October 25, 2004
Cashing in on GOOG real estate through Google
By Tom Foremski - SiliconValleyWatcher.com
As I was researching a story on Google through Google’s search engine, I popped in the stock ticker GOOG and guess what turned up on the side sponsored link? An advert for a $2.2m home in Menlo Park, right in GOOG’s neighborhood. And the name of the realtor company? Cashin Company Realtors.
Very clever, I thought, what an excellent way to target those newly paper-rich Googlers who are checking on the GOOG share price through Google. But what surprised me even more was that there was only ONE sponsored link for GOOG.
Does this mean that Cashin outbid everyone for the adword link? Or does it mean that only one local realtor knows how to run a Google ad campaign? It’s probably the latter.
Which means there is way more room for Google to grow as people become familiar with running a Google online ad words campaign.
Posted by Tom Foremski at 05:35 PM | Comments (0)
October 13, 2004
Tom Watch: Lost in the world of server side software, php, css, templates, and MT modules
Watchers of the Silicon Valley Watcher site might have seen some (momentary) strange displays of our entries, sidebars, ads and other unusual things, over the past couple of days.
I’d like to say we were experimenting with innovative publishing formats, but that was not the case.
It was me tinkering around and seeing what does what and trying to map out in my head how various things interact.
I do speak a little Geek. I had worked as a software engineer in a past life and it was a much simpler life then. Today, developing web services and combining them into different applications is way more complex. Things are nested within each other and point to code on different locations on the same server, and on servers all over the internet.
When I worked as a software engineer, I worked on a mainframe, I would “point” my code to go fetch data from a known and trusted location on that same computer. The data flow is way more complex these days, and this is the opportunity and the challenge. The opportunity is in crafting sophisticated web services applications from either free, or very low cost software components, such as Linux, PHP scripts, etc. The challenge is doing it in such a way as to make it easy to make changes on the fly, and those changes are instantly reflected across an entire web site, or collection of web sites.
In Movable Type (MT), the trick to being able to use this publishing tool in different ways is understanding the interaction between the main index file, and the many different modules and templates—which are then defined in cascading style sheets.
It is interesting to see how sophisticated much of the server side software components have become. However, there is still an amazing amount of integration that has to be done between the tools available. You need a good-sized “box” of tools to do the work. For example, I would love to point and click and drag and save and rebuild and open and delete and undo, and other stuff—server side, as easily as I can do client side today on my laptop.
Playing around with MT was an engrossing, fun, and often frustrating experience, and I managed to wipe out a bunch of modules I had been working on. Fortunately, my colleague Doug Millison was feeding the blog here at “the watcher” with excellent entries. You’ll see more of Doug when we launch Silicon Valley Media Watch in the next couple of days.
Posted by Tom Foremski at 11:52 PM | Comments (0)
October 11, 2004
Tom Watch:I have rarely met a thought I didn’t like at 3am in the morning…Perils of Blogging #1
I have a problem and an opportunity in that I can publish at any time of the day or night.
I’m sure everyone has had the experience of sending an email to someone when on further reflection you would rather have not. My fear is that I will publish something I would rather have not.
I’ve fallen into a geek engineer coder schedule, which is 10am to 3am. The late night hours are quiet and a good time to write. But my judgement at that late hour has always had a spotty record.
I constantly remind my colleagues to edit my late night entries as soon as they awake. And edit them for clarity and stupidity. But if I file after 3am, they won’t see this for a few hours at least, and thus won't be able to delete potentially embarrasing copy that has already been spidered and seen by millions(potentially!)
Which means I should probably stay away from 3am posts.
Posted by Tom Foremski at 03:15 AM | Comments (0)
October 04, 2004
Tom Watch: Self-obsession in the blogosphere
The other day, my ex- said I was self-obsessed because I had created a category on this site, called “Tom Watch.” I tried to explain that this had nothing to do with my ego, or that I was developing an unappealing personal characteristic. It was all to do with “blogging.”
