SMX West is coming to Santa Clara next week, Feb. 10-12. This was a great conference last year and it sounds like people are pretty excited about it again this time around. Danny Sullivan, John Battelle, and Vint Cerf are giving keynotes. I’ll be sitting on the Expert Technical Review panel at the end of the day. Webmasters will get a chance to get there site reviewed by panelists who will give feedback on potential improvements to be made if any.
I’ll be attending as many sessions as I can, and I enjoy meeting others in the industry. If you’re going, please find me and say hi!
Posted in: google, smx.
I finally got around to moving off blogspot and onto my own domain. I suppose if anyone cared, or if I had enough subscribers to matter, I should have posted about this before I actually moved it. Oh well. http://www.nathanjohns.net is where it’s at now!
Posted in: Uncategorized.
I’ll start by saying I don’t support a government-sponsored bailout of the Big Three automakers in the U.S. Some quick rambling points:
- I understand there are a lot of jobs at stake. However unfortunate, this is not a valid reason for the auto bailout.
- The Big Three have been struggling for years. The financial crisis is giving them an out.
- If they don’t get a bailout, they will file for bankruptcy, sell parts of the company, re-organize, and most likely become profitable automakers once again.
- The government as auto industry manager? Seriously? That’s got to be a joke, because if it’s not, my brain might start to leak out of my nose.(I don’t hate the government, I just don’t think they should be making cars).
Here are a couple observations I have on the auto industry. It’s important to note I know very little about the inner workings of making a car from start to finish, etc. etc. Having said that:
- WTF is up with the process of going from concept to production? Why do the concept cars always look really sexy and awesome, then get totally destroyed by the time it gets to production? I’ve heard one simple explanation that goes something like this: the concept engineers come up with a car, then they send it to the production engineers who say “we can’t do this, this, this and this, it’s impossible” so they change everything to make it work. So they spend hundreds of millions of dollars on making a concept car that gets totally borked and re-designed? That seems like a broken system. I understand a car is a very complicated piece of machinery, but damn. Have you seen the before and after pictures of the Chevy Volt? (Before and after pics – the first one I took at Google campus):
I still like the newer look, but it’s still a big downgrade. This happens to be one of the most anticipated cars ever and I thought would be a good example.
- WTF is up with automobile advertising? Is it really worth spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a commercial for a truck with Dennis Leary as the voice-over, and then play it like 43 times during a football game? I understand there’s a certain value behind brand awareness, but c’mon. Auto advertising is broken and needs to be fixed. I think they could spend half the money and be twice as effective.
That is all.
Posted in: Uncategorized.
Last week, I sat down with Tech Talk Radio to talk about blogs, feeds, and web spam. I was joined with my colleague Anindo – You can listen to the full two hour show or get the shorter podcast.
Tech Talk Radio is based out of Australia. They have Lidjia Davis based in the Silicon Valley for reporting and interviews. It was a pleasure meeting her, and getting the chance to sit and chat about some of the topics in the Google Search Quality world.
Posted in: google.
Went to see My Morning Jacket in concert at the Greek in Berkeley last Friday evening. I have to say it may have been the best concert I’ve ever been to.
There weren’t any opening bands, just MMJ. They came out around 8 and finished around 11, so we got nearly three hours of live music. I’d heard that they were really good live, and have somewhat of a large and dedicated following for concerts. I was blown away with how good they sounded. I think these knuckleheads enjoyed it too:
Posted in: music.
I’ll be at the Search Engine Strategies conference this week in San Jose. This will be my first time as a speaker (panelist, really) for Google, and I’m happy to get a chance to represent and help others if possible. I’ll be a panelist for the Site Clinic on Thursday at 10:15 am. Come by and say hi, ask questions, but take it easy on me, it’s my first time!
Looks like the schedule is packed with lots of good stuff, so I’m sure the conference will be another success. If you’re attending, be sure to make it to the Google Dance Tuesday night at 7 pm. I’ll also be hanging out at the Google Webmaster booth. Very friendly people with lots of good advice. I also hear there may be some pretty intense foosball matches being played. Swing by Tuesday and Wednesday in the Expo Hall, booth 530. I somehow got picked to represent Google (along with Jan from the Dublin office). I’m going to need to shake the rust off. 
Posted in: google, ses.
Just tried out the video downloads on the PS3 network last night. I downloaded a couple episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Since it’s just a cartoon, and a rather short one at that (around 12 minutes an episode I think), the download didn’t take very long at all, and only took up about 170 mb or so. They were $1.99 each.
The selection isn’t the biggest yet, but I have to say what is available is a decent selection. Poking around, I noticed among the HD movies available for download, the largest I spotted seemed to be just over 6 gb. I’ll be curious to see how long that takes to download and if it gets throttled by Comcast. I think I’ll need to look into upgrading the storage for the PS3 as well. Is this easy to do on the PS3? I haven’t looked into it yet.
Oh, and the episodes I watched were the first two episodes from season six. Wacky and weird as usual, but still hilarious. And Frylock, Master Shake and Meatwad don’t even show up yet.
Posted in: ps3, technology, television.
I tried to register a couple of .me domain names today. Searching for the domain names returned “available!” messages, so I continued through the registration and payment process. Entered credit card info, etc. etc. Even got the confirmation email.
Then I got an email saying “The following domain name cannot be registered – reason: already registered”.
Well, that would have been nice to tell me WHEN I WAS DOING THE FREAKING SEARCH TO BEGIN WITH.
I know I’m not the only one this has been happening to. How can they not be prepared for this kind of surge? As the self-proclaimed “World’s #1 domain name registrar”, you think they would handle this better.
To top it all off, they send me an email asking to fill out a customer survey after speaking with their support on the phone. I filled out the survey which included some negative feedback. After I hit the “submit” button, I get a pop-up in the browser stating: “You are about to submit negative feedback. Are you sure?”
Wow. Seriously? You’re f$%&ing right I’m sure.
Posted in: Uncategorized.
Time for a doomsday post, but first, a funny cartoon that’s been around for a while:
When you consider all of the things we worry about these days, it can really be quite depressing. Take the following for example:
- global warming
- the economy and possible recession
- the housing market and sub-prime mess
- the war in iraq – still going
- the deficit – still growing
- skyrocketing gas prices and depleting oil reserves
- crazy floods in the midwest
- crazy wildfires in California
- rising food costs
- disappearing or dying bee population – almost 1/3rd of them
- world population is near 7 billion, projected to add another billion in just 12 years
- reality tv shows like tila taquila
Those are just things off the top of my head. So how are we going to fix these things (well, the ones that can be fixed), and continue to scale for the future?
I dunno. I was hoping someone knew. If you have an idea, leave a comment.
Posted in: Uncategorized.
