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Whining is not a bad thing. In fact, I have a theory that although necessity may be the mother of invention, whining is in the mix somewhere. In this theory, exists four types of people. People who whine and don’t fix things. People who whine and pay other people to fix things for them. People who don’t whine. And people who whine and take care of their own shit. There are only two people who get things done in the group and they are agents of change.

How Bitching Can Change the World

There is no such thing as perfection. I think of this as I drive my car over the roads in Missouri and the roads in Arizona were better, but they weren’t perfect. But there is one thing you can be sure of, the roads we have now are better than brick roads. And if there wasn’t evolution in the paving industry, it would tak a lot of bricks these days to build an interstate. And this would not be possible if it weren’t for bitching.

I fix problems or suggest the right tools to people in need. That seems to be the biggest part of my day. Problems are the result of imperfection and if it people thought things could never be changed, they wouldn’t bitch. They wouldn’t tear open the case of something to see if there was a better way of making it work.

So I am thankful for the people who bitch. I bitch a lot myself. It got me into the job I do now. I never meant to write the software I do. I just had to. I was tired of bitching about the software I was using and took things in my own hands.

The Gamble of Early Adoption

I have been the early adopter of many technologies. It has always been a wager of time and sometimes even a wager of money. I have tried to adopt things by popularity but it just doesn’t seem to work for me. I have an aversion to the main stream. I will be there when I have to but when Podunk news channels tell you to like them on Facebook with every chance they get, I am usually out of there.

But newness can also be a drug, an escape from the daily grind and you may or may not being getting any value out of the time. But I do think of all the sites and technologies that have come and gone. They were the newest things in their time, but they only had a short time. Angel investors had hope but there was just something missing in the whole plan.

Working alone, you don’t have angel investors but you do have time. But you may not have much and that may be all you have to spend. So early adoption of a technology or technique that may not pan out in the long run is the same type of dilemma.

An Inventor Is Not Necessarily a User

A lot of the tools you use for your current job have been invented by an outsider. I don’t care what job you work in. An outsider has no sense of the priorities of doing your job. Sometimes this outsider is an engineer who has no sense of utility. Or it may be an efficiency expert looking over your shoulder but never stepping foot in your shoes. Tool designers sometimes just don’t have the necessary insight into the job their tool was made for.

And nowhere is this more apparent than in software. I hat my tv remote and my microwave and few other things I can name. Who wrote the software for that crap. When I worked in part stores, I had a computer but hadn’t done any programming in years. I did use a lot of software though as started to pick up the design aesthetic of good, useable software. And the parts store software just sucked. I walked into the same store the other day and they use their website. I am not sure what point that proves. But after looking at the software a billion dollar company ran their whole chain of stores on, I realized I could do better.

I mentioned software because that is what I know best, but I know whatever job you do, you have probably invented or dreamed of some new tool, technology or way of doing things that just works better. And what I am saying is there is probably an army of you’s out there just waiting for you yourself to take the first step.

You Don’t Have to Be Satisfied With What You Have

Authority was created to keep things from changing. Well, I don’t know if that is true of not, but it sure sounds right. Authority told us for the longest time that women didn’t have the right to vote, that black people could be kept as slaves and that the earth was flat. On a long enough timeline, authority does not have that great of a track record. It is always being proved wrong and a new authority put in its place.

Yeah, history was real. It’s not just a comic book. And people thought some stupid things in the past. And today is the past of the future. From school all the way through our working years we are taught to respect authority. It is hard to break out of that mold for some. For others, it is all they can do to pretend they fit in it until they can find a way out. And that way out is in not be satisfied with your lot in life or even validating the phrase “lot in life”. Your life is what you make of it.

I am writing the same coding and doing the same job that requires a degree to do some places, but I did not take no for an answer. I did my own thing and started making money doing it and other people saw it. It took a while, but it was interesting. There were ups and downs, but at least in my work realm, I am my authority and I can change things.

Creation is Destruction

I remember fighting with another developer in the beginning days of CSS about the future of CSS. I had used tables and I had used CSS. I give everything a shot. My opinion was, after using both, CSS was the way to go. I just was. It made for better looking sites that could be tweaked from a file that didn’t affect anything else about the page or the code running the page. The other guide took the side of tables.

