Search, Photography, Wine & Design

10 Reasons Adobe Space Monkey Will Replace CS3

So, like all of you geeks out there, I too have been drooling over the recent product unveiling of Adobe’s new CS3 line of software. I am excited and waiting until it ships. But, despite all the cool new things you will be able to do with Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, Dreamweaver, After Effects, Soundbooth, and all the others… What about Adobe Space Monkey? Am I the only one that has experienced the power of Space Monkey? Don’t get me wrong, I love the standard line of what Adobe has to offer. I use Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and Acrobat religiously. But I would like to see the not-so-popular Space Monkey get some hype!

Here are 10 reasons why I think Adobe Space Monkey will replace Adobe CS3:
1. It’s free
2. It’s free
3. It’s free
4. It’s free
5. It’s free
6. It’s free
7. It’s free
8. It’s free
9. It’s free
10. It’s free

All great reasons to replace your version of CS3, with Space Monkey -kenny

Office Politics

pol·i·tics (pŏl’ĭ-tĭks) - activities within an organization that are aimed at improving someone’s status or position and are typically considered to be devious or divisive : yet another discussion of office politics and personalities. -kenny

Pay Per Action - PPA, A New Google Service

It was pointed out to me today that Google has a new pay per action service available. The idea behind this, is that you don’t simply pay for clicks or impressions to your site, but you pay when a defined action takes place. (ex. a purchase is made) We’ll all be watching I’m sure, to see how this all pans out. My initial question is, what about sites that have a primary purpose of generating leads via a phone call? Does google zoom their imaging satellites down on your location when you click through to see if you pick up the phone? Maybe! -kenny

Music Lovers Unite

Today, there is a movement going on in attempts to start a reversal of power in the music industry. We all have had our unhealthy inundation of distasteful music from the major record labels. Even despite our vast differences in music taste, we all have heard something on the radio that has been pushed through from the record labels, into our ears, without our approval. Well, it’s time to unite for a cause! A small group called “Bum Rush the Charts” has organized for 1 song, from a band that was rejected by 2 major labels, to get pushed into THEIR face today. The song is titled “Mine Again” by Black Lab. Now, whether or not you like the song, or the band, the idea is to download it from your itunes store (or a link if you are not an itunes user) TODAY, so that it gets pushed to the top of the attention list. This way WE can show the music labels, who decides what is worthy music, and what is not! MUSIC LOVERS UNITE!!!

View the “Bum Rush the Charts” site here

Happy Listening!

Social Media Integration?

Here’s something I’d like to see: a plugin for my browser that integrates with my various site subscriptions to let me know when I view a page that I already have linked or bookmarked from a service like del.icio.us. It would have to store cookies locally and sync via iDisk. Because if you’re anything like me you work off a minimum of 2 machines, and often 3 or 4. I don’t know how many times I have come across a site that looks familiar, but I’m not sure if I’ve seen it before or not! -kenny

New Word

Folksonomy: A user generated taxonomy used to categorize and retrieve web pages, photographs, web links and other web content using open ended tags.

Perfect example: del.icio.us -kenny

Graywolf’s SEO for Wordpress

I just watched a video that Michael Gray put up today on his blog about how to optimize your wordpress blog. The video was mostly informative and insightful. Being that I use wordpress, it definitely gave me some things to consider. Mostly he talked about making sure that googlebot won’t read duplicates of your posts by disallowing the robots from your archive files. This way, he says, you will have the engines only viewing your content in the main place that you put it. Which makes sense. Except that I have three contentions with this idea.

1. Everyone, everywhere else is saying to not worry about duplicate content. It is situations like these that are going to make duplicate content inevitable no matter what. Duplicate content is something that happens naturally, and googlebot knows that.

2. The whole idea behind archives and categories is to increase usability on a website. It is extremely useful to be able to sort or seach posts by date, category, author, etc.. It doesn’t make any sense that we should be worried that our site is extremely accessible, aren’t most of us battling to make other people’s sites more user friendly and navigable by both humans and spiders alike?

