This is simply a blog post to test how quickly Pingvine updates my @BrentDPayne twitter account with this post. If it does it almost instantly then we (Tribune) will move @chicagobreaking to Pingvine to give people instant access to the breaking news versus needing to wait 30 minutes with TwitterFeed.

Testing . . . 1 . . . 2 . . . 3

I believe I can prove that Google is indexing pages that have no inbound links. Thus indexing pages NOT via a typical site crawl. While I can’t prove what they are doing to discover links outside of a typical site crawl, I can prove that they are at least doing it.

Review this query:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aorigin-www.baltimoresun.com&pws=0

And as of today (January 9, 2009) there are 16,200 pages indexed on the origin-www.baltimoresun.com subdomain.

Reviewing this query:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=link%3Aorigin-www.baltimoresun.com&pws=0

Google states that there are inbound links from these pages to origin-www.baltimoresun.com, right? Well let’s look at the code of the cached versions of the pages and see where it is then.

It doesn’t exist.

Okay . . . but we all know that Google’s ‘links:’ doesn’t work well so let’s look at Yahoo’s tool instead which is considered reliable in the Search industry.

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Forigin-www.baltimoresun.com&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=u

Looking at this query, it proves that there are no links outside the subdomain or domain linking to the site. (There will be some from within the subdomain due to relative URLs of course and the spider crawling and finding them.)

What’s really interesting is that out of the multiple Tribune domains (8 domains have this subdomain) that have an origin-www subdomain indexed, the only one that Yahoo found was the baltimoresun.com version. Furthermore, these subdomains have been live for over a full year but I just realized them over the past few days (and can prove a few have been around for at least a month, shame on me–should’ve caught this sooner perhaps). This tells me that this is a fairly recent change by Google and possibly Yahoo! (though I think, for other reasons, that Yahoo is just crawling Google’s search results).

Here are some of my theories as to what Google may be doing:

1. Google Toolbar tracking - Obviously several Tribune employees that hit this subdomain intended for internal use have the Google Toolbar installed.
2. Google Personalization - Whether it is by browsing history, cookies, etc. I’m not sure but several of Tribune employees have Google accounts.
3. G’Talk - Several Tribune employees use Google’s GTalk feature and we send links of these subdomains around through GTalk. Perhaps Google is tracking GTalk URLs for discoverability.
4. Gmail - We have a lot of dedicated employees at Tribune perhaps one of them used their personal email address when working from home to send a link from this subdomain?
5. ???

What do you think? What could’ve caused this problem?

Also . . . seriously, the duplicate content filter didn’t catch this? Why not? You’d think with discoverability methods such as this that’d be the first thing to check.

Note: The only difference between the normal subdomain and the origin-www.baltimore.com subdomain is a server configuration. There is nothing public facing that shares any proprietary information. We only kept it ‘internal’ to avoid this exact problem from occurring (creating duplicate content). Now that it has happened anyway, there is no issue with us sharing it publicly (especially considering all the origin-www.baltimoresun.com etc. will be removed via robots.txt early next week).

Disclaimer: Now that this post exists, some inbound links may develop to the origin-www subdomains but at the time of this post I went through over 20 results for the Google ‘link:’ results and checked the cached pages. No links to the subdomain.

I received a cryptic direct message today from Len Kendall (aka @LenKendall) via Twitter tonight. Keep in mind that this is during the time that there are rampant spam DMs floating around the Twittersphere…so I almost didn’t even click on the link. But I’d had quite a few conversations with Len so I thought . . . probably not spam.

To my dismay excitement I discovered that I’d been tagged to write a post about seven things that are interesting or different about me.

Here it goes . . .

Attempting to sell newspapers to the blind…

I was 13 years old and I was a paperboy for the East Oregonian. I was out selling newspaper subscriptions door to door when my boss (the 25 year old that had a driver’s license and drove me from town to town) told me that this was the last door of the night but if I got this person to sign up (10^th one of the night) then she’d give me an extra $50. For a thirteen year old . . . that’s a helluva lotta moola.

I knocked on the door and a old blind woman opened the door. Now most kids would’ve given up at this point . . . not I said the thirteen year old money obsessed child. I immediately introduced myself and stated that I was from the East Oregonian. I thought of the most useful reason why an old blind woman would want a subscription to a newspaper—coupons of course. She was on a fixed income and the $7.00 per month subscription would be easily eclipsed by the $50 (totally made that up as $50 was on the brain at the time of the sales pitch) in monthly savings that most (as if there was a study conducted on this) people utilize in coupons.

She didn’t get sold on the idea of the coupon savings but she did remind me of her grandson that she wished she saw more of . . . (WARNING: If you have an old blind grandmother stop reading now.) . . . him because he was such a sweet 10 year old boy. I switched gears immediately and told her that some of the best times of grade school was sitting with my grandmother and reading the newspaper together. Truthful?? Umm. Well, let’s just move on to the rest of the story shall we?? I then proceeded to mention that she should subscribe to the paper so that she can have her grandson come over and read it to her. Not only would it allow her to know of the great content in the East Oregonian but it would also educate her grandson while they spent . . . true . . . quality . . . time . . . TOGETHER.

