Christmas 2006 I bought myself a new HP laptop. A year and a half later it started giving me problems. The first sign of something going wrong was when the monitor just went snowy and I had to force it to turn off by holding the power button down for about 5 seconds.

After that, when I tried to restart it, it took about 3 tries before it finally booted up. Over the following week or so, the problem became more frequent and frustrating and finally it wouldn’t boot at all. Push the power button and the lights came on, the HD light flickered and DVD drive cycled, then nothing else would happen. The End.

I tried reseating the RAM, different RAM modules, unplugging the motherboard battery to try and force the BIOS to reset, I even went and bought a new hard drive but it made no difference.

So after much cussing and returning the $140 harddrive to the store, I called HP support and we ran through all the diagnostic drills over the phone, to no avail. The tech person said it was more than likely a fried motherboard, which is somewhere around $350 for this model. Heck, I can buy a low end laptop at BestBuy for that price.

So here’s what I’m going to do with the bricked HP.

1. I’ll buy a 2.5″ external hard drive enclosure for about $20, mount the drive in it and pull all my data off the drive via a USB cable attached to my old desktop.

2. Reformat the drive and use it as portable storage. I don’t know why more people don’t do this. Heck, if you have a bricked laptop or desktop and the hard drives are still good, use them with external enclosures rather than going out and buying retail external drives. The enclosures are as little as $13 over at TigerDirect.

3. The RAM, 2 12 cell extended life batteries, power cords and AC adapter and what’s left of the carcass (monitor, ports, card reader, dvd drive, internal charger, etc.) will be sold on Ebay or Craigslist, which should generate somewhere around $250-$350 in total.

4. Use that money along with some savings and buy a Mac Mini or MacBook… because after 10+ years of hearing those Windows chimes it’s high time I joined the cool kids.

Anyone want some used HP Pavilion dv2120ca parts?

This video, this post and this conversation have all resonated with me. They have changed my whole outlook to my blogging (and obvious lack thereof) to the point where I’m inspired.

Thanks Scoble.

I just listened to a few old podcasts from another blogger and there were two words mentioned several times in each recording: “Our Competitors.” It’s not so much those two words, but how they were said that made them stick out like a sore thumb. The tone of the guy’s voice when he uttered those words gave me the distinct impression that he focused too much on other sites in his niche - to the point of obsession.

I have watched and read this persons blogs for quite some time and always got the feeling that his thinking of other blogs occupying the same space as competitors was holding him and his business back. I’ve watched other blogs come into the space long after his and watched them soar while his blogs never seem to grow as fast.

My feeling is that he should have been looking at other blogs in his niche as potential partners and the new blogs as potential partnership opportunities, or at least as friends and colleagues instead of enemies/competitors.

Competition implies a limited mindset, a limited pie with limited pieces and no flexibility. Why think that if you have a tech blog and some of your readers read other tech blogs, they’re gone? Why try and compete in that sense?

Now I’d be an idiot if I told you not to keep an eye on what/who else is doing things in your niche. I’d also be an idiot if I didn’t tell you to look at those as research and opportunities to build relationships.

Concentrate on building the best blog with the best content possible and build relationships, especially with other bloggers in your space. Otherwise you’ll be stopped on the side of a lonely road while your competitors and their friends whiz by.

For anyone building out a brand around their own name, personality or business, social networks have become a crucial aspect of online life. If you ain’t constantly putting yourself out there in front of your peers and clients, you’re missing out. That’s a fact.

But what if you just want to sit in front of your computer and work. What if being part of all these social networks does nothing for you and your business because of the way it’s structured. What if maintaining appearances at all those social networks is actually hurting your business and negatively impacting your bottom line?

Personally, I’m at a point in my life/business where I would much rather just skrink into the shadows and do some work.

I’ve been ‘out there’ a number of different times. Years ago as an SEO dude, I singlehandedly started the 3rd or 4th ever blog network online, the internet marketing and info marketing, business, ad copywriting, etc. But I’ve never really been one for having my neck out there on the ‘fame and recognition’ chopping block. Quite frankly, I’ve hated every minute of that aspect.

Nowadays, in order to maintain any sort of image or reputation, you need to have a following and presence on all the popular social networks, but that just serves to perpetuate the one part of online business I hate the most.

Anyway, I’m happier, much more productive and a helluva lot more efficient with my time when I don’t have to worry about being part of the ‘IN’ crowd.

When I retire in Aruba in the next couple years, I don’t want to have to hide my face so no-one recognizes me or want’s to pitch business deals, I want to cover my face to avoid a sunburn. The way it’s looking right now, I’ll be there a lot sooner if I spend extra time working instead of trying to keep my twitter account active.

Oh, and ‘Social Marketing’ is an oxymoron to the ‘nth degree.

Ok, I’m probably late to notice this, but I just did a Google search for daylight savings time and noticed that over on the right hand side of the search results page, where AdWords ads normally appear, there were search results labelled “Blog Results »»” (click the thumbnail below for a full sized view of the page).

Yes, I know that blog posts show up in Google’s regular search results, but I’ve never seen them clearly labelled like this before. Has anyone else noticed this?

For me, as a long time blogger and somewhat of a blogging evangelist, when a search engine the size of google goes out of it’s way to let searchers know that “These results are from blogs” and also places a link above the results the searcher can use for further blog searches (even though that link leads to results on their own blog search service), it’s a massive hat-tip to blogs, bloggers and blogging as a whole. It helps legitimize blogging to a higher degree.

Good onya Google. Bravo, and thanks, sincerely.

Update: I just tried to replicate the same results so that I could add a link to my post above and the blog search results did not show up this time. Which leads me to believe that they are testing this feature in a limited way.

So Google, when will we see this go mainstream? Matt? Anyone?

Ok, that title could have went in more than one direction but, this post talks about dates on web pages, not trying to get laid.

Scenario: A new person comes online. This person is not internet savvy so they haven’t yet learned what to look for when searching for or reading info online. They are looking for info on how to set up your own online business.

After struggling through a few hundred pages of sales pitches, they finally find a page that outlines the basics for them so they print it out for reference.

Now, this page lists links and software tools that are (or were) essential to starting and running a profitable online business… in 1999 but, there was no indication on that page of when it was actually written!

This person now has woefully outdated information and eagerly absorbs that information, which forms a frame of reference in their mind - this is what I need to do to start an online business. They go forward from that point, searching for more information based on what they learned on that old web page and, essentially, they end up learning old techniques that nobody has used for years.

They learn about FFA pages and search engine spamming. They learn about email blasting and usenet spamming, etc. - the things that were somewhat accepted back in ‘99 but if done today would instantly ruin a person or company’s reputation and possibly even be against the law.

All because there was no date on that old page.

I love blog software and this is one of the reasons - the dates. The date and time the page was published is usually either in the URL itself or somewhere near the post or footer, which gives the reader a chronological reference as to when the information was published.

One of the things I’ve always hated about search engines is, up until recently, they would weight older pages online as being more relevant in the search results which in a lot of cases meant that when searching for something the searcher would get outdated information. I’m glad the search engines have largely ‘woken up’ and realized that not all things published online are ‘evergreen.’

Relevance in search results is not just about relevance to the word or phrases being searched for, it’s about time relevance as well.

So folks, anything you publish online from now on, please add a published date somewhere on the page, preferrably at the top and in plain view somewhere. In a few years, the info you published may no longer be relevant and some poor soul could end up being steered in the wrong direction.