3. We should not have Google dictating this kind of stuff to us. We should be dictating how we want THEM to function. IMHO it’s one thing to optimize a site so that it is viewable to robots by using text and rich content, and to build links etc etc etc.. Nit-picky stuff like this should not be mandated because googlebot might get confused! Google has one of the biggest, best and most expensive devlopment teams in the world, they for sure can figure this out.

So, mostly I like what Graywolf has to say. I read his blog regularly, and am for what he is doing in the “greyhat” area of SEO. But stuff like this, brings up feelings like noted in #3 of above. Let’s all use good technique as we develop. But let’s also develop from the bottom up, and not worry about who’s sitting on top. -kenny

Social Organism

So, this past week I have been trying to help my cousin make the move from San Diego (where I’m from) to Santa Barbara (where I live). I haven’t been on the job hunt for some time now, but I was reminded of the agony/intrigue of it this week as my cousin is on the hunt. The interesting thing to me is that, no matter where you are, or what your skill set is, there always seems to be a conversation with someone you know that starts off: “I know this guy…” Now, sometimes it’s just the necessary smoke that gets blown, but occasionally its that spark that ignites a beautiful opportunity. It was this thought that led me to consider the possibility, that no matter where you are, or what your circumstance is, we are all part of an organic, social culture. Whether it’s someone you know that hooks you up with a job, or 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon, we are all networked by nature. It is this aspect of our being that make certain aspects of being a web developer incredibly interesting. These past few weeks, Justin and I have had pretty extensive conversation regarding the whole aspect of ’social media’. A site like Digg incorporates most all of the aspects of just being in relationship with people. Some things that come up are valuable and interesting. Some things are people who don’t know what they’re talking about, but get a lot of attention. And some things are people trying to exist in a place that they have no business being. The problem is, the latter two seem to be much more common than the former. As I expressed previously, it is this reason that has turned me off to the social media world. But I am beginning to see the value of sifting through all of the bs to get to the meat that is worth chewing.

I think we are all at a point where we are warmed up to the idea and concept behind social media, so let’s move forward now! I think it’s time to stop theorizing about it and start practicing. “Practice and preach, don’t Theorize and Teach” -Anonymous. We know what we like, and what we don’t. We all have ideas that would improve the current realm of social media, sooo… GO! If it’s truly social media that we’re talking about, there should be nothing preventing us from changing the way that this beast grows and flourishes. WE are the body, we belong to it, and we make up the very cells that cause it to exist. It is time to take ownership and make something wonderful. -kenny

Social Media Hype

So, for some time now I have had this sort of (and I know it’s cliché) love-hate relationship with aspects of the whole ’social media’ world. On one hand, I absolutely love what sites like del.icio.us have done for me. A way to track what I like in an orderly, accessible manner, that is user friendly and sensible. On the other hand, I roll my eyes when I hear someone say “Did you see that site up on Digg?”. Up until now, my opinion of Digg has been that it is simply a Myspace for web geeks. It’s not that I haven’t used Digg, or Myspace for that matter, but when I do use them I keep it to myself. The same way I use del.icio.us to track sites for ME, not for everyone else to see. So now we come to this week. On Monday, my buddy and partner Justin Walton, wrote an article that received quite a lot of attention on Digg. Being as we talk via im constantly throughout the day, he informed me when it had received a few hundred diggs. We continued to watch the numbers climb through the morning until it hit about 1400 diggs, when our server crashed. After scrambling a bit to get it back up and running, we watched the article climb to be the #4 most popular article of the day across the board. It is currently at 2871 diggs! Since monday, we have been seeing the results of this article’s popularity. We had something like 54,000 unique hits on our server, 550 people subscribed via RSS to Justin’s blog, he gained over a hundred new links to his site, and will be appearing soon on Jason Calacanis’s podcast. Now, Justin and I are both benefitting greatly from this. As we are starting a business together, all of the hype and new traffic to our sites will pay out long term no doubt. And as search marketers, Justin and I are also very happy to have the increase in link traffic and publicity. So, as it turns out, my opinion of sites like Digg, is not so bad anymore. I can see the benefit that is offered to web developers and bloggers alike. Whether you are tying to make a point, or sell a product, this whole environment of social media turns out to benefit us all! -kenny

Do you digg this?

Check out this Digg page on how to convert csv files to html. -kenny