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I have been talking for years about how Google is the most Enron-like company out there.  Now I find out that Google has plans for trading energy!  A quick overview of my Google/Enron arguments:

• Adwords! Google makes nearly all of their money through a process that is only completely transparent to themselves.  Adwords advertising is what makes Google its money.  Everything else is small change.  It takes a lot of $1 clicks to turn into billions of dollars a year, but everybody I talk to says they “never click them” or “nobody clicks those ads!”
• The smartest guys in the room! This documentary film about Enron is starting to seem eerily familiar when I watch Google.  Hire the smartest people you can find, so it gives the illusion that you are really doing something.  Now, if anybody questions how you are able to make so much money, you can just say they are stupid because they don’t understand!
• The Black Swan! This phenomenon refers to the idea that because all the swans you see are white, black swans must be impossible.  A company grows from nothing into the the most dominant force on the internet in just a few years.  It must be perfect!  Its stock will never go down!  They have never made a mistake, so they never will!  Hooray?  Be careful.

I understand that Google probably uses more electricity than anybody other than the national security agency, so it makes sense that they would want to get more involved with energy trading.  Google makes a lot of money, so they should be involved with banking too right?

The problem is that the public trusts Google too much.

Companies that make massive entries into new and unrelated businesses often fail spectacularly.  When you get a bunch of smart people together to make money, the last thing you should do is trust them.  Do you want the information Google stores about you influencing your power bill?  Do you want to upgrade your thermostat to a cool new one from Google?  What if it provides you with free wifi?  Yes I’m joking, but Google isn’t.

When emptying the trash won’t work in OS X, sometimes the reason given is that the files are in use.  It doesn’t take too much digging to figure out that this is often not the case.  Often I make a slideshow from images taken from my digital camera so that I can see them full screen.  Afterward, I move many of them to the trash since I also keep copies on another computer.  Often, this won’t work for all of the files, and they are left in the trash undeleted.

Here is one possible way to get rid of them:

1. Instead move the files to a different directory where you can easily delete them using the terminal.  The OS X terminal program might be in your Utilities folder inside your Applications folder.  I also suggest you put a link to your terminal program in the shortcuts in the finder.  This can be done by highlighting the terminal program and using the Apple-T keystroke.
2. Open your terminal program.
3. Navigate to where you moved the files using the cd command.  This is the change directory command and will move you to the directory you specify.  If you want to go to a directory called aaaa the command would be: cd aaaa
4. Make sure the files you want to delete are the only ones there! The command to see what files are there is ls.  The command I’m going to give will delete all the files in the directory, so make sure you check first.  Everybody makes mistakes, and this is one you can’t easily undo!
5. To delete the files, and I mean all the files in the directory, use the command rm *.*
6. If you only want to delete some of them, for example picture.jpg, use the command rm picture.jpg

I hope this stuff works for you, and doesn’t cause more confusion.  I honestly don’t know why this problem hasn’t been fixed with a system update in the YEARS since I bought this computer, but at least there is a workaround.  There is much more that you can do with the terminal program, so reply if you can think of more helpful hints.

According to an inside source, Yahoo! has begun to shut down their spider bot named slurp.  This is apparently part of a plan to eventually team up with Microsoft in using their Bing search engine.  It is not news that Yahoo is going to be outsourcing their search functionality to Microsoft and Bing, but it has started to be implemented.  Our tracking software at ELW is very comprehensive, and our recent data indicates that Yahoo has let its spider software rot, and this traffic has begun to disappear.  Stay tuned for more information as it becomes available!

I use icerocket.com to find the latest information in blogs they scan from all over the world.  I highly recommend icerocket to anybody interested in keeping track of information in blogs that might not have gained too much popularity.

Today I noticed that there is another Ben Smith out there making posts about web hosting.  For a number of reasons, I’m going to give this guy a link:  The other Ben Smith.

