Mike Levin – A Marketing Technologist in NYC

More about Mike Levin

▶ What are your exercises for clear thinking?

▶ What’s the difference between thinking and doing?

▶ Why is everything so difficult?

▶ How do you know so much?

▶ What are your biggest life’s learnings?

▶ What can you do, and what have you done lately?

▶ Why do you keep an online journal or diary?

▶ Why do you write about these particular technologies?

▶ Why is everything here so technical and difficult to understand?

▶ Who are you, and what is this site about?

Here are my 50 latest posted articles:

• The Time I Shot A Guy I’m not proud of this. Oh wait, I sort-of am. Here’s a story I’ve only shared over the past twenty years with close friends, and maybe only after a few drinks. It’s the one they can’t believe happened, except for the fact that it did. Although it briefly made me a hero to some Philadelphians, it was still an unfortunate series of events that could have become the main thing I was known for before I even established myself. So I swept it under the carpet for the better part of two decades. Flash forward twenty years, and I’m now a Marketing Technologist in New York City with one of the top 1% of viewed profiles on LinkedIn. I carry my career and reputation with me now wherever I go. And since I’m finally getting my stories out there, I guess it’s time I wrote about the time I shot a guy. It was in Philly back in the ’90s… the early ’90s. And that’s all the explanation my wife ever gives—letting the mystery hang there in the air, to which I add a confirming nod. She shits you not. Still, to this day, that’s as much explanation as a few of ...
• Park Terrace Gardens NYC Co-op Bullying By Board & Neighbors Note: Reach me or my wife @jewyorican at ParkTerraceGardens.org, and enjoy her famous humor at @elbloombito. This post is about being bullied by a pair of neighbors, and testing the limits I can endure trying to adhere to my own self-image as a good person. I’ve held back on publishing this article after the harassment intensified as I tweeted about my mother’s passing. I’ve held back on publishing it after the lies were exposed and the real motivations revealed. I held back as management ignored our repeated requests to address security issues. And so, I was forced to install a security system that has captured just a couple of incidents in the pattern of threats and harassment we have endured over the past year here at the Park Terrace Gardens in the Inwood neighborhood of New York City. I can no longer hold back as the threats against my family have become blatant and menacing. And with the belief that there is no better way to cope with a bully than to shine the bright light of accountability on their actions, here it goes. A walk-in inspection was performed on us despite the super admitting there was no odor in the hallway. Yet, ...
• Getting My Stories Right – Career Repositioning Everything’s in flux! To me, this is the most interesting sort of time in my career. I’ve made several successful transition leaps—print to webmaster. Webmaster to SEO. And now SEO to some yet-unnamed but more important evolution of my career—a culmination of everything. What is it called? I’m not precisely sure. I’m drawn towards some sort of soup-to-nuts tour de force marketing technologist. “MT”-alone sounds—I don’t know—empty. I need something to say I’m the architect and the programmer—the doer! But for lack of anything better, I’ll probably stick with MT. I’ll tell you one thing. It’s not going to be social media. Being popular on line should be a side effect of the other hopefully brilliant things you’re doing—and not an end-in-itself. Everyone and their mother is jumping on the social media bandwagon. Literally! Is your mother a social media guru yet? And what is social media, anyway? Blah, blah, blah echo chamber. Not interested. Like public relations before it, the rules are fuzzy, very personality-driven, and has a low barrier-to-entry. But ask one of them to set up their own web service—and silence. In other words, social media is a great place to plant a flag in a new career ...
• Daily Work Diary Thought-work For Getting Into The Zone Ah, welcome again to my daily work diary. Things got rough again recently with the loss of my wife’s grandmother. I’m deep in my first project in my new role where I work. I’m going to be out of the office for two days next week for a big company management off-site. And I have to “show” my work at the office tomorrow, which is usually a work-from-home focus Friday day. Sunday will be the memorial service, and Monday will be Sitting Shvia. My dog needs to go to the vet, and I need to get my co-op management to do repairs to a wall at home where a mirror fell off the wall because it got wet from repairs in the apartment above us. There are many plates that need spinning, and I have to work smart, work hard, and not starve anything for attention that needs attention. Yeah, I know. First world problems. But this is my daily work journal and you’re reading it, so there. Get this day underway, and make a wonderful story to tell for today that isn’t bogged down or derailed by other things going on in your life. It’s time for a little compartmentalization ...
• Life after SEO I need to get myself more productive on a daily basis at work. This is my daily work journal, and I should do better to keep that continuous, if not rather unpolished, story rolling out every day. A nice strong narrative keeps your work and your live moving along forward—the correct direction. Life’s little knocks and trials can so easily make you backslide. There are a certain amount of projects in one’s life that feel worthwhile during the normal workday, and certainly are distracting. But they must be treated like plates that need spinning, and you have to avoid chasing the rabbit down the rabbit hole. Yep, my life is filled with metaphors. On any given day, I first ask: What’s MOST broken? Then I ask: where do I get the biggest bang for the buck? And finally, I ask: what plates need spinning? Many of the projects that threaten to consume me for the day if I pursue them are actually just plates that need to be spun, and then forgotten for the rest of the day. I have to always remind myself of that, and that’s one of the functions of this daily journal—to keep me on track. And by ...
• My journey from squishy wizard to lightning bruiser Bear with me a moment. I’ll get to the squishy wizard stuff. Well, a new day has started. I’m going to keep on track with my daily journal in the Tiger code in vim. This is part of my old-school is cool agenda, and practicing what I preach. It is also to keep me on-track and focused—and I suppose OUT of the web browser while I’m writing, really. As much as I love Google Docs, this may be a case where being in the browser as a writing environment may be more distracting than its worth. And I need to master vim! I have a lot on my mind to write about, and a lot of work to do. I have a flurry of meetings starting at 10:30 AM, and then most of the day free. So today is a day to take a few very well placed chisel-strikes to tease out the shape of the beautiful masterpiece that I’m gradually revealing. Okay, so first… my subway writing from this morning, and what THIS journal entry is really going to be named for. I’m tempted to actually get rid of this daily journal opening paragraph, and just make it a post ...
