Daily Brad, the blog

As this is the first day of the new year, I wanted to use it as a chance to send out a big thank-you to those who read my blog on a regular basis and take the time to comment. I also wanted to list the top 5 most read blog posts that I wrote in 2006 and a little snippet from the post:

Top 5 Posts of 2006 by Traffic

1. Website Pirates Strike Again - Park City Group
   I was looking at a list of public companies in Utah a couple days ago. One intrigued me, so I accessed their website. The Park City Group was founded by Randy Fields, the co-founder and former chairman of Mrs. Fields Cookies. Their customers include such well-known names as The Home Depot, Foot Locker, Inc., The Limited, Albertson’s, Schnuck Markets, Pacific Sunwear of California, Wawa, Busch Entertainment and Tesco Lotus. And guess what? Their website design is pirated.
2. Design Your Own Snowboard with Revolution
   The last time Jon and I were on the slopes (last month, can you believe it? With all the new snow, we’re planning on going this month as well) I looked around to get a sense for some of the snowboard designs that were out there. And you know what I realized? Most snowboard designs suck.
3. Utah Creatives - Designers, Agencies, Firms and More
   So there use to be this great site called ampUTate.org that would contain links to all the local Utah advertising agencies, graphic designers, photographers, illustrators, etc.
4. Pixel Patterns Wallpaper - New Graphic Design Trend?
   Here’s something I’ve been noticing a lot lately, haven’t you? I call it Pixel Wallpaper, while I think most of the web calls it “Pixel Patterns” (or even “Atari Style Wallpaper”). Forget that wallpaper of the past, you know those nasty repeated gifs cut out from a photo or grabbed from a 3D texture makers. These babies are cool. Use a pixel pattern for your blog background or website - here’s where to find some.
5. Is Social Bookmarking the Search Engine of the Future?
   So it wasn’t until a couple months ago, that I began to hear about the whole concept of “Social Bookmarking”. I’ve even mentioned it to a couple of my friends, and they always pose the question “what ARE you talking about?”

Good things are going to happen in 2007, so stay tuned to The Daily Brad for more changes.

My thought today: Can you tell what’s on someone’s mind by what they’ve been bookmarking? See if you can figure out what I’ve been thinking about by looking at a dozen of my most recent bookmarks:

1. Flipper Nation
   I’m a huge fan of anything HGTV, and recently I’ve also been watching a lot of shows about Filpping Houses. I ran across this link, a parody of couple of guys who flip houses. Not only did I get a good laugh, but I also thought they did an excellent job of integrating Web 2.0 concepts into the promotion of their website. I thought if I had a chance, I might blog about some of their comical “rules to real estate” in my some-what always-neglected Utah Real Estate Blog
2. Graphic Design USA Logo Trends 2005
   Since I’ve been getting quite a few clicks on my graphic design trends category, I thought I’d do some more research and found this link. I thought it halarious what they called some types of logos such as “wicker balls”, “weaves”, and “puffies”. I’ve been noticing a lot of “transparencies” in recent design annuals and wanted to blog about it being a trend.
3. Does chocolate really give you pimples?
   No, I’m not really worried about pimples, but ran across this article in looking for interesting items for my Tweet Sweet blog about misconceptions of chocolate. I ended up blogging about Does Chocolate Spoil instead.
4. Icon Advertising Museum
   I’ve had several posts bouncing around in my head about Advertising icons or “company mascots” as I call them. I also wanted to refer Jeff Fisher to this link when I posted a response to his Michelin Man post (since he mentioned he was a fan of advertising characters), but I forgot.
5. Logo Lounge
   For $100 annually you can have access to over 41,740 logos that have been uploaded and cataloged by Logo Lounge members. Members can also upload their own logo designs and they’ll be entered in their logo competition where winners are published. It’s always nice to have logo books around when brainstorming for a new brand, but it’s even more nice to have a logo book with my logo inside. (Jeff Fisher is my hero when it comes to getting published)
6. doba.com - Education Page
   After running across their co-founder’s blog, AND seeing a couple billboards saying “need products to sell”, AND finding a product that was on their website that would work great for Therty Brand, I decided I should probably learn more. Doba provides product sourcing services for small businesses and entrepreneurs, in case you were wondering.
7. The Gardo House: A History of the Mansion and Its Occupants
   In a random search for historical houses of Salt Lake City, I found one who’s appearance intreaged me, and I wanted to know more about it. Starting with my search of “Amelia’s Palace”, I ended up finding this link. I was sad to find out that this amazing piece of architecture originally built for Brigham Young was torn down in 1921. But what an amazing history - well worth the read.
8. The Portland Business Journal - The Oscar goes to…
   After visiting a Moonstruck Cafe in Portland Oregon and blogging about their amazing chocolates, I tried to figure out if their familiar logo had won awards. I learned that it was purchased by Sally and Dave Bany, former executives for Columbia Sportsware company, in 2001. They took their experience and applied it to chocolate with the intentions of positioning it to grow into a national, premium chocolate brand.
9. Feedburner
   What in the world is Feedburner and why have I been running across it so much lately? It looks like something I should learn more about, so I bookmarked it. Do you use it? Perhaps you could fill me in.
10. is this your name?
    A bit of a goofy site that allows you to enter your name and see various stats about it. Since I recently discovered that I’m an egosurfer, this site really appealed to me.
11. seomoz.org - Long List of Link Searches
    I scanned this article about SEO inside information, and bookmarked it to come back for later. As a website designer, I’m always interested in expanding my arsenal of information about SEO.
12. Ironic Sans - Idea: Pre-pixelated clothes for Reality TV shows
    Have you ever watched reality television and saw someone that was wearing a t-shirt with a pixelated logo? Here’s the idea for David’s pre-pixelated line of clothing. I found some of the comments prett comical.