Blogging is many things, and among those many things, it is also about the blogger. It is a form of communication/journalism, in which the author is clearly identified, his opinion is tightly bound to his name, and it also provides a vehicle for a remarkable range of flexibility in terms of subject matter, form, and delivery.
In writing Silicon Valley Watcher, I quickly realized that there are many types of content I wanted to publish. Some of the content might be more like an essay/thought piece to encourage discussion and debate. Some of my content would be more like a news story, feature, or column. Some of my entries would cover specific industry sectors or types of companies. And some of my entries would be about me, my daily experiences, my efforts to make a living, to recruit a team of colleagues, to launch a venture, etc. Thus I started labeling my entries as Tech Watch, Media Watch, etc.
By publishing a Tom Watch entry, I ask that my readers not think of me as self-obsessed, but that I am merely attempting to guide them to entries that they might enjoy, or would rather avoid.
Posted by Tom Foremski at 07:14 PM | Comments (0)
September 29, 2004
Tom Watch: I earned my first dollar today as a blogger!
This is an exciting day, because I just earned my first dollar blogging. It’s $1.45 to be exact and on just my second day with advertisements on my site. And my traffic has soared by 600 per cent since yesterday. At this rate of growth SiliconValleyWatcher.com, will be the world’s largest within just a couple of months…
Unfortunately, I can’t frame my first dollar, but maybe I can frame the screen shot of my G**gle account (I’m not supposed to even mention that there are G00Gly things down there…V or over there >, or even call them @ds, or else they could cut me off, and then how would I survive?)
My ambitions to become a micro-media-mogul are now officially underway, and it is all thanks to YOU, my (hopefully) loyal readers. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Posted by Tom Foremski at 03:57 PM | Comments (1)
Tom Watch: I ran out of bandwidth Tuesday morning…
I am learning a lot about the daily travails of “blogging” or being a “stand-alone journalist,” as Chris Nolan puts it. You also have to be a stand alone IT expert sometimes, a stand-alone publisher, and a stand alone anything-else-that-needs to be done. That’s at least four jobs rolled into one.
I wasn’t handling the IT job very well Tuesday morning. I had been slowly rolling out this site over the past few days, just telling small groups of people at a time.
But traffic spiked up quite quickly and I ran out of bandwidth. I didn't notice for a while, then it took me hours to find the right combination of username and password to get into my service provider and open up a bigger pipe. So, my apologies, and I hope you come back.
Posted by Tom Foremski at 12:09 AM | Comments (0)
September 26, 2004
Tom Watch: Fun with a Treo—the “Frisco Wave”
or how to flag down a taxi cab from three blocks away on a busy Friday evening.
I was running late and needed a taxi, but there were few to be seen along Geary Street, and with six lanes of traffic, it was difficult to be seen. Then, I spotted a taxi three, maybe four blocks away, but it was in a far lane, and likely unable to see me until closer, and by then it would be difficult for it to pull across two lanes of traffic to pick me up. But, pulling out my trusty Treo 600, I...
I switched on the screen, which is quite bright and large on a Treo 600, and waved it high above my head. Within seconds the taxi flashed back a response, and it had time to move across two traffic lanes, and I was in the cab and on my way.
“That was the first time I’d seen anybody do that,” Chuck Walker, the cab driver said. “That was very effective, I could see you from a long ways away. Otherwise, it’s difficult to spot people unless they step out onto the road. I told him that it was a spur of the moment thing, but that maybe we were both present at the creation of a new thing, and maybe we could launch it as a meme.
But what to call it? The taxi beacon? The taxi flash, or flash a taxi? Or, the “San Francisco wave,” which would likely be shortened to the “Frisco wave” by outsiders, much to the annoyance of San Franciscans, who generally hate the term “Frisco.”
What do you think that method of hailing a taxi cab could be called?
Posted by Tom Foremski at 02:52 PM | Comments (3)
