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As Ice Cube would say, today was a good day. You see, today I worked in a snow storm putting floor joists into a home for Habitat for Humanity. I had an amazing time doing it and I learned a lot in the process. Most importantly, I learned that I really suck at hammering. Exhibits A and B:
Seriously though, if you have a chance, take a day and go build a house with Habitat – the Peanut will thank you for it.
I think we all get a little annoyed when we run across a person who parks like a complete toolbox. You know, the SUV that is parked in two parking spots, or the compact car that is parked about thirty degrees off of straight, or the Lamborghini that's parked in a…ok, so I just wanted to use one of my Gumball Rally pictures.
None the less, if you are sick of people that park like idiots, the folks at I Park Like an Idiot (.com) are there for you. You can buy packs of 20, 40 or 100 stickers to use to mark the cars that aren’t really living up to your high parking expectations.
Much respect to Tumbleo for the point.
[Note: I figure this might be a more manageable crusade for me, since the SEO Sheister thing went over like Dick Cheney at a Taliban chili cook off.]
That’s right folks, if you have been thinking about blogging but you are a bit skurred about the time/effort it will take to write, you might what to try out a tumble log. You see, if a blog is like a journal, a tumble log is like a scrapbook, if that makes any sense.
For a great example of what I am talking about, check out Project.ioni.st (killer domain name by the way). And if you want to sign up for your own tumble log, try out Tumblr.
Big ups to Cost-Per-News for pointing these out.
I recently started getting Step Inside Design magazine and it has turned me on to a lot of really cool designers and their work. Tonight I was checking out the site for Pocko, a publishing house/creative agency/community. So stop reading this and go take a few and explore the Pocko site – I think it’s really awesome.
(The image here came for a screen grab on the Pocko site.)
I Am Sick of It.
I’m sick of the phone calls from SEO companies. I think my company gets at least two calls a day from shady search engine optimization companies, and 99% of the time they are from the snake oil salesmen that give the SEO industry its terrible reputation.
The people who call are slick sales types, or the lackeys of slick sales types who work to prey on small and large businesses that have no real knowledge about search engines and how they work.
And now I’m sick of it. And I want to do something about it. And I need your help.
I think it’s time to start outing these SEO sheisters, right here on the good ol’ Intarweb. And I think anyone who wants to make the SEO community a better place should chip in and help me. Here’s what I’m thinking…
The Plan
My Hope
I am hoping that doing this will help out the bad seeds in the SEO industry. I am hoping that if enough people do this, the companies will start telling the truth or at least think twice before lying. I am hoping that doing this will make SEO companies think twice before making that outgoing call to find the next sucker. Will it work? I don’t know. But I think we should try…
I Need Your Help
It is time for the SEO and online community to start policing itself. It is time to start outing these companies. It’s time for the Diggers out there that hate SEO so much to show the world why by outing the jerks. It’s time for the big name SEO gurus to start protecting the reputation of the industry that they have profited from for years.
So what do you say Danny, Rand, Greg, Michael, Barry, Jill, Eric, Jeremy, and Bruce? Are you ready to stand up for your industry? Are you ready to start fighting back?
It’s time. I need your help. Who’s with me?
There are a lot of billboards out there, and most of them are not very memorable. On occasion, however, you see a billboard that really breaks out of the outdoor ad unit doldrums.
AutomoBlog has a great example, from Ford no less, that shows innovative execution of billboard advertising. Here it is:
No, it’s no just paint that looks blurry, it is actually semi-transparent Lexan - so no matter what is going on with the weather the billboard will always match the background. Pretty neato, huh?
So this might be turning into a Holga photo blog. As you can tell, I am having a lot fun with the camera (thanks again Mz. P). Check out the latest round of experimentation.
This blog has been getting completely destroyed by blog spam lately. I think I cleaned out 200 spam comments the other day…pretty annoying.
But you gotta look on the bright side of spam, and luckily there are two comments I got that made my spam-filled day. I wish all spam comments were as funny/interesting as these two. It would make blog maintenance a lot more fun.
Here is the first one:
Bonjour! What a super websight! Very refreshing to peruse from where we live in Paris (France). I eat frogs and drink wine. Woold like more informatons on this. Best regards! Mikael.
“I eat frogs and drink wine” – hilarious.
