Looking at my “failed attempts” or goal making, it seems that I am a bit behind on the ball. I always have high expectation with myself and tend to let myself down when I do not deliver. So to get started, I wanted to post up some ideas and concepts that have helped me get back on the ball and hopefully help you.

1. Read a Book - Reading has been a great way to motivate myself and inspire others. I have recently been asked by some passion readers to post more often. I keep finding myself with only an hour of time a night after my long commute. I tried bringing my laptop and working on the train, but find that I am a better writer at night then in the morning. I know in the past I have put together a book club that has some amazing books that are inspirational. The latest book that I have read, and need to post up is. “Screw It Let’s Do It”, by Richard Brandson.
2. Goal Setting - To get back on your feet, sometimes you need to take a step back and realign your goals. I have previously posted about the Opensource Goals Meme. I am a big fan of posting up your goals and looking at my 2008 Goals I am surprised my readers have not given up. (I too need to get on the ball, I guess I should be eating my own words.) Also if you have not created one, try making a dream board and posting it where you are most often working.
3. Cleaning - The old saying of “cleanliness is next to godliness” is very much correct in my life. I know when I am down and not motivated, a quick clean up of my desk does the trick. I am not sure if their is some Feng Shui in my life, but when I clean I become more focus and driven.
4. Screensucking - When you spend 14+ hours a day in front of a computer, you tend to read a lot of peoples blogs, websites, ebooks, whatever. You are basically on a uncontrollable hunt for information and keep searching for more information until you get up. Screensucking can get me motivated because I read about someone getting funded or launching an idea that I had years ago. I would suggest looking at various blogs and pin point 3 to 5 blogs that inspire you such as stories of a $100 company.
5. Network - What better way to pick yourself up then to tell the story to a bunch of strangers who are trying to pitch you their business. When you surround yourself with passionate and motivated people, it tends to rub off. Networking events can be hit or miss, some are great and you leave with a great lead/card, where others are more of a so you do this… right. Try and focus on the person as much as possible and ask questions. People love to talk about themselves, and their is nothing better then talking to someone is who passionate about what they do, giving them feedback and letting some of that good vibe rub off on you.

Popularity: 19% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, feel free to subscribes to my RSS feeds

Basic SEO Glossary

Continuing my teachings to my visitors, I wanted to provide a very basic SEO glossary. This should cover just the basic (Don’t worry, I got more cool SEO stuff to show for those SEO Experts), I will be adding more as well as creating the ultimate SEO ebooks and videos soon.

301 or 301 Redirect - This is a permanent server redirect - The t (Uniform Resource Locator ) of the webpage/website has been change. These are used to address duplicate content (canonical issues) and can be done with a .htaccess file located on the apache server.

Alt text - This is HTML attributes on images, links, forms, and other HTML tags. These are used to increase SEO by adding a description to various images, links, etc. The alt text is important to search engines because their “bots”/”spiders” can view this text and derive keywords based on the context. Filling out the alt text is a MUST for any SEO wannabe

Anchor text - These are the computer jargon words for visible text links. These links or anchor text are used by search engines to indicate relevancy of the referring site and create a relationship between sites. The anchor text is also important by using descriptive words and keywords when describing a URL. For example a link to Amazon can be coded as the following <a href=”http://www.amazon.com” title=”Amazon has amazing deals everyday!”>Great Deals</a> rather then <a href=”http://www.amazon.com” title=”amazon”>Amazon</a>, the description and title gives more relevancy and context to the link.

Black Hat - This is a term used to describe SEO tactics that are counter or opposed to best practices. The best practices are summarized in the Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Robots, Bots, Spider and Crawler - These terms are used to describe the programs that performs automated tasks, such as a search engine finding and adding websites to their search engine indexes.

Canonical - (duplicate content) - This is the term used to describe duplicate content. Duplicate content has a lower rating by most search engines.

Content - (text, copy, body) - The words and/or part of a web page that offers value to the user.

