The Game of Life: New Chromatic Projection Method
I’ve been interested in The Game of Life ever since I heard about it back in the 70s/80s. It was some time around when my dad bought us our first personal computers. The Game of Life was invented by the mathematician, John Horton Conway, as he worked upon a way of modeling life-like behaviors within a simple field of rules. Conway’s Game of Life was popularized by Martin Gardner — the well-known writer of a popular science column in Scientific American.
Tons of hobbyists and computer programmers cut their eye-teeth by playing the Game of Life through programs copied out of magazines onto their PCs. I recall copying one of these programs out of a computer magazine into either our Timex-Sinclair 1000 or Commodore 64. I can’t recall whether it was Dr. Dobb’s or one of the myriad specialty Commodore zines that my dad was always buying.
Glider Pattern animated
with color path projection
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 02/14/2007
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Filed under: Dynamic Sites, General, technology cellular-automata, game-of-life, John-Conway, Martin-Gardner, The-Game-of-Life
Pork Board Thwacks Mom to Safeguard their Money-Laundering Scheme
So, the blogosphere was full up last week with postings about Jennifer Laycock, the well-liked search marketer who put up a website to support a breastfeeding nonprofit group. I heard her speak on Linkbaiting last year at SES San Jose, and she was fantastic! I’d even spammed some of our staff at my company with a note mentioning that session.
Well, one of her fundraising methods is to sell t-shirts with humorous phrases on them referring to milk and breastfeeding, and the one bearing the slogan, “The Other White Milk” attracted the ire of the National Pork Board who own the trademark “The Other White Meat”. Laycock blogged about the National Pork Board‘s demands, and many other bloggers jumped to her defense in a small blogstorm.
Most folx mentioning this failed to mention what use the National Pork Board has put “The Other White Meat” slogan to: avoiding controls on how they spend money. Read on and I’ll elaborate. (more…)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 02/05/2007
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Filed under: brand names, General brand names, national-pork-board, slogans, trademark-infringement, trademarks
Dinner at Moto
So, I took Stephan Spencer out to a restaurant here in Chicago tonight that I was dying to try out: Moto Restaurant. We’re both here for the SES Conference, and it’s my first time in Chicago proper, so I wanted to try something I couldn’t get at home in Dallas. Moto had caught my eye because the chef, Homaro Cantu, is apparently something of a mad scientist. He’s known for using all sorts of bizarre ingredients and methods to create his food, and the place has this dangerously edgy feel to it that makes you feel like you’re engaging in borderline risky behaviour, just by eating there.
If you know Stephan, you might know that he tends to prefer simpler food in general, so he nearly balked at the idea of going. Once we’d arrived and had the first course or so, I think he was starting to think that the whole thing might be some horrifying Fu Manchu torture, or perhaps a really bad joke on my part. Read on for more details.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 12/05/2006
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Filed under: General, Image Optimization Food, Image Optimization, Moto-Restaurant
Attending SES Chicago 06
I’ll be attending the Search Engine Strategies Chicago 2006 conference next week, and I’ll be speaking on the panel on Images & Search Engines, for anyone interested.
My part of the presentation will be on “Optimizing Through Image Sharing Sites”. I’ve written here previously about optimizing images for both image search and web search, but some of the material in next week’s presentation will be completely new, and hopefully worthwhile for anyone looking for new organic traffic opportunities to exploit. I’ve been sweating to complete some of the research for this for the past few weeks, and I think the resultant info will be pretty cool!
I’m planning to drop a handful of my bizcards off at the Superpages.com booth in the exhibit hall, for anyone interested in contacting me while at the conference. I understand that our booth will also be sharing space with our compatriots from Inceptor (a company we acquired earlier this year). I’ll be interested in seeing how this hybridized booth thing works out, along with any new Idearc branding that might start showing up on it.
Mike Sack from Inceptor will also be speaking later the same day as myself, on the panel for Converting Visitors Into Buyers.
