Food, foosball, and Nerf were the main themes (well, besides Fedora & Ubuntu) at last night’s Ubuntu/Fedora Release Party at Code Greene. Here are some pictures from the party posted on flickr.

The inaugural PodCampSLC 2008 took place on Saturday, March 15th, 2008. The turnout was pretty good. There were a few glitches with building entry and wifi, but all-in-all it was a fairly smooth unconference I suspect. I had great fun meeting people and listening to interesting conversation and one very well done, very educational speech on audio engineering by Mike Wiseland. I also was pleased to meet Jake Spurlock, who works on skiutah.com blog as part of a school project. Very cool stuff. While browsing the blog, I saw this truly gorgeous ski photograph by Grant Gunderson.

Some really cool things I learned at PodCampSLC were:

• The Zoom H4 is a dynamic and superb little podcasting tool.
• The Sure SM58 is a common mic you can get for ~$100.
• The AT4050 is a great mic (three mics in one: cardiod, omni & figure 8) that retails for $999, but you can probably get it for around $550.
• The biggest problem with lower end video cameras is hum from the tape.
• Vegas is a really great professional podcast editor that also does video.
• VisualHub is great video editing software.
• I really like startcooking.com (mentioned by Doug from Podango).
• 50,000 downloads/month is not enough reach to attract sponsorships, 50k might be enough for niche advertisers.
• If it takes 1 hour to create a 13MB audio podcast, it probably will take 10 hours to create a 50MB video podcast.
• Blogging is a great search engine tool. (I knew that one!)
• The best mic situation for a group setting (i.e. users group meeting) is a Zoom H4 type device to record the speaker plus two table top mics for questions from the audience.

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PodCampSLC 2008
Learn, Share, Evolve.

Bloggers, podcasters, videocasters of all skill levels will come together on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 to mix, mingle, and enlighten the Utah community about podcasting. PodCampSLC is a free event open to the public. Tracks include Podcasting 101 and Advanced Podcasting. Registration/networking for this free event begins at 9:00 am. Event is from 10am to 4pm. Please come, learn and share.
http://podcamp.pbwiki.com/PodCampSLCSessions

Sign Up for PodCampSLC at Upcoming.org
Saturday, March 15, 2008
10:00 AM - 4:00 PM
Registration/networking begins at 9am
Neumont University
10701 S River Front Parkway, Suite 300, South Jordan, UT 84095
GPS Point: 40.5585 N 111.9104 W

Say hello to custom laser engraved moleskine notebooks. The worlds favorite notebook just got way cooler.

WebProNews does a brilliant job introducing coverage of Search Marketing Expo West 2008 in this great viral video. You probably have to be an SEO insider to get it though. The video production is just really well put together. Love the music and sound effects. Looks like it was fun to make. Kudos to Mike McDonald and the WebProNews crew for putting it together.

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It was extraordinarily cool to meet WordPress creator and Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg at a Utah WordPress Meetup on Saturday, February 2, 2008. Matt is an all around nice guy who is unassuming and very laid back. Despite his reserved nature, I think he has a million ideas in his head at any given moment. His ability to really listen to and get to know people was evident as he mentioned about a thousand past conversations he’d had with many people I know of (and many I didn’t). At 24 years old, he’s only created one of the most-loved blogging platforms ever (WordPress), built one of the coolest companies on the planet (Automattic), raised millions in venture capital, and managed to put together a phenomenal team dedicated (pure and simple) to developing free and open source web software for all.

A media darling with serious geek appeal, Automattic quite expectedly makes my list of most-favorite-companies-in-the-world because they manage to combine extraordinary developer talent with a business model built around open source all the while maintaining blog, anti-spam, identity, wikis, forum software, and more via a world-wide spread of developer locations from Australia to Bulgaria. Talk about breaking the barriers of a normally prohibitive job market demographic… don’t let geography get in the way of hiring the most talented developers! I would love to hear more about Matt’s thoughts on his process for hiring such an amazing team. The Automattic outfit completely fascinates me.

Special thanks to Joseph Scott, Automattic’s brilliant “Bug Exorcist,” for organizing the lunch.

Nanosolar claims to be the first solar panel manufacturer to be able to profitably sell solar panels for less than $1 a watt. That is the price at which solar energy becomes less expensive than coal. Check out this NY Times article about Nanosolar posted December 18, 2007. And, watch this video from KQED:

I am fascinated by solar power.

Here are some pretty nifty Google search parameters to help you with your SEO efforts.

Adding &pws=0 turns off personalized search.

If you work with clients in a region other than your own, localization could come in handy.

gl - country &gl=US
gll - latitude,longitude
gr - region &gr=CA-AB &gr=GB-ENG &gr=US-UT
gcs - city (gr must be set) &gr=UT-US&gcs=Salt Lake City
gpc - postal code (gl must be “US”) &gl=US&gps=84109
gm - US metropolitan areas &gm=770

Restrict search results to a date range by using as_qdr.

d[number] - past number of days (i.e. &as_qdr=d10)
w[number] - past number of weeks
y[number] - past number of years

“&strip=1? on cache: queries strip media from the google cache view.
“&filter=0? on site: queries hide duplicate results.

Joost de Valk created a very nice pdf summarizing several of the google url parameters. You should also check out Cheat Sheet For Google Cheat Sheets for a few more links.

Google representative Matt Cutts advises using 301 redirects to establish a preferred www or non-www domain. URLs such as www.example.com, example.com, www.example.com/index.html, and example.com/home.asp all seem like they point to the same page, but all of them, in fact, could contain unique content. In order to cut down on a search engine cataloging said content more than one time, and therefore diluting search engine results pages (SERPs), you can use 301 redirects, a good internal link structure, xml sitemaps, and set your preferred domain in your Google Webmaster Central account. Read the rest of this entry »

Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP: A Developer’s Guide to SEO by Jaimie Sirovich, Cristian Darie
Publisher: Wrox (April 16, 2007)
ISBN-10: 0470100923
ISBN-13: 978-0470100929

From url canonicalization to link bait, Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP hits all the SEO basics a php programmer could need. Billed as a book written for the php developer or tech-savvy marketer, this book attempts to debunk a few myths and protect you from the black arts of black hat seo while offering up a healthy dose of code examples and tool suggestions. Read the rest of this entry »