Apparently this guy has been posting his ass off about web hosting.  This topic seems related to what we do at ELW, which is web design.  I love generating publicity for ELWsoftware.com, our fast-growing web design and development company.  My absolute favorite technique for publicity for ELW and our clients is link baiting.  This means that we post some articles that are specifically aimed at making people notice.  The best way to do this is to get people pissed off enough to write about you.  Here goes:

I am not the Ben Smith in Dallas that writes about web hosting.  I am not illiterate, and I don’t post bad articles and videos about web hosting on a politics.com blog.  If you want a real blog, contact us!

I am the real Ben Smith, and I have the scars to prove it.  I suspect this other guy is some spammer making posts all over the internet in some naive attempt at SEO.  He probably got paid $50 or something on Elance.com to write 500 articles about web hosting.  Let’s see how that works out for him.

If you are considering hiring a web designer for your small business, you should have all of the facts available.  If your small business doesn’t have a website at all, you need to read further.  If you have a website and you want to get more visitors, or if you don’t know how many visitors you get, please consider hiring a professional.  Here are a few things every small business owner should consider when making decisions about a website:

1. Do you want new customers? You would be surprised how many small business owners don’t think about this question.  What would you do with 10 or 100 new customers a month?  What will your existing customers do when the quiet place they like suddenly becomes busy with new people?  If you use your website as an online store, is it possible that fewer people will come in?
2. Do you have anything to say? There probably isn’t too much daily news about the auto repair business, so maybe a blog isn’t right for you.  On the other hand, if car repairs will be taking a while to fix, it would be pretty cool to get updates with pictures.  It might even be fun to have a step-by-step slide show of what goes into fixing or customizing a car.  People love their cars.  Showing people how things get done can produce a great deal of trust.
3. Do animations really look professional? The honest and truthful answer is no.  Animation distracts from your message, especially if you can’t read further until the animation finishes.  You want your web page to say one thing: We can solve your problem. Animations and other eye-candy distract from your message, if they even work.  If you rely on animations to get your message across, this could even hurt you.  Search engines don’t use graphics, they use text.  If the text on your site isn’t good enough, nobody will find it on Google.
4. Who visits your website? If you don’t know who is visiting and how often, you are at a great disadvantage.  A website is not a television commercial where the advertisers don’t even know who is paying attention.  A website offers the ability to know exactly how often people visit, what pages they look at, and where they found you.  You would want to know if all your website visitors came from a Google search for “worst website in town” right?
5. How expensive is a website? Most web designers don’t care that the budget for your small business doesn’t allow huge expenses.  Your plan shouldn’t be to spend as much as you can afford.  If you give a web designer a budget of $5000, they will find a way to spend it.  Your plan should be to find a web designer who wants to improve your business for as little money as possible.

Yesterday I went to Burger King because I wanted a burger with bacon.  I didn’t think about how difficult the drive would be because it isn’t very far.  The nearest Burger King is next to the mall, and the entire area was crowded with Christmas shoppers.  Every year it is like this.  I hate it.  The entire road-facing side of the Burger King restaurant was painted saying that Whoppers were 2 for $3.  So, that is what I ordered.  I added bacon to the whoppers for a dollar each.  I also asked for onion rings since I saw them on the BK value menu for $1. Who is doing the math with me?  The total should be $6 plus tax, but my bill was for 9.97!

I could go on and on about things like this but they happen every day, and apparently nobody seems to notice anymore.  I read a blog post by Seth Godin about what buying a new PC is like.  I had forgotten all of the PC troubles, since I have been using the same Apple computer for almost five years now.  I forgot all about anti-virus software, ridiculous desktop icons, and permission popups for everything.  I understand that they are cheaper, ok?  The problem is that the same people trying to save $100 on a PC are the same people who buy a new car because their old one has slow leaks in their tires or something.  I don’t want to sound like a salesperson for Apple.  I have written about some problems before like the Apple Mouse scroll ball, and how OSX won’t delete files in the trash.

I want to know whether there is a class in business schools that teaches any of the following:

1. Charge people for things at random, and refund them if you someone is patient enough to wait on hold and complain.  (I would single out Bank of America, but everybody else does it too.)
2. Make canceling any recurring payment as difficult as possible.
3. Don’t even think of fixing a problem with a product.  This is what upgrades are for!

