Archive for February, 2007

I got a kick out of a recent invitation from the Lexington Venture Club� to hear Steve Mansfield of prefound.com� speak downtown (he’s a passionate guy!)� In it, it says we Kentuckians involved in the search engine industry to be� as “Rare as a Coconuts in Antartica“… So I started searching, and sure enough, Steve,� Drew� Curtis,� Matt� and Mike� are pretty much the only others visible online� in the industry from the Bluegrass State.� Li Ge is working on click fraud under a grant at at U of L, but who knows where Li will Google Go after his studies are done.� I’m thinking there’s plenty of people out there who are just keeping a low profile. Who’d I miss?�

� Last week, I blogged that I thought Lexington might be one of the CompUSA stores that would be wiped out in a� restructuring move, but it looks like they’ve avoided the chopping block.�

CompUSA said in a statement it would close 126 of its stores, but after� updating their store list, Lexington is still there.� Looks like we’ll get to keep our local store for a little while longer.� But a lot of communities are going to get stuck with Best Buy or Circuit City as their ony choices for computers.� � “The process began last week with the closing of four CompUSA stores and over the next 60-90 days, the company will close a total of 126 stores in the United States to focus on initiative that enhance its top performing locations” CompUSA said in the statement.

I’m hoping the $440 million in capital and re-focusing includes improvements in the remaining store.� This digg comment summed up the hundreds of others on there following the news:

“They earned their failure. It seems like no on that works at our store even wants to keep the place open. The service desk is staffed with snobs who think it’s some unspeakable burden to acknowledge their customers actually exist. The last time in there I politely tried to stop a store employee as he walked past, and the fucker literally ignored me. And it’s not just me, I hear similar complaints from friends and family who go in there. Regardless if it’s the middle of the day on a Tuesday and there are 2 customers in the whole damn store, they are still too busy to be bothered to help an actual customer.� “

Then again,� the� Digg community are probably very different than those shopping in Lexington’s store.

side note: I am still putting a few important Lexington news items� on this blog due to lots of Lexington subscribers and a delay in the launch of the Lex only blog.

I was working on a client project when suddenly I noticed that all of the results were from New Zealand. I checked my settings - yes, I’m signed in and my home country is set to the US. So I wiped my cookies and even tried another computer. Google is pretty confused who I am. Not only that, it’s showing me Adwords Ads from Arkansas and Frankfort (German) in the same session! I did not log out for these screen shots.

I had to go through a proxy to get work done today. I hope this gets cleared up soon!

Pro Quality for under $1000 - Now, about that content.

Well, my audio editing guru Jerome has helped put together a selection of equipment to record telephone interviews for podcasts using standard telephones. We want to make it easyto interview someone without having to worry about the technology, letting them concentrate on the content.

The challenge with any phone recording is separating the audio between the two people, but this setup allows that. While I have set up a pretty servicable telephone interview recording setup using Skype and Pamela in the past, it was always subject to the idiosynchratic nature of Skype - and made for embarassing problems at times.� � The audio stream from our setup uses the left-and right audio channel for the two people. The caller is on one channel and the callee on the other. Of course you don’t broadcast it this way, it’s strictly for the audio editor. By separating the channels, you can do a controlled mix - equalizing the levels and tonal quality. You won’t get the harsh difference between voices that make some phone interviews so hard to listen to.

Telephone interview podcast equipment

• $469 JK Broadcast Host —� separates the audio between the caller and the callee
• $60 Audio-Technica ATH-M30 headphones
  $100 Shure SM58SLC dynamic microphone
• 1/8” stereo mini to L/R 1/4″ phono cable –found at
  Atlas desktop mic stand
• $15-20 XLR mic Cable�
• Zoom H4 recorder .� � it operates on 2 AA batteries or an included power supply.� It uses SD memory cards (comes with a 128MB but I use a 1GB)

The Zoom H4 could be replaced with a laptop, but we found that it� was very hard to remove “buzz” from the system with laptops.� The H4 suffered no such buzz and made really clean recordings.� If you want to use a laptop, you’ll need a high quality sound card - probably an external system and appropriate USB cables.

Another alternative now is a hosted solution called FreeConferencing� - We have not tried their calling solution, but since it will record everyone on the same channel, it will suffer the same weaknesses as Skype.

I’m checking out a new software called castblaster shortly, it looks promising - but a little bit pricy given Audacity is out there.� I’ll report back and link to them� if it works out.� I was disappointed in RecordForAll.

Consumerist reports 100 stores (of 229) will close in 2007.