Since this is my last post before the Christmas Holidays, I just wanted to wish everyone a Happy Christmas!

JupiterResearch released a report in June 6, 2006 that shows 35 percent of large companies plan to institute corporate Weblogs this year. Combined at the time with the deployed base of 34 percent, nearly 70 percent of all corporate website operators will have implemented corporate blogs by the end of 2006.

Not to question the analysts at JupiterResearch, but I think that their numbers might be bloated (coupled with the fact I now have the 20-20 hind-site at the years end). While I think some companies are on the forefront of web technology, others are asking “why do I need a blog?” It’s a tricky question to consider until you’ve actually got one going and see how you use it and how your customers respond. From a retail standpoint, the corporate blog seems to be part newsletter, part customer support, part message board and part press release. But I still think it has yet to prove its position in the marketing mix.

With blogging I’m seeing a little deja-vu of the early to mid 90’s where the world was buzzing about Web 1.0. Those were the good-old-days when some corporations asked the question “why do I need a website” and then sat back while other visionary companies innovated and showed them. Now building a website for your company is as necessary as having a 1-800 number. Will Web 2.0 have the same impact? What will be the Web 2.0 Corporate Blog effect?

Let’s look at a couple corporations who are using blogs. (more…)

Have you got a blog? Do you write about what’s happening in your world, or under your expertise, or in your realm of influence? Gannett Co. may want to hear about it. The nation’s largest newpaper chain plans to create stories with information from bloggers, people who post in Internet discussion groups and other non-journalists in hopes of winning readers from the Internet, television and other news sources, officials with the company said.

Gannett, which operates 90 newspapers, including the nation’s largest, USA Today, is hoping “citizen journalism” will reverse the company’s part of an industrywide trend of declining circulation and advertising revenues, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. Gannett also plans to merge newspaper and online operations of USA Today and other publications. All Gannett newspapers are being urged to make the transition quickly.

The question is begged to be ask, As Blogs and Citizen Journalism Grow, Where’s the News? Who writes the news, and what news is news?

Read about it in this article: Yahoo News - Gannett enlists citizen journalists

Here’s some nice commentary: The 11 Layers of Citizen Journalism

So it wasn’t until a couple months ago, that I began to hear about the whole concept of “Social Bookmarking”. I’ve even mentioned it to a couple of my friends, and they always pose the question “what ARE you talking about?”

Even though I understand how social bookmarking works now (well, not completely, but learning), I tend to still say “hu?”. Social bookmarking is a web-based service, where shared lists of user-created Internet bookmarks are displayed. These sites generally organize their content using tags (a keyword or term to classify content). Social bookmarking sites are an increasingly popular way to locate, classify, rank, and share Internet resources through the practice of tagging and inferences drawn from grouping and analysis of tags. But HOW do they make money?

(more…)

So I did a couple searches yesterday looking for the technique for putting Google Analytics on my blog. Since I’ve already put their code on the main pages of my portfolio site, I wanted to add it to the blog as well.

I found a quick little bullet-point that revealed how it’s done on Matt Cutt’s Blog (he was one of the first search results I found when searching). He says:

If you’re using WordPress with a theme like almost-spring, you would edit your header.php file, e.g. wp-content/themes/almost-spring/header.php and put the JS just above the tag. That’s it. Do a view-source on this page and search for “urchin” to see where to drop the code.

I tried this, and it’s already sending through hits. Wow, cool. Thanks Matt. I’ll have to monitor this over time, as it looks like it’s not sending as specific information through as I’d like. I’ve heard of other blog tracking tools, but this should be sufficient for now.

So guess what? I now know you’ve visited. Yeah! Upward and onward.

Renaming my blog for better search engine recognition

Tweet Sweet made it to the top!
So I make it an effort to check at least every few days where my search rankings fall in Google and Yahoo. I’ve even started checking MSN, though I don’t get as much traffic generated through them. I’ve been checking Tweet Sweet (my other blog) and its location, and making every effort possible to get to the top of the term “Tweet Sweet”, which finally happened on their last crawl.