• Planning My Daily Workflow I’m going to try to move my daily journal entry once again back into the Tiger code-base. This has a few advantages. It helps ensure that I actually go into the Tiger code-base every day, which is where much of my capabilities and productive momentum comes from lately professionally. But it also keeps me immersed in the vim text editor, sharpening my skills and forever reaching that elusive infinite limit, which is total vim mastery—one of the ultimate achievements for anyone considering themselves a heavyweight tech. Okay, it’s Monday morning, and a perfect time to think through my overarching habits and workflow that I’m trying to get into place for my new job responsibility. It goes into effect full-time on March 11th, but I’m being allowed to put up to 50 percent of my time against it starting right away. And the projects are there. The projects are interesting and right up my alley. And the projects are truly valuable to the company and in some unexplored territory. All I have to do is get myself a bit more immersed into it. It has to be as interesting to me as anything else going on. The other thing going on right now ...
• VMWare Fusion 5 on Mac OS X in full-screen is remarkable I have to test my Levinux tiny virtual Linux server distribution on a lot of different operating systems. It’s designed to run with a double-click whether you’re on a Windows, Mac or Linux desktop—and a wide variety of Linux at that. So, I need to try it out on a lot. This article is about one of the tools I’m using to accomplish that. While I do have various different computers to test on, I don’t have as many computers as the OSes I need to test. So, it’s time to play around with virtualization products again. But I have a love/hate relationship with virtualization, and I’m always dubious—especially of a kind called Type 2 hypervisor virtualization that runs after a main OS boots. Well, I’ve used VirtualPC and Parallels on the Mac. This time up, it’s VMWare Fusion 5. It’s turning out that VMWare Fusion and the Mac OS X are a match made in heaven. I’m finally starting to have some faith in type 2 hypervisors—something l’ll explain in this article. This is a surprising development for me, as I usually advocate using the one intended OS per piece of hardware, to keep things running smoothly. Life’s too short to ...
• Learn Computer History When Becoming a Tech I’ve started teaching a friend to become technical—someone who for years now has demonstrated the aptitude and interest, but for whatever reasons has not yet taken the plunge. Or shall we say—has never stayed on the water and committed to a swim after taking the plunge. With my mission to turn my personal Linux distribution into my secret weapon at work and into a groundswell movement in education, I’m taking the opportunity to turn him into a tech and take some notes. After the first couple of lessons, my observation—at least with this particular learner—let’s call him Boris—is context, context, context! This was an unexpected learning for me. Even though the computer history context of what I do is always fascinating to me, I always thought it would make others tune out. For me, these rich histories have eclipsed sports, music, politics, and a ton of other areas in which people revel in knowing the players, following the careers, reciting the stats. If you talk to me about programming syntax, I’m as likely as the next guy to zone-out. But talk to me about the stranger-than-fiction tales of Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing, Charles Babbage, and I’m engaged. I’m glad to learn ...
• SEO Changing As Four Horsemen Wrangle You With Cheap, Awesome, Frequently Upgraded Hardware I finally bit the bullet and read Nate Silver’s Bayesian prediction book that’s made so much press from predicting election outcomes and such. Nate’s that guy who uncannily predicted the outcome of EVERY electoral college vote in the 2012 presidential election. Okay, I’m now on the Nate bandwagon in regards to my field of SEO… well, sort of. But as usual, with all great books and great ideas, it just reinforces something we already intuitively know—or at least suspect… The world is way more complex than can be pigeon-holed down into a simple computer model. On a lot of unpredictable subject-matter, the model can only be directional in nature and must be open to constant new input, which has been “pre-filtered” or “pre-considered” by a well-informed, mostly emotionless HUMAN! That’s a big part of Nate’s message: a bunch of stuff is extremely predictable, and a bunch is not… and those pontificating assholes should be a little more honest about it. However, in those cases where things ARE predictable, you have to zero-in on the real story with a rinse-and-repeat process that uses new input as it becomes available, understanding the fact that even this new input is in fact subjective—yet, it’s striving ...
• Plan For Obsolescence-proofing Before Learning to Program Are you getting ready to learn to program? The purpose of this article is to equip you to fend off the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) that is about to be thrust upon you as you go researching what programming language to start with. I’m here to tell you: start with something else. Buy yourself some time, and get used to some hardware issues surrounding code obsolescence, career obsolescence, and planning for neither to occur to you. Obsolescence is a fact of life in technology. This is a sobering truth to people who are already in the field—but all the more so for people just getting into the field. There are so many good technologies heavily used online, guaranteeing you a fresh set of skills for life—I mean like Macromedia Flash… oh wait, no sorry. I mean like .NET… oh wait, no sorry. Neither one is really a good idea to take up as your primary language these days. On Windows, there’s new thing after new thing after new thing. Joel Spolsky famously calls this effect “Fire and Motion” in reference to how developers keep you working hard just to stand still, while THEY forge ahead with truly new products that everyone ...
• Levinux Released, But Help From QEMU Gurus Needed Note: After all that work, I’m temporarily giving up on compiling my own QEMU binaries. On any one platform, it’s doable. But across all three with color curses support is all but impossible in the current state. So, I’m using the binaries from the ProofOfConcept for now. Okay, okay, okay, Levinux is finally released… sort of. This article releases Levinux, my multi-host tiny virtual machine derivative distribution of Linux to the clamoring masses who have been filling out my web form. You can have my Proof of Concept version, based on a magical cocktail of binaries I found from the usual (and usually trusted) suspects around the net. It works great, and the Recipe system is there and working great. I’m also releasing the cleaner, but much earlier-stage LevinuxAlpha, which is built from my own compiled binaries using the latest QEMU and Tiny Core Linux, but the Recipe system isn’t there yet, and there’s a few rough edges on OS X (sometimes incompatible binaries) and Windows (only B&W text). So what’s so special? My tiny virtual distribution of Linux runs with a double-click with no install from the desktop of a Mac, Windows or Ubuntu machine—pretty much any desktop or laptop computer based on semi-modern Intel or ...