Creation of new technologies destroys others. This argument I had was not a “Beta-Max vs. VHS” argument. Two technologies were not fighting over which would win. This was a change in standards. A change in the way a site was designed. The new technology that every browser understood was the obvious choice. Creation of one thing means the destruction of others. Without renewal, we live in the past.

Whine On

So go ahead and whine. Whine until the solution seems obvious and the problem silly. Because sometimes it is and your idea on fixing things may just be the right one. Everyone who looked at the problem in the past may have said, “It’s just the way it’s done.”, have been fighting a mountain of corporate bureaucracy or have been just too stupid to bitch in the first place.

Yeah, I said it. Sheep just go with the flow.

Tear the problem apart and putting back together, because if you are running your own business, you may be the only one to oil that squeaky wheel. And that problem will bother you until you do. But if you whine and do nothing, you are just wasting air.

And I am proud to say I am a whiner. If I don’t like the way things are, I change them. But don’t go picking around too much, because I have built a look of things as a result of my whining and sometimes I can only focus on one squeaky wheel at a time. It’s a slow process and Ozymandias be damned, as long as I see the result, it really doesn’t matter what you see.

Related articles

• A Simple Introduction To HTML5 (regulargeek.com)
• WebPutty: CSS editing goes “boink” (fogcreek.com)
• Are You An Early Adopter? (cindyholman.wordpress.com)
• Whiners (eschatonblog.com)

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Perfect Math

Tonight I watched Proof. Before I got a computer I watched movies all day long while reading books. Now a chance to watch a movie comes few and far between. And because it does and it is one of my favorite things to do is veg out for hours and watch a movie, it gives my mind a chance to look at my work from a little perspective. The work I had been looking at with a microscope for weeks at time. If I can get far enough away for a little while, the answer will come.

I thought about math. I never really liked mathematics until I played poker for the first time. But I was always good at it. I remember doing Algebra, Geometry, Calculus and Advanced Math and running out of places to go in mathematics where I could be challenged, so I started programming in my last year of high school, games mostly, when one person could do that and screens had 32 colors. I was home schooled so subjects came and went fast and I could pick what I learned for the most part.

And now I couldn’t tell you one thing about Calculus. It’s the way my mind works. Fast to learn, quick to discharge when it’s done with it. None of the books that taught me math taught me how to apply it, so I lost it all. I do remember physics and some descriptive geometry because I could apply it. And I love catapults in physics. I could finally write the pattern of that arc I always noticed down in a language. I already could visualize it in every rock I threw as a kid.

And with poker, I learned statistics and probabalities or what I like to call prediction and it ran directly into the part of mathematics I could have loved 7 years out of school. But I soon learned that poker was not all math and I was not a people person and moved on.

And math sort of followed me everywhere. I picked up a book on design and it was there. No wonder a conch shell is amazing. I could draw one and come close. But now I could build one out of numbers.

Math is pattern recognition in a language. It is turned into the language so that pieces of different patterns can be manipulated and merged and then pulled out again and put back into concrete ideas. Take object, turn into number. Take another object, turn into number. Shake them around a bit in their number world. Pull them back out again as newborn baby predictions of what will happen or of something you don’t know yet.

If you have one apple and bob give you two, you will then have three. This face has a 99% chance of being Bob Jones’. An eye-witness would make it a 100% chance in a court of law. So math is an attempt to put down on paper the way the world works as we interpret it. What natural law says that people can recognize faces in the first place? And if everything I saw visually as orange, you saw as green, how would you know? You would call it green and I would agree, but my lawn would look totally different to me than you.

So math could never be said to 100% describe the world we live in because some part of it is still a justification of the patterns we see in the outside world as filtered through our senses and finally our psyche and that last one can be a doozy.

I throw rock, hit target. You throw rock, hit target. We not insane. Ok, throw rock this hard, hit target. Go get Bob, have him throw rock too, just in case. Then we’ll be sure. Then we’ll go sacrifice this goat to thank the gods for this inspiration.

