Guy Decoder From I-Village

While doing my usual dating research, I stumbled into random "guy decoder" from i-Village. I remember the site because I had a job-interview with their parent company, NBC-universal about a year ago. This "guy decider" is a list of explanations for girls on why guys do things they do. I got curious and decided to check on the article for "Why does he put his friends ahead of me", and the answer just sickened me.

It's with great reluctance that a man leaves the tribe of men to be with a woman. And often that's what it feels like to us: As a couple, people have entirely different social interactions, and for a man to be part of a couple usually means he can't hang with his buddies as often as he wants.

Your man just can't commit to the transition to couplehood -- it's the classic desire to want his cake and to want a stripper to pop out of it, too. But he needs to make a choice, doesn't he?

The bad news is he really might choose them over you. He might not be ready to be with you the way you want. Some men are just very slow to grow up.

The article described men as some kind of pre-human, using words like "leaves the tribe". "Can't commit to the transition of couplehood"? Maybe he can, and the woman's just too demanding of his time. A lot of times, the guy really isn't the problem, he CAN "commit to the transition of couplehood", but his version of "couplehood", not hers. And just because he doesn't enter a relationship in the exact same manner as she wished him to, he is "slow to grow up"?

It's these types of articles that make society how it is today. It's not uncommon for commitment seeking people to have more than 5 "meaningful relationships" before marriage, and today's divorce rates are higher than 50%.

Let's make a change: Instead of building unrealistic expectations by bashing each other and making society think everything is at fault of the opposite sex, more should be emphasized on "what can we do to help the situation" instead of "the bad news is...".

Apartment Decorations

Other than a hotel room turned into a studio apartment in the ghetto of Greensboro I lived in 3 years ago, this is the first apartment I've ever had all to myself. I've been having fun decorating it, making it an inviting, but personal place for myself - down to earth but elegant.

The newest additions are a piece of simple art and an ambiance lamp. Right now, the lamp's just sitting on the floor, its position is perfect to bring the attention to the art. I might get a small stand for it, but so far so good.

The Perfect Woman

One of my favorite DC bloggers, Roosh, talked about "the perfect woman". He didn't really talk about who the perfect woman is or what she should be like. What he did talk about was the concept of the perfect woman disappearing as he "dated" more and more women. It reminds me of a more extreme version of my experiences - My failed relationships in my early 20's, casually dating women after that, the more women I date, the more vague the concept of "the perfect girl" is. Of course, I'm not nearly as jaded or had been with nearly as many women as he claims. I liked how he ended the post. "So… she’s gone. Experience killed the perfect woman. It means nothing to me."

It kills me how random life is. A big chunk of me has nothing to do with me. It’s just the environment I’m in, the events and people that cross my path. Wrong time, right place.

I was 23-years-old when I met a beautiful girl. I have no idea how I got her but I did, and I didn’t have the “game” that I have now. She liked me for me, an eager guy out of college trying to relieve whatever inadequacy he thought he had.

She crushed me, but that was okay. But I did something that wasn’t okay. I overcompensated, to the extreme. I had to get even better at the game so not only could I find a girl like that again, but I could keep her as well. You see there was an end goal of a happy relationship somewhere along the line, but it didn’t work out like that. The game was the end itself. The perfect woman I thought I wanted slowly slipped away. She morphed into this monster of easy sex and unrealistic expectations. Sex on demand, no later than the third date, and if you’re not exactly what I want then fuck off.

Part of me wishes I got swooped up by her. Maybe I would see women as more than just numbers and stories. Maybe I’d be in a happy relationship. Sure I’d be whipped and still working in some soulless job trying to pay a mortgage, but at least I’d have this woman who cared for me and loved me, and I would do the same to her. I think I was capable of that.

Instead I went down this rabbit hole… deeper and deeper… and darker. I see less than I used to. Too much experience, too used to easy attention and cheap thrills. You can’t undo your experiences, especially when there is just too many of them, their naked bodies, their smell on your fingers as you drive home racking up another score… your fantasies of their moans and kisses as you smile yourself to sleep. The way they laugh at jokes you’ve said a hundred times before.

It gets worse every year, the happy relationship with my “perfect” girl just gets farther as I become more incapable, as I become “better” at getting sex that has meaning but really doesn’t. I don’t even notice differences in girls anymore. But I can’t stop. I notice most other guys can. Am I… a validation junkie? An attention whore? Like the girls I criticize?

