Northcast

Northpack

Northcrew 

• Give Up Chocolate
  • Fecking hell, with 5 days to go until I make a toblerone castle at my desk, I’ve gone without it for the year, I’m not going to lie, it has been difficult and I did move to other sweet type things but all in all I did lose some weight

  Do The Great North Run

  • I did this one as well, It was one of the most fantastic experiences I’ve ever had and I urge anyone to do it, however if your gonna do it, do it dressed up! seriously, nothing gets you going like 3000 Geordies shouting “Go On MARIO”.

  Start A Company

  • hmmm I’ll get back to this one in the middle of Jan, my work with stickyeyes took over a bit but I might have things to announce then

2007 was also an amazing year for my other projects, MTGCast went from 800 listeners to well over 10,000 a week, I’m very proud of the podcast and though it gets criticisms and people are always moaning about “transcripts”, I know that I’ve created something popular, thats why its quite hard to write this :), The week of Jan 20th will be my last show as host of Monday Night Magic, there are a lot of reasons for this, not just the fact that I havn’t played Magic properly in ages, I don’t have the time to keep up with the news and the rumors and the listenership has changed a lot in the last year and wants more information rather than good humored banter.. I will still be very involved in the network (since I own and pay for the bloody thing) but on a more admin and server level..

Onto 2008

• Make Secret Project N A Roaring Success
  • More about this in the middle of Jan
• Learn To Semi Play An Instrument
• Lose Some More Weight
• Cut down on the goodies but not give up
  • I’ve proved I can give them up, now can I cut them down
• Sometimes I’ve gotta take my time with things, instead of diving in head first (sometimes good, sometimes bad)
• Do another big thing for charity
• Blog at least once a week (this has to be the hardest one)..

The We I mention are Paul Stanton, Ryan Taylor, Deb Bassett and of course ME!..

We had a good response yesterday from the preshow which was just to get Stanton and Taylor used to talking via a podcast and will be recording the next one… soonish

The real one launches in Jan with lots and lots of shiney (read: crappy) video until we can afford some decent stuff

Version Control by Lorna

Q and A by Rockstar

(half of) TV 3 by Mark

and a few others, I really was intending on podcasting the day and doing some interivews but that really didn’t go to plan, however people seemed to like the day and have blogged some good stuff (especially about my session) and who could forget the ultimate barcamp battle of Rockstar’s latest game - Wii Table Tennis, in one corner - DOM, someone who never touched the game before, in the other corner IAN - Art Director for Rockstar Leeds, it was a tense battle with the warmup game handed to Ian first off but when The Hodge got into it Rockstar was defeated!.

The best bit about barcamp is the evening, and thanks to Rockstar for helping us out with that (congratulations to all afterparty attendees for out geeking a Rockstar coder), theres a lot of pictures floating around the internet, (do a search on flickr for barcampleeds)

God knows when the next one will be but I’m sure you’ll be informed..

As for geekup, last night I did a presentation about MTGCast and how it grew from this small little podcast to a network of casts thats too big for its own good ;), it was a 20:20 presentation that I felt went badly because well basiclly with everything that had been going on this week, I didn’t have time to sit down and go through it, but the information was there and it was a starting point for people to ask me questions after the presentation (of which I got quite a few).

We also announced the development of Northcast (I’ll link when things are up), a podcast that will demonstrate the abilities of northen companies and developers, the presentation was a “test the waters” thing to gauge peoples reaction and I’m glad I did a lot of people had comments and seems genuinely enthusiastic about it, a lot offered advice and quite a few wanted to book a slot to demo / talk about there site, company, experience, Ryan and Paul of Havoc Stuidos also joined as partners in podcasting, podcasting with people you know and gel with works a lot better (as was said in my presentation).

There are plans for a Rockstart’s Party in the evening however that hasn’t been finailised yet…

Thanks to everyone at Rockstar Leeds for being so accommodating and we look forward to kicking your arse…at the game you made?

(since I’ve had a few questions,

• I’m one of the organisers so this isn’t a load of Bollocks
• Rockstar Make Grand Theft Auto
• I don’t know if they are looking for developers.. ask them on the day

• Anger
  • They assume I’m the one who has knocked their precious website to #2 in Google
• Confusion
  • They don’t understand and when the next person asks, chips in with “He makes websites”
• Ok”
  • They understand what it is and leave it there or want to know a bit more..

Its completey obvious me to 90% of them they didn’t understand what I do…whilst some people were engaging and asked questions, other dismissed the work I do off hand and marked me as a blackhat spammer stating

“Google has a whole bunch of programmers to stop what you do”

…. not so much? or else these pages on Google’s site wouldn’t exist, let me pull a quite out from one of these.

“However, a few unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to unfairly manipulate search engine results.” #

and these few are the ones that people hear about, but search IS important, I was talking to someone last night who was spending £200 a day on PPC but nothing on SEO, using the outdated but still used Yahoo Keyword Tool, we could see his term had 40,000 searches a month on Yahoo UK online in Janurary 2007.. if he was in the top ten and got just 10% of that traffic, that would mean 4000 clicks a month on one term alone, with an average CPC of £0.30.

4000 x 0.30 = £1200 a month in free clicks on one term alone..

if we take my podcast network, we recently had an upserge in downloads and we are looking at around 10,000 downloads per week, I really like looking at stats and use a mixture of Heatmaps tracking, server side tracking and Google analytics, you’d expect a podcast network to get most of its traffic from directories and referring sites…. not this one!