If mathematic were always 100% accurate this were not so, we would not be in the financial fiasco we are currently in. Mathematics made the risk seem less than it was, sometimes by removing the risk from the equation before it is written. Garbage in, garbage out and garbage algorithm.

More money could be lent on the hopes of more money to be made when it was paid back. But the formula did not work. It was wishful thinking or maybe meant to only look good in the short-term like our perfect calendar that has to correct itself every four years. An economy cycle diet meant to shift the numbers to a steeper slope.

Which makes me wonder if the ultimate model of economy is mother nature herself and it just doesn’t know it yet or at least the rest of the world doesn’t. And mother nature is really a bitch on the person to person level with the whole survival of the fittest thing. Mother nature is not fair. The damn whales people try to save suck down thousands of shrimp in a mouthful. A you freakin Vegans, plants have a conscious too, so you better find a new diet of rocks, water and air. There is no way to live with out killing a lot of other things in the process and just to survive.

And SEO Chasing It’s Tail or The BeeWatcher Watcher

And by now, I myself am wondering when I am going to get to SEO. All those paragraphs were just meant to lead in and I got carried away. But during the movie, I started thinking about mathematics, search engines and SEO. Some people who use math change the way we look at the world. And some use it mundanely.

I started thinking about what a great discovery in SEO would be. It would be discovering the algorithm that someone else wrote to recognize a pattern in language and use it to rank documents. These documents themselves are ideas encoded in one written language or another. The goal of these documents is to transmit these ideas to another person who wants them.

An SEO works in the gap between the algorithm and what people see. This is not even a science, more of a meta-science, if there is such a thing.

I starting writing this post months ago and dropped it, because I could quite get to what I wanted to say. But for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been playing around a lot with the my6sense android app, which I now prefer to any social media app because it pulls my Google Reader feeds in also. I do like reading more than random brain farts.  And what did I see, the same stories over and over. And in my area of the internet, the Google Farmer Update, which to me just seemed like Google’s rules, which have been there for years. were finally being put to use.

In all this, the thought never crosses most people’s minds that Google in its current state is not the end of information retrieval. Stop being librarians with the Dewey Decimal System. The Dewey Decimal System was great for paper cataloging, because location in the library and topic indexes could be one in the same thing. One number was all you needed. And it worked at any library you walked into. It is about the best you can do for physical books, because the contents of each book aren’t indexed.

The printing press was invented in 1436, 440 years before the Dewey Decimal System was invented in 1876 and has been updated 22 times since then. I know technology moves quicker now, be we are no way near the end of search engine evolution. All search engine algorithms are just that, algorithms, mathematical constructs that are never 100% accurate and only infinitely get closer to accuracy through change.

Google’s system ultimately will become a system of providing commerce above information. It has stock and shareholders and no real rules governing how to organize or order its content. A corporation’s core interest is the bottom line. And the bottom line means, sell as much as ads as you can in the space you have. When does this core interest interfere with “Do No Evil”. When does it interfere with “most relevant content” and who is this content relevant to. Network TV jammed as many ads in as it could and someone came up with cable and then cable did this and another ingenious bastard invented the dvr.

Google is big. Which means they move slow. Oh, yes, Google has done a lot in the last year or so. So much so they look like a combination of Yahoo, Facebook and Bing. But much of this technology and features were already being done by competitors. They have become a “do that too” company, which means they partially do something another company has put all their effort into. Some of these swipes are more apparent. I didn’t realize the extent of copying until I started looking through some semantic search engines and found the origin of many of Google recent “innovations”.

And I thought Google’s homepage was the way it was for a reason, with a bunch of scientific mumbo jumbo to explain why minimal was better. Or maybe I’m the idiot and the history police have already rewritten that part and I didn’t get the memo.

So I think Google has become sloppy with change on the heels of Facebook’s popularity, Twitter’s ability to serve information happening now instantly and Bing’s increase in search market share.

But this has nothing to do with the Farmer/Panda or whatever the fuck it is update. That needed to be done. It knocked out some crap content.

