Fionn Downhill – Digital Shenanigans

I always use Google they are the best search engine but what on earth are they doing with real time results and incorporating twitter into the results.  I do not use Bing because I think their results are garbage and irrelevant most of the time so why does Google think they need to  make this move.  A search for Taylor Swift shows this rubbish in the middle of the results.  Google I don’t care!!!…I want clean relevant results and the fact that somebody just tweeted that they learned a Taylor Swift song on their guitar. this is beyond irrelevant to me.

Who Cares

On Friday the 4th of December Google made what is probably the biggest change ever to its search engine.  It affects every one of us who uses Google but Google did it without any notice or media attention.  This post by Danny Sullivan  explains it more clearly and eloquently than I could possibly ever do. Thanks Danny. 

I find this very troubling, the reason I find it troubling is that most people will not even know that it is there.  It is not like user personalization is new and for a long time if you were logged into a Google account, Google were tracking your history.  Now though everybody’s search history is being tracked and it is an opt out not an opt in feature.  Many people will  not want this but will not even know its happening.  I am not saying that it may not be helpful it may be to some people.  Personally, I would never want customized search results as determined by Google and the absolutely most annoying thing about this is that I cannot opt out permanently.  I can only opt out each time I search.  I am trying to imagine if Faceook, MSN or Yahoo decided to do this and store everybody’s information wihtout telling them to then use it to demographically target them in the future, I am pretty sure they would not get away with it.  Why can Google do this without giving notice.  Why? because they are Google no other good reason they have the absolute power they can do what they want.

Well we did it our first black Friday.  Got up at a respectable 7.00 a.m. and left the house at 8.00 to head first to Fashion Square.  Place was deserted and some of the stores were not even open.  When we did enter the stores they were quiet and I am not at all sure where the bargains were I did not see many.  Its seems that there are a handful of items at a good price and everything else was normal or with a slight discount.  It was just like any other Christmas shopping day and we did get pretty much everything we set out to get just not at very cheap prices.  We then headed to Nordstrom rack.  We were not dissapointed and we picked up some great stuff there.  A $400 pair of pants for $120 and a Juicy Couture shirt originally $180 for $50.  Good old Nordstrom rack my favorite store in Phoenix.  We went to Kierland later in the day and  picked up the last few items and still no rush or crowds.

My other daughter and husband went to Wal-Mart and said it was just like an ordinary Saturday they got everything they wanted as he was responsible for the electronic purchases.  Even got a new blender but we have strict no blender for gift rules.  A blender as a gift equals an instant divorce filing so the new very good blender which only cost $14 is now fully operational on the kitchen worktop. 

We went to Palm Springs on saturday for some R&R and paid a visit to the Cabazon outlet mall.  It was like a madhouse.  We only stayed 40 minutes after parking in god knows where miles away it was too crazy for me.  I saw on the news about the crowds everywhere so what gives is it Arizona? Does the fact that we have now lost more jobs than Michigan have anything to do with it.  Where is our presidential hopeful John McCain as Arizona slips deeper into the Abyss with a mother of all commercial real estate crisis predicted for the New Year maybe our Black Friday turnout is an indication of  just how bad our economy is.

A very happy thanksgiving to all my readers and friends.  After living in the US for 13 years and two years as a nationalized US citizen I have decided to brave my first Black Friday.   As a Black Friday virgin I have decided to take it easy on our first time out and start at 7.00 not 4.00 a.m.  I have convinced my teenage daughter to come with me.  I am curious more than anything else.  I have completely wimped out on going to the big box stores and will be hitting Scottsdale Fashion Square to first check out the new Barneys store.  I figure that might be a bit quieter but since its my first time who knows….

I am hoping to survive and I will report back on first Black Friday experience if I survive!!

Its the dream of the Internet start up.  Find an interested investor and get in front of them to give your passionate pitch.  Investors see many passionate pitches but invest in very few of them.  They are looking for passion, business acumen and an opportunity to make lots of money quickly if your pitch does not convince them of that dont bother.  You have to able to convince them that you and your business are that opportunity.

But if you are not already making a lot of money be prepared to give away a large slice of equity if you  want an investment.  Remember investors are only interested in making a lot of money.    However, if you cannot convince them that you are a credible person they can do business with then you are likely to leave your pitch empty handed.  These two young internet entreprenurs had a strong pitch but had to give up 50% of their business for a reasonably small amount of money. 

