For the last several years, that’s brought me to the world of Search. I was the SEO lead at iVillage, at the time the #1 site for women on the Net, owned by NBCUniversal. It was quite a trip optimizing a multi-million-page site and I’m proud to say that I helped realize a 40 percent year-over-year increase in organic traffic. Before that, I was a Senior Media Analyst with InterfaceGuru, an excellent usability practice, working with some very large consumer and b2b sites on their usaibility and information architecture. Most recently, I was the SEO strategist at Conductor, Inc., a leading purveyor of paid links that’s developing an SaaS organic search analytic tool; at Conductor, I consulted with a wide range of leading publishers and e-commerce partners to improve their organic traffic.
But before it all, I was a publishing guy, starting in the news business with United Press International and leading a universe of consumer and b2b titles in print and online. I’ve been publishing online since 1985; I was one of the first to produce a profitable regularly published e-mail newsletter and one of the first to put a monthly newsstand magazine on the Web.
Mass media is largely designed to be ephemera, so a lot of my best writing work long ago hit the bit bucket. But not all.
Here are some of my more recent writings about the meet-up of old and new media. This is how newspapers can fight Craig's List. This is why the "blogging vs journalism" debate misses the point. This is how asking whether blogging is itself journalism only confuses the question. And this is the exact moment that the Web became a mass medium.
This was written on deadline for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001. It appeared the following day.
From WinMag.com, here's my take on putting digital genies back into analog bottles, and two columns about what happens when online businesses think they're immume to the laws of financial gravity.
I've long been fascinated by the possibilities of electronic cash and electronic identity. I've also long been fascinated by great barbecue. (Warning: 2.3MB PDF.)
From UPI, this item was the first national write-up of an early experiment in consumer-level electronic media.
From NetGuide: "'Remember Elvis,' my friend Grace said. 'People try to ban what they don't understand.'" This one argued that wiring schools is dangerous and subversive, and that we should begin immediately. And this one got collected in a standard Freshman Comp textbook, alongside essays by Maya Angelou, Anna Quindlen, Fox Butterfield, William Least Heat Moon, and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; I argue the (alloyed) virtue of branded information.
From Computer Update, the magazine of the late Boston Computer Society, a lighter column imagining a conversation between Archimedes and his flak, Delirium. As ever, PR wins out.
And remember Jaron Lanier, the virtual worlds guru? I caught up with him way back at the 1986 Consumer Electronics Show, where he was flogging his first product.