEO? It’s the process of doing SEO for a product so that it shows up at the top of a search. After all, there HAS to be a correlation among top ranking books and sales of said books.

Let’s take a look. My book currently shows up at #1 for an amazon search of “Internet slang” but it’s nowhere to be found if you just search for “slang.”

That’s got to be hurting my sales eh?

So what factors might come in to play when searching Amazon? Well, there’s title, Author, description, product details, and reviews.

As an author, I personally get to choose the Title, Author, and Description. The details are things like language, publisher, weight, etc so we can assume they don’t really matter here.

As a community, the rest of the web gets to write the reviews. Thankfully you need a valid account to review an item, so we don’t have tons of keyword spammed reviews (yet.)

It seems to me that the bulk of ranking on Amazon would come down to your title and description. Unfortunately there’s really no way for an author to update his description to test some SEO wording. As you can see my description is written more for the customer without regard to the Amazon search algorithm (whoops!)

This doesn’t mean your book should be authored by “John Q. Bad Credit Auto Loans”, but it’s definitely something I’d think about before you publish your product for sale.

It’s worth mentioning that this idea also applies to Ebay, Barnes and Noble, CafePress, or just about anywhere else that you can sell something. Is this the next step for SEO? We’ll see.

May 1st, 2007

Google Personalized HomePage At Work

When I switched the DNS for some of my sites I noticed something weird. One such Internet provider couldn’t access my sites. If I went to a proxy site I could access them with no problem, but if I tried to access them directly they didn’t load.

The problem was due to a slow DNS refresh by my ISP.

Anyway, during this time I also noticed that my Google Personalized Homepage also didn’t load widgets from those sites but Google translator and the GoogleBot had no problem visiting them. This means that the Google homepage must have been using some client side technology like JavaScript to load all the widgets and feeds. No big deal right?

After testing some common workplace spying software I noticed a weird fact. Every RSS feed or widget I load on my Personalized Homepage shows up in the logs as if I visited that site directly.

I’m not sure if this is a bug with Google’s Personalized Homepage or if it’s more a bug in the workplace tracking software (I’m willing to bet the problem is with the latter software.)

This can have some pretty bad effects for those of you who use Google Personalized Homepage at work – especially if you have a draconian boss who measures productivity by the amount of keystrokes you type.

For me, my last employer was seeing 15 or so website requests every time I loaded up Google to search for something (which in the course of a workday happened often)

If you work for a company that says things like “well, you took 2 bathroom breaks and a lunch so you need to stay at least an hour after today” then you’re probably better off NOT using things like the personalized homepage at work. Consider buying an umbrella dryer singapore – LTC Office Supplies to maintain cleanliness in the office even on rainy days.

April 27th, 2007