The next one is not so family safe, so click to read it. It is the longest spam comment I have ever seen, and is quite funny as well. You have been warned…
Like many people, I get about dozen emails a day bearing news good and best. The best is that my penis is too small, too soft and lacking the endurance to satisfy a fruit fly. The good is I can build a longer, stronger and everlasting erection for a few hundred dollars — by taking miracle pills. Example: "Get ready to be stopped by women in the street. Your entire image will emanate increased size! This is what you always needed to lead a happier, more fulfilling life." What's being promised is akin to Jack's magic beans, except penis-enlargement pills don't work so spectacularly. To get the extra inches requires at least a six-month commitment. But the pills need to be taken with an exercise program — "jelq" — including drills similar to stretching hamstrings before jogging. To see what LIKE many people, I get about a dozen emails a day bearing news good and bad. The bad is that it takes to become a Mr Big, go to enlargepenisguide.com. You'll find a nude man, a fairly happy man one imagines, pretending to be a clock, with what appears to be a baby's arm grafted to his pubic bone as the minute hand. By the time I found this impressive fellow, I'd already paid $106 for a month's supply of SizePro (chosen because of its professional-sounding name) and followed these instructions: "Type your name, the number of inches you want to gain, and the reason(s) you want to gain those inches in the blanks below. And read the completed statement out loud to reinforce the commitment that will lead to your ultimate success." And so my colleagues heard me pledge earnestly: "I, John Elder, have decided I want to gain two inches in length and one inch in girth (I felt modest ambition would minimise disappointment). My reasons are vanity. And I'm committed to a good penis-pill system until I reach my desired gains." If I hadn't made this pledge, I could have abandoned the project — particularly after spotting Mr Baby Arm, whom I presume is also trying to improve himself. And that's the rub. If you're born with one of these ridiculous organs, there are times when just about every man feels short-changed. The average size of an erect penis is about 15.24 centimetres — six inches in the old money. (When talking about penis size, it's traditional to use inches.) The sad thing is it seems there are many men living fretfully with a ruler in one hand and a world of hope in the other. To meet some of these people, return to http://enlargepenisguide.com — and log on to the "progress reports" forum. You'll find men apparently taking the pills, diligently jelqing (stretching a flaccid penis) and sharing how it's hanging. Like Nicky: "I'm 21, and, measured from the pelvic bone, the length of my penis is around 7.5 inches, but I've always wanted to be large like a porn star. I've been doing the exercise a few days now …" Occasionally, someone claims spectacular results. The simple reason is that the pills — herbal aphrodisiacs, not muscle-building proteins — give little more than an illusion of growth by concentrating blood in the otherwise shrivelled underbelly. But the real joke is that the more anxious one becomes about penis size, the more it is likely to shrink. "The curious thing about our society, most of the time we pretend that the penis doesn't shrink," says David Mitchell, a doctor and a medical anthropologist. "In fact, the penis doesn't have a set flaccid size. It's actually meaningless to measure the size of the penis because it varies from minute to minute according to the temperature and one's state of mind. The trouble is, if you get anxious, it only makes it smaller, to the point where it can disappear … in cases where anxiety spirals into a panic attack." Dr Mitchell has researched a recent outbreak of these attacks — known as "shrinking penis disease" — on the Indonesian island of Flores, where black magic is widely practised. In these instances, the sufferer believes he will die if his penis disappears. The last outbreak in a modern society occurred in Singapore in 1962, following a rumour that eating pork vaccinated against swine fever would cause shrinking penis disease. "There were people rushing through the streets holding their penises … some of them using chopsticks," Dr Mitchell says. "As soon as they hit the hospital and started to relax, they came back to normal." Dr Mitchell says the disease could re-emerge in the Western world. "It could come back again in our society if someone spread the right stories around," he says. Chris Fox, of La Trobe University, is doing a PhD on penis size and its role in body image. So far, he has interviewed 15 men aged 20 to 75. "The short answer is that every man at some point in his life worries about the size of his penis," Mr Fox says. "If we don't like our penis we won't enjoy sex. For people with a pathological issue with penis size, it will affect their sex life. "In some cases it will affect how they behave around other men. And one has to remember that most people make their comparison with a flaccid penis — at the urinal or in a change room. The only erections we tend to see are the very big penises on porn stars … and my interview subjects didn't feel threatened by these giant penises because they felt they weren't real. It's in the real world that anxiety takes root."Impressive, huh? God bless the spammers that make spam interesting…
Here are some B&W Holga shots I took recently. There is kind of a train theme, you can see them all at Flickr too...
Living in the world of search marketing, we often assume that every business in the world:
But reality is a lot different from our perception. The truth is that many businesses don’t have web sites and even the businesses that do still have no clue what to do with it.
