davidjewlian

…despite my brief stint in public relations.

The beauty of accountability

It’s no surprise with all the databases and doohickies associated with the Internet to say that the digital age brings accountability to the performance of websites, media, and other such digital routes of expression. In business, this is called return on investment, or ROI, an acronym I am so sick of hearing. I guess it’s what matters when you want business results, but jeez, talk about over-use.

Marketers love digital because of all this. They can tell how customers got to where they got, and even who the customers are. When you look at the data, it becomes very 1984. But in a good way, I like to think. If I frequently travel to San Francisco during Christmas, I’d like to have airlines send me offers around that time for discounts and deals. If a little bit of creepiness can save me a few hundred bucks, why not? But that’s what makes Gen Y different from Baby Boomers, or so I hear.

To me, for this site, and for my own personal research into other sites, it’s useful yes, but above all fascinating.

How do you do a nerdy face on GMail?

That sentence will be forever etched in my brain. Why? Because it is the first organic search engine lead that led someone to this exact site (well, actually, to this post). It occurred on March 5, 2009 at 7:20 PM. I could also tell you which web browser and operating system platform the visitor used. See what I mean by a little creepy?

At the time of this person’s visit, my website was the first for that exact search: “How do you do a nerdy face on GMail” and I’m rather proud of that. However, now that it’s many, many days after that person landed on my page, I’m no longer even on the first page.

Knowing that there are actual people searching for things that may end them on these pages is comforting though. It sure beats a lot of the comments I get submitted for approval on these posts, which range from “hentai” to “miley cyrus [inappropriate words go here]” to “titten” and “zkyxkvw.com,” which I don’t think is a real website. So this is why they invented Search Engine Optimization. Do those comments really think I will help drive business to their sites? They should know that most people don’t appreciate the SPAM, and they’d be better off being classy. Like Playboy.

I’ll get off my rather short soapbox now.

The customer is always right

Unfortunately, when whoever it was landed on my page, they did not find the “nerdy face” they came in search of. There’s one reader I’ll probably never get back. Adieu!

However, if they (you) do come back in search of a nerdy face, I do not want to disappoint. So here’s the best I could muster up:

:-B

Because, obviously, all nerd have buck teeth.

DS

…if you thought it was, I bet you were sorely disappointed when you got here and read my crock of shite.

But your first entries have been a-tweet with tech references and topics!

There’s a simple answer to that: it’s my current fascination. Last week I made a choice to start a website for a couple reasons (explained below). Then I decided to see what Twitter was about. Then Dailybooth came along. And now I’m head-over-heels drowning in social media and technology.

That and I got a new MacBook a few months ago and I lurve it

The truth is I get obsessed over things easily. At one point in my life I even had a failed blog about it, called “LesNouveaux.” Don’t bother looking for it, it was short-lived and incredibly underwhelming. That said, there have been past obsessions. I have an immense amount of scarves during my knitting phase. I have an unordinarily large library of Tori Amos songs (and my mother says I breathe heavily when I listen to a particular one). I know a lot about customizing a PC computer to look like a Mac (or anything else). And more than a lot of other things in life, I love strengthening my skills at Trivial Pursuit. That means a lot of aimless Internet research. But the word “research” makes it seem far drier than as I experience it.

And that means this blog will change focus over time.

But don’t you have to have a focus?

To be successful, yes, probably. The best blogs seem to have focus. Take, for instance, Brazen Careerist. AdScam. Engadget. TUAW.

But blogging isn’t about success, is it? There are many millions of blogs out there, but only a few are read with any regularity or with any monetary success. This copyblogger post explains, quite sadly, why you cannot make money blogging.

My blogging is for me. I said before I began this website for a couple reasons. There were two reasons:

1. To gain some digital technology experience. At work, I have been helping re-launch a website for our company. I don’t have a digital background. I went to school for marketing and business and only had passing experience with HTML coding, absolutely none with further forms of programming. When I was thrown into this project, people began asking me about PHP, XML, and all other sorts of abbreviations that made no sense to me. I thought, the best way to gain this experience and not sound like a doofus would be to get some experience and be able to play around with these things not under the watchful gaze of my more experienced colleagues.

2. To work on my written communication skills. Again at work (see a common theme in my life), I recently had a performance evaluation and one of the most striking comments was that I need to work on my written communication skills. Copywriting, memo writing… all of it. I don’t think I’m all that bad, but I know I can use vast improvement.

Those are my reasons for beginning this site. No overarching message, no focused theme. Which makes me think, makes me hope, that maybe blogs don’t need a theme. iJustine doesn’t seem to have one except her and her Macs (love the site, watch obsessively–but not in a creepy way don’t worry). And while the Huffington Post focuses on current events, they’re not just about foreign policy, not just about celebrity, it’s news in general.

The thing that each one of them has, I’ve come to realize, is a kernel.

A kernel…!!

Chris Brogan has a great post at his site here about blogs and kernels and how you don’t need a focus, you just need a kernel, a point of differentiation, a purpose of sorts.

