I was trying to muster some sympathy for poor old Terry Semel, then I realized that an annual compensation package of $71 millon meant that he made nearly $300,000 a day. In the week between the shareholder’s meeting where his compensation was approved and his exit he made $1.3 million dollars. I don’t make $300,000 in an entire year let alone. Sorry Terry I can’t muster any sympathy.

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How does a blog that has existed for only 5 months have a technorati ranking of over 5000? How does a blogger whose postings include a lot of references to how high his rankings are – do so well on Technorati and Google? The answer Technorati spam. Gary (and many others I won’t link to) use “link trains”. What is a “link train”? (from John Chow): 

1. Write a short paragraph at the beginning of your post and link back to the blog that put you on the list in the paragraph. This isn’t a suggestion. You need to break up the duplicate content string. Someone took the time to add you so the least you can do is give them an extra linkback.
2. Copy the list of originals below COMPLETELY and add it to your blog. If you would like a different keyword for your blog then change it when you do your post and it should pass to most blogs with that keyword.
3. Take the adds from the blog that added you and place them in the “Originals” list.
4. Add no more than 5 new TECH, SCIENCE, or CONSUMER ELECTRONICS blogs to the list in the “My Adds” section.

As John goes on to say these will drive Technorati and Google nuts. Sadly they also drive the real users of technorati and google nuts as they are more likely to find this blogs instead of the valuable content they’re looking for. After all Technorati doesn’t exist to boost the ego and readership of (some) bloggers. It exists to help real people find useful content. In their attempts to game the system John, Gary and others will eventually destroy the value of Technorati. 

In his latest game Gary has a run a favorites link train – you favorite everyone else on the list and then Gary will favorite you back – etc.

Read More…

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In December last year I stumbled on two interesting contests in the blogosphere. The first at Pimp Your Work promised some fabulous prizes (a copy of MindManager etc.) to enter the contest you had give them your best working tip. My tip was a review of my favorite GTD tool – MyLife Organized. The contest ran until Dec 20. On Dec 22 Trish posted a note saying the contest was over and they would award the prizes within the week. Since then silence. This sucks, you baited us to write content for you; you got us to read your blog. Now follow-up and announce the winners.

By contrast Cameron and Neil at Pronet Advertising have run a far more honest contest: "Pimp Your Links". You submit a link to your website/blog and they will choose one a week to feature and criticize. Like clockwork they’ve reviewed one week ever since. Their analyses have given me a few new ideas – now if only they would focus on my own humble blog.

Tris and Scott – will you ever post a list of winners or at least tell us whats going on? BTW Other annoyances there isn’t a email link on your blog nor do you appear to support trackbacks. Blogging is supposed to be about a conversation. You’re making it next to impossible to engage in the conversation.

Update: Leaving my second comment on their blog this month finally got a reaction. Scott said that the contest is still very real and they’re just behind. My suggestion to Scott and Tris: communicate. Write a short blog posting to tell your readers whats going on.

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Scot Herrick asks is LinkedIn useful? What do you get out LinkedIn? What would it take to make it more useful?

I get only a little of value.  When helping a friend conduct a job search recently it was helpful in
figuring out who to introduce him to. Finally its just plain fun to see
who you’re friends are connected to. One of my friends has over 600
contacts – confirming what I’ve always known – he’s a great connector.

I also get some traffic from having my blog as my home page on Linked-in. In theory it will also help keep track of people who change their email addresses.

Next time I do my own job search I’m sure that most of the value will come from taking a few good friends out for lunch. In that case Linked will just be a good reminder of who to talk to.

As I’ve said before (Online Code Reviews suck – even Guido van Rossum can’t fix that) nothing beats face to face communications.

How do you use LinkedIn?

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Choose your
timeslot and subject title wisely. Competing against Mike Milinkovich (Eclipse
Foundation) and Alec Saunders, Michael Dunlevy (Founding Agreements) wasn’t a good
choice. In addition, the title “Scrum in a Nutshell” only sells to people who
already know what Scrum is (I was hoping for a wider audience). Perhaps next
time I will choose a title like “Does your process hold your team back?”.

Finally
trying to squeeze the Scrum game into twenty minutes would have been a really
bad idea – I glad that we stuck to discussion instead. Next time I will get the
audience to drive more of the presentation content.

Thanks to Mark
Stephenson, Peter Childs, Ryan Lowe, Ian Graham, Erik Hagborg, Melany Gallant, Sonny
Juane, Geoff Waddington, Karly Bennett for organizing the BarCamp2.

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Suppose your tired of the lame stats that are available on typepad (hint Anil and Co. – this is the number one issue that would eventually send me to word press). You might want to incorporate Google Analytics into your weblog. If you look in the knowledge base it says that you need advanced templates, a pro level feature, to make use of Analytics. What to do?

Well as I just discovered setting up Good Blogs for typepad you just need to create a typelist (see the instructions on the GoodBlogs site with pretty pictures). Or:

• In the TypeLists Panel Create a new Typelist of type Notes and give it a name (sadly this name will appear in your blog).
• Click "Add this list to your weblog(s)".
• Select your blog, save changes and close the window.
• Choose "Add Item" and paste you Google Analytics code
• Edit your weblog design to decide where this item will appear.

The only downside to this approach is that the typelist will appear in your blog. If you already have another typelist in your blog (Technorati tools? GoodBlogs? etc.) then you could always add the Analytics to it.

By comparison with Typepad’s stats – Google Analytics sings and dances. Maybe Six Apart would just like to get us lowly plus bloggers better support for external tools like this.

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Link: Carbonite Online Backup. Just found this via PC Doctor. I’ve been hoping to find this for a long time. I’ve 30+ GB of photos on my home machine. I do regular backups to a networked hard drive but have always wanted something in the cloud. Now I think I’ve found it. US$ 5/month, unlimited storage. This almost seems to good to be true.

I wonder if this implemented on top of the Amazon S3 cloud?

BTW I  no longer use Carbonite – instead I have a hard disk at a friends house and we just do incremental backups to that device.

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