• Escape From The Suburbs – I’m Finally a New Yorker! I’m a New Yorker. It took me eight years and three jobs and a wife and kid to really, truly start feeling that way. It wasn’t the Broadway shows. It wasn’t the bright lights or the insiders’ city. Nor was it really even the tech-meetups and access to J&R and B&H (which turned out to be three big points). Rather, it was giving up a car and finding the new family, neighborhood, job and mission in life that suited me. I found it all. I made it here. And this article is about that transformation to urban life and greater happiness, which is still playing out. For many of my first years in New York City, I felt I was “wasting a slot”. But now, I wouldn’t return to the ‘burbs and the New Deal American Dream (car in every garage) “bill-of-goods” for anything. While other peoples’ experiences are surely different, when I hear “a suburban life”, I finally get what they’re saying. This article is about the painful process of transition, and my plans now that I have this new perspective. I plan on raising my daughter Adi with all the city-smarts I can, surrounded by two-or-three world-class everything’s (museums, schools, ...
• Mr. Sucro’s Removable Finger Magic Trick I can take my index-finger off. Mr. Sucro my mailman growing up taught me how to do it, on my little suburban street in a neighborhood he too lived in. I went to school with his son, Ricky and his older daughter. Once every couple of weeks I’d see Mr. Sucro’s truck drive up. He would give me the mail, take off his finger, and show me how it’s done. He’d show me precisely how to position my fingers, what parts of the technique are very important: don’t lift too far! Keep your other fingers locked straight! This finger-trick has become a running theme in my life, and Adi my 2 year-old now finally appreciates the trick, demanding that I show her again and again, piecing together that it’s a trick, but full of wonder, and that devilish look of knowing she just got secret insider knowledge. Apparently, that’s a feeling not outside a 2 year-old’s range. My heart soars at that look. Aside from my daughter, I must have shown and revealed this trick to dozens of kids over the years. The basics of understanding it is not that hard, but to convincingly master it takes forever—especially for a ...
• Preparing Adi for Ray Kurzweil’s World I read Verner Vinge’s Rainbows End last last year, and it kicked my ass into realizing how close we are to an unrecognizable world. Then, one of the world’s wackiest inventors and prophets of technological singularities and other stupid human tricks becomes a director of engineering at Google. A world of autonomous robots and self-driving cars is what my daughter Adi is going to grow up into, and it is my job to equip her. And I barely even have those thoughts together for myself for self-help in my own time and place. But at 42 years-old, I think I’m finally getting down a system. My plan is to write a book. But with almost half a century behind me, I still haven’t done so. I’m more of a stream of consciousness guy, and I have plenty of that. But that won’t do any good for Adi. Concepts need to be developed. Good stories need to be crafted. This takes time, and goes against my “flying by the seat of my pants” style. In this blog post, I resolve this. Writing a book and blogging are two somewhat conflicting needs, because with a book, you go back and revise, refine and rewrite. ...
• Too Many Meetings Will Make You Dumb Okay, working in vim is something akin to getting prepared for the future. I’m starting to see why I’m so drawn to it. All the nuances, and working magic spontaneously without hardly thinking has unlimited parallels to the Epiphany vision in Vernor Vinge’s 2006 Rainbows End Hugo Award winning scifi book that I’m finally getting around to reading. This was out while I was creating HitTail. Ugh! Interesting way thoughts develop, and how it can take place in such an accelerated, pure form in scifi writers like Vinge and slow in people like me. It’s about 9:50 AM on a Monday, and after a successful journal-entry last Wednesday after a 2-day extravaganza of meetings, I’m optimistic about getting this journal process going again, and do some amazing navigating of the coming days, months, and years. Career recalibration is always an interesting time, and I’m hellbent determined to optimize the next bunch of years for the benefit of my family, my daughter Adi, and my own sanity. I’ve hardly traveled for pleasure in my life (all business and family trauma), and I don’t want that to be transmitted generationally. I have a meeting in 5 minutes concerning thought leadership with one of our ...
• Trying to Re-Kickstart My Daily Work Journal I have some very good ideas, but it’s the end of November, and my last entry here was the beginning of October, and mid-September before that. And THOSE were probably still only journal entries too. However, my Mom did die of lung cancer, and all that. My kid did just turn 2, and once-in-a-lifetime events in my life are playing out that I refuse to miss, or be excessively absorbed into work for. However… that’s NO EXCUSE! The reason I’m not kick-ass world-class AWESOME at SOMETHING by now, per my plan, is the details of my day-job. Awesomeness can totally take place 9 to 6 during the day. I’m entering a phase that I go through every 5 or 10 years, I think of as career re-calibration. The way my ideas flow is just awesome. But not only that—I seem to have the unique ability to filter down to the correct exactly-doable-today ideas and get them implemented in a meaningful, usable by the world fashion. Knowing how to do this and my ability to communicate the process is probably my greatest asset. It’s not this SEO stuff where people strive to endlessly tweak meta tags to recover some lost position ...
• Isolating Dependencies for QEMU on OS X for My Tiny Linux Distribution Note: If you’re looking for a Linux distro that’s really designed to run with QEMU, download Levinux. It’s really only text-based Linux Server, but it will run with a double-click from your Mac, Windows or Linux desktop with no install. I am fighting off a funk. Maybe its the holidays. Maybe its the accumulating effects of my previous post. Things are in flux, and my responsibilities are stuck in the past. I need to forge forward. I do have one piece of real work I have to do today, which is suggesting some topics for a monthly SEO strategy meeting coming up this Tuesday. Beyond that, the day is wide open, and I have to use it to keep my sanity. So, I’m taking another crack at moving my unique Linux distribution, Levinux, forward. The precise reasons for choosing the work I choose to keep my sanity is a bit unclear, but my unconscious mind is pushing me relentlessly in this direction. It is the one thing that my unconscious mind consistently keeps corraling me back to: a tiny linux virtual machine that runs anywhere. People reading this might imagine me going off into some sort of fugue state in which my-body-knows-better ...