Finally, I should also mention that Stephan Spencer, who graciously invited me to guest blog on here many months ago, will also be speaking that same day on the panel for Blog & Feed Search SEO. I’ve heard Stephan speak on this subject previously, along with Rick Klau from FeedBurner, and I found it very interesting/worthwhile.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 11/30/2006
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Filed under: Blog Optimization, General, Search Engine Optimization, SEO Blog Optimization, Image-Search-Optimization, search-engine-strategies, SES-Conference
Questions for SEOs
A few weeks ago Stephan invited me to their motley crew and though I start with great enthusiasm, I’ve had many sleepless nights considering how to make a first impression. I’m Paul O’Brien and while I, as do many, write a blog of my own at seobrien.com, I am grateful for the opportunity to share, amongst the tremendous SEO experience that Chris, Stephan, and Brian bring to the table, my natural search perspective and experience from Yahoo! and HP. My background lies in advertising, paid search, comparison shopping, and brand and demand gen advertising; SEO is only a part though it consistently remains the most beneficial. I’m a practical SEO, heavy in analytics and science, dependant on resources and support, and light on the technology; hopefully, I can share with you something of value.
At the risk of not delivering to your expectations, or perhaps merely my own, I thought I’d start simple. I noticed that over a year ago Stephan posted a great series of questions for SEOs, questions about the industry, the practice of SEO, and our future. Missing from NaturalSearchBlog is a discussion of the appropriate questions to ask an SEO when seeking support. Here are my thoughts:
- What techniques do you use to achieve rankings?
- Avoid companies that focus on getting you links or promise you top placement
- What risk is involved with the methods you suggest?
- Every technique has risk, get an answer and weigh it against the benefit. Consider that risks include a wide variety of hurdles and challenges such as IT intensive projects, adverse impacts on your brand, or withdrawal of your site from natural search results.
- What will happen if our relationship is dissolved?
- They should be able to get in, do some work, and get out, leaving you with the experience to maintain your optimized site
- Yes, you might want a full time, ongoing SEO but you don’t need one
- Can you show me examples of past work?
- You bet they can
- What was the client’s ROI?
- Sure, SEO is “free” in that it doesn’t have a marketing cost but good SEOs know the cost that went into their service, IT/engineering resources, copywriting, etc. Don’t be sold on just the improvements in traffic, position, or the growth in revenue, what was required to deliver that?
- What increases in traffic are reasonable to expect?
- This is tough because it depends on your site, but that’s why you should ask, expect an answer that is relative to your site and details that show how your experience is unique
- How long until I start to see results?
- What would you expect from OUR end to aid your work?
- Important because the answer is NOT ‘nothing’
- What were some of your top search ranking achievements?
- Do you offer any other internet marketing services to supplement your SEO offerings?
Look for a company that understands your business, marketing, technology, and the internet extensively. Most importantly, do not shop around based on price. You don’t want a deal as you need expertise while at the same time, SEO isn’t really expensive rocket science (it is alien for most people but not rocket science).
Find a professional that meets your needs, start with these questions, let us know what works for you, and what you look for from an SEO.
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Posted by stephan of stephan on 11/29/2006
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Filed under: Best Practices, General, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Tools, Worst Practices agencies, black-hat-seo, choosing-seo-firms, SEO, SEO-consulting, SEO-worst-practices, SEOs, support, vendors
Update: Sullivan still to be involved in SES
Last night I noted that SearchEngineWatch briefly cratered as some sort of early apocalyptal sign of things to come after Danny Sullivan’s earlier announcement that he would be leaving SEW behind, and that he wouldn’t be involved in Search Engine Strategies Conferences in 2007.
Now for instant turnabouts: Sullivan announced just this morning that Incisive Media worked out some details with him at the eleventh hour, so he’ll be chairing SES NY, co-chairing SES San Jose, and participating in the SES Chicago.
That’s great news for 2007!
