Ferguson Canyon

I wanted to use my new camera; So I decided to take a quick hike up Ferguson Canyon.

This is actually a first for me. I've managed to label the pictures with 24 hourse of taking them. I usually end up letting several years lag between taking and labeling.

The pictures were taken in megabyte resolution. I compressed them down to 100k for display on the web.

I have a set of photos taken during the summer of the same canyon that I will upload shortly.

Hiking through Ferguson canyon made me distraught. Like the south Fork of Neff Canyon, Ferguson Canyon was filled with rich loamy soil that is getting trampled. Coco tends to run off trail. Watching her run, I could see the soil being broken up. (NOTE, the upper part of the canyon is 45 plus degree slope with loose soil. A dog running back and forth through that soil does damage.)

Much as I love dogs, I've found that I really hate taking them on mountain walks. Dogs stress the wildlife. They get in the water. Running off trail in riparian zones can affect the fauna in an area. Most areas, of course, can withstand a dog or two.

Anyway, I've decided against taking regular walks in this canyon. Coco is best suited for grass covered parks where she can run and catch frisbees.

Denver City Park

Here are a few pictures of Denver City Park that I took a few years back. I lost my notes; so I skimped on the descriptions.

Building Community

I guess the main reason I was upset with Kathleen Gage's presentation was that the message was diametrically opposed to my belief that the best way of small businesses to approach the internet is to learn to become a good netizen. I reject the notion that the individual is in opposition to the community. What we really should be doing is learning to build community.

I think that this ideal of the individual working within a context of a society to improve himself was central to the classical thinking that had defined the American middle class up to the present era.

The guru world, on the other hand, tends to fall into a more Machiavellian view where everything is based on secret little power relations. The idea of having a group that manipulates sales statistics to make a book look popular is a power relation creating an illusion of success.

IMHO Such illusions simply transfer power to the puppetmasters behind the illusion. They do not actually create wealth.

Conversely, I believe that authetentic actions to build a community really do create wealth. Of course, when you look at the books. Kathleen Gage's gurism has apparently made her quite wealthy. My Community Directories might be benefitting the community at large, but have definitely not put pennies in my pocket.

Street Smarts

Yesterday I attended a meeting hosted by "Street Smarts" guru Kathleen Gage. The meeting was titled "Making Money on the Internet." The meeting was hosted by a Salt Lake County economic counsel at the Salt Lake County Complex. A primary reason I attended the meeting was that the County Building houses a superb collection of art from local artists and I wanted to meet the people from the County.

Anyway, Ms. Gage is an engaging speaker. It would be great to hear her talk about something that she actually understood.

The talk she gave was painful to witness.

As far as I could tell the gist of the program was that she knew the secret for making money on the net. If I were to buy her $120 package, I would be in on the secret.

There is, of course, no formula for success on the internet. Any replicable formula will end up quickly diluting itself. For example, if there was a given topology of spammy web sites that snagged a lucrative key word combination, that topology would end up being replicated to the point that it would either fail or the search engines would find it necessary to find a way to counter the manipulation.

Kathleen Gage did a great deal of talking about using autoresponders and building opt-in email lists. She bragged and bragged and bragged about the success she is having with her list. The problem is that only a small number of businesses do well with such marketing schemes. The business guru world might be one of those small markets. It is not a good path for most businesses.

I say a company should only undertake the cost of developing a newsletter when there is a direct and important benefit to the newsletter. A mortuary problem shouldn't have a newsletter. An association of morticians might have a newsletter. This thing of standing in a crowd saying authoratatively that everyone should have a newsletter, autoresponders and spam list is bogus. These email marketers invariably end up saturating their market. They either fail, or in desparation, become spammers.

She spoke a little bit about Google. Her demonstration of SEO knowledge was quite amusing: She had a big demonstration where she showed that if you typed the string "Kathleen Gage" (using the quotes), you would see 29,000 results. She then asked a member from the audience for their name. The person had an unusual name. She typed in the name. There were only 500 results. The speaker then very proudly announced. If you follow my program there will be more results!

So friggin' what? The number of results simply shows that a name is common or that it is attached to a famous person. Even worse. It might simply shows that someone created a large number of pages bearing their name.

The speaker clearly did not know what she was talking about. My guess is that she was trying to repeat a demonstration someone else gave, but didn't catch on that it was not the number of results that mattered, but one's ability to score well with a lucrative key word combo. Kathleen Gage's scoring the top entry for the term "Kathleen Gage" is not that surprising since she is developing her name as a brand.

The primary subject in her presentation was that she was recently a part of a scheme to propel a book into a top position in the Amazon sales rank. She and some hundred other business gurus had made an agreement that they would all send newsletters and put a particular book on the front page of their site on a given day.