Recently, Bill Slawski of SEO By the SEA, who normally blogs about the technical world of search engine patent applications, wrote an amazingly simple post that reminds us why your business should have a web site. Read it here.
I never got a chance to post about the LED mayhem that overtook Boston a couple of weeks ago. I personally thought it was a great marketing piece, and I dug that it was a hat tip to the Graffiti Research Lab. Alas, the butt-bags of Boston decided that LEDs + Duracells + cartoons with middle fingers up = explosives.
To add insult to injury, the CEO of the Cartoon Network decided to fall on his sword last week and resign because of the issue. You can see the letter over at AdRants.
Seriously people, Cartoon Network is paying a huge fine, and the company apologized about a billion and a half times. Let’s move on shall we?
I bet real terrorists are laughing their asses off at us right now.
If you can’t tell, I’ve got angst folks.
Luckily, Dywell.com has created a game that will help me with my issues called Save Boston. Go to the site and see if you can save Boston too.
Also, feel free to make your own virtual bomb over at the Lite-Brite site.
[Oh yeah - this was my favorite article about this. Hair questions only please.]
Most all of us get it at one time or another – and some of it get the lust more severely than others. The site A Year in the Life is the journal of a Brit’s year-long trip to get away from his normal life and into the life of a traveler. The site documents his trip through Asia, Australia, New Zealand and North America.
So if you are feeling like wondering, but you’re not going to get away anytime soon, live vicariously through A Year in the Life…
[One question - why is it that Brits always seem to get a chance to do this kind of thing?]
StumbleUpon presented me with this video today. Since I like The Office and I am hooked on Call of Duty, it cracked me up.
Geek Note – When I heard the first sound of machine gun fire in this video my heart rate doubled and my thumbs started trembling.
I first heard of StumbleUpon at the Search Engine Strategies conference in August, but I never really thought much of it. From what I heard, it sounded a lot like Digg or Del.icio.us, but smaller. I ended up forgetting about it on the way back from San Jose.
Then last month, I wrote a post on my day-job blog that ended up getting a couple hundred visits from StumbleUpon. Pretty cool, I thought. After visiting the site and opening an account I lost interest and stopped messing with it.
Over the last week or so, Danny Sullivan (a big guy in my industry) has mention StumbleUpon over and over again on his daily podcast. Danny kept saying that he loved the site and that it was a great way to get traffic to his site, Search Engine Land.
Since it sounded like there could be potential to get some visibility for some of our projects at work through StumbleUpon, I ended up checking it out again today, and I gotta say, I’m loving it.
So what the heck is StumbleUpon. Well, from the “about” section on their site, StumbleUpon says:
StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences. These pages have been explicitly recommended by your friends or one of 1,852,170 other websurfers with interests similar to you. Rating these sites you like automatically shares them with like-minded people – and helps you discover great sites your friends recommend.
So basically, you add a toolbar to your web browser that allows you to click the “stumble” button whenever you want to see something neat. When you see a site, you can give it a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, and based off of that info and some other questions it asks, StumbleUpon will pull up sites that match your interest. And if this sounds like a big time waster, you might be right – but it is also a great way to find out what is hot on the net (or at least that is what you can keep telling yourself).
Ok, I promise it is a lot cooler when you try it. Here are just a couple of examples of things StumbleUpon showed me today:
- Mark Jenkins: Street Installations
- Breathing Earth
- Auto Insurance Video (I love this)
- Strange Statues from Around the World
So if you have the time, and you want to see what StumbleUpon has in store for you, get signed up here.
I admit, this is a post for people who like to see things blow up…a demographic that tends to skew male. I first heard about this on Diggnation (if you aren’t listening to or watching this podcast, start) – and ended up finding a whole slew of videos like this. This was my favorite…
Here is my second roll of film from my Holga camera. Still learning how to work the darn thing. Between forgetting to take off the lens cap, overexposing, underexposing and having to completely guess how to focus it – I am lucky to have pictures as well. This one is my favorite I think:
Here are the rest (and here is the Flickr link to them as well):
Welcome to Marketing Punk. I’m James Omdahl and I am a Denver, Colorado based online marketer and blogger. This blog is a compilation of the things that interest me online and offline. Topics will vary from blogging to search marketing to finding passion in your life to art to pretty much anything else that interests me. Thanks for visiting, come back often, and please take the time to leave a comment and let me know what you think about my posts.
