During my morning feed-read, I found someone discussing Wordpress 2.1 and the benefits of upgrading to the newest version of our favorite blog platform. I was not quite sold until I saw that Wordpress had named the latest release after the prettiest little girl I know and so I will be upgrading The Search Ninja Blog…
For Ella….
It seems that here in Reno, there is something of a re-branding fever that many local businesses are experiencing. One of the most significant that I have seen is Washoe Health Systems re-branding as Renown Health. Companies may re-brand for lots of different reasons: publicity, mission refocus, to appear more timely, to escape the negative stigma of an obviously unpopular namesake, etc. occasionally a company may re-brand and then de-brand (retro-brand). Which can be motivated by finding that a new image isn’t taking quite as well as the company had hoped or even as the result of divestitures/mergers (For example the many faces of AT&T and its spin-offs).
Obviously the longer a brand has been in play, the more difficult it is to effectively re-brand and accordingly the stronger the motivation for such a move must be. It would be interesting to know some the concrete internal motivations for Washoe Health to abandon their 140+ year old brand name in favor of Renown.
As you may or may not know I come from VERY humble roots. So much so that ghetto-hardened slanguage is very much a part of my vocabulary. In the professional arena these skills are rarely applicable or beneficial in any conceivable way, and consequently everything that comes out of my mouth must pass through an active filter/translator that I have created to help me maintain the illusion that I come from the same type of background as my colleagues (I don’t want to offend the delicate sensibilities common to business professionals).
About a month ago I contributed some key terms from my “spirited” youth to the Slang O’ The Day website. Today I noticed that one of my entries was published:
“A vacuum is a hell of a lot better than some of the stuff that nature replaces it with.”
- Tennessee Williams
Google’s webmaster tools, or more specifically the “add a website” feature of webmaster tools seems to be quite effective at initiating the “initial discovery” of a website. For example; jasonjgreen.com is a brand new site with no backlinks whatsoever. On Friday I added jasonjgreen.com to my tracked websites in the Google Webmaster Tools system. This morning the website showed up in my Google Alerts for “Jason J Green”.
I have opened up my personalized Google homepage every day since the product was released. From day one I have had this neat little widget installed that gives me some up-to-date top search queries across the major search properties. To be perfectly honest I completely ignore the little box that dutifully displays the days top searches despite my indifference.
Today however my first glance at the unassuming list turned into conscious attention. Before I knew it I was carefully studying its contents. Soon I realized that something was really starting to bother me about neatly styled ordered list; its carefully contrasted list items, presented in a comfortable line-height and readable font; the same as every day before.
That’s it: THE SAME AS EVERY DAY BEFORE!
What the hell could be so damned interesting about Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and “Boobs” that they should boast a constant and reliable top-search-share every single day?
I can see how the digitally immortalized escapades of the hotel princess should draw some heavy activity.
It’s understandable that Britney would stir some big buzz (I’ll admit that I’m occassionally guilty of thinking about the schoolgirl-era Britney: complete with plaid skirt and white stockings. I wish she would do that again.).
And I can’t for the life of me, find a good argument against a healthy interest in “boobs”. Again, you’re preaching to the converted with this one.
But every day? Every single day; these searches commanding hundreds of millions of inquiries?!?!
Don’t you people have things to do? Day-to-day routines, distractions, jobs, etc.?
Really, guys, its been an amazing run for these topics, but there are about 50 billion searchable items out there, which are literally at your fingertips, so let’s give some of the other fascinating information a chance to dazzle you into a drooling coma… Please.
“By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you’ll be happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.”
- Socrates
This morning has been awesome, I’ve had my kids with me this weekend and we have been able to spend some quality time together. It’s always an eye-opener for me to watch my kids play and hang-out or otherwise do the things that they like to do. It is certainly interesting to compare the types of activites that we enjoyed as children to what we now enjoy as adults. Most people reach a certain post-pubescent stage and simply “turn-off” the kid stuff. Fortunately for my kids, I am incurably immature and still very much enjoy digging dirt fortresses for action figures, building things out of legos and of course the PlayStations 2+3 are a corner-stone of my personal entertainment regimine. My oldest son Donovan, got a PSP for christmas and I can hardly keep my hands off of it. Not-unlike my children I equally enjoy less traditional activites such as the study of science and mathematics. My son Aidan and I frequently collaborate on more technical projects and are currently designing and building a robot that can do a variety of interesting things and will even have a built in grappling-hook which is propelled by compressed gas. My girls on the other hand are a little trickier as far as finding common interests, but I have out of sheer desperation to appease them reluctantly subjected myself to a handful of “make daddy pretty” parties, which generally include a facial, make-up, beard-braiding and even some color on my finger-nails. You can be certain no pictures of that will ever be posted in my photo gallery.
The point is that without all of these common activities our relationship simply wouldn’t be quite what it is today and so I will gladly subject myself to the horrors of every new make-up kit that should come my way and I fear only the day when they won’t beg me to play along anymore.
I posted over at EMP a rather lengthy treatment of what it means to be and SEO Expert.
“We’ve heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.”
- Robert Wilensky
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