7 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Me
Shite the kilt I must be popular, I’ve been tagged twice for this malarky! Richard at Makakmedia sprung it upon me and then Paul at Northsouthmedia just got me too. So I better get this done before every other bugger on the planet has done it.
The Rules for This Particular Meme
* Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post. (see above)
* Share seven facts about yourself in the post. (see below)
* Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. (see below)
* Let them know they’ve been tagged. (you’ll just have to trust trackbacks and such)
- I wore my father’s wedding dress to get married in.
- I have 42 James Brown Albums on vinyl, 38 are original pressings.
- I have the same ethnicity as James Bond (Scottish Father / Swiss Mother).
- My Achilles tendons are as thick as your thumb.
- Amongst the random crap I have collected are 6 rubber bullets.
- The Swiss army gave me a medical certificate stating I should “lie down as required”.
- I tried to have a child with my first girlfriend by planting lettuce seeds in her navel. (Aged 4)
Right now for tagging the 7 lucky sods who get to reply, in no particular order (but locals last :P):
pascii
Vladimir Prelovac
Alastair McDermott
Roberta Kyle
Stephanie Hicks
Mike Coulter
David Hamill
This entry was written by , posted on March 12, 2009 at 3:49 am, filed under Uncategorized. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Andrew Burnett Is An Idiot.
It’ll take me a while to get to why I am an idiot, but please bear with me.
ThinkVisibility
This past weekend Wiebke and myself headed to Leeds for ThinkVisibility. It was the first industry conference either of us had been to, so we had no idea what to expect. We definitely didn’t expect it to be quite as great as it was!
Pre-conference Booze
Friday night started well with us meeting Paul and James of NorthSouthMedia. I’ve "known" Paul for what seems like an eternity but it was the first time we’d actually met. What a thoroughly stellar chap he is, as is James.
As luck would have it the next two we met also greeted us with West Coast Scottish accents (which if you don’t know it is like an East Coast Scottish accent, only not as good :p). I’ve seen a lot of Shaun and his company Hobo-Web online, but had never spoken to him. Shaun is extremely social and someone you really should get drunk with if you have the chance! Chris of Sunshine was making sure that we did get drunk with exceptional generosity in the form of beer and vodka redbulls. I’d not heard of Chris before, but seriously what a great guy!
The only other couple we encountered were Dave and Elaine from Allkids.co.uk, we met these lovely people (I hope) just in time before I started slurring my words.
Ok, this is where it starts to get a bit hazy… but I think we met Alastair of WebsiteDoctor and Al from SelfMadeMinds both of whom are sterling gents too, though there’s more about them to come later…
The Conference Proper
TheHodge welcomed us all to ThinkVisibility and I’d like to give him a little extra attention just now, because he deserves it. Thinkvisibility was full of brilliant presentations which I will come to. The other phenomenal thing for me was the broad spectrum of people there. I have written about the people we met before the conference above and will write about those we met after too. So Mr. Thehodge, I would like heap praise upon you for organising ThinkVisibility to entice all these fine people away from their desktop! Well done Dom.
Tim Nash
Tim Nash Tim’s presentation was a great start to the day. He told us how he’d been challenged to explain how a search engine works to pre-school children. He then had buckets with red water in them – apparently gJuice is red, who knew? By using holes in the buckets he showed how gJuice is transferred but by bunging up those holes only a few drops escaped. At some point he expected the buckets to explode, despite this not happening it was a wonderful analogy which I haven’t heard before. Ranking for white coat SEO would have worked had Dave Naylor not have hijacked him ;)
Chris Garrett
Chris Garrett‘s presentation fitted ThinkVisibility very well: "25 ways to get visibility with blogs". Chris ensured everybody knew to use quality as opposed to tricks, concentrated on people over numbers and realised there were only 3 sources of traffic. He then went on to share his 25 ways of getting visibility (sounds almost like a linkbait resource post, doesn’t it?) including some that I had never considered. Q&A sites for example, sheer genius.
Tom Smith
Tom Smith came the closer to Twitter that I have ever seen any live person come. His style of presenting and evident enthusiasm for Social Media left eery second sentence unended. I must admit to never having heard of Tom prior to Thinkvisibility but anyone with such passion and energy is worth keeping an eye out for!