Will Lexington’s CompUSA Store Close in 2007? CompUSA announces restructuring, nearly half of it’s 229 stores. If the Lexington store avoids this it will be lucky. According to the Consumerist, recent chances of cash infusions didn’t pan out. I hope the local store makes it, but this store has always been a customer service disappointment to me. I’ve used it as a “picking warehouse” - looking up stuff online and then going to get it once confirmed in-stock, and if I was pretty sure I’d never return it. They keep a good selection of products however, and has always been good for browsing. The other nice thing is that you didn’t have to shop amidst the blaring car stereos like Best Buy or Circuit City. The bad news is that the Geek Squad will probably be fixing more computers, and that can’t be a good thing.

So many people think CompUSA sucked. GizModo’s comments are rather scathing.

The Cruel Shoes Site

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To those of you with Adcenter master accounts which contain multiple “sub accounts” you should know about� a glitch that can put you in a pinch with all of your accounts off-line - and YOU in a financial pinch.

If any one of your sub-accounts’ credit cards expire or get declined they’ll all be put� on “account hold” even though each sub-account has its own credit card number.� Last Summer, Microsoft told me a fix was in the works. But yesterday, after it happened to me for the third time� the Microsoft rep called it a “feature” that “protected” client accounts� (I drilled, but couldn’t get� any sensible explanation of how.)�

When this happened, in each case, there were no email notifications sent (I have “microsoft.com” whitelisted) so, the only way that you’ll know is by a sudden removal of your Adcenter traffic.� Furthermore, there is no indicator in the accounts list on Adcenter to show you which account has the credit card glitch.� You have to check inside each accounts billing list activity to see it.� � Microsoft told me they had “a few problems” with outgoing card notifications.� Oh.. kay…

How could SEMs be stuck holding the bag here?�

If you end up with a deadbeat client with an open balance and a bad card, you could get stuck with having to pay it yourself to clear up the account and get your other clients back on-line!� Microsoft won’t unlock the other accounts until ALL accounts are cleared up.�

For me it was no big deal, I only had a few clustered together, and it was a simple expiration date issue tat was cleared up right away, but I run hundreds of thousands of dollars through pay-click campaigns and this could be a disaster if they had been grouped in a bigger way and the balance was higher.� (Account grouping is very tempting for a time-strapped SEM wanting to avoid repeated log-ins.)

I asked Microsoft if they could break apart my accounts for me and they wouldn’t, saying I’d need to create them all from scratch and they were really “sorry I’d lose all my historical data.”� At this point I have little choice.

Superpages.com is rolling out a new system that is supposed to improve relevance.� It’s the latest in pay-per-click systems to move from the highest-bidder-highest-position and include other aspects of the ad.� While it’s not entirely clear what those “multiple facets of your ad” are it stands to reason that factors similar to other pay-per-click engines will be applied.

Keywords in the business profile and searches from audience members of various categories will be taken into account.

There will be 2 weeks of testing, and then it will start being rolled out to existing advertisers.� Advertisers will be getting emails about their accounts.

I asked about the dangers of people spamming their business profiles to get added rank and there was no real answer, so I guess we’ll have to see.

Many people take little time to get their business profile right, so I guess it’s time to spend some time on that!

WLEX News� (our NBC affiliate) will go High Definition this Spring, making it one of the first mid-sized markets to broadcast news in HD.� About 30 stations nationwide broadcast news in High� Definition.� It stands to reason, as many of the news stories feature our georgous landscape around Lexington - and it will look great in High Def.� I’ve been on their news broadcast before talking about Web Marketing� and they’re a nice bunch of folks.�

� “WLEX has always been at the forefront of the latest developments in broadcast technology, setting the standards and leading the pack in local news coverage,” said WLEX President & General Manager Tim Gilbert. “We were the first on the air in this market, first in color, first with stereo, the first morning newscast, and the first and only station with live Doppler radar.� Now WLEX is making history again by being one of the first to offer local news in HD.� We’ll deliver the dependable, accurate coverage our viewers count on with picture and sound quality like they’ve never experienced before.”

I hope the new system is a big hit.� Goodness knows people are watching enough TV.

Local TV station websites aren’t faring so well. As with many� such sites, it’s a design stuck in 1999, and another example of a news portal gone haywire.� And what’s the deal with “black background” news sites?� How about something lighter and more cheerful?� RSS feeds?� User interface design rigor?

Rustybrick at SEOroundtable has drawn attention to a very interesting thread which should make those in charge of client webservers prick up their ears. I encounter resistance from some clients when I suggest a hosting change once I see they’re using a cut-rate provider. DNS changes, server switch-overs, and broken 404 pages are all major poison to your Google rank. It’s also sounding like you may not get back where you were in the Google index - as it’s my understanding that Google counts “length in index” as one of its 200 ranking factors.

People wonder sometimes why I run my own servers and have a backup SLA of 4-6 hours. I think his observation speaks directly to the need for this. SEO and server uptime are peas in a pod, folks.

So the next time your host says “your site will be off-line for a few hours while we do maintenence” think about the implications to your rank!