Ryan Jones Blog – dotCULT.com

Posts filed under 'Main'

Gaming Google Suggest

Was playing with Google Instant / Google Suggest today and couldn’t help but get my mind spinning.

Imagine the following hypothetical scenario:

[Scenario removed because it was pointed out to me that yes, this WOULD be a good way to spam Google, and yes it WOULD work. So in an effort to be a good netizen and not help propagate more spam, I took it down.]

1 comment February 9th, 2011

SEO Columbus

When I was leaving work today I caught a glimpse of a blog post about a trademark on the keyword “SEO Columbus.” Basically, some SEO in Columbus who went by the name SEO Columbus had sent a few threatening emails to some other SEO in the Columbus area who used the same word on his blog asking him to take it down. (If you want the back story, it’s all here.) I see this shit all the time so I paid no attention to it and went to go work out.

I couldn’t believe all the “SEO Columbus” crap that was waiting for me when I got home. Wow! In a mere few hours the SEO community banded together and beat the virtual crap out of Mr SEO Columbus (whose actual name I’m going to protect in this post)

We’re talking all out ORM barrage here. Facebook groups, youtube channels, blog posts on major SEO blogs, sucks domains, and tweets. Nothing was spared. It really amazed me how quickly and cohesively the SEO community banded together. I’m just a little ashamed it was over an SEO Columbus trademark abuse.

It just goes to show: the SEO community is a tight one (both in and out of Columbus) and you don’t want to piss us off. (trust me on this. I’ve done plenty of that in the past.)

It’s also a good reminder of the importance of SEO for ORM. SEO isn’t a stand alone practice anymore. It’s quickly merged with social media and ORM to form one monster of a profession – and if you don’t keep up you can find yourself on the outs quickly (just ask ~~Joe~~ SEO Columbus about that.)

So How Can I Avoid An SEO Columbus Fiasco From Happening To Me?

Good question. Here’s a few SEO/ORM tips to avoid your own ORM disaster.

Don’t be a dick. This goes without saying. If you’re not a douchebag you won’t have to worry about ORM – but let’s face it, being a bit snarky can be fun and we all sometimes make mistakes.
Register [yourname]Sucks.com If you don’t, the first SEO you piss off WILL register it. While you’re at it, pick up the .net, .org, .info, .ws, .us, and .co version of your name. I just checked a few minutes ago and most of the upcoming SMX West speakers still don’t own the .co version of their names. Remember (as some of us learned the hard way by being assholes) it’s perfectly legal to own the “sucks” and “I hate” version of somebody else’s brand. In this case, there’s nothing SEO Columbus can do about another SEO owning seocolumbussucks.com As long as he states it’s his opinion that it sucks and sticks to factual information he’s not breaking any laws. (Disclaimer: IANAL)
If you do fuck up, eat it. You’ve gotta own that shit. Admit to what you did wrong, apologize (sincerely) and learn from your mistakes. The SEO community will actually respect that. Trust me. I’ve pissed off a lot of people in the past but I apologized and offered to make amends and now several of them still offer to buy me drinks at conferences. (Note: I’m a nice guy now, and I don’t go around pissing people off anymore.) My gut tells me if this guy would have said “my bad, sorry guys” and let it be none of this would have happened and he’d still be ranking #1 in Google for seo columbus instead of scurrying to re-brand himself and his business.
Establish a social media presence – even if you don’t plan on using it. You don’t just have to worry about domain names anymore, you also need to worry about social media sites. Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Blogger, FourSquare, Quora, DailyBooth, Blippy, the list goes on and on and on. (check out KnowEm for a good place to start on this. ) Then use them. Join the community. Say Hi. Build friends. In this case, nobody knew who SEO Columbus was so nobody stuck up for him (granted, when the full details were revealed it was clear he didn’t deserve sticking up for.) If he had been involved in the community though, somebody would have sent him a DM and said “dude, chill out it’s no big deal. Just say sorry.” Instead, this guy used his twitter account like a billboard. He only posted relevant “columbus” garbage and didn’t engage anybody. He had nobody in his corner when the bell rang, and the SEO community came out swinging.

If you want to do SEO in Columbus (Or Detroit, or anywhere) then you’ve got to follow those basic rules. Respect the community, establish your presence, apologize if you fuck up, and don’t be a dick. After that, it’s all beer drinking and profit. Hopefully well all learn from SEO Columbus (I know I have.)

And by the way. If you ever run into this guy at a conference and he’s actually eating some humble crow, buy him a beer to help wash it down. No doubt he could use it.

2 comments February 8th, 2011

Facebook IPO – Am I Bad at Math?