And if the Internet Was Forever

And, we as SEO’s just follow Google around like a God with a lot more commandments. What we have to realize in this is that Google is following around everyone else, trying to figure out what they like, so they can serve it up. Which makes us as SEO’s, the beewatcher watcher (Dr. Suess reference).  Let me explain.

Let’s say you bookmark your site at one site and it is dofollow and you submit an article at another site but your link is not dofollow. The use of a dofollow or nofollow tag is a bandaid to prevent spam link building but it is a hindrance to ranking content. Back to the link submissions. If the article site or guest blog post gets 100 the clickthrough times the traffic of the bookmarked link, and that article link in nofollow and therefore gives you no link juice by Google’s algorithm, then by all logic, Google’s algorithm is wrong.

And if Google algorithm stays wrong and flaws are not fixed, another search engine will find a way in. Read a college paper on knowledge theory or information retrieval every once and a while and you will realize that the Google algorithm is a toddler when it comes to finding relevant information, while the company itself is getting older. Not a good combination in my book.

And if the internet was forever, who gives a crap. But then again, what is forever on the internet. About the time between the launch of AltaVista and the launch of Google and it probably decreases as time goes on.

I am not saying or want anyone to take away that I think Google will be going down any time soon or in the future.

What I am saying is this. If you start thinking about your websites as a house you own in the city. Repaint it (tables to css to html5) every now and then and keep it occupied with good content and it can only go up in value. Your house is there forever if you want it, past search engine algorithm changes, before and after social media, however long this internet protocol lasts. I have never sold a domain and don’t really plan to. I want to pass them down to my kids if they want them. I want them worth money and I treat them that way.

No More BeeWatcher Watching and Meeting Google at the Pass

This got me thinking. Google is not God. Google is a fixture and now must filter new search technology and roll it out slowly. The key is not to know Google, but to be there before Google is. Google follows the internet. Google follow internet technology. Google follows what people do. Google can’t do it too quickly or it will freak people out. A few search engines were years ahead of Google with LSI and Semantic search. Google can’t do it too slowly or Google will not be where it is supposed to be and someone else will be there and quick, YouTube. And Google just can’t get some things right, maybe too many PHD’s and not enough hard knocks. My nickname for Google +1 is Google Me (Windows reference to go along with the current antitrust issues).

Google is trying to figure out the way we rank content and SEO’s are trying to figure out what Google is trying to figure out. Why not cut out the middleman?

Backrub (Google 0.0) used academic papers as it’s model for ranking content. Before this, every search engine mainly used keyword concentration for a rank indicator.  The internet was bigger than any mountain of data a computer had ever climbed and indexed correctly before. But it was in HTML and HTML had various indicators of content importance similar to acedemic papers. 6 levels of heading tags from H1 to H6 could indicate rank. A link to another paper could indicate importance. Count those links and you have a scale. And on and on.

But the truth is, Backrub was reinventing the wheel in code. The heading tags were already an indicator of rank when reading a document and you knew when you hit a list, to take notes.

But the wheel now is code and content. The sonnet was invented. The novel was invented. Twitter invented a new content type. What about videos? Social networks invent new content types every day. Algorithms still have to be built to process all of this stuff and those must adjust with time. Everything is in flux and social is here to stay, smart phones guaranteed that for a while.

Google can write it’s algorithm but social networks gave people a voice against Google which Google must eventually adjust to or perish if it is to provide “relevant content”.

Google can refuse to index a technology or content type correctly for a while but when enough people start using it, they must change or perish.

Know Your Media and Your Audience – Zen and the Art of SEO

I have actually become bored writing about SEO because most of the concepts are pretty simple.

• People search with keywords
• Research words that people would use to find what you have to sell
• Write content with these keywords
• Write better or more controversial content with these keywords (linkbait)
• Build links to this content
• Get social buzz for your linkbait
• Build different iterations of this very flexible erector set

But really isn’t this just:

• Do research on topic
• Write cool shit on topic
• Find people who like this kind of shit
• Tell people about cool shit

There is not really much to it for someone with an analytical mind and creativity. Pick a new social site, bookmark site, article site, etc.,  figure out it’s dynamic, and work a little magic with it to get links in to your site. There are and were new social sites every week. Simple concepts with an almost endless work schedule if you wanted until you had the site where you wanted it. I guess you could write about each and every site, but then spammers would read your stuff quicker and start manual spamming and then write software to do it.

