Broadstreet Blog

My daughter Patti is in London, England for three weeks as part of the USC Law program, and we are keeping her daugther Eva.  We have been having nightly Skype sessions where she tells us about her day and she is even able to read bedtime stories to Eva.   It is amazing and it is free. 

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I fell in love with a new Drupal module tonight.   I am working on rebuilding the New York Pizza Finder site (www.newyorkpizzafinder.com).   This site is a database of New York Style pizza places around the country.  It started with my New York Pizza Blog, located at pizza.wordpress.com.  Then it transformed to an Access database and a number of ASP pages and Google Maps integration. 

Then for some insane reason I decided to make it a wiki, so I installed MediaWiki.  This was a terrible idea-- I ended up with a very unstructured database and a site that attracted a bunch of spammers.  The battle with spam was manageable for the better part of the year, but then the spammers started getting smarter and doing multiple updates in rapid succession which made backing out their changes quite laborious, and I finally just shut down the site.

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My father-in-law, Jerry Maslar, is  working hard to promote traffic to his trout fishing site, www.troutu.com.  As you can see from the chart above, he is doing quite a good job.  In the last week or two, we started talking about "going viral", the idea that we produce something on the site that people want to forward to all their friends, which of course would drive tremendous traffic to our site.

"That's sounds great," he said, "how do we get started creating a viral video?"   Well, I thought, one of you guys could do a belly flop off a water fall, or you could slice open the fish and eat it's guts out... generally something really stupid or really gross would have the best chance of spreading... Of course it doesn't have to be stupid or gross, it could be someone singing real well, like that Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent,  which has had 50 million views in two weeks.

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Busbee Truck Parts has been a customer of Broadstreet's for several years now.  Doug Busbee had the insight to begin selling truck parts on eBay a few years back, and then realized he needed his own Web site.   He called me and soon www.BusbeeTruckParts.com was born. 

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The January 14 episode (click to download) of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast had an excellent interview with Seth Godin, talking about the opportunities for small businesses and individuals in the current economic climate.   As usual, Seth motivated me, and as a result, I am blogging again. 

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I've become more and more comfortable putting important personal and business information on Google Apps.  It's very convenient to create a document and share it with my wife or other associates of Broadstreet Consulting.  More and more, when I need to create a document that is to be shared, I will create it with Google Docs and then share it. 

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I recently was informed of a site called Camospace.com, which is a social networking site for outdoorsmen.   This is a protential place to advertise for TylerBrothers.net.  In the p

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Ever wonder what is the most popular site on the Web?  ComScore is a business that measures traffic on the Web and publishes it on a subscription basis.  Below is  Comscore's listing of the current Top 50 sites on the Web (for the U.S).  You can find this yourself by going to http://www.comscore.com/press/data.asp and clicking on United States. 

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As predicted, President-elect Obama will use YouTube in addition to radio to deliver his weekly address to the nation. This will be the first time that a President-elect will use online video to deliver his weekly message.

Read more here:  https://wired.com/2008/11/obama-turns-to/

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President-elect Obama is looking to create a position for Chief Technology Officer.  This is a good thing.  Frank Greve at McClatchy reports that Obama will use new media in the form of YouTube in order to speak directly to the people, bypassing the various biased media.  This is a great thing, and will improve our democracy. 

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