In-Bound Link - (inlink, incoming link) - Inbound links such as anchor text/tags from another website.

Keyword - (key phrases) - The word or phrase that a user enters into a search engine. It can also be used in terms of content, the keywords that the content is focused on.

Keyword Cannibalization - Excessive use of the identical keyword or phrase on too many web pages and/or within the same web site. Focus on the keywords, but do not go overboard.

Keyword Density - The percentage of word(s) on a specific web page which are keywords. If this value is high, it can have a negative impact on SEO.

META Tags - This is html attributes that are located in the HEAD section of the HTML page. META information is used for displaying the description of the link in a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). The use of distinct or unique meta titles and descriptions is important for better SEO.

No follow - This is an attribute and/or a meta tag that is used to instruct robots to not follow the link and/or view the page. The no follow meta tag is used for content that a webmaster does not want a user to view via a search engine. The no follow attribute on links is used to NOT give link backs. (IE. for sites like del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site, no follow’s are used so a webmaster can not easily create thousands of links to their web page from such a popular site like del.icio.us.)

SEM - (Search Engine Marketing) - This normally is used to describe the act of researching, positioning, and submitting of a web site to a search engine to provided for the most optimal exposer.

SEO - (Serach Engine Optimization) - The process of increasing the total number of visitors to a web site by reaching a higher page rank (SERP - Search Engine Results Page) in a search engine.

SERP - Search Engine Results Page

Site Map - A page or organized listing of links which every users is accessible to access on a web site. Most websites contain 2 site maps, one used by the user/visitor and one (XML based) used by a search engine bot/spider/crawler. The XML based sitemap is normally located at the root direction of a web site with the filename of sitemap.xml.

URL - Uniform Resource Locator - AKA Web Address

White Hat - This is a term used to describe SEO techniques that conform t the best practice guidelines and do not try and purposefully manipulate SERPs.

Popularity: 42% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, feel free to subscribes to my RSS feeds

To help kick start some eLearning I wanted to provide visitors with a basic glossary of Advertisement jargon. I know this might come to a shock for most, but last night was the first night I signed up and used Google Adwords. So with various advertisement jargon like CPA, CPC, and CPM in my head, why not post up a glossary of terms and definitions.

Please feel free to add more in the comments, Enjoy!

Basic Advertisement Glossary

Google Adwords - A Pay Per Click contextual advertisement program which is used as the majority way to advertise online

Bounce Rate - This is the percentage and/or rate of a user who enters a web site and then leaves without viewing other pages

Conversion - This is the quantifiable goal of a website, such as clicks, sign ups, and sales.

CPA (Cost per Action) - The advertiser is paid based on a users action, such as a when a user completes a form submission.

CPC (Cost Per Click) - This is the cost (amount) of a user to click on an ad, normally used with a Pay Per Click Advertiser.

CPM (Cost Per Thousand impressions) - This is a statistical measurement used to form an average estimated value of 1000 page views. The mathematical formula is average value / cost of pay per click. The M in thousands come from the Roman numeral for one thousand.

Impression (page view) - This is when a user visits and/or views a webpage. Note: The measurement of uniques is also related to Impressions, to find the average number of page views a user visits, the mathematical formula is total impressions/uniques which gives you average impressions (page views) per users.

PPA (Pay Per Action ) - This is almost identical to a PPC (Pay Per Click) except payment is only made to the publisher if the click through results in a conversion. (See CPA)

PPC (Pay Per Click) - This is a contextual advertisement plan where advertisers pay ad agencies whenever a user clicks on their advertisement. Google Adwords is an example of PPC advertising.

Popularity: 44% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, feel free to subscribes to my RSS feeds

Thinking about how far I have come with this blog I have started to realize that what people want is answers. Either answer they have search on Google or answers in the form of daily/weekly news. So being that I have recently rebranded this blog I feel that it is time to step up to the plate and focus on blogging as much as possible. I have a ton of content in my head and need to get it out and give it back to the world. I still have not found a “niche” per say, but I am realizing that sometimes covering various topics is a niche within itself.

