Author Topic: The Official Introduction Thread.  (Read 457371 times)

Woz

  • Tea! Black! Strong! Hot! Now!
  • Global Moderator
  • Full Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 214
    • View Profile
The Official Introduction Thread.
« on: November 02, 2010, 07:45:42 AM »
or, as we Aussies would say - "Who the Bloody Hell Are Ya?"

So, tell us:

who you are,

perhaps where you are,

how we might recognise you around the traps,

and as much else about yourself as you are comfortable us knowing.
Courage, Courtesy and Service.
Constant and True.

Woz

  • Tea! Black! Strong! Hot! Now!
  • Global Moderator
  • Full Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 214
    • View Profile
Re: The Official Introduction Thread.
« Reply #1 on: November 02, 2010, 07:50:57 AM »
I'm Woz

from Australia,

known as Woz almost everywhere online,

Jack of many trades, Master of, well, a couple perhaps. Trained musician/composer/recording engineer, although it's been a long time. Dabble in the Webmastering/Marketeering arts. Filling in my spare (??) time studying Permaculture, and Old Forgotten Skills as we are headed for tough times ahead, and amuse myself with Bushcraft activities.

Onya
Woz
« Last Edit: November 02, 2010, 08:48:16 AM by Woz »
Courage, Courtesy and Service.
Constant and True.

4Eyes

  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 817
    • View Profile
    • Email
Re: The Official Introduction Thread.
« Reply #2 on: November 02, 2010, 11:36:32 AM »
4Eyes

One of those who jumped ship from WMW when it started being interesting for all the wrong reasons (YMMV)

Older, balder and fatter, but still doing pretty much the same thing as before - client SEO, conversion improvement and affiliate stuff - balance falling more on affiliate stuff these days though.


TallTroll

  • Sr. Member
  • ****
  • Posts: 272
    • View Profile
    • Email
Re: The Official Introduction Thread.
« Reply #3 on: November 02, 2010, 11:55:00 AM »
TallTroll

Looking at the member list is like old times :) So, is this place going to *SPARKLE*?

Drastic

  • Need a bigger hammer...
  • Global Moderator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 3084
  • Resident Redneck
    • View Profile
Re: The Official Introduction Thread.
« Reply #4 on: November 02, 2010, 12:37:25 PM »
Drastic

Location - South Carolina (Southern East Coast US)
Class - redneck. <cannot continue gaining levels in this class>
Strengths - affiliate, seo, tactics
Weaknesses - graphic design, kryptonite, Chuck Norris

Likes - moonlit walks alongside automated bots, cigars, beer, home theater
Dislikes - guberu speak, hats, most email, the telephone

Hero - Ricky Bobby (you may have seen his latest hit movie, Talladega Nights)

Good to see all the new and old faces here, welcome people!

rcjordan

  • I'm consulting the authorities on the subject
  • Global Moderator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 16268
  • Debbie says...
    • View Profile
Re: The Official Introduction Thread.
« Reply #5 on: November 02, 2010, 02:09:12 PM »
Crap, the member roster is making me wonder if the lobby of the Islington is still available.

...and Debbie says hello, boys.

<added>
>Islington

Yup.  Here's the infamous "front table in the window"

sugarkane

  • Inner Core
  • Jr. Member
  • *
  • Posts: 82
    • View Profile
Re: The Official Introduction Thread.
« Reply #6 on: November 02, 2010, 03:51:51 PM »
sugarkane, UK

Some great memories been stirred here...

These days I'm still up to much the same stuff - affiliate, adsense, and running a credit brokerage (been an interesting few years on that one).

Looking forward to seeing where this goes :)
I'd rather decline two drinks than one German adjective.

agerhart

  • Global Moderator
  • Full Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 233
    • View Profile
Re: The Official Introduction Thread.
« Reply #7 on: November 02, 2010, 04:26:58 PM »
agerhart - US

Previous life of daytime corporate SEO and night spamming

Leading a new life running a company...managing the team, driving traffic, monetizing in any way we can, etc.

DrCool

  • Global Moderator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 874
  • I know you all want to know what I think
    • AOL Instant Messenger - drcool1973
    • View Profile
    • What Does Joe Think
    • Email
Re: The Official Introduction Thread.
« Reply #8 on: November 02, 2010, 04:35:50 PM »
DrCool in the US. Joe is my real name.