• Yet another “future of SEO” thinking out loud post It’s time to start using my daily journal for what it’s for—keeping my bearings, suppressing distraction, and preparing some good writing for the Internet that could only come from me. I am reaching a crossroads. It took me 7 years to call myself an SEO, and we’re 7 years past that. The center cannot hold. SEO is still interesting, but the game is changing and becoming more complex, broken down into a variety of subspecialties, and amid that fluctuation, the “universal truths” are poking through. The sub-specialties are all moving targets, with battling vendors and data-sources. “Local” is the prototypical example. However, it’s the under-lurking universal truths that are of interest to me, and where recalibration of my career must occur. I’m going to let this daily journal entry ramble for a little bit, because I need to get all my thoughts out there to decide what to do next. There are the things expected of my for my job, but I think that is rapidly losing validity. The battle to manipulate Google now in light of the war-on-SEO arms race—characterized by the Panda and Penguin updates—is increasingly relegated to the less profitable and less interesting long-tail. The long-tail is still a place ...
• Finally got QEMU compiled for Windows—success assured Ugh! I knew compiling a curses-enabled version of QEMU for Windows was going to be harder than on Linux and Mac, but I had no idea how much harder! I probably won’t even be able to document precisely what the special cocktail mixture is right away, I tried so many different things. But finally, I got it to work, after reaching out to both Stefan Weil who did the latest popularly distributed Windows QEMU binaries, and the mxe cross compiler listserv. I tried compiling it native on Windows 7, then cross compiling from Linux, then back to native again. The problem is that there are just so many moving parts that have to be aligned just-so. It was a real puzzler. The keys to making it work was to REALLY have all the documented dependencies copied into location, and then a few that weren’t documented. And then finally, I had to use one version older than the latest of pdcurses and do a couple of edits to its include file. And even after all of that, the make procedure generates a ton of incompatible data type warnings that appears to have to do with string formatting, but still I got the ...
• Compiling QEMU for Windows… HELP! Note: I gave up and am using the popularly distributed binaries on each platform. Download Levinux and witness Linux server running with a double-click with no install from a Mac, Windows or Linux desktop. I’ll get back to compiling the binaries when some real minimal kernel and QEMU gurus interested in my project contact me. Two down, one to go—I’ve compiled and have running successfully QEMU on Linux and Mac. Only compiling QEMU for Windows remains, and it’s time to start learning about the GNU C compiler toolchain on Windows. Yuck. I always say that Unix is the generic plumbing of information technology, and Windows is actually among the last remaining major platforms that remains proprietary hasn’t fallen into line. Android and iOS are Linux/Unix, as are Macs, which helps explain why compiling QEMU went so easily. Only a free and open source package manager and a C library were missing. But Windows PCs are a different animal all together. That “generic plumbing” aspect of Unix has a name. It’s called POSIX-compliance—just another standard akin to ISO and ANSII, but a a portable OS specification from the IEEE organization. Macs are in fact POSIX-compliant. While Linux isn’t technically POSIX-compliant, it’s close enough ...
• QEMU Mac OS X… Success! It’s time for for me to create an up-to-date QEMU on Mac OS X. I had wonderful success yesterday getting QEMU compiled and installed on my Commodore 64x running Linux Ubuntu beta 12.10 yesterday. I’m working from home today on my Macbook Air laptop, so I’ll today, I’m doing it for Mac. My goal is to make the best portable Linux for USB drives that works across Mac, Windows and Linux. I did this before in a proof-of-concept Levinux, cobbling together QEMU binaries from different sources, with inconsistent versions and unencapsulated dependencies. This time, I’m doing it in a cleaner and more organized way. This has been a stumbling block for me for quite some time, preventing me from “taking things to the next level” of which I see this as a critical first step. It turns out, compiling QEMU from source across all three platforms to my very specific requirements wasn’t as easy as I had hoped. But yesterday, I did it for Linux. What about Mac? First, we look at the options for getting QEMU on a Mac, and inevitably you end up on the website for a project named “Q”, which has a lot of great characteristics in ...
• Encapsulating an App in a Linux Directory Like Mac OS X Packages Note: If you want to download an App that has all this encapsulation stuff worked out, take a look at Levinux. It’s only a 15MB download. Okay, the day is winding down. I’m determined to get the first half of this Linux QEMU encapsulation project done. There are two set of dependencies you must think about for making QEMU portable. The first is all the support files that the QEMU make install process itself installs in your /usr/local path. I grabbed the mess-of-a-message that make install created, but there is a better way. Just use a DESTDIR on make install, and so I re-did the install with this command: make install DESTDIR=/home/username/Desktop/qemu-linux/ Now, I’ve got the /usr/local directory structure expected by the QEMU binary all collected up in a folder on my desktop that I am free to surf. First thing, get the size! 15.8 MB. Okay, not terrible. That doesn’t include the hard drive image from Tiny Core Linux, which is an additional 8.3 MB, for a total of 24.1 MB. Still acceptable for what I’m trying to accomplish. Okay, now I’m going to try to accomplish something here which is as close to OS X software .app file bundles or packages ...
• Compiling QEMU from Source on Linux, My First Big Success Okay, I am restarting my effort to get my own distribution of Linux going. It will essentially be Tiny Core Linux, but booting from a tiny QEMU virtual computer from either Linux, Mac or Windows. It’s what I consider the ideal Linux learning platform, and life-long life preserver for your code. My effort has stalled out because I didn’t want to release my last version that used the now obsolete Q version of QEMU for Mac, along with compiled binaries that I got from different sources for PC and Linux, for which I did not really encapsulate the dependencies. I’m taking a newer, cleaner approach by which I compile all the QEMU binaries myself, and very deliberately “encapsulate” each version to carry around as many of its own dependencies as reasonable, so it truly doesn’t need any installs, but still runs with a double-click from any x86 host machine. This is a sort of universal Linux code execution platform that you can carry with you for life. I’ve been down this route several times before, and compiling QEMU isn’t as easy as it seems like it should be. There’s the dependencies, the toolchain to do the compile, and the nuances of ...
• Picking a Programming Language is Not Your First Step to Becoming Technical Note: If you want to go down the true righteous path of learning Unix/Linux system stuff first, then building on top of that with an appropriate programming language, then try out Levinux, my own Linux distro designed to get you started right. When it’s time to become technical, one of the overwhelming questions is where to begin. Your decisions at this point could determine whether you become genuine technical talent, or just another code monkey. There’s a difference between folks who fundamentially know things and make the right decisions for the right reasons, versus those who can slap out some PHP to customize WordPress. The former can be a tour de force techie, and the later, a hack—in the not-good sense. There is quite literally too much to learn, and a lot of it is driven by fads. Yep, fads exist in tech just like everywhere else, and what sounds like fundamental progress today can seem like a huge waste of time tomorrow. Plus, even among the compeltely enlightened and valid paths, there are dramatic splits based on how you want to specialize, and what and “secret-weapon” advantages you wish to have. You’re going to face an onslaught of keywords, with each one’s “camp” claiming ...
