New Home Inspection (A Revisit)

Ryan    Uncategorized     Historic Phoenix, Home Inspection, New Home

So after Tuesday’s home inspection, Andrea and I have come out way better then our last attempt. No foundation issues, major plumbing issues, HVAC… I’m getting more and more pumped on closing on this thing each and every day. June 30th, it’s getting close.

More to follow.

Twitter: Pop Culture’s Introduction to RSS Feeds

Ryan    Uncategorized     CNBC, Google Reader, Rss, Twitter

Never mind the co-communication aspect of Twitter. Never mind the community building, social networking, or anything else related to multiple-sided discussions. Twitter, in it’s bare bones state is a micro blogging tool (some people hate this phrase) allowing people to create snippets of some kind of ‘information’; be it personal, topical, organizational, or whatever else. While it is NOT a news feed… it essentially is. Sorry guys. The only thing is… you can listen to a lot of different feeds at the same time. Oh and you can talk back.

Look at this guy..

Image taken from: www.MinervaNetworks.com

Wow he looks pretty relaxed and happy in his chair watching lots of different television screens pump out shows of who knows what kind of content. Is this like a Twitter?

I would have to say no.

This is extremely wasteful and you’re not going to be able to make any kind of sense out of any of the content unless you’re Dr. Nash from Ron Howard’s movie, A Beautiful Mind. No, instead, maybe… the NASDAQ studio you always see on CNBC or Bloomberg TV; maybe that is a better representation.

Image taken from: www.media.cnbc.com

If you don’t understand the differences between the NASDAQ studio and whatever room the guy up there is in, then you should watch CNBC. I’ll catch Squawk on the Street and the The Call every now and then before work. It’s like home or something for me in my early morning grumpiness.

Okay, so Twitter is a feed. Hello?… Twitter Feed. But where have we seen feeds before? Sure Yahoo!’s constant news updates is refreshing every minute, same for Google, oh and that PerezHilton.com. That dude updates his feed in time with whenever the minute hand of a clock hits a prime number. But what I’m really trying to say is, your Twitter feed is the simplest way for people to create their own feeds for whoever wants to listen to them, or look towards them for information/entertainment.

If we asked this same group of people to set up an RSS feed reader and get their updates that way, what do you think the majority would say? First of all, if you knew how to do it in the first place… you’d think it was too hard to set it up, actually go into the content itself, and then make your comments that way. Although blog users love that kind of interaction. Why do you think they are always posting tweets like… ryanjin ‘New blog post: Twitter: Pop Culture’s Introduction to RSS Feeds… http://bit.ly/d7MFg Make a comment!!!’ ITS AN RSS FEED PEOPLE

My question for you now is this… how will Twitter utilize these millions of RSS feeds. How will you? While some might consider Twitter ‘non-content’ we essentially are creating gobs and gobs of it. I think the idea of flipping through the channels is an idea that we just kind of need to reevaluate. It’s a little old school.

For more information on RSS feeds check out www.WhatIsRSS.com or look it up in Wikipedia.. and if you’re interested… reader.google.com.

Peace

A Home Inspection in Historic Phoenix

Ryan    Uncategorized     Historic Phoenix, Home Inspection, New Home

Today marks the date for home inspection numero two. That is inspection numero one on house numero two. The first house ended with too much work to be done and the seller pretty much thinking that gray caulking in between bricks would suffice for extensive foundation work. #foundationfail

Joel at Sherlock Homes is coming back for round two however, and Andrea and I feel that we have better chances of coming out ahead of the game on this one. For one… the house just has a lot better bone work, and second, we have a little more cash for doing improvements should our report come back with a massive honeydew list. So our fingers are crossed, and our toes are painted. We feel confident… now we just need to get some cool storm shutters like in the Bahamas. They would really go well with the house. Trust me. Now we just need a pool or some cooling off feature. I don’t think a fountain will cut it. And by fountain I mean an outdoor cooling shower. Although a waterfall would be awesome… as long as it was falling in our new pool.

Any ways, if you’re looking for a historic house in Phoenix.. check out..

www.historicphoenix.com

Peace

Social Pyramid Schemes

Ryan    Uncategorized     Facebook, Pyramid Schemes, Social Media, Twitter

Found this NowSourcing.com image off of Google Image search: 'social media war'

So while I admit that I’m relatively new to Twitter, I feel pretty confident in some of my other social media platforms, mainly Facebook. By today’s standards however, if you took a look at my Facebook page, you might say otherwise. Maybe this is because I am one of those early adopters… those old fogies who don’t like change in what’s already a perfect system. Who knows.

When I first logged in, and submitted my first tweet on Twitter, I had already figured out that getting followers is the way to really make it in the twittersphere… (The more people who follow me, the more reach I’ll have when I want to say something really important. Good right? At the same time, I should also care about who I follow. Friends, family, role models, yadda yadda yadda)… For me, there was no agenda, no purpose for me to strive to gain followers fast, so I didn’t. I lived in the Twitter moment, and then at times, came out of the woodworks and sparked a little debate here and there. It was fun! Although I soon began to want more followers.

