Delicious Designs & Intriguing Interfaces

Social Surplus

2008-07-21T19:30:00.000-07:00

I just read this incredible article about social surplus and it's quite inspirational. Here's a quick excerpt: Let's say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five

Audit Page Tracking Code

2008-07-12T23:18:00.000-07:00

This is just a quick reminder to audit your pages for tracking code from time to time. I just realized that the blog wasn't being tracked! This is not a big deal for me, however on a typical B2C website the more complete your statistics the better you can make strategic marketing decisions.

Not that it matters, but back to PR6

2008-05-01T21:13:00.000-07:00

Not that it matters, but it appears that the mastermynde.com website is back to a PageRank of 6. And oddly, many other pages that have been on the site for a long time are now unranked. This highlights that PageRank is not the only thing to concern yourself with when looking for link partners.

Osmo Wiio

2008-04-22T21:38:00.000-07:00

This article at 37signals.com very much resonates for me. It is an entertaining summary of Osmo Wiio's theories about human communication. How often have you felt that the following could apply to your communication? "If a message can be understood in different ways, it will be understood in just that way which does the most harm." Go read the article now, it's worth it.

Clients Blogging?

2008-04-20T15:24:00.000-07:00

My friend and client Alex Curylo makes an interesting point, which is that many many many blogs fly under the radar and have few if any cross references on the web. I'm sure this is partially due to few people understanding how to properly promote themselves, others not caring, and of course general Signal-to-noise ratios. I'm inspired to start posting again, thanks Alex!

What do I do?

2006-09-11T23:40:00.000-07:00

I look at a lot of websites. I do web marketing for my clients and I've personally done cross-linking research for dozens of clients. This is how many websites I have looked at (solely doing this work!) expressed as a math equation: (for the sake of the equation let's express dozens as 36) 36 clients X (10 to 30 key phrases) X 30 top ranking sites = 10,800 to 32,400 That is a lot of websites.

I'm hiring in the Comox Valley

2006-09-03T23:14:00.000-07:00

I'm looking for a junior web person - if that is you or someone you know, get in touch. See the linky-link for more details.

Internet Marketing as a Business Differentiator

2006-08-30T18:50:00.000-07:00

This article is intended for the layperson. With business in general becoming more global and with the number of businesses offering any given product or service growing it is important to differentiate yourself from your competitors. You can differentiate yourself in many ways. You can offer the highest quality, the cheapest prices, the best support,... You can value ethics, shareholder profit

#3 for vancouver web design today...

2006-06-14T21:16:00.000-07:00

I know it's been ages since I posted last - I have no defense except for my wife's pregnancy and our move to Vancouver Island. :) I can't promise I'll be posting much in the near future, I've been told babies are time consuming - but I'll do my best. In other news, I've been listed in the top four positions for "vancouver web design" on google for some time now.

Web Marketing Software

2006-01-25T20:42:00.000-08:00

I use a variety of online tools and software to help manage the web marketing process. I begin by using Digital Point's excellent Keyword Suggestion Tool to generate a list of key phrases. I use Advanced Web Ranking to track search engine ranking positions (SERPs) and to determine linking opportunities and do competitive analysis. I'm currently investigating Link Assistant to see if it will help

Google Local Canada, open for business

2005-11-01T10:43:00.000-08:00

It looks like Google Local is now open for business in Canada. (I find the process of submitting your business a bit strange.) Step 1: search for something with a locale specific phrase (e.g. vancouver web design) Step 2: click on one of the local results Step 3: scroll to the bottom of the page and click on Information for Business Owners Step 4: add your business Step 5: wait for an

RSS Digest, easily include RSS feeds in your web content

2005-08-18T13:04:00.000-07:00

I use a neat little service called RSS Digest to link to an RSS feed of my del.icio.us bookmarks. (You can see this in the blog sidebar) RSS digest essentially allows me to automatically publish a third party RSS feed on my site. In essence RSS Digest allows you to easily syndicate third party content without any technical tinkering. Be careful though, it is always best to ask for permission

TimeSlice time tracking software

2005-08-15T11:44:00.000-07:00

It seems I have a constant stream of friends and acquaintances who are becoming independant contractors or starting to supplement their income with contracting work. As a result I am always answering questions about staying organized and my general business practices. One of the most common questions I get is about how I manage and track my time. I'll get into time management in another post as

#8 for Vancouver Web Design today...