With the past couple of months spending various time networking and interacting with various “ungeeks” I am realizing, it is up to the know hows to educate the unknown. Think of it in terms of iPhones (insert joke here). An iPhone is a pretty awesome device by itself, but a hacked iPhone has a lot more powerful stuff. If you have a hacked iPhone, you understand and know of all the cool things you can do that the average iPhone user has no idea. If you don’t, lets start to list some of the stuff that I could used a hack iPhone for, play awesome games (Chess, checkers, sudoku w/o an internet connection), Easily Spoof your caller ID/Voice (SpoofApp), Download/Organize/Read your RSS feeds without internet, AIM, Voice Notes, SSH, etc. The knowledge of hacking an iPhone is very important because it opens the door to all these external capabilities. So it’s up to the “in the know” on educating the “not in the known”. So with that being sad, I will be focusing on topics that I found very interesting WordPress, SEO, Networking, etc and Geek Stuff, but with a beginners, intermediate, and advance philosophy. I want to make the internet simpler and will be posting up some glossarys as well as screencast videos.

Popularity: 44% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, feel free to subscribes to my RSS feeds

1. Focus on related meta data from the header into the images alt tags and title tags. For our case, each screensaver and wallpaper has it’s own landing page. Focus the image and meta data to contain very similar information to make sure the proper keywords are picked up by the Google Spider. Note: the Google Spider for Images is very different then the Google Spider for web pages.
2. Alt Tags – a MUST for each image and be sure to have description keywords of the image as well as include keywords that relate to the meta data in the header. These descriptions should focus on each image rather then contain a standard web phrase or tag line.
3. Title Tags – The title tag should be either identical to the alt tag and/or with a unique title appended to it, possible the title of the web site.
4. Use larger images; suggest 333px x 334px or about 10,000 pixels in size. Note that Google Images also breaks up images into 4 categories:
   1. Small Images (150×150)
   2. Medium Images (150×150 - 500×500)
   3. Large Images (500×500 - ~1200×1200)
   4. Extra Large Images (~1200×1200+)
5. Descriptive filenames. If the image is a picture of the empire state building name the image file empirestatebuiliding.png.
6. Wrap an Image with descriptive text that summarizes the image as well as uses some of the keywords and description in the alt,title, and meta tags. Some designs and layouts push the descriptive text too far down the page, focus on wrapping the image tag and text inside a div.
7. Create a sitemap of images with descriptive text around each image as well as a link to each image. This might be a bit over the top, but also could provide a unique viewing experience.
8. Focus on creating links to the image itself, such as a full size view. The link should go to the src of the image tag.
9. Focus on creating links to the page the image resides on
10. Specify the height and width of each image in the img html tag

Popularity: 60% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, feel free to subscribes to my RSS feeds

update: Found a couple of bugs, will keep the site up but will be fixing them tomorrow and later this week.

I have been wanting to do a redesign for a long, long time. My design skills are “subpart” as you can prolly tell, but plan to make iterations on this design and bring it up to speed. I have done a lot of hacking at the code and might have missed some things, but take a look. I might look into contracting out the next redesign and outsource the process, but that won’t be for another 6 to 12 months.

Anyway, please let me know what you think and/or if you like this or if I should just roll back. I enjoy feedback and do not bite, so give me your true thoughts, I can handle it.