Although there were a couple weeks where I made hardly any tweets, I’ve tried to push my TPD (Tweets Per Day) averages since then, so that I could slowly become more relevant in the twitter aspect that is… ‘popularity’. The events that followed, however, soon began to modify my outlook of how Twitter is really making online computing communication different then what it used to be, or what we perceived it to be. Twitter is a great way to dumb down every day life. For example…

To follow the life of a new Twitter user, would look something like this:

1. Have a friend tell you how cool Twitter is.
2. Have another friend tell you how cool Twitter is.
3. Reluctantly create a Twitter account.
4. Make first tweet/twit whatever you want to call it.
5. Realize this is a waste of time.
6. Have people nag you and tell you you aren’t doing it right.
7. Realize that I should ‘optimize’ my tweets/twits for optimum searchability.
8. Reference someone in a tweet/twit.
9. Get in an argument with a tweeter/twitter(er).
10. Realize you are better then them.
11. Begin your quest to gain followers, in hopes to one day over take your antagonist in ‘follwers’.
12. Devise your own ‘get followers quick’ scheme.
13. Market it on Twitter.

Alright, so maybe that isn’t the way it works, but it might be close.. to some people.

In essence though, this could totally be a reason why Twitter is catching on so fast. Sure friends like to use it to communicate with each other(@noexample because they are my friends), companies and brands like to use it for PR and branding purposes (@starbucks, @zappos), or even news agencies will use it to broadcast each and every damn story they produce down to the minute (@nytimes, @cnn). What about everyone else? Maybe everyone else is just a Social Media Evangelist. “How can I show you the POWER of Twitter? Look at how many followers I have. I must be a professional at this SM stuff. I will show people that you just need to push garbage out of your Tweetdeck and sooner or later, people will think you’re cool and will want to follow you.

The idea I’m trying to convey is that a lot of what is happening on Twitter, is talk about Twitter. I’m not opposed to this! Don’t get me wrong. I just think that in order for this NOT to become the next big Pyramid Scheme… we should look at our actions on Twitter carefully. Hey, yeah I know I’m adding fuel to the fire, but look at the rest of my blog. I’m not a social media evangelist by any means. Although I do think everyone is an expert at it.

Peace.

Andrea's Home Blog

Ryan    Uncategorized     Andrea, Blogging, Dwele, New Home

With the recent turn of events….

I’m not quite sure if I said this, but a while ago Andrea and I made some offers on some houses which we didn’t end up getting, until we finally did get one about 3 weeks ago. Well after a week and a half of inspections, we figured the house was too ‘in the hole’ (no pun intended) for us to take on. Cracks, foundation issues, and everything else. We got out of that quick.

That being said, we found another house.. this time, one that we thought looked a lot more stable and apparently had been taken care of a lot better. Well with our fingers crossed, we’re not just waiting to hear back from the Lender to see if our offer made it. There were like 4 or 5 other offers for the same listing, so we’re hoping ours was the highest. Maybe today?… who knows.

Well with all this stress, anxiousness, and everything else, Andrea really wants to start writing a blog about our upcoming stories with dealing with our first home. Sounds fun right!? I’m just trying to figure out, where should I put it? As you may know, you’re on a WordPress blog hosted by my account with GoDaddy. Wow.. two plugs in one sentence. Should I buy a new URL or is there just so little interest in both our writing that it wouldn’t really be worth the money? Say for example we decide to host it through WordPress; would that be a better idea? I know Andrea has her own little ways for marketing it out there, but I dunno.

Any ways, I’m probably going to look into it more tonight. Just though I’d give a update on our house issues at the moment, as well as a future plug for Andrea’s home blog, to go HERE. <- No link cause I don’t know where it is yet. Stay tuned.

And for your little blip for music for the day… – Dwele

Some Jazzy Smooth RnB. I like it!

Peace

Fetchback Retargeting

Ryan    Uncategorized     Fetchback, Retargeting

Monday afternoon, and once again I found myself working. Nothing new, but the day seems to be going by quickly. That being said, I just thought I’d talk a little bit today on my experiences with Fetchback and the power that is ‘Retargeting’!

At work, I deal with a plethora of different search agencies, ad agencies, marketing companies, etc. etc. And to tell you the truth, after a while, hearing sales pitch after sales pitch of why we need a certain thing gets kind of old. Thank goodness I have a little bit of a system. An in all reality, you learn a little bit with time how to just say no. Fetchback, on the other hand, is one of my favorites. (We’re already working with them, so maybe they don’t count)

Fetchback is a retargeting company that works with you, a client, in creating holistic marketing campaigns dedicated towards a group of individuals that sometimes rarely gets noticed. “Has beens” Well not really has beens, but people who’ve come and gone from your site, just like that. What retargeting does, however, is it allows targeted display ads to populate those individuals search and online activity experiences, not only increasing branding, but pushing ads at reasonably good CPCs/CPMs, etc, since the targeting is so superb. Does that make sense? In essence, we’re targeting a group of ads to people who thought “Hmm… that seems interesting, maybe I’ll come back and look at them later.” Cool right?

Well since working with Fetchback, I’ve seen great numbers, and thats why I’m happy to share this kind of info with you! Actually, you can check me out on their site… www.Fetchback.com/Testimonials.html Just look for my name.

Also they have a YouTube channel.

Just some interesting video… I dunno… Thanks Fetchback!

Peace

P.S. One thing… their site could do with some SEO optimization for sure. Just my little sidenote, in case they are listening.