2005-08-05T15:36:00.000-07:00

Well... it was bound to happen sooner or later. Mastermynde is back to #8 for Vancouver Web Design on google, if only for a day. Many of my clients are willing to link back to my site and my theory is that as their fortunes rise, so do mine. It seems quite fitting that our fates are tied together. For some of them, the first link to their site is from my home page.

LinkedIn : Business Networking

2005-03-28T01:11:00.000-08:00

I've recently started inviting everyone I've worked with professionally to join LinkedIn.com, a business networking tool that is a nice mix of simple functionality and smart design. The idea is essentially that your network of business contacts can help each other (and you) to land jobs and grow your businesses. This seems eminently practical to me! If I've worked with you and like working with

Staggering Feats of SEO

2005-02-27T18:59:00.000-08:00

My experiments in search engine optimization have led to the realization of an astonishing possibility... Anyone who is meticulous and has enough time on their hands should be able to rank well for any decent adequately targeted term. My experiment was for "vancouver web design" and I think I spent about 10 hours on it. I sat at #8 on google for a couple of days and have now slowly slipped down

Google is IP filtering

2005-02-15T22:18:00.000-08:00

In astounding news, Mastermynde is ranking around #9 on google.com and google.ca for "vancouver web design"... at least... sometimes. Like, from my home. But not from my office... Searchgal and I were talking about this and our theory of the day is that Google is doing some IP filtering. Anyone else have any other anecdotal evidence about this sort of thing?

I have been sadly remiss

2005-01-30T01:13:00.000-08:00

What is the point of having a blog if you don't update it regularly? Alright, still no incredibly noticeable changes in my rankings for the terms I'm targeting for my own site, but I'm seeing definite success with a number of clients. My theory is that the web design companies I'm competing against are much more savvy about internet marketing than the companies competing with my clients.

Is Friday exciting when it's day 5 in a 7 day week?

2004-11-26T10:30:00.000-08:00

Mastermynde dropped to 193 on Google for Vancouver Web Design last week, but has since partially recovered and is back up to 89. I just did some research around local geo-specific business directories and will be adding Mastermynde as appropriate. Other than that, haven't done any on-page optimization yet. Regardless of google rankings, traffic from search engines has gone up and my daily

Promotional Activities

2004-11-15T22:12:00.000-08:00

I've been doing further promotional activities including becoming a member of some social groups, like Meetup.com's Vancouver Web Design group and Vancouver Graphic Design group, Clubzone.com : Vancouver Nightclub Information as well as other misc. directories like Xemion. We'll see what impact this has on the experiment. PS. No significant movement in the search engine rankings yet, but

Long Week

2004-11-05T16:45:00.000-08:00

I entered a fugue state about two hours ago and am only now back to normal, prompted primarily (I believe) by loud music. Still sitting at about the same place for Vancouver Web Design, and am working on SEO for this, that, and the other thing. The imprecise science appeals in much the same way as messing around with colour palettes, but it's much more quantitative. The next step involves

Vancouver Web Design

2004-10-29T16:01:00.000-07:00

I'm attempting a search engine marketing experiment of my own. Digital Point's Keyword Suggestion Tool is reporting an aggregate number of 202.2 searches a day (6150.25/month) for "Vancouver Web Design" across the Wordtracker and Overture networks. Google's AdWords Traffic Estimator says I'd need to spend $15.71 USD a day (or $477 USD/month) to show up #1 across the AdWords network, at an

Social Networking Links Added

2004-10-27T15:55:00.000-07:00

Aloha to friendster, LinkIn, Orkut, etc. See the right hand nav and add yourself to my social networking circle.

Naomi Blog!

2004-10-24T17:58:00.000-07:00

I'm getting my little sister hooked up with a blog. I'm curious if it will actually be useful for her or not, but it's been fun setting it up. :)

Donna's on her way...

2004-10-21T09:35:00.000-07:00

Messing about with blogger today because Donna is heading to france and might want to blog it.