• Starting a Business, Starting a Tribe I walked past Seth Godin at the Maker Faire New York this weekend. I didn’t stop for his talk because I was with a 22-month old who wouldn’t sit still for it. But I read his business platitudes every day, and am a fan of that long tradition of business guru writing going back to Peter Drucker. This got me to thinking why I’m still working for the man, and my answer keeps coming back to a lack of risk-taking and I sufficiently clear thinking. Entrepreneurialism is too fancy of a word. Everybody should be able to pursue their passion, so long as there is a money-making aspect to it that you enjoy doing, and make a livelihood out of it. This spirit is everywhere at the Maker Faire. If you could do most of it at home to cut out the mind-numbing daily commute, only attending the occasional “in real life” events like this to get the word out, the world would be a much happier place. I’m thinking I will start to refine my website now to be how-to guide on the more technical aspects of this dream—and maybe help myself along in the process. So many endeavors ...
• Happy 6-year Subwayiversary, Rachel! Six years ago today, a I sat down on the One Train, coming home from work late as usual, and sat across from a beautiful woman, and made sure I got her number. Six years later, and we’re married and have got a wonderful little daughter together, and it’s hard to imagine a time before Rachel. Here’s a tiny slice of the story, and a public thank-you to her for being so awesome. I was barely a New Yorker back then, and when I moved here from Philly, I determined that I wouldn’t live more than a 5-block radius from work. Back in Philly, I did the reverse-commute out to the ‘burbs, driving through both city and King of Prussia traffic to get out to the boondocks. I was determined to wholly eliminate the commute, and how the frustration and lost time cut into my happiness. Well, after my first 2-year NY-apartment lease was up, I realized that short walk to the office was keeping me from assimilating as a real New Yorker, so I tagged along with Adam Edwards on HIS apartment shopping—the same guy who happened to be the reason I was in NYC in the first place, and on ...
• Cheap Hardware And The Battle For Default Search Awesome hardware is getting cheap—I mean really cheap. I am a huge fan of the $35 Raspberry Pi general purpose computer from a UK charity organization. But then, I’m also a huge fan of the Google Nexus 7, which is one of the first examples of a highly capable graphics device built on a chip and spec put out by NVidia. But earlier this week, a story on VentureBeat about a $45 Android tablet has lodged itself in my brain. And then, there’s the $45 Aakash tablet from India that’s flying off the shelves. Bottom line: pretty awesome tablets are about to become free. You’ll have 5 or 10 of them in your life. There won’t be time to customize their environment much or move files around, so you’ll be relying on the cloud for sure. You’ll have a couple of favorite mobile apps that you always ensure are installed (or are auto-installed by the cloud at first login), and those will give you that homey base-of-operations feeling more than the device itself or its operating system. No matter your loyalty to Apple and iOS, you will not be able to resist having these virtually free devices in your life, ...
• Anticipating new specialties within the field of SEO Do you have to “be someone” in order to have an impact on search positions in Google default search? Maybe not today, but its certainly looking like that’s where we’re heading. It used to be that you could just do some information architecture and hyper-optimize a site as some anonymous guy in tiny server closet and have a big impact on sales. But today, in the fight against spam, evidence suggests actual people are going to have to put their reputations on the line to vouch for content. Regardless of how search evolves, chances are that “generic search” will likely continue to exist, because we don’t always know or take the time to choose a specialized search starting-point such as Yelp or Amazon. We just want to start typing or talking and have the best results come back. And so long as this generic type of search continues to exist and be a popular starting point, there will have to be some sort of relevancy and ranking system to sort it all out. You might think that explicit data sources and API’s that can insert Yelp results for restaurants or Amazon results for shopping could change all this generic search ranking. ...
• Cometh The Super-Curator – How SEO is Changing Under the “new” SEO model, you will either need to become an Agent with a high reputation score, or be able to rally other Agents with high reputation scores. But your reputation will only make you authoritative and able to impact search rankings in your areas of expertise—how the Circles you belong to have been named (tagged), and the subject-matter on which you regularly write, and have been rewarded with +1′s. This has not happened yet, but the overwhelming evidence is that it will. So you need to either BE the genuine article, or know how to motivate the behavior of others who are the genuine article in the field you’re addressing. This will lead to whole new ranking manipulation schemes. However, there will be string incentive for these “Agents” (really just Authors or a company proxy) to not put their reputations at risk over inappropriate endorsements, because a lifetime of reputation could be irrecoverably lost in a few seconds of Google penalization. It’s the Google+ profile that would be penalized—not the site. So you’re putting your reputation at risk with every endorsement. So what to do if not some fancy modernized version of link development using people? Well, the ...
• AgentRank is the future of SEO… someday. This post is a direct continuation of yesterday’s ramblings. I discussed the stream-and-tag model of organizing content for search versus the crawl-and-index model. In the stream, you have a whole bunch of content authors and publishers wanting their stuff to be discovered and perform well in search, so they tweet announce their content, Facebook share or Google+ post. Information consumers and curators step in and start tagging and associating their own identities with the content. Identities are not equal, because some Google+ profiles have ascended to authority positions on certain keyword topics. While such a system initially serves to elevate the super-popular pop-culture silly meme content even higher, over time real domain authority experts will sort out and lend their credence to the less mainstream but still meritorious content. It’s going to be an iterative and long painful process, just like PageRank. And Google insists this will not replace the link graph and PageRank, but rather work an tandem—and I presume become merged with it. Google insists that the crawl and the link graph and PageRank aren’t going away. And Google’s Web Quality Team, or whatever Matt Cutts group is being called today, is taking it up several notches informing ...