Facebook is going to launch an IPO sometime before April 2012. That’s pretty much a given. If you’ve read any financial site in the world this week you’re well aware of that. What most people might not be aware of though is the actual numbers at play here.

The big figure being thrown around is the $50 Billion valuation of facebook by Goldman Sachs. That’s a lot of money, so I wanted to look a little deeper at the figures and see what’s going on here.

In the first 9 months of 2010 Facebook earned $355 million profit on a revenue of $1.2 billion. That’s a great margin percentage, but it’s not a lot of revenue. Based on $1.2 billion in revenue, that means the $50 billion valuation of facebook is almost 50 times higher than Facebook’s revenue.

To put that in perspective, Google (over the same 9 months) made $6 billion in profit on $29.9 billion in revenue – yet Google’s current market value is only $196 Billion. That’s only 7 times it’s revenue, not the 50 times revenue valuation everybody is throwing around for Facebook.

TL;DR: either I’m terrible at basic math or Facebook is very overrated.

I’m actually a bit curious to see what happens when they DO file an IPO. The math alone tells me to stay away from this, but it IS facebook. The pundits (Scoble, Arrington, etc) are all blindly in love with it, and so is the Media. That tells me that this thing has the potential to skyrocket quickly. Whether or not that rocket will blow up and come crashing back down though remains to be seen.

What do you think?

1 comment January 7th, 2011

There’s a WordPress Plugin for Everything!

Over the weekend I was working on my newest site: Jersey Foul when I decided to try something different. Rather than use the custom coded platform that I use on Fail Pictures I decided it would be fun to see if I could create an entire site without actually typing one line of code. I restricted myself to only using “off the shelf” components and plugins.

I thought it would be hard, but it turns out that there really is a plugin for everything. I was able to build my entire site, with all the features of a failblog type site, basically just using a mouse. It’s amazing how far the web has gone. I remember hand-coding perl content management systems that stored everything in text files as recently as 1998. I can’t believe how simple it’s become since then. In fact, I almost think it’s too simple now. Having no barrier to entry can sometimes be a bad thing – but that’s an entirely different post.

Anyway, I half wanted to let everybody know about Jersey Foul (which, if you don’t know what a jersey foul is I have an explanation here) and half wanted to give a shout out to some very awesome plugins I found along the way.

Here’s some of the cool wordpress plugins I’m using on the site:

Advanced Random Posts let’s me pull the first image out of a random post and show it on the sidebar with a link back.

GD Star Rating does a great job of ratings and includes several widgets for the sidebar. It’s got a million customization options too.

SEO Title Tag is great for simply adding a different title to posts. I’m not sure I’m going to stick with it though as I like some of the features yoast’s wordpress seo offers – and the two don’t work well together.

WPTouch is probably the best “set it and forget it” way to offer a mobile version for your site. Plus, it even works nicely with adsense.

watermark reloaded is a huge timesaver. I never watermarked images on FailPictures.com because it was a giant pain in the ass. This plugin automatically watermarks all images I upload – and gives me control of how they should look.

Twitter. Can you have a blog without it? I’m using twitter anywhere, Twitoaster for twitter comments, and of course everybody’s favorite TweetMeme

I’m also still experimenting with some email to post plugins, and some auto update facebook ones too. If you’ve got a suggestion for a plugin (or anything else) that would be awesome on JerseyFoul.com let me know – I’d love to try it out.

Implementing this site was so easy (and playing with plugins was kind of fun) that I’m half tempted to redo FailPictures.com or start up another wordpress site just for the hell of it.

3 comments January 5th, 2011

A Do Not Track List Won’t Work

I’m reading a lot of articles about the FTC’s proposed “do not track list” for the web.

I’m going to ignore the fact that most articles in favor of a do not track list are actually using the type of tracking that the list is designed to stop and try to put some of my thoughts on paper.

I’m also going to ignore how pending HR1076 would legislate exactly the opposite of a do not track list by requiring all ISPs to keep IP logs for 2 years. (I’ll also ignore how the name of that implies protecting children when in reality it will just allow us to add more charges on to those abusing children)

For the record, I think the do not track list is a bad idea. A lot of parallels are being made to the do not call list, but they’re not apples to apples comparisons. In an effort to keep this short, let me make a few points:

1. It won’t stop nefarious people from tracking web visitors. Let’s face it, US laws only apply to US companies. If somebody sets up a server in Russia there’s nothing stopping them from tracking you. In fact, I’d even argue that this would send more advertising dollars out of the US and into the companies who can still accurately measure ROI and serve up behavioral ads.