Popularity: 60% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, feel free to subscribes to my RSS feeds

I have been doing some research into User Experience as well as User Interface for building easy to use websites. Building a site that functions for the basic users as well as advance users is important. You want something that caters to the herd, but also the web developer user type who complains when you add a new link. User Experience and User Interface is very important to me and I plan on posting up some more of these types of articles in the upcoming weeks. I think everyone is a closet designer in some sort (including me!) and finding websites that “just kill it” are a great for inspiration. Remember, Picasso once said, Good artists copy, great artists steal. I complied the top 10 websites which I find have amazing User Experience. (in no particular order)

Digg

I have been an advivd fan since October of 2005. Their designs and implemmtation has been in my mind one of the first dare I say web 2.0 sites. Their main designer, Daniel burka has done an incredible job. I got a chance to meet Daniel at SXSW and got a little estar strucked. He has put down some killer designs as well as layer out an amazing UX (User Expeirnce) not only from digg but also from silver orange, and of course pownce. The usage of javascript on digg is what makes it truley great! As well as the amount of clicks or lack thier of. Even the digg bury comment system is being ripped off!

del.icio.us

Ok so maybe I’m an addict, but its so simple to create an account, add bookmarks, and even tag sites for your friends. Some sites should stick to the basics and that is what del.icio.us is! The user experimce could be improved with a nicer user interface, but that may ruined the experince of bare metal social bookmarking.

Popurls

For this of you who have not checked out this site, go now, its simple, clean, and takes away my active feeds on google reader. Think of morning news, a quick glance at work or on your iPhone in the morning (they have a nice iPhone interface). Basically the user interface is just some RSS feeds on 1 page, but they do have some other in-depth features if you create an account. Although what is so unique and great is that the mouseovers on articles give more meat and detail, but still let me view the titles and quickly view the content. The layout of video screnshots and flickr images is just amazing. More recently I have started to customize this landing page an show more articles. The user experience is just amazing and simple. It’s very had to stay clean and simple, but popurls does and amazing job.

Animoto

I had the prevelge of sitting next to one of the cofounders on my way back to NYC from SXSW. I checked out the site and dam! You put in email, select a bunch of images and in a couple of minutes they email a link with you meet music video. I am very impressive with thier upload system for showing the status as well as which file their uploading in near to real time. The user experince simplifies the problem of uploading a lot of images one by one, massive props to the developer who had to deal with all that javaacript, as well as the video remix code to match the images and music, a great product and experience.

37 signals

Need I say more? For the company that prides themselves on keeping it simple and barebones, they offer a simple user experiene and focus on keeping out features and focusing on what users really need and use the product for.

Apple

The company that always puts design infront of features. (short rant: Although seriously can you guys make an update within the same year you launch a product, WTF, no delete mail from (insert date here) like my crackberry, sorry!) The experince researching and buying a product from your online store is almost compaired to the experince of going to thier Apple stores, simply remarkable (Yes, I know I am a bit of a mac fanboy). You just kill the ease of buying a product online and offer a great design to showcase the products. From their website to their software and even their powercords on macbook’s (gotta love the magsafe!)

Muxtape

This project started out as a User Interface experiment and now offers a great user expeirnce. The site is simple, create an account, upload your favorite 12 songs, done! You can find new music searching and finding other muxtape users and listening to their favorite 12 songs. Simple concept, simple solution, just amazing! They have received a LOT of PR the past month and even recently presented at NY Tech Meetup, which I attended. Hearing Justin Ouellette, the creator, speak about adding your own amazon codes to muxtape so you can make a small cut if people choose to buy your songs/muxtape leagally online is pretty interesting. This website is changing the way we think and can possible allow both finding new music and actually paying for it, very interesting go check it out.

bla.st

Bla.st is a free advertisting newtwork and web directory. The site is actually for sale, funny enough, but the user expeirnce when coming here is very uquine. The human mind can only hand 7 uquinie items at a time, so web designers/developers focus on navigations that limit to 7 top choices. When presenting over 50+ we various blogs/websites on a page that people can mentally handle is hard. Some how this site offers not only a simple image referencing each site, but also add a little bit of Ajax to do some mouseover tooltips that give some information and an enlarged image, is just a great user experience. Another site that is similar in style, but for design inspiration is cssremix. CSSRemix seems to be having some server issues, but be sure to google it and check out the cache page. Bla.st is also unqiue in offering a variety of viewing options so for those geeks who want to view 100+ directories on their 30in Apple display they can, as well as the older generation who do NOT want to grab their glasses, they can switch to large images.