Brad McCall maintains its top ranking
I’ve maintained top ranking for a while with any search for “Brad McCall” (my portfolio site). I make it a joke with my friends who say they lost contact with me by telling them to type my name in any search engine… yeah, that was hard wasn’t it? Back in the day when I started bradmccall.com, I got listed on DMOZ which I hear is actually quite difficult to do now. DMOZ (the open directory project) still feeds into a lot of smaller home-baked search engines as well as some of the big daddies. Since it’s managed by people it’s suppose to be more accurate. At the time, there were tons of “search engine submission” services around the web, one of which I used to get my URL out there. (MyComputer.com) I look at the SEO process now, and it’s quite apparent how things have changed in how things are done. This “submission” service back then was like $50.00, and recently I got an email from i need hits that offered it for $1.97. Thus, the “submission only” service’s effectiveness in today’s SEO market.

Where’s Brad’s Blog?
But I’m off subject (what’s new with that?) My point is, Tweet Sweet and Brad McCall have both made it to the top of the search engines. So what’s my next step? (For them, it’s probably keyword optimization for specific terms) But for me, I wanted to see where this blog ranks. I didn’t spend much time thinking about about a name for this blog, I just typed “Brad’s Blog” and launched it. In this morning’s search for “Brad’s Blog” Google came up with 105,000 results, some of which I could probably never throw off the top of the heap. So I tried another phrase I’ve used many times before “Daily Brad” (a play on the prayer “give us this day our daily bread”). Looks like there was just under 32,000 searches with this term - 2 of which seemed to offer the most competion. Thus, more success in getting listed in the top 5.

So today “Brad’s Blog” became “Daily Brad”. My only concern? Now I’ve set the expectation for daily posts… goodness. I guess I better start pouring out those ideas, observations, and general stuff that keeps rambling through my brain.

In case you hadn’t read previously, this isn’t my first creation of a blog online, and probably won’t be my last (unless of course, noone ever reads my long posts and I start to get bored of writing to noone.) My first attempt at a blog, Tweet Sweet, is online at www.tweetsweet.com. Tweet Sweet is more of a hobby site that allows me to log and share my ideas on the creation of a dessert/sweet shop, as well as little tidbits I run across that are in-line with the “sweet” subject.

So, since I hadn’t blogged before last month (did you know that according to a recent InformationWeek magazine that I picked up that the word “blog” was coined by Peter Merholz on Peterme.com in 1999?) I thought I’d share my experience of creating and making a successful blog as I experience it. (I cross my fingers on the “successful” part)

Yesterday marked the first month anniversary of my first blog post on Tweet Sweet, here’s what’s happened thus far:

What is a Blog?
As I mentioned in my first post here on Brad’s blog, my ideas have changed on what blogging is all about in the past couple months. Wikipedia.org defines a Blog as a type of website where entries are made (such as in a journal or diary), displayed in a reverse chronological order. The word “Blog” comes from the contraction of “web-log”.

So first, I learned that a blog was something that interested me, and would be a good outlet for my ideas, as well as build traffic to future projects through it’s readership.

What do I need to start a Blog?
To start a blog, all you need is an opinion or interest, or even a “life” perhaps, and access to an internet connection. Though it helps to understand basic concepts of how websites are built, no programming knowledge is really necessary.

I have opinions, ideas, interests - sounds like a good one for me.

Getting my blog started
I took the advice of Janet who’ve I’ve mentioned before, and decided to use WordPress as opposed to Google’s blogger that I had heard mentioned a couple times and had looked through their demos. And when I investigated the possibility of hosting it through my current host - BlueHost - I found that they offered a one click installation for Wordpress. I decided to host it myself so I could make more customizing changes down the road, rather than host it for free at a sub-domain with WordPress.

So from the process of not having a blog, to making my first post was taken care of in a matter of 5 minutes. Really, BlueHost is amazing (I’m not just saying that because I designed their website either.), but I’ll talk about hosting later.

Writing content that you’ll enjoy and so will others
If there’s one thing about the web, is it’s so large that eventually you’ll find a lot of people who have the same interests as you. I’ve been trying to write what interests me, as well as add reviews for places I’ve gone. Tweet Sweet has over 30 posts now, and I’ve even gotten a couple comments from readers. I’ve found that my biggest struggle is trying to keep posts short and to the point - I tend to think i have to over-explain everything. So how did my readers find out about it?

Telling others about my blog
Janet told me about Technorati - a search engine where you can let others know about your blog. There’s also digg, and del.icio.us that I still have yet to explore and figure out. I’ve also been watching and working with Google to see how it indexes my site. As I learn more about this, I’ll blog. It’s fun to be learning something new, and contributing to the content on the web… hopefully someone, somewhere out there will enjoy it and comment.