So I’ve finally gotten off my lazy butt and created a new blog. Rose and I will both be blogging at http://roseandsnail.com. If you’re subscribed on my FeedBurner feed, it should already be picking up my new entries over there. If not, head on over and get on my new feed!
See you there 
Pete’s sister was taking a business communications class and one day, he turned to me and said that I was in her textbook and they were talking about me in lecture. Nice! I wonder what they had to say
She’s visiting Pete this weekend and she brought the book along. It’s called Business Communication, Building Critical Skills, and it’s written by Kitty O. Locker (of Ohio State booooo 
) and Stephen Kyo Kaczmarek.
It’s only a quick reference in the book, but I am curious to know when people are discussing my story in class. If you’re a professor or if you’re a student in a class about this stuff, let me know; I’m always happy to discuss these things
Update 4/13/2007: Oops, it looks like some people were having trouble with the slides I uploaded, so I’m reuploading them in Powerpoint 2007 format, Powerpoint 2003 format, and PDF. If you’re still having trouble, please let me know
I just finished presenting at the ALI Social Media Summit here in Chicago and since I didn’t get a chance to print out my slides for distribution, I’m posting them up here for people to download.
Also, here are a few links to things that were mentioned during my presentation:
Blog aggregators:
Blog search tools:
And as my regular readers already know, feel free to contact me if you have any other questions about blogs, wikis, forums, etc.
I got some great comments back from Rita and Sarah over at H&R Block on my previous post now. So, it looks like they are listening and they’re actually soliciting feedback too - hurray! That’s what I like to see from a company.
I’m not sure if I’ll be back to file my 2007 taxes using Tango at HRBlock.com next year, but at least the probability is now greater than 0 
So verdict on the product: not so good for 2006/2007, hopefully much improved for 2007/2008. Verdict on the team: excellent
I also just met a few people from their PR department here at a conference I’m speaking at (more on that in a later post). Looks like they’re already going in the right direction and really on the ball about learning more; I know a few other companies that might benefit from their example 
ORose tipped me off yesterday that I Google had indexed my blog post about H&R Block’s Tango e-file tax web app (or rather, lack of e-file web app I should say ). Check out the Google search for “Tango HRBlock.com”, I’m currently the thrid organic search result.
Now I’m definitely not an A-list blogger, but it seems that the bloggers over at H&R Block should have seen my post fly by on their blog search feeds. I even linked to their Tango Tax Blog on my previous post, but it looks like they dont’ have trackbacks turned on 
Oh well. If anyone from H&R Block is reading this post, I’m still waiting for my refund…
They all got on my bad side at some point, and I blogged about it (buy.com, 24 hour fitness, msn messenger, q-cup). No big deal I thought, but then I noticed something interesting: I was getting a lot of comments on those posts, and I kept getting them, even entries that were almost 2 years old.
So I looked at my referrer logs in StatCounter (a basic, but free web metrics service) and saw that a lot of people were getting to my blog from Google searches. Actually, 90% of my web traffic was coming from Google searches, so I did some investigation and here’ s what I found:
Whoa. Top placement on a Google search. That would explain why I’ve got 85 responses to my buy.com sucks entry. Check it out.
Turns out, I must have a bit of Google juice becuase I’ve got top placement for “24 hour fitness membership deals” and “MSN messenger memory leak” as well…
And my tirade against Q-cup a few weeks ago is on the first Google result page for “q-cup cupertino” as well. Not top placement, but not bad
Something tells me these companies aren’t using blog search tools…
At Meebo this past week for Lunch 2.0, I ended up meeting Jason Calacanis (thanks Jeremiah for grabbing this photo of us):
I’d e-mailed back and forth with Jason before and it was good to finally meet him in person. I wasn’t the only one making connections; the crowd was a good mix of over 100 students, engineers, product people, and even the occasional Googler
Looks like we’re hitting our original goals of Lunch 2.0 - and of course getting free food to boot
Along with the lack of writing this past month, I’ve also been way behind on my feeds. Between work, church, Rose, and miscellaneous errands, I just haven’t had time to do anything. Today though, I’ve finally gotten my unread feeds in Bloglines down to 0!
Whew, that took a while. I think it’s time to clean out my feeds; there were definitely feeds in there with 200 entries waiting (which I believe is the max unread entries bloglines will keep for any feed at a time 
).
I’m scheduled to be on another blog related conference panel at the beginning of November. Bulldog Reporter is putting on a seminar entitled “Advanced PR Technology in Practice” and I’m on the “Blogs 2.0: The Next Generation” panel. Here’s some info about the conference:
Advanced PR Technology in Practice
November 3 · New York City · The Yale Club
November 10 · San Francisco · Marines’ Memorial ClubAn intensive One-Day Update on How to Exploit the State of the Art for Increased Visibility, Greater ROI and Crisis Management
If you only attend one PR technology event this year, make it this one. You’ll bring yourself absolutely up to date on where PR technology stands today, on how to put it to use safely and cost-effectively, and on what new advances you can expect to see over the coming year. Best of all, you’ll learn it all from the nation’s most experienced practitioners of these techniques. They’ll candidly share their war stories, successes, and mistakes—so you can move forward more confidently. In just eight intensive hours, you’ll discover the most powerful techniques for increasing your visibility, improving your ROI, and managing the online conversation.
I think you can get $200 off if you mention my name when you register If you’re in the audience, please do come up and say hi after the panel!
I gave a talk at Advanced Learning Institute’s blogging and podcasting training seminar earlier today. Personally, I wasn’t sure how the event would turn out (I’d never heard of A.L.I. until this event), but so far the conference has been pretty good. I’ve finally gotten a chance to meet Chris Barger from IBM face to face (we e-mailed back and forth when we both released our blogging policies publicly early last year) and it’s also been a good opportunity to chat with people from a wide variety of companies who are thinking about getting into blogging.
Here’s a weak cameraphone shot of the scene
For people who attended the talk, I mentioned some links which I’ll throw up here for you:
Blog search engines
Blog aggregators
Plaxo Blog Policy
My official post about getting fired (check out the comments!)
And finally, here’s a PDF of the notes that were handed out. Of course, since Shel and Chris pretty much covered a lot of this stuff before my presentation, we didn’t really follow these notes. Feel free to contact me if you want to discuss anything in particular!
Hi, my name is Mark Jen. I work for Plaxo. I used to work for Google and before that, I worked for Microsoft. The opinions expressed here are my personal opinions. Content published here is not read or approved by Plaxo before it is posted and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Plaxo. No warranties or other guarantees will be offered as to the quality of the opinions or anything else offered here. Enjoy!