Hungry House - An online home food delivery service in the UK.  Here is their pitch.  They lost 3 investors quickly but finally won two.  All Dragon’s Den investment deals are subject to due diligence by the investor before proceeding.  I would love to hear from the Hungry House owners how it went after the Den.

Part 1

Part 2

What is Minnovation?  This interesting article from Harvard Business discusses why it is not necessary to be the next Bill Gates to be an entrepreneur and piggy back on existing ideas.  I saw an entrepreneur last night on Dragons Den (one of my absolute favorite TV shows and a must for anybody who ever plans on pitching investors)  She had a business distributing a line of fully recycled gift packaging.  Interestingly enough, despite the dragon’s green leanings they were quick to point out that in order to survive she needed to expand to ‘recyclable products” as well as products which were made from f”ully recycled paper”.  A good example of minnovation adding something different to an existing lucrative market but leveraging the existing market to make money.  Upon her agreement Theo Pafitis owner of one of the biggest stationery chains in Great Britain backed her.  He liked her green idea but not much use if it doesn’t make money and profits.

This is a very funny post about the upcoming world cup match between the Irish and the French.  The Irish are funny even if I am biased. 

Nicolas Sarkozy and the Irish get out of the box

Go boys in in green!!

My beautiful little niece in Ireland in her Gymboree Pumpkin outfit!!! I never saw a pumpkin in Ireland so I am sure she was a novelty. Not only a pumpkin but a cute little human one.

No cuter pumpkin than this one

The SEO world is a buzz with talk about Google Caffeine, Google’s new version of its search engine and the biggest change since Google was first launched is coming soon.  In fact if rumor is correct some of Google’s data centers are already switched over.  Since it is organic SEO they (Google) don’t tell us much so we will have to keep spreading rumors and speculation until caffeine is live and we can really audit the results and go from there.
From what I can see so far large authority sites will do very well.    Caffeine results will be much more relevant and if you have been doing SEO correctly you have nothing to worry about.  The long tail provides a much more relevant set of  results therefore it stands to reason the long tail SEO strategy will do better in caffeine.  We have been telling our clients for a long time to focus on long tail for more relevant traffic.  Many businesses still hold onto the old ideal that the trophy terms are the best.   Everybody is going for the trophy terms and the swift rank therefore,  it stands to reason that widening the net to the more relvant searches makes sense.   Going after trophy words has not been the best approach for relevant traffic for a long time.  One of our clients in a very competitive space and an industry riddled with spam has done very well on relevant traffic and leads  with the long tail approach.  The site owners who have stopped chasing the trophy terms and focused on content for the long tail should do much better in caffeine.  You can read more about Google caffeine here or play around in their test sandbox to see what your results might look like post rollout.

So what can you do to prepare for Caffeine. Go to Google’s webmaster guidelines and if you are not following them start now.  Start writing great content and make sure your site is the best that it can be in your space and the rest will come.  Well its not quite that simple but its a good start.

With Google’s branding affinity and caffeine the small guy is going to have to be much more creative in organic SEO to get relevant traffic.

Today we released the Beta version of our SEO Reporting, monitoring and SEO management tool SyCara.  SyCara is the public version of the in house SEO tool we have used first as Elixir Systems and now as Elixir Interactive for the past 6 years.  The tool was developed more out of frustration with the multiple tools we had to use to do our work.  No tool available was ever quite what we needed so we built our own.   Much of the tedious work of SEO has to be automated and  SyCara is the result of our efforts to ensure we created efficiencies which we could pass onto our clients.  We have been able to offer first class Search Engine Optimization Services at an affordable price for many years now and SyCara has been a huge part of our ability to do that.  There will never be a tool that replaces tenure and expertise in the sometimes volatile world of SEO.  SyCara can however reduce the number of staff with tenure and expertise needed especially if you are a large Agency offering multiple services with SEO being just one of those.  The SEO industry has never kept up with the growing need for trained staff and automation has become a natural next step to fill the gaps.  SyCara’s unique feature is that it was developed and coded by our own search strategist who has 25 years of programming experience and 13 years of experience in organic SEO.  

We are excited to offer this product to a much wider audience and some of our patent pending features are unique in the space.  Contact me if you require further information.

So what about the name you may ask?.  The answer is random but not totally Cara is gaelic for friend and Sy is the accepted abbreviation for security.  So if I had to pretend there was major logic to the name I would say that it represents a secure friend for your SEO efforts but that sounds really corny so we will go with completely random.