Being a professional search engine optimizer requires more than just getting paid.  It seems like search engine optimization has become a profession along the lines of psychics and stockbrokers, since results are never guaranteed.  Search engine optimization is a science, and should be treated that way.

The goal of professional search engine optimization is to reverse engineer search engine algorithms!

The process of a professional search engine optimizer begins not with link building or content generation, but testing.  Here is an explanation of the process used at ELW software, which should be an example for anyone considering themselves professional search engine optimizers:

1. A page scraper. First and foremost, the process of analyzing a web site or a set of search engine results should be automated.  Who would you trust more, somebody who reads a few blogs about SEO, or a company that analyzes many thousands of pages per day?  This means that our software performs searches on many key phrases.  Then the results of all the searches are stored and analyzed.
2. An HTML parser. Once the results have all been stored, it must be converted to make analysis easier for the computer.  This is done with an HTML parser, and there are many of these available free on the internet.
3. Data Mining. Once you have the data ready, the goal is to find out what factors correlate with search engine results.  ELW software doesn’t go into detail on this subject, but we can tell you that the results are often counter-intuitive.
4. Using the data! Once you know what parts of a web page really lead to higher search engine rankings, you just need to change bad web pages into good ones.  This is where you can start generating content, and link building.

Professional search engine optimization techniques aren’t exciting, and aren’t done by typical web designers.  The computer equipment necessary is very expensive, and the software is usually custom-made.  Most web designers are graphics and appearance focused.  Doing real research into search engine optimizing requires using some very modern computer science.  Don’t be fooled by a graphic designer trying to put keywords in meta tags, and buying links.  This isn’t SEO.  Please don’t pay for it either!

Can anybody explain to me how after living in Riverside, California for well over two years, I have never heard of the movie Inland Empire?  It is made by David Lynch in 2006, the guy who also made Twin Peaks and other weird stuff.  I’m going to watch the movie tonight, and I hope It has some things I recognize from the local area.  Maybe the Mission Inn, or the University of California, Riverside campus.

Inland Empire Movie

I’ll let the readers of this blog know if I find anything related to local search engine optimization that would be useful.

I have had an Apple mighty mouse for around 4 years now. Occasionally the scroll ball stops going in certain directions. Nearly every time this happens I think about buying a new mouse, but I love the squeeze buttons on its sides. Apparently the new mouse from Apple doesn’t have the squeeze buttons. I also don’t want to deal with recharging batteries on a mouse. So, I’m not going to buy a new mouse any time soon.

How to fix the scroll ball on the Apple mighty mouse:

1. Find a square of paper towel.  Use a brand that won’t rip too easily.
2. Fold the towel in half twice so that it is a square 4 layers thick.
3. Pour some warm water in the center of the square.  Pour just enough so that some of the towel is still dry.
4. Flip your Apple Mighty Mouse upside down so that the scroll ball is pointing downward.
5. Slide the Apple Mighty Mouse around in circles on the paper towel so that the scroll ball goes in all directions.
6. You can do this with the computer on, and the Mighty Mouse still connected.  This will let you see when the Mighty Mouse scroll starts working again.
7. This will probably solve your scroll ball problem immediately, but often it helps to repeat the process after a few minutes.

I sincerely hope your Apple Mighty Mouse works forever, or at least until apple incorporates the squeeze buttons idea into their new mice.

Every small business needs a website.  Most small businesses either ignore this great opportunity, or take the idea in the wrong direction.  We are very focused on actually getting new customers for your business.  A website is generally just a tool to get this done.

• A website is permanent. Television and radio ads last 30 seconds.  Ads in magazines last as long as people keep them around.
• Say whatever you want! Yellow pages ads cost more when you need to say more, and they are only printed once.  Your website can be updated any time you want to reflect minute-by-minute changes.
• Get found! If somebody types your company name into a search engine, do they find you?  Do they find your competitors? In the worst case scenario, do people find something that isn’t even true about your company?
• Do you have bigger ideas? Do you want to start the next Amazon.com, or Ebay.com?  We call ourselves ELW software for a reason.  We love trying out new things on the web.  Your idea might just be the next big thing!

We would love to help you build your dream website!  Contact us for a free consultation!