• Jump on the giant Internet clean-up bandwagon while waiting for tectonic plates to shift I’m back to work after a very long time off, between a one-week vacation and grieving the passing of my mother. My mind has maybe been less than fully into the game of late, and that has to stop because things are in flux and people will be looking to me to discern what’s going on and how best to position ourselves and our clients for advantage. That, and I just love this stuff. It will be a nice place to escape to for awhile. Currently, I feel like I’m rudderless on adrift on the sea. The world is probably about to change again tomorrow with an Apple announcement. I’m loving my Google Nexus 7. I clearly have a very hardware-centric view of the world, because I love me some hardware, and am keenly aware of what happens in your life as you go through an upgrade cycle. Out with the old, in with the new—and THAT’S the key moment where the world can change on you. Are you moving from iOS to Android? What’s the default search set to? Is there a new search model trying to weasel its way in? These are things on which I need to think ...
• The Final Days of Lung Cancer and Good Son Syndrome Note: This article is a “heavy” and if at any time, it gets too depressing, go look at pictures of my delightful daughter Adiella Levin taken by me and my wife @jewyorican who is also @elBloombito. Okay, so here’s the type of writing I’ve been holding back for years. Life is full of chapters, phases and trials. This is one such time for me. On the one hand, I have a beautiful family and nearly 2-year old daughter who fills every one of my days with delight. On the other hand, I have a mother who is imminently dying of lung cancer. Against this backdrop, I was fighting adult bullying, and my volatile profession of search engine optimization is in flux again and I have to break out my best game. This article is about dealing with the death of a parent and the internal conflict that can arise when the extreme circumstances of cancer, harrowing mental health histories and the hellbent determination to keep a life on-track collide. At such times in the past, I have stumbled and allowed the giant “reset button” of life to be pressed. First when my dad died as I was coming out of college and ...
• Navigating disruption – both personal and professional I’m definitely working hard to keep my grip on the rudder of the ship of life. I simply have to keep control and pull off some genius navigation to get myself out of the current dire straits and into some smooth sailing once again. This post is about thinking through that navigation chore. It may come off as a bit of rambling, but it’s the kind of rambling that belongs in a daily work journal, so tough noogies. Stop reading here if you can’t use your imagination to connect loosely arranged dots. My job is to know when the waters are getting treacherous… anticipate it long before… and plot a course for the optimal success of the journey—both for my employer, and for me personally. This narrative is what’s been missing from the past couple of days… or weeks? So, I’ve been significantly thrown off my groove. My mother is dying of cancer, and I’m on the roller-coaster ride associated with that. I’ve been estranged from most of my growing-up family for many years, having drawn a line in the sand about “making it” and establishing my own life here in New York City without the giant reset-button of family-affairs being hit… ...
• Ubuntu Unity 2D is no more, and boy did it give me login problems this morning Okay, this morning’s Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha update was huge. It looked like it locked me out of my PC. It included a kernel and nvidia driver update. I threw caution to the wind, and let it do everything, but then it wouldn’t let me log in after the reboot. I thought it nuked my password, but that wasn’t the case. It was reporting a bad password for actual incorrect attempts. This was just not allowing me to get to the desktop. It kept returning to the login screen. I logged in with the emergency console, and did an apt-get update and apt-get upgrade, and it got a few more things… no luck on the reboot, and it told me that “packages have been kept back” including the kernel and nvidia update. So, I did an “apt-get dist-upgrade” and it finally let me in, but my dual monitor settings were blown away. I went into System Settings / Display and removed the checkmark next to “Mirror displays” and I had to rearrange the monitor icons to get the left monitor on the left and the right on the right. I remember way back I switched VGA and DVI cables to accomplish the ...
• Tablet Form-factor Matters — I’ll take all three One-handed typing (with coffee in the other) is possible on the iPhone, but not the Nexus 7. I’m typing this on the NYC subway right now—Nexus 7 relegated to a coaster. But when I read books, up comes the Nexus 7—which is usually on me these days, whereas the iPad isn’t. The iPad I use as a sort of Wacam tablet for animated whiteboard recording. Earlier this week, I had to work on a PowerPoint on the train, and carried my laptop to-and-from work for the first time in months. Form factor matters. But which one do I do sketching and art on? All three—with almost exactly the same software: Sketchbook Pro. Thank you Autodesk for doing such a great job with Photoshop-like software in mobile!
• Sudden Social Soil Liquefaction in SEO… When? Okay, I can feel client work heating up again. My last two days of journal entries have been flops. I’ve been put on another in-jeopardy account to do my ride-in-on-a-white-horse routine. Helping the agency with these needs pays for the rest of my time—preparing for SEO to become disrupted and helping the agency to navigate its SEO practice through those turbulent waters. That’s my special skill: a healthy paranoia and mad skilz to adapt. Meetings have also been increasing. And as per my review feedback, I’m trying to become less distant from the team. As I discussed with a coworker yesterday, it is precisely this “going into my own head” that makes me effective. I have to strike the correct balance, and solving puzzles like this is precisely what life is about. Everything you want and need to do is not always compatible until you really get creative. I know I have course-correction to do, because my day-to-day work is increasingly misaligned with my mission—a technology education curriculum that could allow you to reboot society (based on the presumption that such deep knowledge will help you everywhere in tomorrow’s future). I need to tweak things here and there to re-align. But what ...
• Deleting Animation Effects in PowerPoint 2011 for Mac Wow, I had a few straight days to mostly focus, and this is the result. Massive forward movement. My hypothesis about focus and momentum isn’t simply a theory. If you can dig in and get into the groove… get into the zone… for a few hours straight, then a few days straight, you can make massive forward movement. I can not emphasize enough, the typical daily grind is the enemy to creativity and advancement. But I have to stay rooted. Take stock of what I still owe people on Tiger, and weigh that against the things you WANT to work on. Well, having rolled out a few new features pretty aggressively lately, it’s important to test and stabilize. I increased the maximum number of rows from a thousand to five-thousand in order to run some internal jobs we’ve got going here. I haven’t fully split internal from external behavior, and I urgently need to do that. Also, I have a request regarding Author influence investigations, both from a reporter in the SEO space, and from a sister Dentsu agency. That’s feeling pretty important… but let me go on. I finished the Flickr functions, but there’s still a few more from ...
