My piece on “Making Businesses of Negativity” apparently caught the attention of one of the businesses that I criticized, DirtyPhoneBook.com, since they forwarded a Tweet to me this morning of a followup article over on Silicon Alley Business Insider where their CEO had provided a rebuttal letter. SAI had posted an article earlier about them, dubbing them the “Horrifying New Startup Of The Day“.
In the apologetics letter, Peter Green compared Dirty Phone Book with other, better-known social media services, Facebook and MySpace, and he says it’s all about freedom of speech. He goes into further comparison, pointing out hate groups active in Facebook, and tries to say that Facebook is actually worse than DirtyPhoneBook.com. Finally, he suggests that DirtyPhoneBook is treated worse by the press than sites Chatrouleette and Facebook because people have some sort of prejudice against he and his cofounders because they are a “stripper”, a “degenerate gambler”, and a “washed-up Las Vegas comedian” instead of being young whiz-kids from Harvard or Moscow.
While he makes a very well-worded case for the business, I’m sorry but it isn’t sufficiently convincing. Read the rest of this entry »
A recent quick review shows that Google Maps has cleaned up the “Escher Effect” seen in Satellite view. The Escher Effect is caused when two separate aerial or satellite pics are taken of different sections/plots of a city, and then stitched together to form a continuous composite picture. Each pic is taken from a different angle, so the taller building pictures are taken from different perspectives, causing them to appear to lean toward or away from each other.
Escher Effect of the Empire State Building
The “Escher Effect” is named after the famous Dutch artist, M. C. Escher, who was particularly known for illustrations using optical illusions that often involved perspective and side effects from how perspective is perceived.
When Google Maps introduced satellite and aerial photos, there was a lot of the Escher Effect going on. Read the rest of this entry »
While speaking at SMX West, I photographed Steve Ballmer’s keynote interview.
Just as I frequently do, I uploaded the photo to Flickr, and added description notes to the photos which invited bloggers and news reporters to use the photos in return for an attribution link.
I’ve had photos used frequently in online media, but this is one of the rare occasions when one of my pics has appeared in print media. The Metro, Silicon Valley’s weekly newspaper, picked up one of my photos and reproduced it in their column about Steve Ballmer’s keynote. Read the rest of this entry »
I just wrote an article criticizing businesses based on negativity, and coincidentally this other “negative” website came to my attention: Yavoid. Except, it’s negative in a good way!
There are quite a lot of variations on “how-to” sites out there, particularly in terms of giving life advice. Some well-known how-to sites include eHow, DIY Network, and Ask Answers. However, there’s relatively few that focus upon avoiding problems to begin with.
I decided a long time ago to avoid pursuing business/career options which involved more negative ways of making money. The philosophy first came to me in college when I observed how lucrative — and vile — the local businesses were which operated towing services for our campus. (My university openly and purposefully sold far fewer parking permits than there were students who needed to use them, and then received a percentage of funds back from the towing companies which charged huge towing fines.)
In the internet world I work in, I try to help companies in ranking well in search engines when people search for their keywords, and I also try to help those companies when they have reputation management problems. One type of problem that I feel is increasingly targeting companies and individuals are sites which are set up to specifically encourage people to complain about companies or even make false accusations against them.
I’m not talking about all sites which enable people to write ratings and reviews. I love sites like Zagat, and TripAdvisor, which can be really helpful in finding good restaurants and hotels. I was pleased to find ratings of doctors (see RateMDs, Vitals.com & HealthGrades) and dentists (see DR.Oogle) when I was seeking an oral surgeon recently on a business trip, and I see attorney ratings, too (Avvo).
I was really delighted when I noticed that StumbleUpon had set up a URL shortener named Su.pr! I imagined being able to use it to submit content to StumbleUpon users simultaneously with Twitter and maybe even Facebook, perhaps with some sort of combined analytics to show clickthroughs and such after the fact.
Further, I really like the domain name, “Su.pr”, since it looks like “Super”! (Why didn’t SuperMedia and Superpages.com snap that one up?)
But, from a search marketer’s viewpoint, Su.pr has a major defect that makes it unsuitable for me or my clients to use as a URL shortener. Read the rest of this entry »
I got up excruciatingly early today (4:30 am) in order to drive down and document the demolition of the gigantic Texas Stadium in Irving, Texas, about 5 mile south of where I live. Texas Stadium was the home field to the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys football team, and had hosted many other events as well ever since it was built in 1971.
It took me relatively little time to get up and get ready. I went prepared, taking my camera, leftover danishes to breakfast upon, milk, tea, bottled water, jacket, dust mask, goggles, a folding-chair, and my Nikon Coolpix camera. Read the rest of this entry »
The recent kerfluffle surrounding “TOP SEOs” rating service reminded me that I actually did a sort of rating directory of in-house SEO professionals myself a few years ago. Today, I revisited that listing of professionals in: Top In-House SEOs: Where Are They Now?
I never claimed to have used some consistent/formalized approach in producing that original list of people – as it fell out, it ended up being people who worked for highly-recognizable brands as SEOs and disclosed that fact through LinkedIn, blogging, and speaking at conferences. Nothing very scientific.
However, the experience of just publishing that informal list made me realize immediately how difficult it is to really rate people fairly. If you do ratings, you need to be very open about the criteria you’re using, and it should be real criteria as opposed to doing it merely based on being paid. Recent uproars over Yelp ratings and TopSEOs.com highlight how sensitive such an exercise can be. Read the rest of this entry »
I’m not at all sure that our group should be spilling all the local search ranking secrets to Mike in this way! Way, way, way too openly!
For myself, I cite the excuse that I was high on dental anesthetics at the time, which are the equivalent of being given truth serum. I was drugged, dammit! 😉
However, I think many people may not have realized that CLAIMING your business actually is a major ranking signal for Google Maps, and automatically gives a listing a leg up over many unclaimed listings in the same category/area combination. Google employees have actually publicly verified that this is a ranking factor! There are very few instances where they’ll say that some factor is influential on rankings, so this is not to be ignored.
My piece on “Making Businesses of Negativity” apparently caught the attention of one of the businesses that I criticized, DirtyPhoneBook.com, since they forwarded a Tweet to me this morning of a followup article over on Silicon Alley Business Insider where their CEO had provided a rebuttal letter. SAI had posted an article earlier about them, dubbing them the “Horrifying New Startup Of The Day“.
Texas Stadium Implosion – Huge Demolition Event
April 11th, 2010 by Chris Silver SmithI got up excruciatingly early today (4:30 am) in order to drive down and document the demolition of the gigantic Texas Stadium in Irving, Texas, about 5 mile south of where I live. Texas Stadium was the home field to the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys football team, and had hosted many other events as well ever since it was built in 1971.
It took me relatively little time to get up and get ready. I went prepared, taking my camera, leftover danishes to breakfast upon, milk, tea, bottled water, jacket, dust mask, goggles, a folding-chair, and my Nikon Coolpix camera. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Dallas Cowboys, events, Texas Stadium
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