When that girl dumped me I cried. I went to her place to get my stuff, hoping I could keep it going. But it was done. I left and parked in a gas station and sat there and cried like a little baby. If that happened today, I wouldn’t even give a shit, and I think that’s my problem. I’m a machine with flesh, no empathy or love… another night, another performance.

She wasn’t perfect, not even close. But she was. Anyone decent looking can be made perfect. You already know it takes very little effort. But I haven’t done it recently.

So… she’s gone. Experience killed the perfect woman. It means nothing to me.

Internet Media South Park Quote

This week's episode of South Park talked about kids trying to make money on the Internet by uploading entertaining videos on the web. At the end of the the show, they had a "what did we learn speech" and it was the following:

Yeah, but you know I learned something today. We thought we could make money on the Internet. But while the Internet is new and exciting for creative people, it hasn’t matured as a distribution mechanism to the extent that one should trade real and immediate opportunities for income for the promise of future online revenue. It will be a few years before digital distribution of media on the Internet can be monetized to an extent that necessitates content producers to forgo their fair value in more traditional media.

Personally, I think the market has matured enough that if someone puts out something with millions of page views, and has access to the page (instead of uploading it to a 3rd party site like YouTube or MySpace), he could make a pretty big chunk of change.

All he needs to do is negotiate a banner deal or two with some companies. At the industry average rate of $10 CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) per ad, 2 ads per page, the publisher would receive about $20K every 1 million hits to that page. And if he can somehow increase the page's "stickiness" and get each visitor to click one more page averagely, that's $20k more for that original 1 million hits.

Southpark: It's not hard to monetize Internet media if there's enough traffic.

Trip to San Francisco

This post is a couple of weeks overdue, but better late than never.

So last February I went to SMX in Santa Clara. It ended on Thursday, but I decided to fly back on Sunday instead.

San Francisco is amazing. I loved the area, and also the culture. In my experiences on the east coast, as a whole, different cities have lots of "friendly" people, or "intelligent people". DC is probably fairly close when it comes to a combination of both. But wow, Northern California is full of people who are truly both.

I loved the China Town in San Francisco. It's the biggest one I know in US. But then again, the only other ones I've been to are the ones in DC and Manhattan. I think I bought about $100 worth of souvenirs in their different gift shops over 2 hours, from stuff like shot glasses to random wall-scrolls. I only walked 1/5 of the China Town itself. The reason I stopped (other than time) was I knew I couldn't fit more souvenirs in my luggage to fly back.

I mostly ate at the suburbs of San Fran. The most unique place I ate at was a little Taiwanese desert place. They had all kinds of random small deserts that are unusually simple to make, but people just don't. I ordered a desert that's mostly shaved ice with light syrup over it, almost like a snow cone but with thinner syrup, and it had fresh strawberries and mangoes as toppings. It was awesome.

Maybe it was the tourist mentality, but I just fell in love with Northern California, and I'm definitely thinking of moving there in a few years.

Google Spam Manual Review Guidelines

I stumbled upon this in my daily SEO research. Haven't seen it in a while, so I thought I'd share it. It's guidelines for people who're manually reviewing and penalizing spam sites. It's an oldie but a goodie.

Random Meeting Gibberish

I totally busted out this quote in a meeting today (but only as a joke).

I plan to fuse six sigma with lean methods to eliminate the gap between our strategy and our objectives.

SMX Recap

Wow, first major search engine conference I've ever been to. It was fun, but really exhausting. I've picked up some small things here and there, but I feel like I haven't learned anything really new. I learned small "tricks" such as to rank for more positions in search engines for your company's name, try creating pages on already-trusted domains such Myspace profiles.

It was amazing to see that many search marketing professionals in one place. Most places I go to, I wouldn't know any one person that knows what search marketing is. I've shaken hands with Matt Cutts, the top Google QA engineer who's the "voice of Google" to webmasters and SEO's. That was a real treat for me.

