Philoking.com

For real guys, I know I work for Microsoft and all, but 6 months ago I would have had the same response, what a load…

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.

That statement is just not even based in reality. Of course this is 100% my own opinion and by no means a statement from Microsoft, but seriously, the intention is to be more competitive with Google, not to take over the Internet and make it proprietary.

Even if that was possible, Microsoft is very aware of the legal restrictions in place in competing in the US and abroad, I doubt seriously they would make moves, especially such highly visible moves, to try and further that perception of the company. Sheesh…

I have almost written this post so many times. I was hesitant for several reasons. The first being I didn’t want to insult anyone in the gay or lesbian community. The second is I didn’t want to talk bad about Google Adsense since they pay me.

Here is the rub. For the thousandth time I have gotten an ad for gay or lesbian websites on my website. Philoking.com is a tech blog. I write about computers, operating systems, software, consumer electronics, blogging and the like. It’s just not an appropriate ad that I want displayed on my website.

I go through the motions, block the site and after a few hours the ads go away. The question is, what about my content makes Google think that those are the kinds of ads that I want on my website.

I hope that they take some stock in their algorithm, look at the sites that we block, and try to intelligently block similar sites for me.

I am have been looking into other ad publishers for some time now given the major discrepancy between credited clicks and the logs my servers show for outgoing clicks, but this reason gives me renewed reasons to quickly look for an alternative. Hopefully Microsoft will open it’s ad serving program to less major sites and I can use that.

I love taking photos. If you haven’t checked out my flickr stream, you will see I take lots of photos. One of my major weakness has always been losing my photos! I would always take hundreds of photos, like a couple, clean them up, resize them, put them online or something, then forget about the originals and at some point inadvertently delete them. Drag!

I had tried Picasa, and it’s a great app, but it didn’t have quite the same ease I have found with iPhoto on my Macbook Pro. Anytime I plug in my camera, it asks, it downloads, I do 99% of my editing in iPhoto, and I am set, my photos are saved, organized and kept safely. I back them up to my external, and I don’t lose anything.

With tagging I never have problems finding them and I can quickly create sets by ranking to put on any of my iPods.

For those of you using a PC, Picasa is an admirable replacement. It’s not quite iPhoto in my opinion, but I would say it’s the best photo management application on PC.

The bottom line here is don’t try to organize your photos in an arcane file system yourself. Find a program that allows you to organize by events or tags and let the application do the work for you. You will be glad you did.

Search engine algorithms are top secret. I would be willing to bet that only a very select few really understand how they work within their own companies. I have been fighting the good fight and have had incredible results with search engine optimization on Philoking.com, but only recently have I discovered a serious flaw in my personal branding, and it has brought to light some inconsistencies in the algorithms that provide results.

I could be way off base here, but at least in my opinion, Google, Yahoo and Live Search are the three most popular search engines. Recently I have began monitoring vanity searches on those services with the terms “Philoking” and “Jason Burns.”

Now this site is no gangbuster of traffic, sure I get tens of thousands of unique visitors a month and my Google Page Rank is 4 and growing, but it’s no monster site, that’s for sure. Never the less, I would hope that many cases would find it higher in relevant search results and especially in the case of Yahoo and Live, they do not.

I will disclose that I spend the majority of my time tailoring to Google, but I do submit sitemaps to the other two and would expect similar results. If you go to the top three and search “Philoking,” I am in the following places:

	Google	Yahoo	Live!
Rank	1	1	3

No big surprises here, on Live! I am bested by my own Flickr profile twice on Live! before my domain which matches the keyword 100% ironically, makes the cut.

My name is completely different though, look at these results.

	Google	Yahoo	Live!
Rank	3	12	7
Top Result	bbbburns.com	Myspace	Hoya burns

So recently I ran a question on Linkedin.com to get some suggestions for how to raise my branding on my own name and I got some great answers. I have implemented these suggestions and will see how they work. The top suggestion email came from Scott Allen from http://entrepreneurs.about.com/

#1 – Put your name in your site title, e.g., “Jason Burns’ Philoking.com”, etc. The title tag is the single most important piece of content on your site regarding search engines.
#2 – You don’t seem to have an “About me” page on your site. Create an About page and make the URL http://philoking.com/jason-burns (or /pages/jason-burns or whatever)
#3 – Modify your template so that Jason Burns in the “Posted by…” is a hyperlink to the About page you just created.
#4 – Write some articles (at least 10) and submit them to EzineArticles.com and maybe a couple of others. In your byline, make your name a hyperlink to the About page from step 2.
Do that and I can just about guarantee you you’ll be #1 for just your name within 30 days. And then you can buy me a chai latte.

Thank you very much for the tip and you can guarantee that if it works I’ll do more than buy you a tea!

I would love for this to become more of a live SEO discussion, please comment and tell me how you have helped brand your website.

Want simple, powerful communication and collaboration tools for your organization without the usual hassle and cost? Ok, I stole that. That’s the pitch from Google. I was curious so this week I did some investigating.

I host my own email. While I liked the web email client I was using, it wasn’t quite as good as Gmail, and it surely did not have the features I was able to integrate with this tool.

This week I undertook the conversion. I gave my most trusted information, my email, to Google. I felt scared at first, but they have yet to do me wrong and I am very happy with the results.

It began with simply signing up for the service and verifying that I do in fact own the Philoking.com domain. I decided to do this by uploading an html file with very specific content but you can also do it with some custom dns records.

Once I had done that, I started setting up the services. They begin with some aliases so you don’t have any downtime with email during the switch. After I had completely set them up, I went into my domain control panel and set up four custom mx records to tell my domain host where to find my email now.

Within an hour, it was getting my mail via Gmail and loving it. I set up POP access so I can still get my mail through Apple Mail, and then I began to explore the service more.

Of course with Google you get Docs, Calendar and GTalk too. Once I started playing, I created my own custom landing page, apps.philoking.com, I created my own aliases to mail, calendar and Google docs, and I am really enjoying the services. I had used the services before of course, but tied to my own domain is very convenient.