Rejected out of hand!

I find it amusing that after I submitted my sites to the Social Media Award section of The Irish Web Awards none of them has even been visited. Rejected before even viewing them. That either is an indication, that your efforts are not worthy of examination, or that you are not acceptable. While none of my sites has ‘hit the big time’ it’s not a precursor to exclusion.

What do you think:

Selling your self

I’ve been engaged in a discussion on facebook on a subject proposed by Bernard Goldbach. The subject has shifted a bit into what ‘marketing’ is. Or more so perhaps to what discussions in a public forum are. It’s also the basis of why the Delphi Method and my Idea Forecasting project are so important. But the only way I can illustrate this is like a 3 year old would do, with the ‘Why’ drill down to find the basic question. So here is my attempt;

Why do you blog, or post on any public forum?

To participate in the dusscussion.

(good, nobel thought. ed)

Why?

Well I think it’s a good disscusion.

Why?

Well I think I have some thoughts on the idea which I wish to contribute.

Why?

Well I think my Ideas are good.

Why?

Well I’ve had these experiences which have taught me a lot, and I think everyone should hear them.

Why?

Well I think everyone should know them, they can learn from them as well.

Why?

because they are important

Why?

because they are great ideas.

Why?

etc ad nauseam …

They are personal, you deem them valuable, and wish to give (read sell, promote, peddle) them to others.

The Delphi Method is a way to remove the ‘Personal‘ the Ego from the the Idea. The idea, and the discussion is on the merits of the Idea, and the comments, not on the personality, or the need of the individual to promote that Idea.

Twitter Marketing

I’ve been browsing the Twitterverse for anyone discussing ‘Ideas’ or Forecasting and I’ve started following them using the @ideaforecasting twitter account. I’m hoping to stimulate some interest, or at least some hits on the ideaforecasting.com site. We’ll see. My expectations are high, but I’m not deluding myself, there may be no reaction. I believe that it may be true that any marketing solely dependent on Twitter, will fail. I’ll followup on this by blogging this over time.

Free Beer, not a good advertising campaign

In the area of advertising, outside of posting nude pictures of celebrities and offering Free Beer I’m out of my league. When I talked about my new projects to the Open Coffee Cork gang, I got what I thought was pleasant interest. But outside of the amusing use of my @querynetTwitterBot asking about jaegerbombs, no one else bothered to visit my projects.

I have been seeking any feedback on Idea Forecasting, Query-The.net (@querynet) and fleetingthoght.com (@fleetthoughts) but if I can’t get a reaction from a more or less friendly crowd, it’s unlikely to get much of a reception from anyone else.

SEO and the Robot Races

If you have been paying attention to this site and my attempts to join the ranks of the super wealthy.
I created a DIY Server which sets under my desk at home, connected to a modest DSL line with crappy uplink speeds. It currently hosts five (5) domains, but is essentially unadvertised on the internet and yet I still get visited by up to 10 Robots repeatedly every day (see below) in the form of GoogleBot, Yahoo Slurp, MSN, MSN-Mobile, Baidu and other miscellaneous Curl and Java skimmers.

So what is it that a SEO specialist do, that won’t happen completely natural just by putting any domain up on the internet?

Creating ANY content, or rather interesting content will draw down the bots onto you site, the job of SEO is easy, content creation is the hard part. Let me know what you think.


robot_bots

More Fleeting Thoughts

My new project fleeting Thoughts has more or less grown out of my other project, Idea Forecasting! However Fleeting Thoughts is a lot more modest.

Fleeting Thoughts is a Twitter related application. The basic concept is that most Twitters are temporal and transitory communications. But the thought came to me that some of your twitters might best be preserved, bookmarked, in a way that you can retrieve them. So the basic Idea of Fleeting Thoughts is that if you add @fleetthoughts to any tweet, either as a reply, or added to a re-tweet that ‘thought’ will be captured and saved on the site http://fleetingthoght.com (yup, misspelled) and sorted by owner, where they can be viewed latter. The can even be commented on by either the owner, of other visitors.

Give it a try, Twitter It 🙂

Chinese Search Bots

I was thinking that if you wanted to stop Chinese Search Bots and Hackers you could put up a photo of Tiananmen Square and the guy stopping the tanks. But NO, they are still visiting my Idea Forecasting site.

Perhaps maybe if I’d changed the name of the JPG file so that their search engine could identify that photo 🙂

Idea Forecasting Project

I continue to work on my Idea Forecasting Project. But I’m not completely satisfied with it. I also have an idea that the process I have in place could also be used as an electronic Corporate ‘Suggestion Box‘. After all, Ideas are suggestions, which can be either anonymous or presented with ownership. I will probably have to get some other ‘Eyes’ on the site to get some feedback on this prototype.