This is really unbelievable.
Bologna-based street artist, Blu, has recently collaborated with David Ellis to push the ambitions and [sculptural] dimensions of his last hit, MUTO, with this latest hypnotic piece entitled COMBO.
Source: http://motionographer.com/2009/09/23/blu-david-ellis-combine-forces/
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In the early fall of 2007 I was approached with a novel idea for an online real estate business. I tend to get pitched on a lot of moderately good ideas by people, but this one was particularly interesting since it came from a really smart guy with experience in software and real estate. Don really was 100% behind the idea and I really loved it too — it made tonnes of sense to me. I immediately committed to work toward developing the project, and after many iterations we brought the site live earlier this month.
Agent Invitation is a web app created to let real estate clients and agents/brokers work together to save money for each other. Clients can send an Agent Invitation to up to 3 agents anonymously giving the agent details about the transaction they’re looking to make and why it might make sense to offer them a discounted or alternative commission rate. Agents can then respond with proposed transaction terms (including no discount at all) and include details about their own business and specialties to sell themselves. The client chooses which agents should receive their contact information, and then finally pick out and later review the Agent they hired (if any).
Head over and read Don’s Agent Invitation Blog or go visit Agent Invitation itself and watch the videos explaining how and why this works for both parties.
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Just got a TED link from a twitter feed and I had to post it here because I think it’s SO relevant to me and my life. Currently for example I’m looking at mobile phones and am lost in the endless array of factors to choose from and underlying contractual obligations that ensue. What should be a fun thing isn’t and in this video Barry Schwartz talks about some eye opening stuff. WATCH IT.
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It’s not often I have something great to say. In fact, I’m quite skeptical whether this blog will have any value at some point. However, one thing you might have noticed if you know me is that I constantly have links to stuff/content/etc. This comes from having a disturbingly large RSS reader feed and generally being an Internet dweller every day of my life.
If you’d like to follow along, catch me at @calgoodman on Twitter for day to day stuff or My Tumbler Site where i’ll put anything that’s not an original thought (ie. other content from the interweb).
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You American folks spent/lent/gave out $1.2 Trillon bucks from a slush fund — with a T, yes. $4k for every man woman and child, and your government wants to keep where it was spent a secret. 
Source: @JasonCalcanis
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This Christmas I received a large wrapped box, like many others, but open opening it I was surprised to find a wooden box with heavy rope handles on its sides. The inner top lid had a peace sign and “Boites de la paix” burned in with a hot iron and it was generally a beautiful piece — then i figured out what it used to be.
This is actually an authentic United Nations ammunition box used to carry ‘50 fuses detonating’. It was created in Germany and was found in Quebec and re purposed as Eco-friendly furniture. My piece is a beautiful re-use of military purposed gear for peaceful means and makes a nice accompaniment to my office.
Visit Boites de la paix
See my own munitions box in its new role at my flickr feed
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A month and a bit ago my friend Harris inquired about doing a website for his company, Seapark. Considering how long it’s been in business I’m stunned that they never needed one before, but I was happy to help. So, over the course of a few weeks, the written input of his PR genius sister and a couple revisions I put together a little site — nothing too advanced at all but it was what they needed.
Harris’ business is industrial glove recycling, which is for the automotive industry (among others) is a big deal. Used work gloves are cleaned, re-used where possible and replaced when necessary. It’s an environmentally friendly practice that helps industrial companies to be ‘green’ and save money at the same time. After all these years, Seapark has a long-term customer base of small, medium and large companies for its services.
The reason for this post is to mention how good their timing was though. A major technology-based company found Seapark’s website not more than 2 days after it went live and gave them a call. After almost 35 years without a website, they got a call from a potentially huge customer in the first two days of being on the web. The timing could not have been better! I really don’t do promotional websites that often these days, but I must admit I feel pretty satisfied that I could help Seapark get rewarded immediately for their decision to put their business on the web.
If anyone reading this actually does call Seapark for more information, tell Harris that I sent you!
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I’ve been working with a few different monetization methods for my websites, as you can imagine. Now, a new service out of NYC is looking to monetize your posts as they’re put up. By turning some plain text in your normal blog or website post into a link pointing to an advertiser, this service aims to provide easy, natural link sales.
Currently the service works for publishers running Wordpress, Movable Type and Drupal. If you’re looking to acquire some links or make a few bucks, check it out right away.
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I love web traffic. There’s nothing like getting free hits from Google, MSN or Yahoo just because your web site’s content has content matching a user’s query. Just today I realized that this site now ranks for the hugely competitive (hah) “mint hot chocolate” query at Google. While that query won’t make me rich — and nor will this website — it does show that clean on-target content still achieves natural traffic even without incoming links.
So what’s this search engine optimization thing? Well, it’s actually a really deep and complicated field of study. Lots of people spend their whole work life trying to rank highly in Google’s search results for competitive terms.
At its core, SEO is all about making a URL come up early in the search engine result pages (SERPs). To rank a page in SERPs a search engine will take into account the page contents including title, headings, text and overall structure as well as the website surrounding it. It also takes into account the authority of a website. Authority is simply defined as the quality and quantity of links to the site. Some links are worth more to a site’s authority, some are worth far less or are possibly negative. The general idea is that when good quality sites link to another site they provide a credible ‘vote’ for the linked site. This is sort of the same idea as Colin Powell throwing his support behind Barack Obama near the end of the US Presidential Election. Credible sources are thought to ‘vote’ for other credible sources through a link, and thus bring up their authority.
So what’s a newbie to do?
First, do some more reading. Site structure and on-page optimization should be the first step toward ranking a page for a keyword. Currently important structural things are a good <title> with the keyword early in the title, a good filename like keyword-phrase.html, relevant header tags (<h1> <h2> and so on) and coherent, quality on-page text. And, you have to make sure the search engine can find this page from your other pages, so it needs an incoming link, preferably with its keyword in the link.
Check out Google’s SEO Starter Guide
Next, if your page content is quality and worthy of links from other people, publicize it. That might mean emailing your partners, vendors, other related websites and so on to ask them to give your new page a read, and if it’s valuable to their website visitors, a link hopefully.
Too much work for you? Then hire a qualified person or company to handle it for you. Search engines are how most people find things on the Internet these days. Quality SEO is nearly always a positive ROI investment in my experience.
I’ll talk a bit more about SEO in future posts hopefully, and possibly a bit about the white-hat vs. black-hat SEO strategies.
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