Do primarily affiliate stuff. We have created a couple IM products in the past as well. Have a couple more of those in the works.

I am probably the dumbest guy in the room here. Most of my affiliate stuff is pretty low level datafeed based sites.

JamesR

  • Full Member
  • ***
  • Posts: 206
    • View Profile
    • Email
Re: The Official Introduction Thread.
« Reply #9 on: November 02, 2010, 05:23:16 PM »
JamesR - my real name is top secret  ::)

Independent webmaster

rcjordan

  • I'm consulting the authorities on the subject
  • Global Moderator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 16268
  • Debbie says...
    • View Profile
Re: The Official Introduction Thread.
« Reply #10 on: November 02, 2010, 06:55:27 PM »
OK, I got slapped for not really saying anything, so here it is, more than you'll ever want to know....

1972: BS in Commerce and Economics from WLU.edu, Mid-70’s: Worked for Burroughs (now Unysis) for a couple of years selling mainframes door-to-door. They taught me some programming, enough to be dangerous.

Late-70’s to present: Work in the family businesses. Wrote the A/R, A/P, and Inventory software from scratch for a mid-size wholesale supply house. Got heavily involved in price books, catalog production and, later, desktop publishing. My computer background led me to PC’s but it was the unrealized promise of desktop publishing that whetted my appetite for the web.

1995: My first 4 domain registrations were free. The current registrar system wasn’t set up yet.

1996: The beginnings of the high-content, official tourism network goes online. These sites were, and remain, responsible for generating the revenue needed to develop and maintain the project, which is still done through banners (now contextual), affiliates, sponsorships, and ad sales. Today, the sites continue to cooperate extensively with numerous regional and community chambers of commerce, museums, historic sites, and organizations. For most of them, it still provides their primary ‘official’ tourism leads and referral traffic.

1997: Get C&D from a billion-dollar chemical company, they wanted one of my geographic domains. Seems they had a trademark, but in a different classification. They ended up buying it for about $7,800.Lawyers got $2k of that.

1998: First super-long tail local site went up. Though there are so many sites like it out there now that we all damned as a class, mine was close to groundbreaking but probably not the absolute first, though I can’t recall having a competitor when it went live. Being unique and having enough real utility, it was listed as a good travel resource by newspapers, major magazines, edu sites (yeah!), library sites, etc. It even had a book credit from Neil Gaiman …just goes to show how perceptions change or, more importantly, how a good niche gets to be shoving-room only. Interestingly, it was also the one that was absolutely at its dog-ugliest while it was piling on the authoritative incoming links and racking up significant hotel bookings.

As for my involvement in SEO, I was sitting at the keyboard when Digital Equipment’s Altavista changed the web. I say it changed everything because AV was the first spidering engine with a hint of mass appeal and popularity. (“Mass” in 1995 was still pretty pitiful in media terms.) The realization of just how much this would profoundly alter the linear nature of web surfing even caused me to call a meeting on how to deal with it. I still remember the subject line of the email; Whoa! This changes everything! I guess if you’re looking for the definitive moment when my SEO thoughts crystallized, that meeting would be it. The thoughts? [1] Long Tail and [2] Doorway pages. A few months after that, as Altavista started making inroads with the general public, a local Chamber of Commerce president called me, he was very much agitated and alarmed. His town had been the location of a very negative event that would blacken tourism and relocation prospects and Altavista’s serps were chock-full of references to it. He wanted me to get them removed from the search engines. I explained that while no one other than the search engines themselves could remove them, I thought I could push them off the front page. The Game was on! I was an early subscriber to Danny Sullivan’s new-ish paid site, SEW, but dropped out of it after a few months. I drifted around a bit between a few SEO forums (there weren’t that many). I was an active member in Jim Wilson’s searchengineforums, quit, came back a year or so later, started hanging out online with Oilman. Online forums just weren’t hitting on what I knew was working, what I knew would manipulate results. Then, as now, the newbies drowned out any real chance of having a serp-jerking discussion. Oilman moved to a site with about 40 members –searchengineworld, the predecessor of webmasterworld. I visited, it seemed to be primarily about cloaking, I left. I came back a few months later, though, and became active. Later, I became the first admin, or at least one of the first. There I met or re-met my online friends, many of whom have gone on to become the brand-name nicks of SEO today (though most have also moved on from life in the forums). Mackin came up with the initial spark of what became Pubconference and we started that as a semi-private, international SEO meeting.

