Search engine experiment success!

Back in February I started a new “experiment” website covering the little maqui berry native to Patagonian region of South America.  This isn’t a new concept for me, in July of 2007 I started an experiment website covering the acai berry. The acai berry exploded with popularity and suddenly my site had a ton of competition – which makes ranking well in the search engines for a 2-3 hour per week hobby very difficult. So I decided to level the playing field when I heard about the maqui berry, a berry that reportedly has a higher antioxidant concentration than the acai berry with much less hype and media coverage – therefore less competition.

But that’s enough background – to the point. In it’s 4th month of existence www.maquiresource.com is now ranking on the first page for “maqui berry” in Google. The new goal? Improve that 9th place ranking into the top 3. That top 3 position can be the difference between hobby revenue and revenue that might actually help me make my car payments every month

Office etiquette between different generations

On TechCrunch Erik Schonfeld recently wrote about a survey conducted by NexisLexis that concluded that Baby Boomers find mobile phones and Blackberries detrimental to workplace etiquette.  That really isn’t a surprise, but what is surprising is the perception of productivity. While 35% of Generation Y’ers thought texting and emailing during meetings improved productivity, only 20% of Baby Boomers agreed with that question. Maybe that’s because Generation Y, on average, has speedier thumbs

The survey had a focus on legal professionals, so the information may be screwed, but another interesting stat was that 72% of legal professionals find the use of laptops and mobile devices to be impolite, comparing to only 60% of white collar respondants. It would be interesting to see that data for more industry sectors – what industry is the most tolerant?

The bottom line is no matter what generation you fall within, every situation needs to be contemplated individually. Falling within Generation Y, I know when I’m in a meeting, seeing a collegue turn off his or her Blackberry can be a refreshing feeling. But on the same note, there are those meetings that seem to be built quite nicely for catching up on email. Whatever the situation, if it’s your meeting, maybe you can gauge your ability to engage by the number of busy thumbs around the table. Afterall, if the team doesn’t feel the message needs their undivided attention, how productive can the meeting possibly be?