55% of all traffic comes from organic search… on longtail terms, sure we are number one for magic the gathering podcast and mtg podcast but those arn’t the terms that bring us the most traffic, its 4, 5 and 6 word keyphrases that do it..

I’m not going to belittle you by explaining the longtail theory but with search and certain niches it really works.. I’m working on a project right now that will prove it because its such a niche area that it’s main market will be.. long tail searches..

SEO has a bad rap at the moment because in the early day’s it was all about “keyword stuffing” and “hidden text”, however the game has changed, the engines have evolved and so has the optimisation, last year I could have posted that SEO is all about TLC

• Titles
  • Make sure your titles are optimised and short
• Links
  • Get good links onto your pages and also have a good linking matrix within your site
• Content
  • Get some good original content, optmised and something that would want to be read by your readers

However now there are just so many other things to consider

• Social Media
• Universal Search
• Local Search
• Competitors sites using blackhat

It’s a funny ol’ game this SEO lark…

Monday, the MELD launch event, which arrived and went with mixed reaction, a lot of people were disapointed at been asked to make posters as a “MELDING” event, but the concepts and the ideas discussed were worth the crappy drawings :), I like MELD as a concept though I think the implementation of it at the moment is too broad and lacks focus, not to mention you had to apply for a place to come to the event and a lot of people were put off by the “invitation only” status..

Tuesday, the Apple launch event at Old Broadcasting House, I feel I will be blogging a lot more about this place over the coming months, not only because Linda is constantly bugging me to join, but also because thats were we Barcamp Leeds will be, but more on that later

Wednesday, Good old Geekup, upstairs this time in a more intimate environment,  good presentations and good company, I may be presenting next time.. IF I can get my skillz in order

Thursday, Work Night Out… nuff said!

Friday, Spent the evening playing Magic, something I havn’t done for a couple of months, which is Ironic considering I run a magic the gathering podcast network

and somewhere inbetween that we announced the date for Barcamp Leeds… which looks to be an awesome event..

I was giving out “The Hodge” cards, which people either thought they were weird or loved (either reaction is fine by me), anyway I realised I hadn’t posted since the last GeekUp, a lot has happened since then

• I Survived the Great North Run
  • (Dressed As Mario!)
• I Finally started my start up (not legally but thats next)
• The podcast network gained another 1000 listeners a week (average)
• I’m pregnant

Ok one of those is a lie……. I didn’t start the start up..

But seriously there seems to be a lot of energy at the moment about Leeds and northen developers and entrpuners, its a really good time to be here, and if we pull our finger out and get to work on .North and BarCamp Leeds eh Imran  mabey that will help the community a bit more…

anyway I will be blogging a bit more now I’m a bit more organized…. Ok i’m not kidding anyone I’m never organized!

Anyway I’m hoping to do a presentation next time, I have one of three ideas

• Making more money with your site - its not all about adsense
• combating click fraud
• SEO site clinic
  • i’d request a site a week before the geek up and do a full fledged seo report based off the current rankings and give my opinion on ways to improve it

not sure which one to go for at the moment but we will choose soon.

• http://www.openstreetmap.org/ was displayed with an invitation to an Open Street Map Party In Leeds (I’ll probably be in attendance)
• Someone I Have No Idea Who - did a presentation on eye tracking.

After the contreversy of last months presentations I’m hesitent to write my thoughts down but I believe I told Deb and Rob last night what I thought so o well, The presentations did an excellent job..there I said it… BRING ON THE FLAMES..

But seriously I felt that the Open Mapping presentation was more suited to the 20:20 style because of the information that was displayed, I can honestly say I remember hardly any specifics about the Eye Tracking one which is disappointing because I was looking forward to it, I understand 20:20 is ment to keep things exciting and not bore the audience but with certain subjects… 20seconds per slide just isn’t enough, don’t get me wrong half an hour on the subject and I would be typing a complaint about the length of the presentation but this is a choice for the organisers but I’ve gotta put my 2 penneth worth in..

As for me, well an interesting conversation sort of took over the nigh, what started off as a joke turned into a full fledged idea and marketing promotion.

whilst having a chat with a few friends somehow we approched the subject of the training for my run and if any companies were sponsoring me to which I replyed no, somehow the offer was there that all my expenses would be paid if I did the run in a Borat Mankini, upon hearing this Imran stepped in and upped the ante, £5000 on the table if instead, I walked from my Office to the next opencoffee in the center of Leeds in the afore mentioned Mankini, there was a lot talk and discussion at that and pretty soon plans for a YouTube promotion and BBC Local and ITV Calendar interviews were in motion…

Two bright sparks then tried to get there website on my two arse cheeks and thus the Million Dollar Arse Cheek Plan was in motion, Although I’ve lost a bit of weight im sure I have a lot more than a million pixels on my posterior, what if I was to sell the space at a $1 a pixel…. COMPANIES WOULD GRAB AT THE CHANCE… (though that would be sexual harrasement and wrong)…

Anyway It was a good night thanks Deb and Rob , thanks Paul and Ryan for the lift home (you already have your links), Thanks Imran for an interesting conversation subject.

Next Month: I may be doing a presentation on Making Cash With Banners / APIS / Fun Stuff