Every social network has a dynamic. You can consider blogs a disconnected social network, a huge one. I consider forums in the social network realm. Any site that you can add content to, that you do not own, I consider a social network. Most likely, the links you get from here and beyond will come from social networks.

Think of link directories, for example. We all know they are worthless. DMOZ and Yahoo may have some value. Small niche directories that have other content may have value. Directory sites with voting and comments (LOL: review sites) may have some value. But the cookie cutter sites? Would you go there? Would someone else?

I had to add the “Would someone else?” because I am 36 now and there are some places I would go 16 years ago I wouldn’t now. But it still is fucking simple. And Google finally said enough. Ditto on the other random crap sites too. And that is the end of the audience section.

But you still have to know your media, not that I do (shoemaker’s children), for those who want to throw stones at glass houses. Google did make some other “Duh” changes, like ranking more speedy content. After all, it is their damn search engine and if you want to drive your broke ass model T site down it, they are going to force you into the slow lane. This post is already almost 3000 words. But there are ways to make your site faster and they are many and varied. I have played around with most of them to know that they won’t fit here.

Make your HTML current, look good or at least presentable, easy to navigate and organized logically. Again, broke ass Model T’s.

Your media is also your content. Write right, for fuck sake (I guess I do earn a few stones for that one, but really don’t give a crap here).

But also keep track of what is happening. New web technologies and ideas sprout up all the time. If you see an in and have the time, jump in. Google will be there soon or someone else will get there first. Microformats were out a while before Google recognized them. If a social network becomes popular, Google will be there. Google is only a diplomat. The internet is king.

And if you are deeper into SEO, read papers and check out new search engines. Something will hit you that is new, that Google missed for a second and you may have a jump on.

The Mantra

If you are doing your own SEO, Google’s changes may have freaked you out.

Evil God Google Smash Site.

But if you are in it for the long haul, then it is just time to rebuild. Upgrade your site design. Speed it up. Make sure your content is unique and fits your visitors. Maintenance would have fixed most of this.

When you get too wrapped in SEO, remember this.

Google is trying to find the people you are trying to find. You just have to be there.

I guess if you work as an SEO, it’s a bit different. You already know this stuff.

Related articles

• 30+ Google Quality/Panda Update Resources for Content Farmers and SEO Practitioners (seoptimise.com)
• Rock-Solid SEO is Simple. Really. (copyblogger.com)
• Android book-scan app tames untidy tomes (go.theregister.com)
• How to Optimize for Google 2011 – Part 2 of 3 (stepforth.com)
• How Google’s Panda / Farmer Algorithm Could Affect Email Marketing (searchenginejournal.com)
• What SEO Experts Advise For Those Penalized By Google’s Farmer Update (reelseo.com)

I have been writing in journals and drawing these, as well as working on my sites, of course. But I have been hard at work. So I write intricate descriptions of site plans and have started keeping a journal just for diagrams, doodles and random thoughts. But the writing has been active writing. Writing and then doing with no time to edit it into something readable for my blog before I have a chance to test it. All I really want is a site that thinks for itself.

Stop Words?

Category Killer Extended

Product Promotion

Content Relations

Category Spreaders and Automation Triggers

Category Killer Site

Image by javYliz via Flickr

My wife’s Inspiron 1525 has always been a bit possessed. It looks nice on the outside and does the job, but it is a bit clunky. We couldn’t beat the price though.

Tonight, it just wouldn’t turn. It would start up. The white timer bar would go across the bottom of the screen. But then only a white flashing cursor on the black screen would show. Okay.

Using the beat with a hammer method, I tried rebooting it a few more times. About 7 or 8 times. Then I tried the Media Direct button. What the hell. If it worked, then at least something did. And it did. I could get to pictures and videos also. So the hard drive was still in there somewhere.

So I searched for “Dell flashing cursor”. And came up with this, which didn’t apply. Though before I went back and read it more thoroughly, I found out how to create a bootable DOS USB Stick and how to flash the BIOS from it. And here is where to find Dell drivers.