I'm glad I went. It was mentally fatiguing, but also a great experience. I the seminars were an hour an 15 minutes each, and I went to four of them a day, with some networking in between. Below was my schedule for all 3 days:

Tuesday, February 26, 2008
09:00 - 09:45: Keynote Address, Danny Sullivan Search 3.0, Search 4.0 and Beyond
10:30 - 11:45: Search 3.0 The Blended Search Revolution
12:00 - 13:00: SMX Meet & Eat: Lunch With A Google Search Engineer (1)
13:15 - 14:45: Search Marketing & Persona Models
15:15 - 16:30: The Economics Of Search
16:45 - 06:00: Online Retail & Blended Results

Wednesday, February 27, 2008
09:00 - 09:45: Keynote Address, Louis Monier: Past, Present & Future of Search
10:45 - 12:00: Branding & Search
12:15 - 13:15: SMX Meet & Eat: Reputation Management
13:30 - 14:45: Reputation Monitoring & Management Through Search
15:15 - 16:30: SEO & Blogging
16:45 - 06:00: Sponsor Session: Applied Keyword Research Training

Thursday, February 28, 2008
09:00 - 10:00: Keynote Address ÐGeneration Next: Search In The Coming Decade
10:45 - 12:00: Generation Google: A Talk With Today's Teens
12:15 - 13:15: SMX Meet & Eat: Non-Paid Linking Strategies
13:30 - 14:30: Analyzing The Competition
14:45 - 15:45: Linking Q&A
16:00 - 17:00: Linking Checkup

SMX West 2008 in Santa Clara

So I’ll be going to Santa Clara for SMX West. I’m pretty excited. This is the first major search engine conference. I remember almost going to SES NY a few years ago, but some last minute things prevented me from going.

I worked a half day today, left my job around noonish for the airport. It was a 1:30-3PM flight to Dulles DC for transferring. My coworkers and I sat around for almost four hours to catch the 7PM flight to San Jose, and this flight will take six hours. The waiting time between transfers went by fast. We talked about all kinds of things, from their families to our jobs. It seems like people were more open to discussing new ideas and navigate away from status-quo when we’re out of the office. We talked about what motivates us to do a good job besides the paychecks. I am traveling with the director of MIS. He wants to see the company’s web presence succeed because he’s been there from ground zero, before the company had a website. The developer told me his motivation is that he really enjoys creating things that help people and businesses out, such as computer programs that automate lots of stuff. And me personally, I really haven’t been at my current job long enough to truly care about its profits. I just really enjoy what I do. I love the pages I’ve “touched” showing up and ranking in search engines, I love the idea of for ever dollar I spend in paid search, I make more than a dollar back. If I’m around long enough, I’d like see the company’s web-presence grow into a major competitor for E-commerce. Starting from almost scratch web-marketing wise, I almost feel like I’m taking on a “pet project” that’s a blank slate. The only difference is that I get to work on this pet project while at work, and I get financial backing for this too. It’s pretty fun – well, if you don’t count the corporate politics, waiting forever for stuff to get done, and dealing with random egos such as the head programmer saying stuff like “convince me why we should do a URL rewriting” when it was already decided because I’ve already convinced our COO and director of MIS. But I guess it happens in every company, all you can do in that aspect is to “play nice” and “make people happy” while doing the things that you feel like is important. With enough advertising dollars, I might be working for a company that will be what Amazon is today.

I am sitting on the plane, blogging but can’t publish due to the lack of Internet. I’ve been on the plane for about four hours, and only two more to go. The plane ride so far seemed a lot longer than the four hour wait for the plane. I’m running out of distractions. My mini-video player is almost out of battery, I’ve went through all my throw-away free magazines, and now I’m almost finished with this blog.

Again, I’m pretty excited. Not only is this my first major search engine conference, but it’ll be my first time on the west coast. I’m obviously going to visit San Francisco while I’m here. I’ll be taking lots of pictures. If anyone wants any souvenirs or has any special requests on pictures, you know I’ll do my best.

Random Definition Glossary

This is to test Google's "define" or "what is" operator and ways to influence it.

I have chosen a few random names of my college buds to target that I think isn't competitive at all.

Examples: Google the following:
define:paul zhao
what is paul zhao

Hopefully, this experiment will work.

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Paul Zhao: a person that's always trying to manipulate Google results

Andrew Simmering: one who is always willing to take shots

Matt Hollinger: someone who can't handle his liquor

Ronald Roode: a person who writes weird programming codes

Mudit Patel: a guy who went to law school and moved to BFE

SMX: the first search engine conference on the west coast Paul Zhao is attending