Twitter

Twitter offers an amazing User Experience. If you are into mircroblogging, keeping track of what your friends are doing, and/or just want to join the converstation, check it out! Twitter is something that I have been trying to use much more (follow @jmurch) since SXSW. I have recently “upgraded” my iPhone to jailbreak and starting to check my twitter even more. I am using Twinkle which combines Twitter with geolocation, so now you can see where I am at while I am twitter. This is very intersting if you have lots of friends in a small area, like college? Think about the fact that you could be at a lame bar, and your friend tweets something and you notice their a couple of blocks away where its happening, you can just go over there. Okay, maybe this is a bit more of an extreme case, but I know for SXSW twitter worked great! (while it was up!)

Google

The King? Seriously the fact that they count how many characters are on thier home page is deserving of a write up. They do many focus groups and are able to keep the look, feel, and brand the same across so many microsites. Ftom the beginning of search without those crazy flashing ads to keeping it simple while showing images, maps, and web links to help find that answer to what you are seachong
You made reading Rss, email so enjoyable and even offer quickkeys for us mouse haters. Google calendar is an experimce online that everyone needs. When calendars were all the rage and 30boxes was the shit google dropped the bomb and build a simple, elegant, and so east my mom uses it, the fact that I can share calendars, make public, and now show off my callendar so others can make plans, genus. I rember coding my own caledwr and wanting to create these features but college woe was keeping me busy.

Popularity: 67% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, feel free to subscribes to my RSS feeds

This past saturday I attend podcampnyc 2.0 . I was not able to get there until the afternoon session and had work friday, so I only got to sit in on 4 talks. I just wanted to give a quick over view of each of the talks I attended and then cover how it was my lucky day!

So to begin my day (more like afternoon) this past Saturday, the first talk I attended was about some of the media tools (twitter, video blogs, podcasting, etc). It was about getting invovled and starting the conversation. We got to hear from Chris Brogan, Laura Fitton aka @pistachio, and Roxanne from Hawaii. After chatting about the tools and opening up the discussion they passed around iFlips and used utterz to help others get others out of their comfort zone and start the online conversation via video and audio. The whole point is that you do not need to be perfect online all the time (ha, just look at me!), but to get involve with the community. It was a packed event and nice talk.

The next one I went to was about the venture capital firm, sophotec. Johannes Bhakdi the CEO gave a presentation about what web 3.0 is to them and how they plan to make money from it. After hearing him explain it, the system he envisions basically described a trivial version of kluster, a system where users can post up their ideas and get money based on how much contribution they give.

The third session was with Kevin Gamble from tiki bar. (Side Note: Tiki Bar is an awesome podcast that you need to check out!). He gave a basic history and look at what they did for their podcast as well as offer some insight into how to improve and what common problems people face. It was very insightful and a nice laugh.

The last talk was about an open discussion about online tools and how much time you waste on them. But to begin this session, everyone handed over their cellphones, yes it made everyone awkward. Think about the basic efficiency of checking email, does Outlook help you or hurt you? I mean for me I tend to get “screensucked” for hours and can get nothing done. Other times I can focus and get a lot done, even with 20 tabs open in Firefox! It was a great open debate and discussion about how some of these online tools like twitter, Facebook, etc are running our lives and making us spend too much time “screensucking”.

It was a great event and wish I was able to attend on Friday and make it over there on Saturday morning. Although after attending the sessions and stopping off for the “closing cerimony” I was given a ticket upon entering. I know from my past “lucky” experiences I have the same chance of winning the Mega Millions as I do winning most raffles I enter. Well, luck was with me on Saturday and I won a nice swag bag from yelp, including a $50 AMEX Gift Card! w00T! So yes, it was an awesome weekend and great event. Since yelp was so nice and donating this bag to podcampnyc 2.0 I will be writing up an review.

