In case you didn’t get the flurry of tweets on my account this week, you wouldn’t know I have been at SMX Sydney 2009. SMX stands for Search Marketing Expo. This pretty much sums up the conference.
I have been working in the web for a rather long time now, and pretty much from the beginning, there has been a need to find relevant content. It is a constant that hasn’t changed; just the ways we get to it has changed.
Before there was Google there were other engines, and since then optimising content has been necessary to get your content found. Note I say content not sites.
One of the important elements from SMX this year is the prevalence of the new windows to content that exist, and that change is always occurring.
Does it mean traditional Search practices are dying? Definitely not. In fact, with all the Social Media hype about at present, one could not be blamed for thinking Search had dropped of the relevance radar.
It hasn’t.
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This seems to be my ‘theme de mois’ at present. Perhaps it has come from a realisation that it is very easy in web development to include a few extras and people miss the actual value of them.
A challenge while managing and building web applications, and sites, is to ensure everything is in the specification upfront so there are no extra charges, or included freebies (gold plating). So far, in the last 12 years of this, I have found that to be near impossible to be 100% correct, if the project is large and complex.
I am starting to use the above phrase more and more in presentations, and during developments, to make sure that everyone realises, time still equals money even on the web. Also many people don’t realise the physical cost of hosting and bandwidth in Australia (don’t get me start on that one or Sol). There is a feeling that because open source exists, and you can access freeware and many code snippets, that everything on the web can be done for nothing.
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Well this month I had to come back from my holiday camping at the beach for the Qld Leaders monthly meeting. Always a shame to interrupt a good holiday but unfortunately there wasn’t a day without an interruption, so was a break if not a holiday.
Being committed to the 12 month process, there was no option of not going.
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Australia is a pretty wide and wondrous country, as we that live here know, and it has been some years since I had (read: made) the time to just go to places just because they exist. Generally these days I need to know it exists before I go there, and this is unfortunately a little true about the way many of us interact day to day in our personal and business lives.
We keep going over the same paths without stepping out into a new space to find alternate experiences (read: new ways to do what we do) .
My latest camping trip took me to Wardell, NSW. A wee town 18 km south of Ballina. Years ago I have blown past this spot without even knowing it existed and in honesty it does not show up much on maps. Friends were Grey Nomading there and invited a few of us to come down for a long weekend. (more…)
While on the annual holiday this year camping at the beach we met some great people from western Queensland, out in the wild dry west where life works in completely different ways.
I love the people you meet in any form of camping, and the things you learn about how other people live that help put your own life in perspective. One such story was about a game this couple played with their kids while doing the long drives from the country. I am sure many can relate to numberplate games including ‘the alphabet’ and ‘cricket’, even ‘I-spy’ until there is nothing left to spy, however this game was very simple.
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