Mar
29
Start a company instead of a summer job
Filed Under Business Ideas, Resources, Principles, etc., Education and Love for Learning, General | Comments Off on Start a company instead of a summer job
Paul Graham’s summer founders program also has a link to starting a start up that is very good.
Mar
26
Google Blog Announces Code.Google.com
Filed Under Technology | Comments Off on Google Blog Announces Code.Google.com
Google has begun releasing libraries and other code into open source.
Mar
26
Unforgettable Biography becomes iMemoryBook
Filed Under Business Ideas, Resources, Principles, etc., Education and Love for Learning, Genealogy to Family History to FamilyLearn | Comments Off on Unforgettable Biography becomes iMemoryBook
Over the last couple weeks we have conducted focus groups and surveys about the Unforgettable Biography and the excercise has proven very useful. We have changed the name and tagline and rebuilt the website, improving it by leaps and bounds in ways that our customers want. The changes are receiving great reviews from our customers so far.
It’s now
www.iMemoryBook.com – collect a book of memories for someone special.
Even though we just released our site, the alexa ranking for today is 60,172, in the top 100,000. I predict this site and product will be a great one for FamilyLearn. Thanks to Paul for teaching me about focus groups.
Mar
23
Seth’s Blog: RSS Addict!
Filed Under Technology | 1 Comment
I noticed Seth got stuck without bloglines for a while. I also noticed that he uses FireFox. Seth, there are some great RSS Extensions for FireFox that don’t require that you use Bloglines. I’m using WizzRSS and it works great. Just nice to have the RSS in my tools rather than going to another site. Like Bloglines, it keeps track of what I’ve read and what I haven’t. It gives me categories. The only advantage I see to bloglines is that you can have a category with multiple RSS feeds and when you click on the category, it lists all the feeds. This Wizz RSS reader requires that you click on one feed at a time.
An advantage to Wizz RSS is that you can click on your feeds on the left in your tools and it opens the link in your browser window (rather than spawning a new window like bloglines.
The final advantage, you can export your RSS feed structure to another reader or import from another reader. You’re not tied to it when you’ve spent time organizing your feeds.
Mar
18
Another MBA Book List
Filed Under Business Ideas, Resources, Principles, etc., Education and Love for Learning | Comments Off on Another MBA Book List
The 30 Book MBA in entrepreneurship
Mar
17
Impact of OpenSearch
Filed Under General | Comments Off on Impact of OpenSearch
Vertical Search Engines are pouring onto A9.com after they released OpenSearch and I ask myself how this will impact the web. From an application stand point, it’s giving me an API to every single little search engine out there that chooses to do this. Amazon is getting all these sites to build an API to their content. This has exciting potential in building useful applications. But as always, I can see SPAMMERS exploiting these APIs as well. I’ll enjoy the benefits of the former. Nice move A9.
Mar
17
A9 Vertical Search Engine Agregator
Filed Under General, Search Engine Marketing, Technology | Comments Off on A9 Vertical Search Engine Agregator
A9, Amazon’s search engine has just released OpenSearch that allows search engines from specific topics publish their search results on the new Amazon search engine. Paul found out about it and wanted to publish WorldHistory.com’s database there. I published it last night. Not that difficult to do. Try the search engine out and add WorldHistory.com to your search tabs. It returns great historical dates.
Mar
16
Here’s a list of personal MBA books that I’m posting so that I make sure I read all the ones I haven’t already. Josh Kaufman: Inside My Bald Head: The Josh Kaufman “Personal MBA” Program
Mar
16
Stanford MBA Seth Godin on the MBA
Filed Under Business Ideas, Resources, Principles, etc., Education and Love for Learning | Comments Off on Stanford MBA Seth Godin on the MBA
Apparently, Seth Godin, famous for permission marketing, thinks that dedicated reading of 30-40 books and real life experience is more valuable than an MBA. I personally turned down an internship and PhD program and more from Penn State in order to work on FamilyLearn and get real life experience. Hopefully, Seth’s right and I’m learning more this path than I could have the other. I don’t suppose I’ll ever never know. Seth does know (for him at least) because he did both. Whichever path one takes, I believe a life-long love of learning is more important than anything else.
Mar
11
Alexa Ranking Doesn’t Say Much
Filed Under Search Engine Marketing, Technology | Comments Off on Alexa Ranking Doesn’t Say Much
I have a MAC and a PC. On the PC, I use IE to use the email newsletter manager for FamilyLearn. I have Alexa installed. Last week FamilyLearn’s Alexa rankings shot up by a half million. During the week, we rearched the top 140,000. It was the week that I was editing newsletters. As soon as I stopped, the ranking started dropping until it’s down to 459,000 right at the moment.
This inspite of the fact our traffic has been booming over the last two months. I know that we have more traffic this week than last because I’ve been watching the logs. It doesn’t seem like many in the family history industry use the Alexa toolbar. I don’t know if that’s the case in other industries, but Alexa isn’t reflecting FamilyLearn’s growth very well. I realize that this is a rank against other traffic, but I’m skeptical about trusting the results for family history users. I’m guessing only the most technical or business minded even care about the Alexa toolbar.
keep looking »