A really very long time ago my friends and I ran a club night in London. I'll spare you the details, they're foggy at best these days. With that said, a very cool chat with Annabel reminded me about some of the music we were listening to back then. I used to DJ at our night and produce (terrible) live mashups using Ableton. Wading through some old tracks I found an MP3 of a tune I put together, (badly).

A small warning - don't listen to this on an expensive pair of speakers. There's no compression or all-important removal of tweeter destroying frequencies on the (endless) filtering of the Oasis sample.

Enjoy :-)

 

My Dad sent me this link today:

http://goo.gl/kEMKs

It's a link to a Google Maps image of my Grandad and Grandma walking between
(I think) Heydour Village and Aisby, in Lincolnshire near their home village
of Oasby. Though I've got no real sense of when this picture was taken (I'm
not sure how to tell), it looks like it's a nice enough day, and judging by
the fact they're both wearing thick clothes or jackets, I'd say late spring
or early autumn. Even at their age, a 1 - 2 mile walk a day would be pretty
standard stuff. That's better than me at 31.

Sadly, Grandad (Ralph Baxter), passed away at the age of 89 on January 27th
2010. I hope Google keep this picture in maps for a long, long time.

This came up the other day - hardly a reflection of the most complained
about brands in the UK, but an interesting idea for further keyword
research...

This made me laugh...

This last few weeks really have been quite fun. In Seattle last week I got
to meet up with the Sphinn / Search Engine Land team and spend two days at
the SEOmoz offices. While I was there, Rand and I made a WBF entitled: "Get
Indexed Faster!". I can't watch myself on video, it's too painful. Hopefully
I make some sense though:

http://bit.ly/azFHyI

I've since written about real time search with a particular focus on
PubSubHubbub here:

http://bit.ly/bj2Ed1

So then in other news, Bas van De Beld has let me add the occasional post to
his new State of Search blog, which you can read here:

http://www.stateofsearch.com/

Bas is a super easy going, pragmatic and friendly kind of chap and I think
SOS has such a lot of potential. In my mind he's got a great eye on the
European search market, and as a result SOS is a cool place to be.

Last night, Joost de Valk, Bas and I discussed Microformats, and if you
haven't listened already - here's coverage of the show and a link to the
podcast:

http://bit.ly/cI5CHm

That was a really fun show - and we had a great after show discussion on
Skype - Joost's working on some amazing stuff with some amazing people.
Watch him closely in the next few months :-)

Check this cake out :-)

Distilled's Will and Duncan celebrated their 5th birthday (the company, not Will and Duncan) tonight, with employees, ex-employees, family and friends.

Happy birthday, Distilled - well done for the past 5 years and here's to another 5!

Yes, you read that right!

In another week or so I'll be posting ads for SEO people to join (and
create) a new team at a new office to service SEOgadget's growing list of
clients. It's time to bring talented people on board who genuinely love great SEO,
get a buzz from delivering fantastic client service are self confessed
traffic addicts.

I'm interested in talking to anyone who

- Has a desire to play a primary role in growing an SEO Consulting firm
- Is keen to work directly with clients, new and old
- Enjoys working with traffic, CRO and Keyword Research data from analytics
tools
- Interested in creative / link bait projects & loves watching the links
roll in
- Wants to get involved and help grow a UK SEO blog by contributing articles
- Would enjoy being close to the SEOmoz community and some great friends
both in the UK and across the pond

As far as experience goes, that's not the most important thing. For me it's
much more about aptitude and capability and a strong desire to do a good job
while learning new skills.

I'm open to informal discussions at the moment so drop me an email at
richard [at] seogadget.co.uk - I'd expect to have my team operational by the
beginning of August 2010.

Really look forward to hearing from you!

SEOmoz launched a new labs tool last night called Custom Crawl. While I'm waiting for the data to arrive for my first crawl (and following - what to do with it and how) I thought I'd share the roundup here.

http://www.seomoz.org/labs/cc

This tool sends out a crawler (identified as rogerBot) to the given domain and starts crawling each link it finds at the given URL. The results of this job are then returned to you via the e-mail address that is associated with
your SEOmoz account. These results include:

URL
- The URL of the crawled page.

Crawl Time
- The time (GMT) our crawler crawled the given page.

Http Status Code
- The HTTP Status code of the given URL
(http://www.seomoz.org/knowledge/url) returned

Title
- The Title Element (http://www.seomoz.org/knowledge/title-tag) of the given page

Meta Description Tag

- The Meta Description
(http://www.seomoz.org/knowledge/meta-description) of the given page.

Outgoing link count
- The total amount of links on the page

URLs with duplicate titles (up to 5)
- The URLs of pages that have identical title elements
(http://www.seomoz.org/knowledge/title-tag)

URLs with possible duplicate content (up to 5)
- The URLs of pages that have similar content
(http://www.seomoz.org/knowledge/duplicate-content)

X-Robots-Tag Header
- Is an x-robots tag present in the http header?
(http://seogadget.co.uk/using-the-x-robots-tag-in-server-headers-on-wordpress/)

Meta Robots Tag
- The value of the meta robots tag
(http://www.seomoz.org/knowledge/robotstxt)

Content-Type Header
- The type of content as returned by the given HTTP header

301/302 Target
- The target page (if applicable) of a 301 or 302 redirect

Meta Refresh Target
- The target page (if applicable) of a meta refresh
http://www.seomoz.org/knowledge/redirection

Rel Canonical Target
- The value of the rel-canonical element.
http://www.seomoz.org/knowledge/canonicalization

As soon as I've played with the tool (I'm off to Norway in about 20 minutes!) I'll post about it on SEOgadget - at first glance though, this
looks like an important step in the right direction and it will be very interesting to see how this tool develops as it graduates from labs.

A month or so ago now, I discussed "getting the most from your SEO" with
Distilled's Will Critchlow. I've liked to the downloadable podcast from
SEOgadget:

http://seogadget.co.uk/get-the-most-from-your-seo/

If you've missed this - definitely check it out. I enjoyed the debate a
great deal and listening to it again was *almost as much fun.

*I hate watching / listening to myself present. Do you ever get that? Ugh!