Share Schoolkids Records in Chapel Hill, NC is closing, after 33 years in business. Apparently the store isn’t getting enough foot traffic, which is insanely difficult to believe considering it’s on the main drag of a massive university town that has a thriving music scene. There was little competition here as far as I can tell, but somehow they’re unable to survive even in the midst of over 30,000 college kids who, by all acounts, listen to music quite a bit. I guess the problem is that these kids aren’t actually BUYING anything in stores. Whether you can blame the high prices of CDs or the ease with which people can quickly download the music that they want, brick and [...]
Archive for February, 2008
When Chocolate Lost Its Universal Search Result
Share It was a dark and stormy night. Somewhere in Pakistan, a turmoil was brewing. ‘These search results must be stopped! They are offensive! BAN YOUTUBE NOW!’ Sensing urgency, the various responsible parties requested an urgent and immediate ban on YouTube redirecting all requests to a holding page. Job done, they went back to whatever other important things they were doing. Winging its way across the internet, the ban request was taken up as urgent on a Sunday. At an odd hour of the day. Coherence was not necessarily present but urgency was understood. The ban spread. Time marched on (as it does). Chocolate and other terms previously graced with universal search results lost them. No more YouTube meant no [...]
Drink For Charity!
Share Top 5 Reasons Why You Should Drink For Charity: 1. Drinking is fun, and since it is for charity, it is more than a networking opportunity, it is a write-off. 2.Chance to see your favorite male SEO’s wear women’s clothing 3. You actually get to help choose what charity gets the money – SO VOTE NOW AND VOTE OFTEN 4. This event is OPEN TO ANYONE! You don’t need to be a rockstar or spend $1M with Google to get an invite. 5. Where else are you going to drink as much as you can for only $40 in NYC? 6. You get to hang out with me ( Okay so I can’t count) Actual Details IM-NY is [...]
My Amusing Gmail Adsense
Share UPDATE: It has come to my attention that this post looks rather weird if you’re viewing it through a feedreader. So don’t. Click through, I tell you! To start, I’d like a show of hands. Who uses Gmail? I hope everyone in the room has their hand up at the moment, because Gmail is one of my favourite things in all the world. It has its problems, it’s had is security flaws, but it has always treated me very well. Believe me: I’ve been around the block when it comes to email providers. I was a long-time user of Yahoo! and I was also one of Yahoo! Mail’s more loyal fans. Y! Mail just wouldn’t do all the things [...]
An Actual USEFUL Niche Engine? Can It Be?
Share I’ve never really understood why these niche search engines keep cropping up until now…and it involves one of my favorite things in the world. Yes, it’s wine. Glorious, spellbinding wine. Doug Cook, a former search executive at Inktomi (for those of you who’ve been in the industry more than a few years, you’ll remember them fondly) and Yahoo has just rolled out the beta of Able Grape, a search engine that scours wine sites. The database already contains almost 10 million pages. To use this engine properly, you don’t need to add the usual wine-related terms that would normally be necessary in a regular engine like Google. The example given on the Able Grape website clarifies this point: “While [...]
Do You Have Big, Fat, Juicy Links?
Share There is always one question on my mind when I am working on Social Media; How am I going to track my efforts? And what is a waste of time? It is very difficult to perfectly determine what type of Social Media pieces have potential to go viral without practice and patience. Thankfully, there are people out there who put a lot of time into this research. Yesterday on ReadWriteWeb, Dan Zarrella wrote an article about the new tool he developed which helps Diggers test out keywords, before they submit a story. The tool researches the keywords from within the title and description of the top 33,000 front page stories that made it to the Digg holy [...]