Just wanted to showcase a custom flash player we recently did:

Hey everyone, I haven't been using my blog much to promote the sites and applications we do, but just thought I would until we update our portfolio in the next month. So today I want to showcase a new website we recently did for  DrTATTOFF.com.

I was recently asked why the wealth of SEO information and How-Tos on the web don't just level the marketplace and make it common knowledge how to get top positions for your keyword searches on google, and therefore impossible to compete as a professional Search Engine Optimizer. The following is my arguement for why that is not true. Keep in mind it was written in a mailing list scenario--so just extrapolate the key points, which truly are helpful and straight to the point for newbies to SEO.

First off, it's going to be a long hard road with many obstacles that only the strongest will be able to surmount. If you are an entrepreneur seeking seed funding, the number one thing to do is Build a company site to solidify your mission more, then save up enough to build the absolute simplest/cheapest version of your product.

Facebook really just needs to do the ad network thing and get it over with. It's 100% obviously what Facebook connect is about. If cookies worked between sites, they would have done the ad network thing a long time ago, but what they're doing is this: getting people to log in on other sites via facebook connect, and then eventually they'll use cookies to offer behavioral advertising on ALL the pages of those sites, even though facebook connect pages might only take up 2% of the site.

Recently, in the meetup.com New York Tech mailing list, there has been a debate on the real ROI of offshoring/outsourcing. Most argued against it. My opinion is that most of these people are onshore professionals and don't want to see their jobs lost, or more realistically, are too proud to consider that such value derived from offshoring is possible. I personally recognize the value in each. I prefer to look at it like a search cluster: you have many worker servers doing all the grunt work and a couple broker servers telling them what to do. There's no point in having all the worker servers (i.e. programmers) be in the states if you can effectively hire a few american "brokers" to architect and manager the offshore workers. It's totally possible, and speaks to the value of both....

To learn how to really really offshore and avoid the above depicted situation, you've come to the right place! Read on if you're really considering offshoring...

The #1 most important thing in market research is researching competitors. It's pretty much the first thing you need to do. Why? Because if a competitor is already doing exactly what you're doing, even all the research about your target market that you want to sell to won't mean anything--BECAUSE SOMEONE ELSE IS DOING IT!

Too often when digesting Social Media blogs, I read the same crap about how to take advantage of basic Social Media tools and methods to promote yourself or company. It's all the same crap about setting up a "listening post" by populating your google reader with tons of blog feeds about social media or using Twitter search tools like Summize or blog search tools like Technorai or just a good "advanced" and narrowed Google search to find where people are either talking about your brand or your niche. The idea is you find these blog articles or twitter conversations or whatever and go comment on them and attempt to interact with people, without hardselling them. That's pretty much the exact lesson that is reguritated in all these Web 2.0 blog articles. And they don't even say it as specifically as I do--they just abstractly say: "Setup a listening post and use X tools" and then some fluffy "everybody loves everyone" crap that connotes genuinely interacting with people you come across in blog comment walls, rather than hardselling them by saying, "come by this from X URL." At the end of the day, what they really mean is just go around blabbering around to important people, i.e. tastemakers, and eventually bring up what you want to sell to them as if that wasn't your intention in the beginning. My thoughts are: Yes this works, but only for small extremely targeted brands like mine, FaceySpacey, where I only need a few clients to make my nut...So I want to share with you a comment I left to one of the top "Social Media Gurus." Expand the whole article to see it -->

Recently, spongecell.com (the popular event scheduling and calendar oriented startup) launched a shareable "widgetized" version of their calendar, where you can essentially add the calendar and its events to your existing calendar, as well as automatically create it as an event on Facebook. I love it!

These sort of ideas, to me, are what Web 2.0 is all about. There's been a lot of negativity in the blogosphere with bloggers pretty much saying that there is no innovation and blogs are just re-hashing the same crap, etc. They're wrong, and they're not seeing what's really going on here.