• Implementing JSONPath in Python, with Examples Okay, I cranked out ezscrape features both for Amie and Jennifer on Monday and Tuesday. ezscrape is turning out as beautifully as I had hoped. It looks like today I may have the focus to do one of those videos. But because tomorrow is my last day in before my Colorado trip, I’m thinking better of that. Today is for polish. Today is for practicing my video-shoot tomorrow. Practice and polish. Deeper familiarity with the internal/external user behavior split… but don’t introduce bugs! And looking at incorporating JSONPath and JQuery for ezscrape. Also maybe filtering which scrapes show for internal vs external users. Perfect subject-matter for today. All inter-related. All of important and immediate use to the organization. Ready, set, go! 1, 2, 3… 1? Okay, so first and foremost is the 1000-row limit that Samir is running into. I thought that was in my configuration file, but it’s not. Then I thought it was in the main Tiger function. But it’s not. Oh, wait! I remember! It’s so memory can’t be nuked on the webserver. Ha! Okay, I changed it to be tied to the maxrow value in the configuration file. Now, the Tiger system is hardwired to not let ...
• In Search Of the Elusive Online/Offline Cloud+Mobile Writer – Google Docs vs. Apple Notes If there’s one thing that illuminates the difference between Google and Apple product culture to me, it’s Google Docs versus Apple’s built-in Notes app. They are both iterating towards being better writing programs. But Docs was born online in the browser, and Notes offline as a “house” app. And they’re in a race now to become that sought after but elusive seamless online/offline cloud writing environment. What they’ve each done to date is highly illuminating of their respective cultures. iPhone’s Notes originally couldn’t even sync with your desktop OS X. You had to email notes! Then during some upgrade, Notes popped up as a folder under Mail—a desperately needed compromise. And most recently, in the Mountain Lion upgrade, it’s now a first-class citizen with a stand-alone app shown off on your app launcher bar after upgrade. While you can’t format text, or organize folders, or even switch fonts, the online/offline syncing in Apple Notes is rock-solid—seemingly, no matter the platform. Wherever I sit down, or whatever device I pick up, there’s my latest notes! I never see syncing issues or win/loss scenarios play out. It just seems to work perfectly all the time. Features are limited, but the must-have feature ...
• Very influential user profiles to become the PageRank 9 sites of the new SEO landscape. And today’s work journal begins. I pushed out an awesome article today. I’ve been trying to envision and nail the future of my field as accurately as I did in 2009, when I laid out precisely how things were going to play out, wrapping social results into search and the gradual shift of relevancy signals away from invisible-hand webmasters, and to the billion-or-so people online, clicking and liking and linking in a brand new way. What PEOPLE are doing matters—not just unaccountable webmaster people who broker the links between scarce influential sites that they control. I hit it out of the ballpark with that premonition, with a company founder mentioning it to me years later, thinking it was something I did recently. I reminded him it was a 2009 deck. Win! So, what about the shift in the field of SEO going on RIGHT NOW? Well, the type of valuable scarcity that was previously in high PageRank sites, giving them the SEO juice to divvy out, the new scarcity will shift to personal accounts that require topical expertise and influence. Think what’s going to happen to things that are “Liked” from a genuine Oprah Facebook or Google profile. See? The social ...
• Prospering as an SEO During The Rise of The Full Lifestyle Ecosystem Company If you have any doubts that it’s a lifestyle near religion sort of thing that the big ecosystem-crafting companies are selling—or are at least preparing to sell—cast them aside. These now-familiar faces are the first wave of business tycoon geeks in the new information economy. They’ve got plenty of ability to become the Mad Men of the new economy. Go read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Frederik Pohl’s Venus, Inc, and come back to this article. Okay, see? That’s why Bill Gates is a pussycat who got some nice little pieces of the puzzle correct, but couldn’t see the whole game. We’ll be looking back at Uncle Bill as a mostly benign cuddly old grand-dad who left his work at the office. Sure, he did some forays into hardware with mice, then XBoxes, and finally the Surface. But too little too late. Larry, Sergey, Mark and Mr. Bezos on the other hand are in a different class of rapidly evolving shark. Steve Jobs of course has himself become the quintessential, iconic, prototypical archetype standard to be marvelled at and measured against. Now don’t get me wrong with my “evolved shark” language. I love what these guys are doing, and I certainly like ...
• Damn, I need a product. Guess I’m an SEO. Today I was neck-deep in PowerPoint. I hate that. But like any exercise, I was able to get some value out of it. Having to put your thoughts into ANY structured format also helps you clarify your thoughts. My thoughts lately, as much as I want them to be about the future of SEO, keeps going to cheap hardware and the cloud.  My current passions happen to by the Raspberry Pi $35 computer and the Python programming language. I have not unified these interests yet, per the demands of my day job and my home passions of family and 20-month old daughter. But it’s coming. And I have to wrap it into my personal brand and some product to sell.  At nearly 42 years old, I’m faced with precisely the same problem as when I was 29. I am good at technical puzzles, and realized I could do search engine optimization well, but didn’t have a product. So I went to work for a company that did for a percentage of gross revenue, but they didn’t hold up their end of the bargain with people to close the sale, so I moved onto NYC (from the Philly ‘burbs) to be a VP. ...
• BAM! You’re a Node – Google+ Circles and The Rise of BrinRank Unless Google is going to fail, then Google+ is something that is going to gradually fill up around us, like water in a bathtub, until we are totally submerged and enjoying a nice hot bath. One of my favorite observers of the SEO industry, Barry Schwartz, noticed a new “Actively Discussed on Google+” link in the search results, and posted an article about it today. When searching on myself, even in Incognito mode, the listing of me on my website includes “In 256 circles”… big swelling ego, right? Well, I checked Matt Cutts, and he’s in 199,372 circles. Oh, what about Danny Sullivan? 1,496,755 circles. And Rand? 40K circles. Okay, getting the point? There’s a new metric being exposed. And the searches on Matt and Danny have a nifty Knowledge Graph over on the right-hand side. Rand and myself don’t. I guess we’re not as noteworthy. But take note! What is this trying to tell you? Well, I’ve been saying for quite some time that PageRank has gotten crusty. The Google Web Spam team is in full-gear warning Webmasters through Webmaster Tools about suspicious inbound links that they ought to think about cleaning up. The Panda and Penguin algorithm, filter or ...