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 10/23/2006
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Filed under: Conferences, General Search-Engine-Watch, SES-Conference
SearchEngineWatch.com Cratered Briefly Tonight
Well, SearchEngineWatch.com apparently had a crash for a short period tonight, giving back pages that looked like this:
Ironically, this illustrates what many in the SEO industry felt would become of Search Engine Watch ever since Danny Sullivan announced he’d be leaving editorship of the site and the Search Engine Strategies Conferences.
Â
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 10/22/2006
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Filed under: General danny-sullivan, Search-Engine-Watch, SearchEngineWatch
Google Book Search: Not a Threat to Publishing
It’s not surprising that large chunks of the book publishing industry have gotten up in arms ever since Google announced its intentions to scan the world’s books and make them available online for free. After all, the publishing industry is not really known for adopting modern practices all that quickly. Book publishing is a grand old industry, and top publishing houses seem more invested in preserving the status quo than in adapting for the changing world.
But, when the publishing industry got up in arms against Google’s plans to facilitate the searching of books, their knee-jerk reaction against the new paradigm caused them to miss the fact that Google’s basic proposal really isn’t all that revolutionary. There’s another institution that has taken published books and made them available to the public. For Free. For thousands of years. Libraries!
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 10/08/2006
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Filed under: General, Google, Searching Amazon.com, book-search, Google-Book-Search, Publishing-Industry
Dr. Paul W.K. Rothemund and Dr. Eric Winfree awarded the Feynman Prize at nanoTX Conference
Dr. Paul W.K. Rothemund and Dr. Eric Winfree were awarded the 2006 Foresight Institute Feynman Prizes at the nanoTX Conference last week, at a special awards reception. (I earlier blogged about H. Ross Perot’s keynote address at this conference.)
Rothemund was on-hand to receive the award, and I was fortunate to be able to attend his presentation on his and Winfree’s research. Rothemund delivered first a presentation on his work, and then he delivered a presentation on behalf of Winfree who could not attend.
Rothemund’s work is fantastic — he works upon Algorithmic Self-Assembly. He’s been able to program long strands of viral DNA such than when mixed in a suspension with other short DNA snippets (and heated slightly), the snippets or “staples” will bind to the long strand in particular order, causing it to fold back upon itself to form precise shapes. Rothemund has nicknamed what he does as “DNA Origami”, although the key concept is the ability to program the DNA to order itself into near two-dimensional, or even three-dimensional shapes. As proof of concept, Rothemund has programmed DNA to fold itself into words, stars, smiley faces, and other shapes.
Smiley composed of one long DNA strand
The staple snippets of DNA are not shown in this representation.
(Illustration copyright 2006 by Chris Silver Smith.)
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 10/02/2006
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Filed under: Futurism, General, technology Algorithms, artificial-intelligence, DNA, future, Futurism, nano, nanotech
Is Web 2.0 Bogus as a Business Model?
For all of us who survived the exuberance of the dot-bombs era, a little blog entry by my friend, Randy Weber, entitled “Business Development 2.0 is BS 1.0” could serve as a nice dose of logic amid all the hype going on.
In his post, he lists out some salient points on why some of the Web 2.0 companies’ business plans are woefully lacking. It makes some sense. After all, if you’re sharing your core content and intellectual property (in the form of free apps), anyone can replicate your site, and they might just do it better than you, and you won’t see any of the money they’re making!
Web 2.0 maybe doesn’t have a simple definition beyond “I know it when I experience it”, but at base it seems to be founded on user-generated content and syndication of that content along with application services. So, businesses based on Web 2.0 would seem to be counter-intuitive to the normal mechanics of classic biz, and those businesses founded on it might have a lot more risk associated with them.
I think there are just a few caveats to Randy’s post, though. Read on and I’ll explain.
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Posted by Chris of Silvery on 09/30/2006
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Filed under: General AdSense, del.ici.us, flickr, Google, konfabulator, thin-affiliates, Web-2.0, Yahoo