Popularity: 65% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, feel free to subscribes to my RSS feeds

This past Saturday was man day and some of us did some reflection and talking about college and what we did/didn’t do. So thinking about it all I decided to post up my thoughts about what you should be doing in college.

So your in high school, maybe in college now and you got into a good school (or want to?) and now you should focus in grades, right? Well, let me make this suggestion to you, when it comes to graduating and finding a job, what do you think will seperate yourself a 4.0 GPA, maybe a grant funded project that got you published in a magazine, maybe even starting a non-profit or a company.

I know from my own experiene the first week of college I went around introducing myself to almost every proffessor in the College of Math and Science and asked them what they did an see if my interests matched. Well lucky for me I found a great mentor and went on to win grant money and a paper conster, which helped me land an awesome paid internship my freshman year! Think of how much work is involved with getting a B+ versus an A+. Possibly another 2 or 3 hours of studying and/or work related each week? Maybe seeing how someone graduated college in 3 semesters should inspire you. Seriously you are talking about taking away more time from your life when you could be enjoying college and/or doing something truly remarkable like start the next Google.

Anything is possible in college, look at the leaders in today world, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. Just remember that a D is for diploma, you do need to maintain a high enough GPA to stay IN COLLEGE, which might be hard for some, I know I had my issues, but focus on outside curriculum and do enough to get by. It should mean your focusing on more important things, like buildings a business or getting involved in something that will allow you to network while in college. Networking is something you NEED to learn how to do as well as creating a personal brand. Spend a weekend with some friends thinking how can I make some passive income or start a business this week. Getting your foot in the door is going to be down either by a connection and/or a distinction that separates yourself from the stack of other resumes on the table.

I know from my own personal experience, I had only 1 company ask for my GPA, Google. I almost ended my interview there, and prolly should have. I can NOT stand this question and feel if you really want to know, contact the school on my behalf. I did hesitated and eventually gave in, but noticed that was the last question about my grades and/or college classes. Many of the questions were geared towards my personal experience out side of class and in the “real work” either internships or jobs. My GPA in school means nothing to me, I spent more time in college learning new things outside the classroom and felt that is how I can distinguist myself from others. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I did alright and focused on good grades in my major. Realize that in life, its a branding game. You need to promote yourself and build a following. Get out there and be more like @garyvee. It’s a branding game, you need to promote yourself and set yourself apart from another, or you are just another resume in a haystack of resumes.

So go grab some friends, some beer, and discuss some ideas for changing the world and making yourself financial independent. Take a look at Meetup and start building your network. Hope this advice helps a bit for those trying to figure it all out in college, from one twenty-something to another.

Popularity: 66% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, feel free to subscribes to my RSS feeds

Happy Earth Day 2008!
It’s seems only yesterday (more like last year) that I launched hippygreen. I really enjoyed the blogging of green news, but blogging in general takes time. Solid posts take a lot of work and I have lost commitment to this. I really enjoyed this, but put so much time and energy into it that I was not seeing the “instant reward”. So after a year I am starting to realize the reward in blogging is not the short term, but the long term, such as SEO and page ranking.

In the past couple of months I have monetized hippygreen more now then I did when I was blogging. I know this might be a capitalist move, but hey trying paying then rent without money. I guess I could have gone the “donate here” way, but I honestly do not like to beg for money.

So looking back on it and my current life setup, I need to start getting back into this blogging habit. I really enjoyed discussing some of these articles and still get new comments on the blog. I have asked for some direction from my readers and think will take some action soon.

I decided to post this on John Murch because I feel that this blog is more of my life rather then a green article. I will “link it up” and hope to continue spreading my green ideas/philosophy to others.

Popularity: 66% [?]

If you enjoyed this post, feel free to subscribes to my RSS feeds