• We are currently living the most interesting computer history since the 80′s As a forty-something geezer, it’s self-evident that this current moment in time is the second-most-interesting point in the history of computers that I’ve lived through—or at least was conscious for. But I don’t know if this is so obvious all you youngun’s, so I wrote this article to point out the awesomeness of what we are currently living through, from my perspective as an ex-Commodore employee and fan. I’m typing this article on my Nexus 7 on the New York subway, in the Gmail app, because I haven’t installed a good cloud notes app yet. Maybe Evernote. It really astounds me that the any-platform offline-or-on notes app is still an unsolved problem—except maybe Evernote. Apple comes close with its built-in Notes app, but its not web-editable. And of course, there’s no Android version. I’m caught in the battle over ecosystems—but things haven’t been this cool since the late 80′s. We are privileged to be a part of the second personal computer renaissance. The first was in the 80′s when Microsoft’s dominance wasn’t yet established, and it could have been anyone’s game. I was an Amiga person back then, and nothing in the 25 intervening years has measured up since… until recently. I ...
• Converting GData Rows to a List of Dicts – racing to something announce-able Okay, I have so much to do, and this is a perfect example of so much time slipping by. How can I just hit this eztab thing home? I need to have something announceable more than I have lately, and the file saving/emailing stuff is hardly announced/being used besides Tamika’s special case use. And I’m soooooo close. All it’s going to take is a few hours of focus to hit this thing home. I have this perpetual reluctance to dive in head-first. Why? 1, 2, 3… 1. Get back to a state where you even understand what you were doing, and have a little continuity of thought. Do this ASAP before too much of the day slips by. Okay, loaded a test spreadsheet, and am using functions that were converted to ezscrape, and I’m making the ezscrape tab get created. Now simply load the data back in from the sheet and populate a list of dicts. I already have the ascrapelist and bscrapelist listodicts being processed. I merely need to make bscrapelist different… loaded in! Okay… so… what? So, I have an ezscrape tab existing already. I do, because I just created one. rows = gdata.GetListFeed(key, worksheetid).entry for arow in rows: for akey ...
• Is Search Engine Optimization Under Attack? Yep, No Biggie. These highly technical and occasionally personal blog posts are a main pillar of my personal brand. Writing is thinking and the more you make yourself write, the more and better you think, and the less you live life on automatic. This is good if you want to be a dynamic, ever-improving person. I guess it’s a bit fatiguing if you found a comfortable role in life and are just playing it out. Not me. I have thousands of little course adjustments to make now for the journey I’m trying to see play out, and I’ve got to be optimizing my decisions. My field of the moment is search engine optimization, which is under attack—the days of Google’s simple trick of sorting out the “top 10″ for any given query are over. Back then there was no fragmentation of audience or query-types, based on intent and the monetary value of the queries. Instead, we all used Google or the few other engines like it, as research librarians. That’s been changing for awhile, but the recent Google product search changes called Google Shopping really emphasized the point—chopping off the fat head of lucrative search space and tossing it to the advertisers, leaving ...
• Moved all the Twitter functions into ezscrape to put it through its paces Okay, now’s your chance to do something amazing. Don’t blow it. Functions like twitter really test all the various things I built for ezscrape. Move at least one twitter function over. Pshwew! Just did a bunch of error checking code to make sure that making new ezscrapes isn’t infuriating from errors, and that things like urlfield (to switch which field to use for a URL) works in conjunction with the rewrite field. This is all coming from turning my twitter functions into ezscrape functions, because it takes twusername instead of url as input, so I both have to use urlfield and rewrite to turn it into a hit against the Twitter json API. Pshwew! I just moved all my Twitter functions over to ezscrape. Hit a bunch of things I had to debug, and it’s now 5:20 PM, and it took me longer than I wanted, but there was stuff like dealing with escaped slashes in JSON. I’m grabbing values out of JSON with RegEx, which is not ideal, but I can really start rolling ezscrape out that way minimizing the number of unknowns I have to deal with. But it really is amazing how much of Tiger’s crufty functions can be ...
• URL ReWriting with RegEx – the hardest part of easy screen scraping Okay. I slip in a bit of coding here and there at work. Progress is much slower than I would like interweaving it with meetings and such. But little breakthrough like yesterday keep me going. I’m working on a big, sexy feature nobody will “get” until it exists. And I gave to supplement these thing with videos, or else they are just more obscure unused features. This particular feature called ezscrape is taking the single most common use for Tiger after crawling—arbitrary screen-scraping or API-calls—and making it easy to spin new ones with copy-and-paste examples that don’t require you to delve into Python Programming. To that end, I had to come up with an approach that doesn’t require Python coding to describe a scrape function in a way that a new user can understand at quick glance. The answer is, of course, just make a new optional worksheet tab that contains all the scraping function names and parameters. Let the user ask for it, then change existing examples or copy-and-paste for new ones. And those cells are all easily described, and none contain Python code. This is possible because almost all scraping jobs are the same—and even complex ones that ...
• I finally grok the group and groups in Python RegEx API Okay, I’m up to a fairly tricky RegEx URL ReWrite puzzle in Python, and I thought I’d dedicate this journal entry specifically towards the solution. I had the sudden insight that the challenge I’m encountering could shed some light on match.group() for those struggling with it, plus nuances of Python that are both a huge benefit, but strange to the un-Python-initiated. So basically, I’m trying to reproduce the Apache ReWrite process. Now, there are both directives for the RewriteCond (condition) and the actual rule itself, ReWrite. I’m only interested in ReWrite, because in my case, it will always be applied when encountered. So, the syntax for ReWrite according to the Apache guide http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/misc/rewriteguide.html and rules http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html pages at is: RewriteRule ^oldstuff\.html$ newstuff.html Now, if that were the extent of what I had to support, there would be no problem. However, we are almost always TRANSFORMING an old URL into a new one, using parts of the old URL in the new. Anything used in parenthesis groups in the pattern can be reused in the new URL with Perl-style Regex backreferences. So, if you wanted to change: http://domain.com/foobar.html …into… http://domian.com/barfoo.html RewriteRule ^/(foo)(bar)\.html$ %2%1.html Notice, when you’re keeping all the traffic on the same domain name, you ...