Now, I hate to break it to you, but I haven’t found mine yet. Seeing from the last couple posts, maybe it’s obscenely long posts. But I like to think that this blog is mainly about fascination, with a small dose of just plain daily happenstance. I’m fascinated with social media now, yes. But I’m also fascinated with Parkour, and Muay Thai. With advertising and psychology. And I’m completely enamored with science and celebrity. So perhaps all of those topics will show up here at one point or another. Perhaps you’ll get to read all about what I’m interested in, and I hope some things in which you are interested as well.

For now, I know a few things: I began this blog to write, and that is what I’ll do. I began this blog to learn, and that is what I’ll do. And I hope you enjoy.

DS

My first comment is indeed from my mother.

Everyone, look for a new posting sometime between this evening and tomorrow morning.

DS

…are a lot more underwhelming than I had thought they were going to be.

Public notoriety always tastes sweet like coconuts

Let’s be real: we all start blogs in order to get read. If we didn’t want anybody to read these things, we’d all be authoring Word docs locally stored on our computers. But we don’t. We publish these bad boys for the entire world (or at least the wired world) to read.

So there’s a certain sense of exhilaration when you get comments on your blog post. Which is why I got excited when my Gmail informed me that someone had commented on one of my blog posts. “Wow,” I thought, “My sitemeter tells me I’ve only had less than 100 hits, but somebody thought what I wrote was so compelling that they had to, just had to comment? That’s satisfying.”

So imagine my diappointment when I saw that my first comment was from none other than the username “cialis online,” and their comment was soon followed by two from “levitra online.”

At least SPAM bots find me interesting. That’s a lot more than I can say for some of the former blogs I’ve started.

And hey, at least it wasn’t my mom saying how proud she is that she raised me. I mean, Ma, feel free to comment, but you don’t need to digitally pinch my cheeks. Unless absolutely nobody comments, then feel free to leave a comment about how proud you are.

DS

…because you have more patience than a third grade special education teacher.

My (first unsuccessful) foray into the world of vlogging

No, you will not find a link to a YouTube video here (though you can see the two videos I do have up by clicking the yellow box to the right of this post). You will not find a video log entry because, well, because they take an incredible amount of patience and, moreso ability, a skill that is absent in my current state of Mac literacy (or lack thereof).

This becomes all the more apparent when I look at a few posts from my most recent Twitter friends (I feel weird saying that): @iJustine and @coollike. They are both popular vloggers on YouTube and other sites, and have both Tweeted in the past day about editing and posting videos. Charlie (coollike) seems to have spent 2 hours trying to post a video only to end unsuccessfully and leave it for today, and Justine spent 10 hours shooting and editing, until 3 in the morning! Do that four times a week and you’ve got a full time job, if you’re lucky enough to work just 40 hours a week. Side note: France, I’m jealous.

Now, I have to say Charlie’s was worth it, because he painted himself purple.

You know what they say if you don’t succeed

I think they say you’re supposed to try again. So I will! I’ve never vlogged before, so don’t expect it to be a gold mine, featured video. But give me some time.

DS

I just read over my latest post, which I should probably do before I publish it. I noticed that I put the words “Internet celebrity” in quotes, as I just did, but not referencing a prior placement of the words.

I want to clarify that I didn’t mean it as a diss, because I could see how it could be seen as that. Internet celebrity is celebrity, I’ve come to realize that in this world of new media. I meant it as a more abstract quoting of Them. You know, those people out there who write about the goings-on of the Cyberwebs.

So, sorry to iJustine or any other Internet celebrities who might take offense.

DS

…is much more difficult than I had originally imagined.

Hi, my name is David, and welcome to my newly-christened nook of the cyberwebs. On a whim last night, I decided to purchase this domain and all the ancillary products that one needs to actually create a web space. Nickel and dime, I tell you, but I’m sure well worth it.

Buying the domain was an interesting experience, and a good lesson in what they told us in university is called “one-to-one marketing.” Think like what Amazon.com does with its personalized “you might also like…” offerings. While buying davidjewlian.com for a paltry $9.99/year, I was given the option of some other, premium URLs. Addresses such as:

davidhebrewlian.com - $9.99

Now, I know my page name doesn’t make a whole lot of sense unless you know my middle name and the hilariously pun-ny spelling error, but really? “Hebrewlian”? At least it’s cheap.

singleorthodoxjews.com - $104.00

Now this one I can understand the premium price for. We don’t live in small Polish towns anymore, and outside of Borough Park, Brooklyn, I’m sure it’s hard to find a strong community of Orthodox Jews, much less single ones. Believe me, I’ve had enough tangential experience with dating sites to know that the URL may be a worthwhile investment.

jewishjews.com - $500.00

Now this just seems unnecessarily repetitive. And I think “superjews.com” would catch more eyes–but of course that address is already registered.

africanamericanjews.com - $549.00

Again, makes sense. There are a lot of African American Jews out there who should have a place on the Internet to congregate and discuss what it’s like to be a minority of minorities. Note to all of entrepreneurial spirit: caucasianjews.com is still available. There may be some possible synergistic ideas here.

medievaljews.com - $599.00

Six hundred dollars?? Six hundred dollars for medievaljews.com? I didn’t even know there were that many Jews in medieval times. I thought we all got killed by the Spanish.

So welcome to my far less premium, but just as compelling space on the Internets, davidjewlian.com: an impulse buy.

DS