Happy 2006!

Spent the last 10 days working on my own projects, including an interesting demographics study for a non-profit called www.opinionsource.com.

Pulled some very useful information from MSN Ad Center Pilot for some of my clients and while the data MSN is providing is raw, it goes beyound what has been provided by Search Engines previously. This year I see some competition in providing intelligence similar to MSN from Yahoo, and possibly Google.

I also went by the Metropolotian Museum to see the Fra Angelico show; i'll go back before the show closes on the 27th. There was also a show about Occult photography at the turn of last century that I would have liked to have looked at more closely. Both shows were so packed I could not enjoy them as much as i'd have liked.

Another show I saw last month and again on Friday was the Oscar Bluemner show at the Whitney Museum; Bluemner was a great artist but his personality made it hard for him to get along with authority figures and he ended up killing himself.

But getting back to SEO, I picked up Andrew Goodman's book on AdWords PPC that is very insightful and easy to read; i've been enjoying it and going slow. Also finishing up on Juan Enriquez's book The Untied States of America ; I did his blog buzz project and learnt something about blog advertising using BlogAds and similar networks and found the whole thing facinating.

I also gave a chat at the World Resource Center on Developing Blog Buzz and on the 16th I'll be doing another chat on Search Engine Spam Techniques you in the house plans industry.

Finally, my wife's hard drive died and we replaced it; the first time that has happened - I read about it all the time...but it happend. The replacement drive was put in and the OS restored quickly - that went fine. What was more more difficult to restore was the customization that she put into the PC, things that were not backed up.

And after today it's back to IBM, where I work with Search Metrics.