Posted by James at 08:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

After a 3-day “blizzard break” from work I am now on an extended “holiday break” until after the New Year. With things being fairly slow this time of year at work, it is a great time to take a week off, relax, and try to get the “life” back in the work-life balance. With that said, the blogging might be a little light this week.

Christmas turned out really nicely. My grandparents came into town for the holiday, which is always a treat. They always tell fantastic stories from their amazing lives and adventures. Also got to spend time with my family and Kristi’s family, got to tear apart a home entertainment unit with my dad, eat a lot of tasty food and exchange cool presents with my loved ones.

I also got to experience what it feels like to pilot a German engineered, finely tuned, luxury-sled on Christmas eve…at least for 15-feet until my journey ended in the back end of a Jeep. It seems that fricton, gravity, and other laws of physics were not on my side. The picture below is of the minor aerodynamic re-engineering the Jeep did on my “schlitten.”

So off to the body shop tomorrow. And in case you were wondering, no one was hurt…the collision happened at a whopping three mile-per-hour.

Posted by James at 09:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It’s been years since I have had a snow day. Actually, the last time was my freshman year of college back in January of 1997…which was almost a decade ago…wow.

Because of the snow, I have been locked up in my house all day, hanging with my girlfriend and cruising the Internet looking for something work related to do. I ended up building a couple of Squidoo lenses today – one that lists the video blog wrap-ups we did at work and one that aggregates various viral and word of mouth marketing RSS feeds.

A few months after building my first Squidoo lens, I will admit I have mixed feelings about the site. I don’t really think there is all that much money to be made on Squidoo, and it seems like Squidoo pages really don’t pull much weight in the search engines. On the positive end, I do see Squidoo as a good place to put together resources and group together various links you find. As I have mentioned before, I really like the idea of people doing research and then aggregating the results in one location where other people can benefit from the research that was done.

One big complaint I do have is the wild number of AdSense ads that appear on the lenses I created. I mean, eight ads on one page? If I was trying to make money on my lenses, that would be alright. But I’m not and it makes the page look a little more spammy than I would like. I wish there was a way to turn down the AdSense a tad.

Posted by James at 07:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Oh the holidays…they get a little crazy. I will warn you now that my posts may be few and far between over the next week or two. I have been storing up some videos links to share, so I figured I would do that tonight.

First – Kelvin…who I respect for his courage (since he was brave enough to post this):

Next, three videos from IBM – proving that even big companies can have a great sense of humor:

Next, get some history lessons about G.W. (Cheech -you will love this):

Then Asimo, Sony’s famous robot impressing a crowd at a Japanese demonstration…NOT! (Not jokes are only funny if you have seen Borat):

Then this Video Short from SNL:

Finally, I have a link to a story that I love and that shows why the Chinese will be the next super-power: Learn about the dolphin story.

[Thanks to Mz. Pocket and The Wolf and the Blog Business Summit for pointing out these stories]

Posted by James at 09:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It turns out that Ms. Dewey (Microsoft’s attempt at a viral search engine), who I posted about a while back, has a bit of a questionable past. It seems that Valleywag found an old movie that Ms. Dewey (a.k.a. Janina Gavankar) acted in…and it is on the soft-core side. The movie is called Cup of My Blood. To see some pictures of Ms. Dewey wearing a little less than she does at her new gig, click here. WARNING: This is not work safe, unless you work in Europe…

Funnily enough, I found this news on the blog of Google’s Head Spam Policeman. I am proud of you Mr. Cutts.

Posted by James at 09:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here are two totally unrelated Ferrari stories that I found on Autoblog that I just got to share:

1. How much does it cost to own a Ferrari? No, I’m not talking about the sticker price (in this case it was a ridiculous $225,000) – I am talking about maintenance costs and fixing broken parts. I’m not going to give it away, but this story will show you that even if you could scrape together a quarter-million bucks to buy a Ferrari, you still better have some insane cash to fix the damn thing. As one commenter says at Autoblog – “For $250,000, the thing should be able to fix itself.”
2. The other Ferrari story is about the Ferrari Formula 1 team. In 2007 my favorite F1 driver, Kimi Raikkonen will be moving from the horribly unreliable McLaren Mercedes team to the world-class Ferrari team. So how much will Kimi be making in his new driver’s role at Ferrari? Just under a million dollars…a week. That’s right, the going rate for one of the best race drivers in the world is $51,000,000 a year – and that doesn’t even include endorsements. So I guess Kimi will be one of the elite who will be able to afford the repair bill on his personal Ferrari.

Posted by James at 08:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I don’t know how I could say this any better than the SEO Loser himself – so I suggest you check out his post and the huge list of comments that followed. The Loser talks about his experience at the PubCon conference in Vegas last month and the drastic divide between the SEO Rockstars and the SEO rank and file. It’s a very well written post, and worth the read.

