Think of Alexa as the Neilsen Ratings of the Internet. Television producers and advertisers rely on a small sampling of Neilsen “boxes” installed on cable boxes all around the United States. Based on what this small sample of viewers watch, they extrapolate out what the rest of America is watching at any given time. Alexa.com works in much the same way. Through a downloadable browser toolbar known as Sparky, Alexa tracks all the websites that people using Sparky visit. This data is compiled and Alexa issues a rank for each website, from number 1 (which is Google by the way) through 14 million or so. Websites with “no rank” account for all those billions of websites that don’t receive enough traffic to rank in the top 14 million.

So if you are looking at purchasing online advertising from a website (such as atGeist.com or atGeist.net), visit Alexa.com and punch in their domain name to see how they stack up against other websites. While the rank won’t tell you how many unique visitors are hitting their website, you can get a pretty good idea as to how popular they are. If you know how much traffic your website receives and the corresponding Alexa rank for your site, you can start to guesstimate how much traffic other sites have.

As a point of reference, atGeist.com in August of 2009 had 11,505 unique visitors and an Alexa ranking of 209,901. Similarly, atGeist.net had 7,961 unique visitors during August and a corresponding rank of 248,591. Plug in the traffic and rank of websites you know using them as your barometer to popularity.

How can you help your ranking? Simple. Get more of your visitors, including yourself, to download Sparky so that Alexa will have more “votes” for your website. It will also show you what the Alexa rank is of every site your visit in the bottom of your browser toolbar.

One word of advice: Don’t get consumed with your Alexa rank, it is a two-edged sword. Remember, Alexa’s rank is “relative” to the rest of the websites on the Internet. For instance, news websites historically lose rank during the holidays because more people are visiting online shopping websites. It would stand to reason that your traffic could go up while your rank goes down just because other websites are getting much more traffic.

I have to admit, the conference was a pleasant surprise and well done for a first-time conference. Some local speakers included Renee Wilmeth of “Feed Me/Drink Me” fame, Bil (one “l”) Browning from the Bilerco Project, Smaller Indiana’s Erik Deckers,  Bob “I look like a high school history teacher” Burchfield from AroundIndiana.com, the Pasta Queen Jennette Fulda. and of course me talking about our Geist Reservoir Community blog portal. (I just love cross-posting!)

Of course, we had out-of-towners from Hanapin Marketing and iSocket.com come up as well as a constituency from Cincy’s PhoTrade.

The term “blogging” is a pretty broad category, and the conference tended to lean towards the casual, shut-in, “wish I could be published” blogger. A lot of hype around Twitter, which I personally think is a waste of time. As if we don’t all suffer from attention deficit disorder enough, let’s keep a bunch of “followers” updated on our every move throughout the day. There is a business model there somewhere, but I just don’t have the time.

Corporate blogging wannabes trying to figure out their online strategy were probably a bit confused as well. I sat through a session by Sarah Robbins with MediaSauce who has a purple swipe of hair for a calling card. The topic was online branding, but the content was geared more towards those trying to reach the college facebook or secondlife “I look so much better as an avatar” crowd. I don’t think the problem was the presenter, Sarah did a great job and kept it interesting. The problem is blogging itself.

I realized after the 1:00 panel discussion I sat in on today that blogging is just a technology that is used and adapted by many people in many different ways. We might as well had a hammer convention and had Lowe’s, Home Depot, and Sears sponsor it.

“I use my hammer to knock down walls.”

“I paint winter scenes on hammer handles and sell them at craft fairs.”

“I’m going to the 2012 Olympics to participate in the hammer throw competition.”

“I use hammers to correct my kids.”

Everybody has a different reason for blogging, everyone has a different community to build, and everyone wants everyone else to read their blog. Reminds me a lot of the self-publishing conferences I’ve been frequenting the last three years.

At least no one mentioned Oprah’s book club at this conference.

CMLP’s interactive database of legal threats contains lawsuits, cease & desist letters, subpoenas, and other legal threats directed at those who engage in online speech. You can view, search, create, and comment on entries in the database from their database page.

Perhaps one of the most useful resources is the Legal Guide for citizen journalists. You can lookup laws unique to each state.

Create a free account, download Microsoft’s Silverlight, and you are creating books online. Upload photos in .jpg, .tif, or .png format, add a caption, upload text or stories, and then you start laying out the book yourself online. Have some family members or friends that want to contribute to your book? No problem, “invite” them to collaborate on your project and build it together (sounds like a Lowes commercial). No software to purchase. No minimum orders. No hosting fees. No kidding.

In typical Author Solutions fashion, they also provide live online chat and toll free phone support for their users.

Remember, this is in beta so expect a few kinks and some “coming soon” images. Overall, it’s a great product for all those people who got a new digital camera for Christmas and have already filled their SD cards with photos. Create a long-lasting book and send it to your family! Visit Inkubook.com now!

Hosted by my favorite afternoon show host, Jerry Springer, the two finalists last year were a ventriloquist named Terry Fator and a singer named Cas Haley. I have to admit, my wife and I fell in love with Cas’s voice on his first night and had to watch each week to see his spin on songs like “Dancing on the Moon.” He’s a combination of blues and reggae with a tropical twist. He’s the next Jimmy Buffet with more vocal talent.

