Pedro Sttau

Would just like to wish everyone a wonderful 2010, and may you achieve all your dreams, both personally and professional.

Just an unsolicited piece of advice, never ever forget the power of optimism. It can make your dreams come true and turn dust into gold. I will try to remind myself of my own advise every time I start whining and complainung about the current state of things.

If you can dream it, you can do it.

Haven’t posted for awhile but I couldn’t resits sharing you a presentation that was sent to me by a friend of mine. Completely changed the way I look at incentives as a way to boost productivity and performance.

I’ve been a little quite lately because a lot has been happening.
So my company is currently in the process of merging with an important player in our industry, and as you might imagine, things are a tad messy at the moment.

I am experiencing missed feelings about all of this, one day I feel great that we were able to grow enough to get noticed in the market, but sometimes I just cant it help but feel that I am letting myself down and selling out. I guess that anyone who was so emotionally involved in a project and has gone through a merger or acquisition will understand.

I will keep you guys updated.

I know this is a bit geeky, but the sheer size of everything is overwhelming. Take a look at the cooling systems.

The answer is quite straight forward, because he simply tells you NOT too, over and over again. And yes, in case you are wondering it’s the disclosure issue again.

Let me just give provide some of the background so that everyone knows what I am talking about.

First and foremost, I have nothing against Shoemoney, I am using him as an example simply because he is one of the most straight forward people I have ever seen in this industry, making it very easy to user him as an example.

Jeremy believes that there is nothing wrong with “subliminal advertising”; that ethically there is no wrong doing in delivering a shinny review of a product/service with the sole objective of selling the product through a hidden affiliate link. To put it more blatantly, the idea is pretty much “believe in me if you want, but take note that I might just be trying to sell you something”.

I must admit that my first draft for this post was a complete an absolute bash of the way Jeremy conducts his business. I won’t be getting too much into it, mainly because I was rushing myself to conclusions, but the apparent moral aspect of the issue is quite obvious… or is it?

While I wrote the post something in the back of my mind kept bugging me, and its all goes down to the concept of freedom, Freedom of choice to be specific.
It’s just too easy to criticize someone that has clearly always been so opened with his business practices, especially when one of these practices seems at a first glance unethical and wrong.

So if Jeremy is the first person to publicly admit to his user base that many of his posts are sales driven, is he actually deceiving anyone? Is it really “subliminal” when people have been given a prior notice?

I don’t have a solid answer for any of these questions, but they really raised a lot of questions in my mind and in my personal work ethics.

Lets say you have taken a significant time from my life and invested it in a Blog, you work hard to build the a brand around it, and work even harder to keep the content fresh and valuable, but most importantly, you provide all of this free of charge. So the question is, is it really unethical that you profit from any method you chose to deploy, provided you are not actively deceiving anyone?

There is no doubt that Jeremy’s blog is a fantastic resource of information for both beginners and for mature Marketers, and the amount of free information that he puts out there is fantastic, but there is definitely something edgy in delivering content with the purpose of selling something that isn’t being sold in a blatant and flagrant way.

Would you do it?

Nothing really new here, except for one statement that really surprised me. Apparently when things started to go downhill in the economy Google pretty much moved the money away from American Financial institutions and moved it to safer external institutions.

When American companies don’t trust their own banks,you know things are bad.

So I finally decided to upgrade, the problem is that there is plenty of hard-coded work to implement in the blog, so I am expecting a lot of surprises. The last time I attempted to upgrade, things went so badly that I had to roll back.

Bracing for impact.

Extremely interesting presentation by Frederic Colas, Fullsix’s CSO at OMExpo in Lisbon. One of the key notes that grabbed my attention was the way Fullsix approached ClubMeds campaign, by engaging the visitors in a very curious and creative way. Check it out, it will be worth your time.

P.s. big thanks for MarketingDirecto TV for making this content available.

Capitalism is an economic and social system in which trade and industry are privately controlled for profit rather than by the state

Agree or not with the prerogative, at least Capitalism states its premise very clearly, well…that is of course, until things don’t go quite as smoothly as planned.

The concept of a free independent market has been the basis for modern capitalism in the last 50 years. In theory, the markets should regulate themselves, and the binary supply v.s demand should naturally dictate the flow of the market.

But doesn’t freedom bring a new set of responsibilities? And isn’t one of those responsibilities to accept the concept regardless of the circumstance? Or are we solely against something when it’s not convenient for us to be in favor of it?

This sort of double standard makes me question if the freedom we thought we were experiencing in this generation isn’t after all the same kind of tyranny our grand parents went through disguised with catchy buzz worlds like “Free Market”.

