Philoking.com

It’s 6:41 PM on Friday night. I am flying home from San Francisco and I still have quite a few thoughts about Google spinning in my head. An interesting thing occurred to me and I thought it would be a great idea for an article and a good time to explain what amounts to a paradigm shift in thinking about my web site.

Philoking.com is a technology blog. I write about everything and anything that pertains to technology and that’s pretty much it. Now to let you in on a little secret about me, in the end of 2003 I resigned from my position with KFC after beginning something totally different as a side project. With nothing more than some knowledge from a prior life and a lot of initiative, I started a newspaper from scratch. The paper was called Operation: Dinner Out, shortly just Dinner Out, (big credit if you can tell me the origin of the name!) and it was one of the weekly society like papers you are used to seeing in most towns. It was about 30 pages or so a week, ad supported, and was in all ways but financially a great success. Turns out that geeks are terrible salesmen, but that’s a story for another article.

The point to this rambling is that only today did I realize that I am just as much a publisher now as I was then. I am much more the owner of my content as I was then seeing that I now do not syndicate any content. With a few exceptions, every article you read on this web site was researched and written by yours truly. So with that something magical occurred to me. I have to publicize this just as I did my paper then. I have to hit the virtual pavement and tell the world how great it is to be in and around my content. There is no one else that is going to magically link me all over the place without some prodding.

Of course I have to continue to create compelling content, and I think that I have accomplished the basics of that with an average of 20,000 readers per month, but the next step, the one that takes me from a few dollars a day to being exceptional, is simply me. Meeting with Google this week was an eye opener on how to advance my web site in popularity and profitability and I am more than excited to put my new thoughts and ideas into motion.

So today I write to you as Jason Burns, editor of Philoking.com, a division of Adspigot Media, my now resurrected Media Company. Adspigot Media is the holder of Philoking.com, TakeMyTech.com and soon to be re launched gaming site focused towards women gamers, Dawngrrl.com.

I am very excited to be doing all of this right now as many parts of my life are becoming more exciting professionally, but this web site has been a real joy to run for the last year plus. With nearly 500 articles in the last year, thousands of comments and almost a million viewers in that time, it’s the time to grow.

My focus for the rest of the year and the coming new year are page views per user, my bounce rate and feed subscriptions. I thank you all for your continued readership and hope you are with me as I begin to solicit new and interesting writers to help expand the content more and more.

If you are interested in writing for this site, including full credit for your work and links back to your own sites, contact me directly.

This was a very interesting last two days for me. Wednesday I flew down to San Francisco and was driven over to meet some of the folks at Google, Inc.

I know that for me even, Google had a very interesting reputation as a place to work. While Non-disclosure agreements make some things impossible to disclose, I can tell you that as a geeky guy, this place was a lot of fun to be at.

There are so many things to tell that I will try to summarize and get to the main points of some of the coolest things and not dwell on heated toilet seats….yes, heated toilet seats.

Google is a quite sprawling campus. For most of the time we were on the side with the Analytics and Consumer Packaged Goods teams so we were only at the main campus for a short time but that was enough to see why people would want to work there. It’s enough time to make you wonder why people would ever leave. It’s a very college like atmosphere and at a different time in my life I would have already sent in an application and never left!

Google has some interesting principles about work load and creativity. The entire place is meant to make you as comfortable and by that as productive as possible. Food everywhere, snacks, drinks, entertainment, you name it.

I met around a dozen team members and while everyone was very nice, several of the engineers and one guest speaker really were impressive to me. Our lunchtime speaker was Google’s Analytics Evangelist, Avinash Kaushik. I had never heard of him before, but I left there in search of his book. Be sure to check out his blog for more information, he is a really smart guy with some very succinct thoughts on optimizing and marketing your site.

Dennis Domingo had some really interesting things to show related to Google Earth and Maps, and Brett Goffin really showed me Google’s commitment to being a true advertising powerhouse, not a search engine specialist.

I wish I could tell more about what’s going on, but secrecy is what it is, on to some cool things.

• Employees are always within 100′ of free food and drinks
• Free on site laundry facilities
• Google employees get 20% of their work time to work on personal projects
• Did I mention heated toilet seats? lol
• Macbook Pro and Thinkpad power adapters built into the conference tables
• Free WiFi (obviously)
• Concerts on campus
• Play centers with everything from pool to legos.

That’s by no means an exhaustive list, but gives you an idea of the working environment. The thing that I have to mention is, the people.

If the environment is what breeds the people, it’s working. Every employee I met was bright, articulate, friendly, and simply brilliant. I have not had a more enjoyable time visiting a company that I can remember.

I am sure I will continue to communicate with a few of the people I met there and I really appreciate the experience.