Ethos Planning

So I’ve been running around the internet lately and reading more blogs, mainly because I’ve decided that I am going to try to post here 2-3 times a week and can hopefully push that up for 4-5 times a week time permitting.

Anyway, I’ve been running around looking at blog designs trying to get some inspiration to finally turn this blog into something of value. I figured I would start with a clean site design and work from there. I somehow ended up on ProBlogger today and his site design is great and clean and frankly I am jealous. Read the rest of this entry »

I just finished re-reading an interesting article on Marc Andreesen’s blog. I guess for starters if you don’t know who Marc is I’ll let wikipedia answer the question for you:

Marc Andreessen (born July 9, 1971, in New Lisbon, Wisconsin) is a software engineer and entrepreneur best known as co-author of Mosaic, the first widely-used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. He was the chair of Opsware, a software company he founded originally as Loudcloud, when it was acquired by Hewlett-Packard. He is also a cofounder of Ning, a company which provides a platform for social-networking websites.

Marc Andreessen breaks down a paper written in 1988 on the subject of age and the ability to produce amazing works.

I don’t have much to say on the subject but I’ll leave you with an interesting quote (and really, by now you should have just jumped over and read his article)

Quality of output does not vary by age… which means, of course, that attempting to improve your batting average of hits versus misses is a waste of time as you progress through a creative career. Instead you should just focus on more at-bats — more output. Read the rest of this entry »

I must have been under a rock for a while because somehow I missed that Google’s PPA program was released, fortunately- I’ve spent the day reading the backlog in my RSS reader and I came across the article on pinkhatSEO.    Its a pretty cool program and she has some great tips on how to handle it and how to use it to monetize your blog.  Overall its a pretty interesting blog you should have on your feed reader anyway.

I saw Mosh Mobile on TC for about 20 minutes before it was promptly deleted and earlier today I decided to take a look at the site.

Basically, Mosh gives you free mobile access.  Yup, free as in a free lunch.

Um..what is that old saying?  There is no such thing as a free lunch.  That applies here as well. Read the rest of this entry »

So after work today I started to hack around with Yelp’s new API– and at first I was thinking to myself “How cool!  This has so much potential– think of everything I could possibly do with this.”

Then I read the TOS and I was stuck for a few hours “Uh…what good can this thing possibly do–  it is so damn limiting” Read the rest of this entry »

How the hell are tag clouds not just keyword stuffing spam.

Take a look at UnCov now take a look at the very bottom of the page.  WTF is that.  How does a laundry list of keywords stuffed into the footer of a website help a user?

ScienceHack has something similar but at least the bloody spam cloud is moderately usable. Read the rest of this entry »

As search goes in the direction of personalization and as Google is, in theory, moving to release a Pay-Per-Action service–  why the hell aren’t their competitors offering analytic packages that blow Google Analytics out of the water?
Take the data and look at things like bounce rates/abandonment rates/user time on sight/ect ect as signals of quality and then use that data to help create better search results.