As some of you might have noticed, it’s becoming increasingly harder for me to keep this blog updated, primarily because it’s so hard for me to write about Search related issues when I spend all the talking and writing about the subject.

When I first started this Blog I intended to focus solely on Search, but it has proven a much bigger challenge then I perceived, especially since I have to run my own company which pretty much takes away all the time that I used to have.

So I am converting this blog into a more “personal” communication platform, where I will pretty much talk about everything and anything I feel like. And that of course includes topics about Search.

Really appreciate everyone who still follows my blog even consider the lack of fresh content that has been put into it.

This one might sound a little off, but this needs to be said.

I am the only one who doesn’t think that things are all that bad? Sure the economy is down, but for crying out loud, I’ve been people mentioning and throwing around the word “Depression”. Depression..really?

My Grandmother was English, and she lived through World War I, and I remember listening to her describe how she and her sisters would go down to the addict and stay there for days until the German planes would stop bombarding.

Every time a plane would go by and dropped a bomb they could hear the sound of the Bomb falling down and my great grand mother would tell them to close their eyes and count to ten. If they reached 10, it would mean that the bomb didn’t hit the house.

She would describe to me the feeling of going up the stairs and leaving the addict after a bombing, with that feeling of exciting and overwhelming happiness…yes…it was a good day, they had survived.

Survived my friends, this is the word to be noted here. Most of us have never had to survive a day in our lives. Sure we have all gone through some hard times, working too many hours for too little pay, but that’s what life is all about, its supposed to be hard.

So I suggest that all of us make a collective effort to simply ignore the word “crises” for the next year or so, you wouldn’t believe out better all of our lives would be.

So last year I finally decided to get myself a second monitor to see how it would affect my productivity. Although it did take a little bit of time to get used too, once my work system got in sync with the new system, my productivity boosted. And I am not talking about a small improvement; it improved dramatically the way I worked.

By nature I am quite multi tasking, but what a second monitor does, is literally discipline the way a multi tasking person works. With one monitor you are forced to focus your attention on a central area of content. With two monitors you can literally split that attention, making one side complementary to the other. I am not going to get too technical here, so I suggest you read the NEC productivity “A Comparison of Single and Dual Traditional Aspect Displays with a Widescreen Display over Productivity”

One taskbar per monitor

The first negative thing that I noticed when I started using a second monitor was that I couldn’t minimize applications in the second monitor. This was really irritating since I was using one screen for active work and another for communication. (Mail and AIM). Every time I wanted to focus on the multiple Skye or messenger windows I had open at any given moment they would get minimized on the main screen, not on the screen where the windows were open. So by default, every window gets minimized in the main monitor and to maximize it you have to go back to that monitor and click on the minimized application in the taskbar.

A simple Google search led me to a lot of applications that supposedly solved this problem and one in particular seemed to have great user references. Ultramon did exactly what I wanted, it created a task bar in the second monitor allowing me to minimize programs on each screen. So in reality it almost gives you a separate system, where you can run certain applications “independently” from each other. This really improved every aspect of my dual monitor experience and in all honesty I wouldn’t be able to use my dual system without Ultramon installed anymore.

On the beginning of this year, I had a brand New dual core PC from the old office that was pilling dust and not being used at all, so plugged it in, partitioned the disk and installed a copy of Debian and played a bit with it.

Why a second *slave* machine?

Soon I had three screens lined up in front of me and before I knew it I started using the second machine to perform routine macros on the first machine. (backups, automated tasks, etc…) The advantages of having two machines working simultaneously, sharing resources between one another began to be evident. Not only was I using the second system as a “slave” machine but most importantly it was not wasting recourses from my main machine that is always running at least 3 heavy duty applications like Photoshop, illustrator, Dreamweaver, and so on.

Now, having two keyboards on the desk was utterly annoying. It was taking so much usable le desk space and let’s not forget the awkward “Dammit, why isn’t this keyboard working”. (Maybe it would work if I used the right keyboard for the machine I was working on.)

It was during this time that I came across an amazing open source application called Synergy. What this little tool does is it allows you to share a keyboard and a mouse on a Network, meaning that it allows you to control multiple computers thorough a single keyboard and mouse.

You can actually place the second system’s monitor on the side of your dual monitors and it will work as an extension, so in reality its almost like a third monitor added but with an independent machine powering it. I will leave the potential of a setup like to your imagination!

Matt goes through some of the topics that were talked about at Webmasterworld Pubcon in Vegas.