by Carolyn Shelby on May 24, 2007
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
Rush Hour
Yesterday on Rush Hour,
Cameron,
Neil and I talked about
Google’s confirmed acquisition of Feedburner, the
Technorati redesign, a really good segment (middle 15 minutes-ish) where Cameron and Neil shared some great tips for legitimately building your Digg profile and getting your stories to the front page, and we also discussed ways some people are making big bank with MySpace. We closed the show with a brief discussion about to what extent a site owner is liable for user contributed content — discussion prompted by some interesting conversations I’ve had over the past couple weeks with some local restaurateurs.
Side note from the MySpace discussion… Since we’re all (and by “we’re all” I mean people who are reading this) pretty savvy, and most online ads don’t “work” on us, it’s often hard (at least for me) to remember that there are tools people out there who believe EVERYTHING they read online. If you ever feel like readjusting your sense of scale, get a few 11-13 year olds in a room with a few laptops and wireless and just see how they use the web. Everything you know not to do online… they totally do it. If I didn’t think it would be ethically questionable, I’d secretly video my daughter and her bff cruising MySpace just to show how many of the ads they click on and what types of things incite them to follow links. On the one hand it’s really interesting from a behavioral point of view. On the other hand, it makes my head hurt and forces me to have to completely reinstall the operating system every so often to clean off all the crap they download. :)
Popularity: 22% [?]
by Carolyn Shelby on May 21, 2007
There is a school of thought that the in-house SEO should be like the Wizard of Oz… feared and awed and hiding behind a green velvet curtain where no one is exactly sure what it is he does, but clearly it must be important. I think that, while this might do happy things for one’s ego, it’s not necessarily the best way to go about dealing with the rest of your team/organization.
Some of the bad things about being the Man Behind the Curtain include:
- Co-workers thinking you’re a pretentious ass who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else.
- Superiors thinking you’re a pretentious ass who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else.
- People (especially I.T.) deciding you’re a pretentious ass to whom they don’t want to talk, so they just exclude you from important decisions like making changes to the web server configuration, or changing hosting providers, or worse…. making “fixes” to the website.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a time to throw down and flex your “I know what I’m talking about and you don’t so shut up and do what I say” muscles, but all the fricking time isn’t the way to do it. Personally, I try to be Polly Anna Sunshine around the office as much as possible, and when I do flip the bitch-switch, it’s (a) for a really good reason and (b) is WAY more scary to the unfortunate target because it is such a drastic departure from my usual tone of voice and body language. (Maybe I shall share some of my more entertaining arguments with our consultants on the blog sometime…)
Anyway, some of the wonderful advantages and plusses to sharing your wealth of SEO knowledge with your team are: [click to continue...]
Popularity: 32% [?]
