The Blog of Noel Churchill

I’ve noticed I get small surges in traffic from Google when I update the blog, so I’ve decided I should blog more. In light of this I’m going to blog to say I’ve been following and posting to twitter a lot more lately. Check my twitter feed at http://www.twitter.com/noelchurchill

I’ll start by saying that I write in more detail about the process later on.  I’ve been working on an iPhone app for a few weeks now and the whole thing is coming together.  It’s going to be legit!  

The whole project is outsourced to people around the world.  I’ve used elance.com to connect with an iPhone developer located in the Ukraine and a php developer in NY.  The quality of work these guys are doing is very impressive and they’re moving fast on the whole project.  I’m going to connect with some graphic designers to create the iPhone icon and splash screen for the app, and to create a basic webpage for the app.  For this design work I’ll either connect with someone through elance again, or I’ve heard good things about 99designs.com.  

Check back soon for more updates with the app!

I see this sign every morning when I walk from the coaster station to work.  This sign is at 6th and C.  I tried a few Google searches but I can’t find any info about it.  It reads “Racing every Saturday & Sunday.  Caliente in Old Mexico.  Home of the fabulous 5-10.  Betting Daily on Major U.S. Horse Tracks.”

I forget how I stumbled across Spitcast but I’ve started using it lately to check the surf forecast before heading to the beach.  I like the simple and clean styling of the website, but best of all it lets you compare the conditions at each break in your city.  Depending on various factors like swell size, direction, and the tide, Spitcast will rate each break and let you know what time of day would be the best time to paddle out.  

The guy running the site seems pretty cool too.  I emailed them asking if they’d add my local break in Del Mar to their list of breaks in San Diego, and he said he’d add it by the end of February.  It’s always pretty cool to get a response from real people.

I had a pretty interesting dream last night. I was at power house park in Del Mar at 15th street and I see Barack Obama sitting on a bench at the park. He calls me over so I go sit down and we start having a a philosophical conversion. I don’t remember everything he said but I do remember him saying something like “For every star that falls there is another one that rises” and I look up in the sky and I see a star falling towards the eastern horizon and then I look back over my shoulder to the west and I see another large star slowly rising above the ocean. I was super excited to be talking to Barack. Then Hilary Clinton strolled over and sat down at the bench with us and I told her that my mom would be very jealous that I was getting to hang out with them.

I’m sure there are plenty of people out there who have ideas on how to save Yahoo.  I just became one of them.  

The problem is that there isn’t a compelling reason for me to use Yahoo.  Google offers a nice clean interface and has indexed everything Yahoo has anyway, so I don’t know why I’d use Yahoo.  Yahoo needs to create a reason why I’d use their search instead of Google’s.  There needs to be something they offer than can’t be found elsewhere.  Here is how they can do it:

1) Give 100% of the advertising commission to website owners who place Yahoo content ads on their website.  This will take some balls because it is a revenue source for Yahoo, but it’s an even bigger revenue source for Google.  Yahoo can afford to give this up because they already make the bulk of their revenue from advertising on their own properties, but content advertising is a serious revenue stream for Google which they can’t afford to give up, especially with their stock price already battered the way it is.  If Yahoo gives 100% of the commission to the website owners this will create serious incentive for them to leave Google for Yahoo.  But there is a catch…

2) Limit this offer to website owners who only allow their website to be indexed into Yahoo’s search engine.  For the website owners to be able to receive their full commission, they need to let Yahoo be the only search engine who can index their website.  This will be a hard sell because many websites are dependent on Google, who commands more than 60% of search traffic, for the droves of traffic it sends their way, and Yahoo is often nothing more than an afterthought.  Preventing Google from indexing their website would mean a certain drop in traffic.

3) Give priority to the Yahoo only websites.  To compensate for the drop in traffic, Yahoo could offer priority ranking to websites taking advantage of this offer.  Yahoo still owns a fair amount of search traffic and if it were to direct more of this traffic to the preferred partner websites it could make up for the drop in traffic not coming from Google.

If this strategy were successful it would create a lot of web content that could only be accessed through Yahoo search, and it would mean there is a reason to search through both search engines rather than just one.  Although this doesn’t necessarily make things easier for web searchers, but it will create competition in the search marketplace, and competition is always good for the consumers.

I always seem to get a lot of ideas while I’m in the shower, so I’m starting a category devoted to ideas I think of while showering.

Last monday night I was driving to my Jiu Jitsu class and noticed a cool allignment of the moon and what I thought was a few stars.  I didn’t realize until later that it was actually Jupiter and Venus I was looking at.  Apparently this allignment of these planets won’t happen again until 2052.  Pretty cool!

I want some of these as soon as they’re available in the US.  These lamps deffinitely rock the socks off any other lamps I’ve ever seen.

Philips LivingColors