I retired from admin life in 2003, I believe, and left public SEO forums soon after. (The problem with the global village is all the global village idiots. Paul Ginsparg) I still post some water-cooler chat and, every now and then, try to provide a reality-check or counterpoint. Other than the occasional newspaper reporter, I’ve given up on minding the mindless, there are just too many of them. Mostly, I just read and watch the developments in search.

The above is from Michael Gray's site. Let's see if he's tending his logs
http://www.wolf-howl.com/local-search/rc-jordan-local-search-interview/

Oct 2010: I'm baaaaAAAaaack.
« Last Edit: November 02, 2010, 06:58:56 PM by rcjordan »

littleman

  • Administrator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 6531
    • View Profile
Re: The Official Introduction Thread.
« Reply #11 on: November 02, 2010, 08:14:13 PM »
Fallowing RC's example I'll put in some detail.

Northern California, USA

The very old timers will remember me from searchenginegforums.com from back in the late 90s.  Those who are a little less old will remember me from WMW where I moderated the Spider forum, Linux forum and was pretty active in the cloking forum.   After a while I just couldn't post over there any more.  My nick went public again for a while back when Threadwatch was active and fun, but it's mostly lived behind closed doors for the last several years.

I started out (late 90s) slamming the search engines with lots of cloked content, and really thought I was the sh## back then owning some great positions in Excite, Inktomi, Altavista and all the other dead engines that use to mean something.

As the engines got better at busting clokes and linkpop became more of a factor I moved to more mainstream SEO consulting which is probably about the most frustrating thing to do for a living -- not that the task of optimizing a site is hard (often it is quite easy with these popular corporate/retail sites) but it is hard because it is really difficult to get the corporate machines to do what they need to do..  Although, I have to say, on those occasions when they do do what is advised it can be quite rewarding.

Last few years I've been involved in a few open-source projects, but I mostly am self employed as an internet marketer.  I Working for myself so I have only myself to blame or praise, but mostly I work like this because I like the commute and I get to spend a lot of time at home.

Strengths: affiliate, SEO, some technical know how
Weaknesses: anything that takes artistic talent
Dislikes: What some of us call stardust and fandom

ukgimp

  • Global Moderator
  • Hero Member
  • *****
  • Posts: 2241
    • View Profile
Re: The Official Introduction Thread.
« Reply #12 on: November 02, 2010, 09:05:52 PM »
1. After school to Leeds Uni
2. MPhil at Birmingham uni followed by phd. Learnt SEO for fun since realising that you could get to the top of AV and Yahoo
3. Work in tech services on portal project which was ahead of its time, but way to far. Learned php and other stuff
4. Work as SEO consultant since 2004 full time, but before that a little on the side during work hours
5. Property rentals since 2008 with a little SEO
6. Moving back into SEO more now now I have taken on people to help with properties.

Looking forward to getting back into it more, in a way that means I wont have to deal with dipshits

Peter

  • Inner Core
  • Full Member
  • *
  • Posts: 118
    • View Profile
Re: The Official Introduction Thread.
« Reply #13 on: November 03, 2010, 01:59:17 PM »
Peter

Various names over various forums/blogs

Started SEO in the late 90s from a design background.

Mod at SEF until I moved totally to WMW - Don't hardly do any (public) forums any more.

Met a lot of you guys at various SEO Roadshows, etc.

Doing client work & consulting half the time - and a few of my own aff/drop ship sites.

Interested in link-building.


Rupert

  • Inner Core
  • Hero Member
  • *
  • Posts: 3347
  • George in a previous life.
    • View Profile
    • SuitsMen
Re: The Official Introduction Thread.
« Reply #14 on: November 03, 2010, 04:07:35 PM »
Ha, so here it is... jumped the gun elsewhere :)

Was the first in the UK to sell suits online. (If someone else was, I never found them for some years)  Most people thought I was nuts to do it.  Now I know I am ...  so many better was of making a living   ::)

 Joined WMW in 2001 left open forums soon after, as the same rubbish kept getting circulated.
... Make sure you live before you die.