Hey, it needed an updated BIOS anyway. And now it has one. I even took picture, which I am not posting to further prove my idiocy. It also still had the flashing cursor.

I happen to run into this 160 GB hard drive/BIOS issue here which I just stepped back from. Did not even want to read it.

So I ran into this post over a Yahoo Answers that gave me a “Duh” moment. And when you do insert the disk to reinstall the Dell’s operating system, realize that there also is a repair function. I found this after backing out of reinstalling Windows. I thought it would be best to ask my wife about files she may need. I could get them off now.

And I saw the repair link, which worked like a charm and took less than five minutes, with no lost files files or other issues. In the words of Napoleon Dynamite, “Idiot!”

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This started as a post telling you to come to Highlight Midwest in Kansas City this Wednesday, but then the iframe virus hit the server this blog once lived on. But no worry. It sold out.

I moved to the fly-over states from Phoenix. They are called flyover states because no one really wants to stop here. For the most part, the opinion is, nothing happens here. And I for one believed it for a long time. I have ranted about the area and it’s backwardness for a long time. And, yes, I do have a right, because I was born here. I only lived in Phoenix for 6 years.

So along came Highlight Midwest, it’s first year and it’s purpose:

• To highlight the best and the brightest web-related success stories in the Midwest
• To connect nearby communities
• To demonstrate local innovation in a rapidly changing economic landscape

I will be presenting there and only have a vague list of ideas that I will be covering so far. But I did do a lot of research on the unconference format and that made me feel a little bit better about deadline productivity method.

For those of you who want to read more about unconferences, see the second part of this post and for those of you more behind then I am, here are some links to help you out with what is going on at Highlight Midwest.

Highlight Midwest Resource Links

• The Official Site
• The Highlight Midwest Twitter Profile
• The Highlights Schedule
• Tonight’s Tweetup at Flying Saucer
• Upcoming Entry for the Reception
• Upcoming Entry for Focused Highlights

Unconference Notes

In order to get this post done and still continue research here is a widget of the search of my Friendfeed. Just discovered the RSS urls for FriendFeed searches today. That way the post can be up and I can still tag new items on Friendfeed to add to it. I will eventually find a better way of doing this, but for now, it works.

Image by eristoddle via Flickr

When you do a lot of things, you have to have a system of priorities. I say that and yet I can also say that I get sidetracked about 50% of the time. There are those days when everything comes together. But I am driven like a MoFo, so even on those days, the to do list is never empty at the end of the day.

And if these things you do are spread apart, you must create your own system. No one will show you how. Being a blogger means wearing more hats than you ever thought you would. Throw anything else in that mix and add even more hats.

One thing you must cultivate is the ability to walk away from something that is not quite finished. Another skill you must have is knowing when to walk away and move onto another project to get it closer to the finish line. Focus is great. Too much focus will have you spending too much time chasing details better left until after every piece of the puzzle is semi-functional.

Every now and then, these half finished things don’t turn out the way I planned. An example: I decided to update WordPress a while back. I knew just about how long it would take, but I didn’t figure in that a buttload of plugins wouldn’t work the instant I update. This results in a setback, which will happen more often than you think.

So now the projects:

• My Day Job at All About Doors and Windows – Switch from a Filemaker database that is 4 GB to something that will handle inventory changes a bit more effectively. Update every picture on the site to a newer, cleaner version – 3000 in all. Restructure all the categories and sort order on the site to make it easier to find parts and have the side effect of better SEO. Build or find a bulk discount module for the sites.
• Green Chili Farm – Teach someone new to the internet how to run a WordPress blog and ecommerce. The first two sales came
• Bloghology – Keep the articles coming for a online, print, and electronic version of the magazine.
• Highlight Midwest 1 – Prepare a presentation on ecommerce for small business.
• A Niche Blog System
• Digital Products Review – Document the niche blog system and write enough posts to keep content fresh during the gaps.
• Study – Landing page design. I figured I have taken things from a broad view down to the narrow view. Landing pages are the end of the purchase route.
• Here – The posts here are basically a side effect of the projects above. And I am still going through notes and flyers from Blog World Expo.
• Of course, there is promotion, link building, commenting and exploring social media also.

