Blog Ryan

Going to be pretty quiet around here for a couple of days.  I’m down at Affiliate Summit with Williams doing some networking and attending some classes.  Had  late night at the Share A Sale sing along.  Pretty funny to watch Shawn Collins sing a Toby Keith song. If you’re looking for any coverage of Affiliate Summit check out our Super Affiliate Marketing blog.

Flew in last night and am getting ready for Affiliate Summit. I am particularily interested in meeting up with people in the financial services space - especially those looking to run the Cash Central payday loan offer. I will be attending the meet and greet and the ice-breakers meetings this afteroon & evening.

I got an e-mail from a new company this morning called Grand Central.  They offer a free phone number that will forward to any phone you choose.  What’s so cool about this? Well they claim that they will always offer unlimited free incoming calls and voicemail storage.  What I really like is I can create groups that will behave differently.  For example, I can have a group called “clients” that will ring only to my office line.  I can create a group called “friends” that will ring to my cell phone, or I can create a group called “priority” that will automagically forward to all my phones to make sure I don’t miss the call.  So say one of my partners call.  The service will forward my call to my office phone and will say “Ryan Williams is calling” I can then decide to take the call, send it to voicemail, accept the call and record it, or listen in as he leaves a voicemail.  Not convinced yet?  How about this, at any time during the call I can hit the * key and it will ring all my phones I have listed and I can switch from my cell to my office line seamlessly, and you the caller won’t be any the wiser.  Cool feature, it can save your precious cell minutes, or let you get out of the office onto your cell when you are in a hurry.

**In the spirit of full disclosure, this review was UNSOLICITED, and UNPAID.  Just thought it was a cool service and you might want to try it.

Made a trip to the eye doctor today. Everything checked out good which made me happy. I’d been experiencing some “visual fatigue” which is what prompted my trip. Basically after sitting in front of the computer all day I would, at times, have trouble focusing. He gave me a list of eight tips that you can implement right away to reduce eye strain and make computer work more comfortable:

1. Position your computer monitor five to nine inches below the horizontal line of sight so that when you look straight ahead, you look just over the top of the monitor.

2. Sit far enough away that you can’t touch the monitor without leaning forward. A good minimum working distance is about 24 to 26 inches.

3. Set computer monitor contrast at moderate to high.

4. If you have a window, position the computer so that the window is off to the side, not directly in front of, or behind the desk.

5. If you use a laptop frequently, get a separate monitor and/or keyboard.

6. Implement use of prescribed office glasses (if applicable). Note: Powers will vary depending on your prescription, eye teaming and focusing (accommodative) abilities.  Your abilities and visual demands are assessed during your regular eye exams.

7. Put a note that says “blink” next to your computer screen. [Jeremy Palmer uses Workpace RSI Software for his reminders]

8. Every 20 minutes, take a 20-second break and look at something at least 20 feet away.

Hope this helps any of you that may be experiencing eye strain or have wondered what the optimal computer placement may be .

The San Francisco Chronicle has an interesting article about some of the 900 millionaires that were made when Google went public. Here are three that I found most interesting.

More than 100 of the original 300 employees have left the company following their new found wealth.
Google employee #53 Charlie Ayers is going to open a restaurant in Palo Alto specializing in organic local foods. He raised $2 million for his restaurant, mostly from former Googlers.

Olana Khan left Google to start a non-profit organazation Kiva.org that does micro-lending to entrepreneurs in developing countries such as Uganda and Ecaudor. (I found this one particularly interesting as Williams and I are launching our own non-profit.)

The other one that would be a dream of mine is the route Aydin Senkut took. He left Google in 2005 to form an angel investing company, Felicis Ventures. He has invested in 17 consumer-oriented Internet start-ups with an average investment of $50,000.

So what would you do if money wasn’t an obstacle anymore?

Checkout additional coverage at Search Engine Land, Marketing Pilgrim, and Google Blogoscoped.

Mark Cuban says Rosie gets it, and Trump is a Chump. His blog entry made me do a little research. Who really gets this new fangled media anyway? Naked conversations as Robert Scoble calls them.

They get it

• Mark Cuban, Owner Dallas Mavericks. Cuban gets the point of blogging. Open yourself up, speak your mind, don’t filter it through layers of PR and Legal (uhm, Microsoft). Cuban is honest, timely, and quite often controversial.
• Bob Lutz, Vice Chairman at GM. No need to remind you how large General Motors is. The fact that somebody as senior as Bob Lutz is blogging, commenting on comments, and implementing suggestions spells out just how well he gets it.
• Rosie gets it. I don’t agree with much that she has to say, but she is out in front letting her opinion be known, and responding to criticism. You see, if you are going to blog you have to do it yourself (uhm, Trump).
• Google - Google gets it. They have many unofficial employee blogs and many official employee blogs. The fact that they don’t put a muzzle on somebody as important as Matt Cutts who is blogging in an unofficial capacity shows they do get it.
• Yahoo - Yahoo mostly gets it. Although maybe not to the same extent as Google. They have a pretty good corporate blog some decent unofficial employee blogs that they seem to allow.

They don’t

• Donald Trump The fact that this blog is located on Trump University site and not on a subdomain like blog.trump.com shows how little the Combover gets it. The king of self-promotion is missing a prime opportunity by not taking advantage of such a perfect medium for his purpose of self-promotion.
• Microsoft has always wanted to get it. They came close when they hired Robert Scoble. When he left so did Microsoft’s chances to prove to the world they could keep up. Microsoft is too bogged down by corporate red tape.  Too busy blogging by committee to actually get out in front and communicate in real time with stakeholders of any type.  They want to, but they just can’t seem to figure it out.

There are plenty more that really don’t get it. I’d be interested to here your take on who does and who doesn’t get this “new fangled “blogging thing.

Here is a link to some corporate blogs that are out there.  Some are great, some are worthless.

Just an update.  Starting off 2007 with a ranking of 893,292.  Pathetic I know, but remember this blog is really only about 2 months old.  Increased posting in ‘07 will no doubt help the cause.  I’ll be posting more on my learning to blog category about new ways I learn to increase traffic, links, and the ‘ol Technorati ranking.

Wow.  Not the way I had scripted it.  I am just now getting over the flu.  This follows, a throat infection and two ear infections.  I spent from Christmas Eve until now feeling like I got ran over by a bus.  I apologize for the radio silence that went on for much longer than expected.  I have a feeling my immune system was weakened from all those late nights watching 24…and yes, I’m caught up now all 5 seasons!

Going to be light posting as we get ready for Christmas.  We’ll be getting back into the swing of things again after the holidays.

 Happy Holidays to all!