evilgreenmonkey

My New Years resolution for 2007 was to become a published author, with the thought of writing an SEO book which tackles search from the corporate and in-house point of view. This idea fell by the wayside when several friends in the industry also announced similar intentions (although with different angles and subjects).

The book which I was planning would not just cover the basic Best Practice areas, but also tackle issues such as Black Hat SEO and dealing with agency bullshit. I’ve worked with some of the biggest brands on the web, and really think that there’s still a lot to be learnt when dealing with corporate websites.

Would you read such a book, and should I follow my ambitions?

It looks like that crafty Naylor guy has asked his blog readership to vote for him on the “Nicest Bloke In SEO” poll. I’m really lagging behind, which is not nice. If you’re one of the 5 people who read my ramblings here, vote for me now and you could win a date with The Lisa*!

* Lisa doesn’t know yet, although I’m sure she’ll be OK with me using her in this fashion

I picked the worst possible time to go on holiday, although my mate Dug and I have been planning a roadtrip around Ireland for a long time now and we’ve already put the date back twice. So we packed our bags and headed to Heathrow for a quick flight over to Dublin and an 11 day adventure. Oh, and to add to things, I resigned from PartyGaming on the day that my vacation began (to move into full-time SEO Consulting)! With the plan being to stick to the rural roads and try to stay away from popular tourist traps, getting internet access was not as easy as first imagined (there weren’t even any WiFi points to leach off!). I therefore had little time to keep up with industry news, which was actually quite daunting for a person such as myself. It seems that Jane is in the same situation as I was - don’t do it Jane!

The holiday was superb though; meeting the Kerry clan…

Re-creating the cover of one of my favourite books… can you guess what it is yet?

And drinking the black stuff of course!

While I was away, ThreadWatch closed its doors, which was not good at all. Although Aaron announced his intentions before my holiday, I was sure that a) It wasn’t just a link bait idea and b) someone would buy the rights and keep things flowing. So when I got home and discovered a page of stale news, I was mortified. If you’re wondering, I heard that Dave Pasternack and Jason Calcanis were to blame for the site closing - threatening to use clickbots on Aaron’s PPC campaigns and write a negative bio about him on Maholo ;).

I thought that JasonD planned to create a Threadwatch2 at w3wisdom.com, although the site seems to have disappeared.

The big chief also started a Threadwatch/Digg style extravaganza called Sphinn which I hadn’t spotted before. It allows you to submit new search industry stories like on Threadwatch and vote for other people’s stories like on Digg. I like how extensive the profile pages are, with lots of room to pimp out your blogs and contact details. I’m actually very keen on the site so far, which is very unusual for the grumpy old bastard that I am. Well done big chief, and I look forward to spamming (sorry, SMO’ing) it soon If you haven’t check it out yet, get in their fast before I hold all your usernames to ransom!

The SEO Chicks also raced ahead of us Blokes with a plethora of almost respectable articles, gaining some cred from Stuntdubl among others. I accept some of the responsibility for SEO-Blokes.com not keeping up with our female fatales, so I’ll try to start blogging again soon.

I don’t think that anything else major happened, not that I can mention here anyway. Maybe I’ve missed something over the last 2 weeks?

It will be hard for me to go without internet access for that long again, hopefully I’ll get a Blackberry soon for my email and RSS fix.