And there were a few projects that were put on the back burner for a bit. They were months away from producing income or getting my name out there.

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This was my office since we moved to this house. I bought the desk in Phoenix online and had it shipped here. We also did that with area rugs because just about every room in this house has hardwood floors.

And this is temporarily my new office, in the basement. And I think I made a good move. Let me tell you why.

The desk in the first picture is in our dining room which is basically one huge room which includes the living room. It look’s nice, but there was not much I could get done.

I have a 3 year old and a 8 year old. There was really no way for me to get work done at the upstairs desk unless they were asleep. Two reasons:

1. They didn’t understand that I was working.
2. I have to get involved in everything in my vicinity.

To tell you the truth, with the laptop, I haven’t worked at any desk except the one at my day job for a while. And for a few weeks, I was driving down there to get some work done on the weekends when no one was there, an hour round trip. And in my mind an hour wasted.

Now I am down here with the spiders, with only one thing to focus on. No books on the bookshelves to distract me. Nothing really to look at. And this is good. Now I just have to make sure that I don’t take off on a tangent with internet ADHD. It comes down to the ability to focus on what I am doing for long enough to actually accomplish something.

It Was Fun

Image by eristoddle via Flickr

I have to say I really enjoyed Blog World Expo, not just for all the swag that almost had me buying a new bag to fit it all in, but that was nice. Not just for everything new I learned. But for the reality it gave to something I do that still had an unreality to it.

Maybe kids growing up today count the internet as part of their reality and I partially do. But it is, still the internet. It is hard to sometimes realize that you are interacting with real people when you write a post, comment or join in a conversation on a forum or social network when all you see is an avatar.

Being at the Expo gave me a new feeling of reality to all of this. Now I know some of the faces behind the avatars and signatures.

The Lessons Learned

For the most part I stayed on the monetization track. Today I went off on a tangent to listen to Tim Street talk about video and then back to the monetization track. And yesterday, I chose to watch the World Premiere of His Highness Hollywood rather than another panel.

I believe a lot in cross-pollination. You can spend most of the time you have on the main track you plan on taking, but you need to branch off every now and then to pull from areas that you haven’t dealt with that much. It brings in new ideas, stretches the brain and sometimes has a rebound effect of bouncing you back into your normal rut with a new energy.

One great thing BWE could do is provide a DVD set of all the panels. There were a few time slots that I wish I could have attended 2, 3, even 4 of the panels that were running simultaneously.

But to tell you the truth I am not sure if I would ever get to watching them. I have had a couple of dvds sitting at home that I have been meaning to watch for about 8 months now. To me, reading is faster, because I can speed read the parts I already know and I can move around in non-sequential order, but that is just the way I learn.

Content To Reality

I sat here tonight thinking how I would put all of the new things I learned and new products I found into a post. And I just don’t think I can. I think I have enough content for a couple of weeks, at least. So that might be just what I do.

Yes, it would be great to write about BWE while it is happening, and writing about it two weeks from now will be so “two weeks ago”, but it is what I will do. Because I bounced a few ideas off of people I met and heard their own. And it has me itching to write about it. I also have about 20 pages of notes.

I have also come away with a couple of new ideas that I can’t wait to toss out in a post and then start playing around with. One involves a dragon I have been chasing for months now.

I am a nervous guy in public for the most part and it was good to see some speakers having the same issues on stage. In fact, it was those speakers I respected and looked up to the most. Because I knew that they hadn’t totally conquered their fear yet, but they were still up there giving it all they could.

I am out of here tomorrow on a reverse time travel flight that in the reality of time zones will take 7 hours. I can’t wait to see my family again. I thought the peace and quiet of this empty hotel room would give me a lot of time to get work done, but maybe I need the noise of kids in the background at least once and a while to remind why I am doing this.

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• Blog World Expo Super-Panel

 

Image by eristoddle via Flickr

The First Day

Okay, I think I am much more put together today. I meant to get a nap in all day yesterday after checking out the 4 block radius around my room. I put some pictures up in Flickr. It seems that there are as many cranes here as there are casinos.