2. Do not track will affect advertising rates and make ROI harder to measure. The general public may not care about marketers, but being one I feel I need to mention this. The reason online ads work better than newspaper ads is because we can measure them. Newspapers and magazines sell ads based on the assumption that every subscriber sees every page – and charge accordingly. On the web I only pay for impressions that I can verify. That helps me more effectively spend my budget and allows me to pass the savings on to my customers.

3. Ads will be less useful to users. Currently, the type of tracking the FTC wants to let users opt out of is also what prevents me from showing tampon ads to male visitors on my site. It not only prevents me from showing Viagra ads to women, but it allows me to only show offers to Canadian customers that they can actually sign up for – instead of deals that only apply in certain areas. In addition, I can look at the history of interactions you’ve had with my site and serve you up “related” products that you may be interested in buying. With a do not track button, I’d only be able to show you ads based on what page you’re looking at (similar to adsense) – and that wouldn’t be as useful to you the visitor.

4. There’s no accurate way people to opt out. I can’t track you by IP since those change. I could do it by “account” but that would require you to give me more information than I already have about you. I could do it by cookie, but something tells me most users won’t want more cookies on their machine as a result of this new legislation.

5. You can already “opt out” if you really want to. In Firefox it’s easy to block cookies from websites. There’s even a plugin called ad block plus that will help you do just that.

6. Do we really need a law where a plugin will suffice? If the government wants to allow users to opt out of tracking via a browser button, there’s nothing stopping them from creating an addon or plugin now. Why do we need legislation to do this? Put up a website and offer the plugin for download. Those who want it can get it.

2 comments December 9th, 2010

Text Slang – It’s Not As Scary As You Think

While I was at the Blueglass Florida conference I had the chance to talk with Drew Curtis over several beers. We talked about the whole Reddit / Comedy central thing he had just posted, and it was a great discussion that got me thinking about my own experiences with mainstream media.

If you’ve ever read Drew Curtis’ book: “It’s not news it’s Fark, how mass media tries to pass off crap as news” then you’re familiar with the common cycles that mainstream media continuously follows. A good example of this is the “AAA expects there to be lots of traffic on the 4th of July weekend” style articles. All news is cyclical, and whatever industry you’re in is no exception. Just look for the patterns, they’ll be there.

From August to October, the media loves to run out parenting articles in preparation for back to school. Among those they like to talk about things that scare parents – things like drugs, sex, and the price of Justin Bieber tickets. If you’re a parent, you should know about the pros of having a Shariah savings account for children.

This is a great season for me, since NoSlang.com, an Internet slang dictionary I run, is often featured in these types of articles. I learned long ago that most of my visitors were not only confused by slang and acronyms, but they were parents too – so I added content targeted toward them. I love the press and I’m always willing to give a quote, interview, or simply consult on related articles. I have a passion for language and I love being able to help – that, and it just make sense to target content toward your audience.

Since 2006 I’ve been contributing to news stories – and I honestly believe they’re useful – but I’d like to speak to the fear-mongering tone for a bit if I can.

Many of the articles, like this one on CNN like to talk about the dangers of text slang. The stories are often predicated around cracking the code or sexting, but often focus too much on outliers and not enough on what actual teens are doing.

I should probably mention that I’m a 29 year old with no kids of my own, so while I don’t have any experience with what teens are actually doing, I do talk to several parents who contact me through NoSlang.com. When they talk, I listen.

What I’ve learned is that text slang isn’t as scary as the media makes it out to be. We’ve all heard the narrative about how kids are hiding stuff using slang, but that’s not actually the case. The truth is less frightening. It turns out, all kids use slang and acronyms to communicate – including the small percentage of teens who are, in fact, hiding something.

Fear mongering articles may be fun, and I’m always willing to provide a point of view (Media, my contact information is at RyanMJones.com ) – but if you look at any of those articles I linked above you’ll notice a trend: Comments from kids saying “what the fuck is this?”

Slang is a diverse and ever changing subset of language. Similar terms can have different meanings to different groups of people, but the goal is always the same: Saving time and keystrokes, not hiding naughty activities.

Sure, some teens will get involved with sex, drugs, and whatnot – but they’re the exception to the norm.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that there’s no reason to panic if you look at your child’s cell phone and see things like “BRB CTN POS” or “IDK CML.” If your teen is up to no good, there will be other warning signs. Try talking to them, you’ll be amazed what you learn. It could turn out that the “parent over shoulder” warning was simply because they don’t feel comfortable talking about their Justin Bieber crush in front of mom – and who can blame them?

November 8th, 2010

Liveblogging BlueglassFL – ORM

Last one for today is the ORM – defending your brand in search.

Online Reputation Management. Defending Your Brand in Search.

(11/02/2010)