ideabastard

My dream job is being a travelocity search engine optimization specialist. Here is a confession: I didn't start a blog because I wanted to blog. If you read this blog, you may have suspected as much due to lack of direction and abrasive name. However, working with travelocity as a search optimization specialist is certainly my dream job. I wrote this blog due to two things. First, I wanted to play with the open source Drupal software. Second, I wanted to play around with Search Engine Optimization, also called SEO, (particularly for “Travelocity”) to see how hard it would be to get relatively highly ranked for certain search terms. I have accomplished the second by using Google's Google Analytics module for Drupal. I know it is strange and weird. I just find it fascinating that my site has been visited by people in India 21 times so far this year. Are they trying to post spam (unsuccessfully) to my site? Possibly. It is also humbling. You think you write 12 genius observations of online video and no one reads it. You explain why hydrostatic weighing is the most accurate form of body fat measurement and that article is read close to 300 times. The point after the break....

A friend turned me onto the craziest of concepts. This guy decided who had the six pack and was in tremendous shape decided to put on weight to show people how easy it is to lose it. When it was all said and done he put on 75 pounds in just 26 weeks. He is suggesting that he can lose it all again is another 26 weeks (half a year). He went "dark" and quit posting images of his progress after an unnamed network wanted to show the results in a big reveal. Anyway, if you want to see some of the images, check out his blog for pics and other stuff including PDFs of his weekly menu plan and workouts. Anyway, he posted the most amazing healthy shake. It has become my new favorite.

After the break is a video where some Cirque Soleil came and performed for Google and did a question and answer panel after. If you ever wanted to see the behind the scenes of Cirque Soleil or wanted to learn more you need to watch this. It is long, about an hour. But so interesting.

One of my favorite things back in the day was to go to a local record shop called CD World and browse through new records. They had half a dozen "stations" that had several dozen CDs you could listen to. Each section had a genre or some theme. Like there was the Best Selling station or the Rap station. You could (and I did) spend your whole afternoon there. But now that record and CD stores are all but a thing of the past, what is one to do? The answer is, in my opinion, better than going to a record store. You swing over to the site Torrent Freak and get SXSW music torrents. They have them going back to 2005. Each one has over 1,000 songs. One song from each band playing at SXSW, easily the most important music festival known to man. After the break I will tell you how to get through all that.

This week is SXSW. It is one of those festivals I have wanted to go to for so long but never have. Mainly because the price seemed too high for what it was. Now it is so big it is pointless. TechCrunch as a great article on Highlight, which is a social location based service. Basically it takes some basic info from Facebook and broadcasts the information. So if you are at a bar and someone in your friends list is also there, you will get a notification. Where it gets cool is that if you have anything in common, you will get notified. So at work, if I check, I see all the people at work that have the application on and shows Sabre or Travelocity as their place of employment(which right now is one). The article discusses how a venture capitalist mentioned how it is being used as a recruiting tool. Which is the most genius use of location based services I have yet heard of. I can't believe I didn't think of that.

I watched this animated short before it got nominated for the 2011 Academy Awards for Best Animated Short. It seems like a lot of short films are available on Vimeo. Here is a great little film by Gabriel Bisset-Smith.

comScore just released online video data for January 2012. There are some really interesting nuggets here. comScore has three tables: Top U.S. Online Video Content Properties Ranked by Unique Video Viewers, Top U.S. Online Video Ad Properties Ranked by Video Ads Viewed, and Top YouTube Partner Channels Ranked by Unique Video Viewers. Clearly YouTube has propelled Google ahead of the number two spot three times over. I don't know if YouTube was worth $1.65 billion but it clearly wasn't the dumbest acquisition ever.

Ghetto Hikes. Funniest Tumblr page I have seen yet. The top of the page says, "I'm 28 and have a full time job leading inner city kids on nature hikes. I simply write down what they say." So freaking funny. Here are my favorites so far: "Yo Mr Cody, how many these mushrooms I gotta eat fo I Super Mario da fuck outta dis place?" and "Them sheep is funny looking. Homie wearin a snuggle full time." Looks like he posts one a day.

Let me preface this by saying Adobe makes some great products. I get a little irritated by Flash and when people have PDFs as part of the content of their site. Restaurants do this and it drives me insane. That said, Photoshop is clearly the industry standard. And I really want to get my hands on Illustrator and their video suite. The problem is two fold. They bundle their products and those bundles are upwards of $1,700. The price point is so high that most students, entrepreneurs, or anyone on a limited budget ultimately either steals the software (as my audio technician proudly confessed last night) or uses some open source alternative like GIMP. So let me put this in perspective.

There is an article in Read Write Web showing social media salaries by city for the top 20 cities. I thought this was cool for two reasons. One, I have been meeting with my mentee, Steven, who I met through Champions of Hope and we have been talking about college, the jobs you can get with a college education, and the salary difference between someone with a college education and someone without. In fact I had a spreadsheet showing with college, skilled, and unskilled salary data. Two, just yesterday I met with a friend who expressed interest in starting his own blog to get into a social media type job. He was asking what someone could make doing that and I wasn't entirely sure. It was cool to see this is becoming a legitimate occupation with decent salaries. The article actually showed data for six different roles: social media copywriter, social media specialist, online community manager, brand manager, social media strategist, and social media marketing manager. I thought it was particularly interesting that Dallas was #12 on the list ahead of Houston and Austin. Graphic after the break.