Also, you can check out Rand’s post about the nervousness we all feel when we talk to the SEO elite. It turns out there is a big old food chain of nervousness with Danny Sullivan at the top and people like me sitting at the bottom. YAY for the bottom!

Alright, enough reading this…read the two posts I linked to. They are worth it.

Posted by James at 08:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So it isn’t BusinessWeek or Fast Company, but I did get quoted in the Life Insurance International newsletter. The article is called Tackling the Internet Challenge and it was written by Charles Davis.

It is pretty cool to have our efforts mentioned in the same article as a much larger campaign done by Nationwide Insurance – and it’s always fun to get quoted.

Thanks for including my thoughts in your article Charles!

Posted by James at 06:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Alright, I’m not a citizen of Second Life, so saying that Second Life terrorists are cool might not be totally kosher. But I do think it is interesting that there is a group of people who are trying to make changes in the Second Life world through their extreme actions. And hey, at least they aren’t doing it in real life.

The terrorists group in this case is the Second Life Liberation Army. Here are some choice posts about the SLLA:

The Marketing Vox article (where I started reading about this)
ReveNews’ interview with an SLLA member
Second Life Liberation Army on Wikipedia
The SLLA Declares War on Second Life Citizens
Video of a Terrorist Attach in Second Life (sounds more exciting than it is)

[Bonus: Clickfraud on Google AdSense ads might be funding terrorist groups.]

Posted by James at 07:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is one of those times. The lead singer is a friend of mine...and if you knew him, you would know why I am so proud.

P.S. - This is a Christian band...so you can let the kids listen and enjoy.

Posted by James at 08:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of my roles at work is helping with hiring. For the last two months I have been looking for talent to fill a number of positions in my department, and I really haven’t had the best luck. Maybe it is the time of year. Maybe it is the job market. Who knows.

In the last two days I estimate I looked at 100 resumes – and after looking at that many resumes, some patterns begin to emerge. The thing that is freaking me out is that almost every resume and cover letter I look at seems to be similar to the one that comes before it. And I’m not saying they are all bad, because they are not.

The freaky thing is they are all written exactly like we were taught to write a resume and cover letter – and they’re just not cutting it. They are all very formulaic and dry. They all tend to regurgitate the things I am looking for – and everyone is a “good/perfect/great fit” for the job…even though they may lack any relevant experience.

It actually reminds me of Google AdWords a bit. See, when you attend a PPC class or conference they tell you that the best thing to do for the click-through rate of your advertisement is to use the keyword in the title of your advertisement (dynamic keyword insertion). It seems that over the last couple of years, everyone took this advice to heart and started to use the keyword for the title to their ad – and as a result they all have the same damn title in their ads. Now the ads that really draw attention are the ones that aren’t using the industry best practice.

I think this same lesson can be applied to writing a cover letter or resume these days. We all know what the best practices are for a resume and cover letter – which is great. As you are writing up yours, think about what you are “supposed to do” and then do something different.

Don’t get me wrong. Don’t write anything that will make you look bad. Use good judgement and common sense. Don’t come off too cocky or strange or random. But make sure you do stand out.

When you are putting together that cover letter and resume, think of ways to be a purple cow in the job market. Remember that you are in charge of promoting brand you – and the best promotions are the ones that stand out and get noticed.

I’ll let you know if I find any purple cows out there.

Posted by James at 08:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am really loving BusinessWeek lately (thanks for the subscription Grandpa).

This week they take a look at an emerging revolution in the corporate culture at Best Buy. Imagine this – no schedule, no required meetings, no need to even go to work. Imagine a job where you are only judged by work performance, not hours in your chair. Pretty hard to imagine, eh?

Well, that’s how they are rolling in some departments at Best Buy corporate…and they are seeing some amazing results, including huge gains in productivity, reduction in voluntary turnover and increases in job satisfaction.

Best of all, this all happened subversively within the organization. The two HR masterminds behind this program (known as ROWE), decided their experiment would never work if they tried to get permission first, decided not to. Now the program is picking up steam and has gotten the support of many of its biggest critics... and even the CEO.

Not surprisingly, all of this makes Tom Peters squeal like a little schoolgirl.

Sorry Tom…don’t kick my ass.

Posted by James at 07:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, I think a most of us saw this coming…Google Answers, the pay for an answer service, is officially dead. It was an interesting idea – and it’s even more interesting that Yahoo’s more social approach to finding answers has done so well.

You should check out the post on the Google Blog about the decision to kill the program…and enjoy the example questions that are listed. I especially enjoy “How many tyrannosaurs in a gallon of gasoline?”

On an unrelated note, I really liked this video posted over on Yahoo! The interviewer, Dave Hill, cracks me up…

Also, enjoy Yellow...

Posted by James at 07:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I am getting a lot of search traffic for terms like "Richard Simmons and David Letterman" and I think this is why...

Posted by James at 09:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)