I didn’t manage to take the nap until 5:30 in the evening. And I basically slept through until 4:30am today. But I am ready to go now. Sleep deprivation has a way of making a person edgy, unorganized, and a little bit moody. Not a good state.

Before I did get a nap, I managed to walk down and get my pass to the expo. And the convention center is huge. I think some of the small towns in my home state would fit inside the building.

Don’t make the mistake of trying to walk through the whole thing to get to the South Hall, which is where the Expo is. After about 20 minutes of that and walking through an Expo of the latest and greatest in mining equipment, I found out you have to leave the building and walk outside to the South Hall. But today I know exactly where to go.

I also picked up a bunch of free magazines. Freebies are cool. Not just the current version of Blogger & Podcaster Magazine, but a few back issues as well. And speaking of magazines,

Bloghology

The print magazine didn’t make it. It was a rush deal and we pushed the first issue to try to get it to the printers in time. It was just not enough this time. But you can still check out the digital issue. This was a great disappointment, but you can’t win everything. We are still going to make this the best magazine on blogging out there and one of the only.

The cover story is an interview with Yaro Starak, who also wrote a great post about the magazine. So visit his site and check his post on Bloghology out.

Today’s Plan

Today’s plan is to get as much out of this first day at Blog World Expo as I can. The schedule is a little bit confusing and it’s seems that there are so many speakers that some are speaking at the same time and you have to make a decision as to what you want to learn. I am still not quite sure what I have access to yet.

So I am going to jump in and play it by ear.

I also plan on getting a pass to the monorail and just riding it like a bum around for a few hours if I get a chance after BWE. I still have some gifts to get.

The kids will settle for the regular touristy things. But the wife is going to need something special after spending the weekend alone with the monsters. We have only spent one day apart for four years. Not that I will find or afford something special, but I will try my hardest.

News

Friendfeed has changed their look.

Twitter has changed their look.

Zemanta is starting to kick ass giving you the ability to add your own Flickr photos and feeds to your suggestion pool. It is something I have been waiting for. You can also filter your results if you don’t think Zemanta is getting quite right.

It is now 8:30 and I have to get a move on. See everyone there.

Okay, time to get these off my chest and write them down so that I can separate the stupid from the actual true issues.

Being Funny

I write posts that are funny in my head at times, by my head can recreate the tone of my voice and a computer screen just can’t do the same for the people reading the post. So I hit publish as quick as I can, saying I will not worry about how the post is taken and then stress about it all night. Of course, the next morning it takes a while to check my comments and when I do, it is usually with one eye closed so that the full force of whatever may be there doesn’t hit me at once.

Sitting Down to Write

Anything and everything that can stop me from writing will do so. It doesn’t matter if I am in a bad mood when I wake up and everything seems uninteresting. I know if I sit here and type, a post will come out. It may be after the first thousand words, but something worth posting will be there. Of course, any research for said post has the possibility of sending me off on a tangent that may not bring me back to writing. Then things will be interesting, interesting enough to keep me from writing. This one is really under scrutiny.

And despite the bravado, writing always is a mean bitch until I am actually doing it. Oh, yes there are times of intense flow where I can write thousands of words a day. But these times are usually sparked by a closely approaching deadline. Do I need an assistant whose only job is too hold a gun to the back of my head so I will start writing?

Dealing with Tech Issues

Screw the backend. It has become auto mechanics to me slowly over the years. I am really tired of that crap. Updating WordPress. Fixing installations. Finding plugins to do what I want. I got into this damn business because the distance between idea and reality is shorter on the net. Now it has been a few years. Shouldn’t this damn thing think for me yet?

Quality

After writing a lot, I realize that I am not as good at it as I thought. In fact, if I look back to my teens, I may have been better then. Sometimes I read what I have written and cringe. And then I won’t write a post here for days. But I sure know how to read books on writing and quote from them like I follow the letter of the law. But I am a lazy writer hoping to improve by osmosis.

I am sure I will find more later. They look pretty silly in print. There you go, issues, see how stupid you look. Now step off.

Like that works.