Peripheral Vision: SparkFun Has a Surplus!

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 15:49:41 -0500

A wide array of interesting electronics tools and products.

I saw this telephone at EntConnect this year - what a hoot. Totally cracked me up. The CEO walks into the bar, drops this huge 1970's telephone on the table and orders a beer. He's waiting for a call which he takes from this monsterous desktop cellular phone. It rings just as it did in 1970, but under the covers, it's a cell phone. Hillarious.

Take a look at their products - lots of vision here.

NomaDesk -- Collaborative Platform

Mon, 14 Jan 2008 13:50:54 -0500

A team document collaboration service for folks on the move.

NomaDesk looks like a pretty comprehensive stab at the collaborative/document sharing process for small businesses. It bumps up against other web-based services such as Basecamp (which we use pervasively at MyST) and Central Desktop (which I know very little about).

One business requirement that NomaDesk meets head-on is security - their industrial-strength 128-bit encryption and Delta-sync™ technology is pretty cool (and highly necessary). Only the changes and updates for your documents are distributed across all NomaDesk workspaces so your team-documents are 100% safe and always available, all of the time and from everywhere.

Take it for a test drive while it's free and give me a shout if you have any comments.

Lake County Ohio Real Estate

Thu, 22 Jun 2006 19:37:40 -0400

I saw this article about real estate search marketing and thought it deserved a good comment or two about relevance and organic search.

It's been a long absence for my thoughts in Peripheral Vision, but I think I'll get jiggy with regaular posts again.

The point of this Realty Blogging article - I agree with assertion that if you write good content and it's highly focused and well tagged, you'll do well in the search engines. However, this writer is not very clear about why this is generally true, nor is he forthcoming about markets that are ultra-competitive like upscale resort properties and other hotly contested markets. Lastly, he couches this as a "proof-of-concept" -- the folks at Real Estate Blogsites have created a production versions of this concept and they've been using it for more than a year; for them, this is far beyond a concept. Disclaimer - I'm a co-founder at MyST Technology Partners, the creators of the Blogsite platform.

There is no free lunch with organic search success - it requires lots of effort and a keen understanding of long-tail search dynamics.

Most articles like this lead you to believe that massive traffic is the outcome for a few top page ranks in Google for any key-phrase. This is simply not the case. Your objective in organic search optimization should be a few clicks per month on very discrete search terms. If you work consistently at your blogging, you'll eventually have ten thousand discrete phrases that will attract 1-point-something search referrals per month, or maybe twenty thousand new visitors per month to your blogsite brand.

The long-tail is not conjecture - it's proven science; 95% of all productive search traffic on the net is based on unpopular terms and phrases. Chasing popular (or predictable) terms is likely to waste time and precious marketing resources. If you chase any key phrase that you think is predictable, the chances are excellent that (a) your competitors think it's predictable as well, and (b) it's not as predictable as you might believe (e.g., PR and the Unpredictable Long-Tail).

So let's look more closely at the claimed benefit of the Lake County Blog as so eloquently stated in the article. The assertion is that the blog created the high visibility and resulting page one Google ranking, but the actual link in Google points to The Crockett Team website. Hmmm - looks like someone's confused. In fact, the Lake County Blog referenced in the article doesn't even rank in the top 100 results in Google. Granted, Google has had some troubles of late so maybe I'm hitting the index at a bad time. But if I'm right about this, the high rankings you're seeing here probably have little to do with the weblog mentioned.

The article is clear about one thing - use tags that accurately describe the focus of your content. You'll get no debate from me about the importance of tags and tagging accuracy. In fact, you'll see a series of tags called out at the end of this blog post that reference Topic Tags; this is driven by an exclusive technology known as Topic Cloud and available in every blogsite created by Real Estate Blogsites. Topic Tags pick up where keyword tags end, and this product overview describes some of the more technical nuances of this very powerful technology.

Peripheral Vision | Bill French

Peripheral Vision: SparkFun Has a Surplus!

See Also

NomaDesk -- Collaborative Platform

Lake County Ohio Real Estate