Nuance on the Samsung Behold

I made a post a couple days ago about my wish to have voice recognition blog posting over the phone. I wanted to be able to make posts or notes while I was walking to work, I do my best thinking at that time.  I just got a new cell phone, well new to me. Its a Samsung Behold. It’s another iphone wannabee but I like new phones, its fun to find out all the stuff they can do without reading the manual . In this case there is no manual because I traded it to for my Dash.

ANYWAY… I was messing around with it and hit the voice dial button and lo and behold, the Nuance logo appeared. Thats pretty cool. I have a real  love affair with dragon naturally speaking, although I still don’t think its ready for prime time, well either that or maybe i jess don’ talk so good.  Whatever, it was ironic and I thought it was cool. Nuance getting in bed with Samsung on phones means that what I want is not far to follow.

Hey, also, I know this is not breaking news. Not by a long shot, but its news to me and that’s all I really care about.

Brad Hicks vs Ron Burgandy

I was just going through my webstats and noticed I got some Google traffic for people looking for Brad Hicks. It was probably Brad Googleing himself, you shouldn’t do that Brad. Anyway, I make no secret of what a joke I think local news is, I am not alone in this and I don’t have much to say that hasn’t been said before. I did find something pretty funny however. I had mentioned Brad Hicks in a post about a couple trash stories on the news lately that were messing with local business. The only reason I mentioned Brad was because of his garish ties and the fact that he just looks like he would smoke weed. Which is totally fine by me. Anyway, I googled Brad Hicks and came across this page.

http://chickaboomer.blogspot.com/2008/03/anchorman-legend-of-brad-hicks.html

There are no original thoughts left….

Incoming search terms:

• Where does news anchor brad hicks buy his ties?

Keeping track of a good idea

I Have a 15 minute walk to work. I think I probably get 65% of the best creative thinking for the entire day during my walk to and from the office. I came up with 3 or 4 excellent topics to write about today.  Unfortunately, due to some bad choices I have made regarding chemical intake in my formitive years, and that I had some wine last night – I forgot them, well most of them.

I use Dragon Naturally Speaking at home. It actually works pretty well. I will be thrilled when its flawless. This got me to thinking, when are we going to be able to phone in blog posts? If you think about it, it really wouldn’t be that difficult. I am guessing that it will happen with Twitter first since. The short character limit of the messages and the explosion in popularity, it makes sense. The problem is, it’s really easy to text message 146 characters. So an actual blog post would be great.

I know some people call their own voice mail and leave their thoughts as a message, and I supposed I could carry one of those mini-recorders, but thats just one more gadget to fill my pockets. I just want to call my blog and post my thoughts. This will happen, I am sure. I just wish it would happen now.

I guess for the time being I will just try to salvage what I can from my fried short term memory.

Oh another practical use would be for prisoners. I see there are a lot of prison blogs, I assume they are dictated over the phone or sent in by snail mail.

Incoming search terms:

• rob benwell lawsuit

Starting an eCommerce Website with Magento : My Journey

I have been working in online marketing since Al Gore created the internet. I have marketed everything. I am an SEO expert, PPC, Social Media, etc. I know the ins-and-outs of marketing eCommerce sites. It has been in the back of my mind that I am really foolish for being so complacent that I continue to make money for other people. I should be doing this myself.

I currently work for a company that specializes in B2B ecomm sites. I work with them from inception up until they are rocking the sales. The pieces that I am missing are unfortunately very important parts of the puzzle. So, I have decided it’s time to take the plunge and do it myself. I am have decided to use Magento as the shopping cart, and I will use WordPress for the blog. I am loaded up with Magento modules, WordPress themes, all that stuff is covered.

The hard part about starting an eCommerce site is deciding what you are going to sell. It helps if you have your own products – but if you don’t – you need to create relationships with manufacturers that will give you a good price that you can mark up enough to make money with, but still stay competitive. Deciding on what you are going to sell is also difficult. Hopefully its something you enjoy. The problem is that even if you enjoy something, that doesn’t mean you are an expert. You also need to know if there is a market out there, and how competitive it is. I love music, but I am not an equipment expert, and I also do not have the relationships or capitol to start re-selling high end equipment. The advertising costs are also expensive, and the competition is stiff. I have been giving this a lot of thought.

I am not prepared to announce what the site is, and I will be vague in the theme of the site. Domain age is crucial in getting respect from the search engines, so part of the task was looking through my domains and pulling one that had some age on it. I have decided on a domain that works for the products I am going to sell. It doesn’t have the keyword in it which is unfortunate, but its a pretty good domain and its 8 years old. The domain has 27,000 page in Googles index, but those aren’t going to do much for me so I will probably lose those. The site isnt a high PR site so I am not too stressed about losing them. The amount of pages and the age of the domain at least tells me that Google will visit it frequently so I wont have too much of an indexing problem.

So, I am going to embark on the first part of the project and install Magento on the server. I might document the process that I go through to help out others who are thinking about taking on the same project. I plan on doing this all on my own with no outsourcing so that will be a challenge, but I have a huge advantage when it comes to the marketing of the site. The challenge is going to be opening up the relationships with the manufacturers of the products I plan to sell, the dropshipping, credit card processing etc.

I have been very lazy about keeping this blog up to date, but I will give it a shot and at least try to write short entries with any lessons learned.

If you would like to help contribute to the project, feel free to check out some of the advertisers on this blog. Any bit of revenue will help.

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