Guy Redwood
Guy Redwood did a phenomenal job of debunking the F pattern myth that I, as many others in the room, had subscribed to wholeheartedly. Despite having seen eyetracking usability testing from "both sides of the mirror" in the past, Guy’s presentation gave much more insight into the whole field of usability testing – the fact that male and female users don’t differ on the whole was new to me for example.
Lunch
Lunch was a buffet and a chance to retank some electrolytes in the form of scotch eggs and crisps to help with the dehydration from the night before. We did get a couple of offers of going to the pub, but being the lightest of lightweights declined graciously.
Just before the next presentation started poor Chris Garrett got caught between two hatted and booze fuming Scotsmen:
Dave Naylor
Dave Naylor answered more questions than anyone else and was frank and open throughout it all. He gave both sides of the coin: From the 3 month old website that had 1500 pages of exceptional content outranking older more established domains without a single backlink, to sites being disappeared in a Van Helsing stylee ;) Buying links is bad kids m’kay.
Tom Critchlow
Tom Critchlow had a raft of advice and knowledge on reputation management to share. From putting stories straight, to the evil wikipedia-press-wikipedia cycle that can take months and legal proceedings to fix. Ryanair of course got a wee mention too, but Tom’s presentation will be remembered above all for informing us of the current market value for Thai brides ;)
Patrick Altoft
Patrick Altoft gave a great talk on linkbuilding, underlining that the vast majority of people forget to figure out what type of links their site needs. He then went on to describe 3 main types of links and how to go about getting them, truly invaluable. The Q&A at the end of his presentation also revealed a further Van Helsingesque technique ;)
Kieron Donoghue
Kieron Donoghue enlightened us about affiliate marketing. Some of his successes with older content getting found again really drove home the point that you should archive and not delete! Announcing to all that Chris would be buying beers in the pub was a great finish to his presentation too ;)
Post Conference Dinner
After leaving the conference and heading back to our hotel Chris, Dave & Elaine really kindly asked us if we’d come along for dinner with them later on. We went with them all to meet Kieron and Ray / @befuddle for a cracking Thai meal. The name of the restaurant escapes me for it to get a link too. Good food is always all the better when shared with good people :)
Booze upon Booze
The Hog’s Head was our after dinner booze destination to catch up with the other good folk. From this point on my hat got passed around a fair bit as my lovely assistant helped to capture:
After the Hog’s Head we went back to our hotel bar where we got more and more drinks in with Tim, Chris C, @Caius, @Peterc, Shaun and Alastair joining us after retrieving his passport ;) More hat swapping ensued:
At some point I fell over, in a spectacular fashion it must be said!
The hotel bar had closed so, as is customary it was decided MacDonald’s was a good idea. The last men standing were snapped by the last lady standing, and proud of her I was too!
Other Posts About Thinkvisibility
Chris C at pfft
Shaun at Hobo
Paul at NorthSouthMedia
Lynne at PoLR
Andy at mmmeeja
Tom C at SEOmoz
Why I am an idiot
I am an idiot for many reasons really, but I realised on Saturday is that:
- I should write a lot more often
- WebArchitecture is a dozy tag
- Half of the photos I should have taken I didn’t
- AndrewBurnett.com should be my personal blog
- Realising you’re an idiot is better than not realising it!
- I’m still hosted on this server.
If you can think of any other reasons I’m an idiot I would genuinely love to hear them!
This entry was written by , posted on March 11, 2009 at 3:22 am, filed under social media and tagged andrew burnett, conference, leeds, seo, thinkvisibility, twitter. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.
Create a Skittles.com TwitterSearch Front Page
Today Twitter has been on fire with Skittles.com’s stunt of replacing their front page with a TwitterSearch page for skittles.
@jennielees asked how they [skittles] could measure the visitor numbers and so on.
The answer lies in the source code of course… The page is still hosted on skittles.com, there is simply an iframe on the page with its source set as being http://search.twitter.com/search?q=skittles .
The aim of this post is not to belittle the brilliant concept of replacing your own content with what people on Twitter are saying about your product.
How to Create a Skittles.com TwitterSearch Front Page Yourself
It could not be simpler ladies and gentlemen.
Go to this page, copy the source code and replace “andrewburnett” with whatever it is you want to appear in the TwitterSearch. (You’ll also want to delete or change the Google Analytics script).
This entry was written by , posted on March 2, 2009 at 4:30 pm, filed under self help, social media. Leave a comment or view the discussion at the permalink.