I’m at the Seattle SMX Advanced Show, and last night Microsoft hosted a welcome party. They fed us all the Coconut Shrimp we could eat, along with Spring Rolls, Shrimp Stuffed Filo dough pastries, and an assorted selection of flatbreads, cheeses and fruits.

There were servers walking around with trays of the appetizers, and there were three separate bars with no lines, all serving complementary beer, wine, and cocktails. Nice!

According to CNN, Google announced that they changed last Wednesday,  integrating all of the different types of search results onto the home page of Google, including news, images, video, and a new menu along the top, for access to all of their different Google services.

Google promises to offset postage charges through their latest project, Gmail paper. According to them, here’s what they’re offering…

A New Button
Now in Gmail, you can request a physical copy of any message with the click of a button, and we’ll send it to you in the mail.

Want to make a crappy Content Management System that nobody will want to use?

Let me tell you some basic steps that you cannot skip if you want to be in the running for the worst possible product for your users…

• Do not use anything “open source”, where outside developers, programmers or a community can contribute improvements for the system. Everything must be completely proprietary, and prohibitively expensive too.

The largest search marketing event to ever take place in Oregon is coming next month, called Searchfest, and it’s going to be good.

I’m on the events committee for SEMpdx, and we’re in the process of finalizing all the plans right now. The speaker and presenter schedules are almost ready to make public, and we’re getting final commitments from people outside of the SEMpdx board.

Mark March 7, 2007 on your calendar, and keep an eye out for more details at the new SEMpdx blog

I just made the blog live for SEMpdx, which is Portland’s first and finest search engine marketing group, for which I am a board member and sponsor.

It’s running on a free WordPress theme that I customized a bit, and I think it looks pretty darn good, if I do say so myself…

I’ve been a Microsoft Action Pack subscriber for  year, and usually had my software upgraded as soon as possible after release. As a computer consultant, I always had to rely on the latest software, and I’ve kept up my subscription for years.
Finally, yesterday, my Windows Vista and Office 2007 arrived . However, I’m less than enthusiastic about not only taking the time to install it all, but about the potential problems I’ll encounter.

As a computer consultant, my clients often used to ask me what hardware to buy. Since I was in the PC business until 2003, I’ve always had good technical knowledge about what to buy. Now that I focus on search, i’m not as up to date on the latest hardware.
Today I got an email asking for my recommendations, and since I had just went through the “PC re-education process” buying my own PC, I decided to make my reply available here…

Today I got notified by a hosting customer that his website had their content and design copied and reposted under another domain name hosted elsewhere.

The copied domain is here – www.nim-company.com while the ORIGINAL design and content are here – www.webpositionexpert.com.

The original site is a friend with a business in Antigua, while the content and design thief is apparently named Robert Soloway, and is in my back yard, up in Washington State.

I first read the Guerrilla Marketing Handbook in 1997, and I read it in one “sitting”. I started the book while on a trip, in my hotel lobby before leaving for home, and I finished on the parking lot shuttle bus back in Portland. I really can’t think of a single other book that’s had such a major influence on the direction my life was taking.

I’m going to fill the speaker slot at next Tuesday’s Oregon Computer Consultants Association meeting, and I’ll likely hang around for questions indefinitely. Below, you’ll see the press release that I just* submitted at PR Web for just $10.

Yes, PR Web did not raise their price, contrary to what you may have read. They did however, change their profitability upward with one little site tweak that was quite smart….

Last year upon returning from the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics show I wrote a blog entry called CES Roundup 2006, where I listed my personal top 10 most innovative items.

This year, at CES 2007, my criteria was about the same as last… This stuff needs to be able to change the world. It could be monumental, or it could be minute, but the potential for innovation and originality was of paramount importance. After all, I was there looking for cool niche stuff…