He lost out to the guy with his hand stuck in a sock (no hard feelings), but I was excited to see him visit Indianapolis on his summer tour last week at the Music Mill near Keystone at the Crossing. He brought in a full band of 7: drummer, trumpet, sax, lead guitar, bass guitar, and a percussionist that added the tropical twang. The concert itself was awesome, only about 200 people but very intimate and the sound was great.

Now let me get to the reason why I’m writing this post to begin with. Cas Haley, besides being musically gifted, is also a very personable guy. After his encore, the lights came up and Cas stepped down off the stage in his “capri-length” shorts and greeted each and every person as they left the venue. I expected a quick handshake, “please buy my CD”, or “hey, you’d look good in my overpriced shirt.” Quite the contrary, Cas talked to everyone like we were at his wedding reception.

Of course, I had to tell him how talented he was, which he graciously agreed. I asked him about his wife and son. He was excited to talk about his new house they are moving into (something he spoke of on his first appearance on America’s Got Talent). He also talked to us about the record deal he passed on from Simon’s label, a deal that would have given him a $200,000 advance. Here is a guy that was basically a stay-at-home dad struggling to make some extra income and he passed on a deal that would have made him comfortable for at least the first year.

As much as I love his music and him as a person, a dad, and a musician, I do have to give some constructive feedback. Cas, you need to come out with some of your own original music. While you sing good songs better than the originals, you need your own identity and “mark” on music. I would also recommend that your website share more family and personal info with visitors, much like the Cas Haley that I met in Indy last week. Hey, I’m thinking about driving to Nashville to catch him again later this month, so I still love the guy. I wish him the best and hope he has all the success he deserves. He’s one guy I wouldn’t mind seeing with the millions of dollars, somehow, I’m not worried about it going to his head.

I’ve been itching to try it again, this time in southern California. Here comes atLaJolla.com! It turns out that La Jolla, California is very similar to the Geist Reservoir area:

• Affluent demographic
• Approximately 15,000 homes and businesses
• Near a major metropolitan area (San Diego and Indianapolis)
• Weak or no local newspapers

I’m flying out to La Jolla to meet with my new partner out there, a local that has already developed one local portal similar to atGeist.com and he has an office in La Jolla already. La Jolla is a hotbed for realtors, plastic surgeons, upscale car dealerships, and of course homeowners associations for those affluent oceanfront homes.

For all of you out there doing your own local neighborhood portal, creating a community showcase event like the Geist Half Marathon & 5K is a great way to rally your neighbors to volunteer, sponsor, or participate. Here is some advice from a guy that’s spent the last 15 months planning this community event:

• Hire professionals: We hired Vision Event Management as our race director and boy are we glad we did. Don’t rely on volunteers to steer the ship, every good army needs some paid mercenaries.
• Focus on kids: Our event benefits health and wellness programs in the local schools. Kids are great networking and marketing vehicles, but go through their schools.
• Focus on volunteers: We ended up with over 700 volunteers, but it was a last-minute drive that put us over the top.
• Get all sponsor agreements in writing: We had a key sponsor start acting squirrelly the day before the event. Manage expectations by putting everything a sponsor is expected to do in writing.
• Bench politics: Don’t allow politicians, lobbyists, activist groups, or other polarizing persons to exhibit or pass out flyers at your event.
• Choose a great venue: If you could take a postcard photo anywhere in your community, where would it be? Wherever that is, host your event there somehow.

“More than 120 people are named in the lawsuit, including many from Indiana who lost thousands of dollars,” said Carter. “In fact, hundreds more may have lost money. They paid for services. Airleaf did not deliver, and now, those consumers deserve refunds.”

Its companies like this that give publishing a bad name. Writers Weekly had to ban Airleaf from posting on their forums they were abusing them so badly. Late in 2006, they organized a “Book Fair” at Franklin College and sold table space to a hand-full of authors that were promised a huge book conference at the college’s basketball arena. Only 5 authors and a custodian wondering why there were 5 authors in the gym showed up.

The learning curve has been in figuring out whether to edit raw clips via Jumpcut or pre-edit them in Elements and upload them as finished shows and use Jumpcut just for hosting. What I figured out (after many experiments) is it is best to create short clips, under 2:00 minutes each, and then create a movie in Jumpcut from the clips. Just like YouTube, Jumpcut has a 100 MB maximum file size so posting a 12:00-15:00 minute video will suffer quite a bit in quality. Posting (10) 2:00 minute clips and putting them together in Jumpcut is the “answer.” Besides, the video quality in Jumpcut is far superior to YouTube.

Now, we’ve been posting the short clips to YouTube and a local video portal IndyTube.tv. This has been pretty effective for us to gain eyeballs and traffic to the mother ship: GeistTV.com.

What we plan to do next is start soliciting neighbors around Geist to submit their video clips to Jumpcut and join our online group. We can then take their clips and add them to our movies, a cool feature of Jumpcut that makes it really unique.

Oh, and if you’re worried about Jumpcut over YouTube, remember that Jumpcut is owned by Yahoo! who also owns flickr. I put a photo slide show to music and posted it on Jumpcut in about 5 minutes yesterday, something you can’t do on YouTube.