On the targetted day, the spam flew. The web pages tauted the book. The result was that the book shot toward the top of the Amazon sales chart for the day. I think many of the people in the ploy bought a copy of the book that day.

Getting a high sales rank in Amazon on a given day is very impressive, but it is really not new knowledge. The book industry has long been under sway of "best seller" thinking. This whole game where publishers fill shop windows with a particular book on a release date is simply to manipulate the bestseller list.

The idea of groups scheming to manipulate statistics has been around as long as statistics. A few people have became extemely wealthy by forming groups that manipulate stock information. There is a good argument that much of the Kennedy fortune came from such efforts.

As I think back on the presentation, I fear that a major portion of Ms. Gage's speach was aimed at pulling people into her circle so that she would have more power to manipulate the system.

Such circles can manipulate data. I would not categorize this as a way to make money on the Internet. In most cases, only the people in the inner circle ever really prosper. It is not really a formula for creating wealth. It is a formula for concentrating power into the hands of the few people in the inner circle.

I was upset after the presentation. Here was a person who was very good at speaking. Following her arguments through, most of what she promoted led to mediocrity.

I chose not to buy her $120 marketing scheme. I fear, however, that several people from the audience did.

NOTS: This is a comment on only one extemporaneous talk from a speaker. I suspect that her talks on other issues are better.

Fort Collins

I restarted the process of adding pictures of Fort Collins. I took these pictures with my old camera, but had a lot of problems adding them to my site. One big problem is that my web host keeps changing the IP of the database. The site was taking 5 seconds to access the database. I found a different IP to use in the connection, and now the site is behaving well again.

Anyway, this is the second go at labeling this set of photos. It takes longer to label photos than to take the pictures. One big problem. I can't find my notes ... so a lot of the photos just get the label some "building at CSU". The other problem. This is the trip when my camera broke. The photo element is loose and crooked. The pictures are all kind of slanted. There is also a little bit of a fish eyed lens effects with each of the photos.

Slashdotting for Fun and Political Influence

Pete Ashdown (The xmission guy) has an interesting article on using community sites like slashdot in political campaigns. His organization had a concerted effort to get a story slashdotted. The effort resulted in people making contributions to his wiki and a rather impressive chunk of free advertising.

BTW: Mr. Ashdown is running for the U.S. Senate.

I guess we should expect to see savvy politicos staging different efforts to manipulate the world's supposedly unbiased community web sites.

I do like Mr. Ashdown. I appreciate that he is honest and open about his web campaign efforts. His blog entry shows the thinking going on in the great public opinion manipulation game.

Every web site, of course, is open to manipulation. Personally, I like to promote small independent web sites ((plug for Community Color) as the amount of manipulation gets offset and diluted.

South Temple

I haven't been taking advantage of my new camera. So I decide to take a few photos along South Temple. This area has a unique collection of architecture including the Cathedral, the Governor's Mansion. I already had pictures of Abravanel Hall, Temple and places west.

Sugarbeets

Here's a picture of one of the sugar beets sculptures in Sugarhouse. I think I will concentrate on working on the photo site. For some Protophoto has been extremely sluggish of late. I am wondering if I have code that's overloading the server or if it is one of the other sites on the shared domain.

Parental Consent

I've decided to use the MSN system for posts on controversial topics. So, I moved this post.

First Post of the Year

I haven't posted a blog item for awhile.

Let's see, for Christmas, I got a cold. Rather than the "Happy Holiday" v. "Christmas" debate, I think the pundits should discuss this whole Santa Claus thing. Here is a guy who travels to all the houses of the world (regardless of whether people are sick or healthy.) He slobbers all over a glass of milk and cookies, and then puts his germs on all sorts of presents that he puts under a tree.

The guy is a health menace. He does worse than an international airport at spreading disease.

Think of it. All those presents being packaged by dirty little elves who probably haven't been trained in proper handwashing techiques ... it's freightening.

Rather than this "Christmas" v. "Happy Holidays" debate, the health department should be condeming Santa as a disease vector.

Speaking of germs everywhere ...

... I download several episodes of the show Monk from iTunes (click here for download). Monk is an obsessive-compulsive detective (the defective detective). His problem is that he sees and remembers everything and has a knack of piecing together mysteries in rather interesting ways.

The show is on USA network ... so you only get to see it if you subscribe to the rest of the garbage on cable. I am happy that both iTunes and Google are starting to make past episodes of TV shows available online.

The price at iTunes is a $1.99 a show (sitting on the upper side of what I would consider reasonable.) MovieLink came has a few programs to download. The shows they had were in the $5 range.

I am happy that the movie and TV Show downloading industry is growing. I hope that more players than just MovieLink, iTunes and Google join this market and that we some day see real price competition in the download industry.