I can’t remember what I spent the $50 on but I am sure I am sure it was worth going to hell for . . .

What would you do for $100? Here’s my story . . .

I was 20 years old . . . going to college in Ogden, UT (majored in Technical Sales & Marketing . . . imagine that). I come from a middle class family and I’d tapped out all the money from my parents, friends, and my sweet “newspaper reading” grandma that I could. I had $60 to my name. I was reading the classifieds in the newspaper (it was 1996 they were still useful then) for job listings and found one that seemed way over my head but thought it would be some good interviewing experience. Plus it had something called a 401-K…whatever the hell that was…

I walk into the office with a black two button suit white shirt and tie to find the interviewer smoking a cigarette, unshaven for a couple of days, wearing a collared shirt and some dingy jeans. Keep in mind smoking indoors is illegal in Utah even back in 1996—so he was breaking the law and I’m not a fan of cigarette smoke so I definitely noticed it. This guy turns out to be the staunchest New Yorker I know still to this day. I try to mirror and match him the best I can in the interview. Try to build commonalities. Try to create relationships of trust. Mimic his body language. Do it all . . . at the end he dismisses me and I swear I didn’t have a prayer at the job.

A week later I get a call and his secretary tells me to come back in for a second interview. I walk into the office and the first thing he says is, “What the fuck kid don’t you own more than one suit?” I reply, “Nope. Sure don’t. I am broke as hell and this is all I’ve got.” He grunts and motions me into his office. We chat a bit and then he pulls out a check for $34,000 and asks me, “How’d you like to make that type of money?” I respond sheepishly with, “Per year? Sure that’d be great.” He laughs a smart ass laugh and says, “Kid…that’s my check for one month. I can show you how to make that type of money.” With my eyeballs have popped out of my head, I respond, “Seriously? Hell yeah. That’d be SWEET!!” He then rolls out a wad of hundreds (probably over $5K worth) and peels a hunskie off and says, “Kid, I’ll pay you $100.00 right now if you will run into that wall right there as hard as you can.”

The imprint I left in the wall stayed there for the full two years I worked in that office.

Hello, my name is Brent, I mean it’s . . .

After collecting my $100.00 from the loveliest interviewer I’ve ever had, he moves forward to state, “Son. You’ve got drive. You’ve got real drive. I can see it in your eyes and I’d love to hire you. But you see . . . I just can’t.” Shocked, I respond, “What? I just ran into a wall for you and you are telling me you still aren’t going to hire me? Why not!!?” He nonchalantly responds, “Well you see we already have a Brent in this small office and it would be too confusing to the customers to have to ask for Brent Bylund or Brent Payne so . . . thanks for your time kid. I wish you the best of luck—I truly do.” Making sure I am wise to discover the primary concern, restate the objection and provide an alternative…I respond with, “So you are telling me that the only reason you won’t hire me is because my first name is Brent? That’s the only reason? Otherwise you’d hire me?” Lighting up another cig, he responds, “Yep. Sorry kid.”

Determined, I reply, “I’ll see you Monday morning at 7:30am. I’m going by my middle name of David from now on.”

For ten years I was known in my professional life as David Payne. It wasn’t until I got out of the ecommerce industry that I started going by Brent again. Funniest part though is that my then wife always referred to me as David Payne when we were at company dinners, functions, calls into the office, etc. but all other times she called me Brent . . . she has a few other names she calls me now since the divorce though.

The Holy Spirit works in . . . ummm . . . mysterious ways?

It’s Tremonton, UT in early 1996. I’m on an LDS Mission Mormon Mission…yep sporting the white shirt and tie, black name tag pocket protector that reads “Elder Payne” the whole ball of wax…and my companion and I knock on the millionth door that day within a low income apartment complex to be greeted with a scrawny, party going, young 20 something male. We open with the most appropriate line for the quick sizing up we can make of the fellow and opt for the, “We’re missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and we’d like to share a message with you about our Heavenly Father and the plan he has to help us return back unto Him someday.” Yikes, bad opening line I guess as he then goes off on a tirade about how there is no god and he is an Atheist because, “If there was a god there wouldn’t be this much suffering in the world.” My companion tries to make a few inroads with the ‘approved’ approaches to overcome this objection but I decide to take a different approach to the matter.

I flatly ask him a simple question, “How do your balls feel right now?” He responds with, “What the fuck you talking about? How do my balls feel right now?” My companion is wondering if the pot smoke bellowing out from inside the apartment is getting to my brain as I repeat the question, “How do your balls feel right now?” The staunch Atheist responds, “Hell I don’t know how they feel right now. Fine, I guess. I don’t take a constant inventory of how my balls feel but I guess they feel fine.” With my companion tucking at me to leave, I state, “So you don’t really appreciate how they feel right now. But if I were to kick you in the balls as hard as I could then I bet you’d realize just how good your balls felt before I kicked you in the balls wouldn’t you?” He grunts, “Yeah, I guess. So??” With my companion standing in disbelief that this is actually happening to him on his mission, I make my point, “Sometimes God has to let people get kicked in the balls sometimes so they learn to appreciate just how good their balls feel most of the time. We as humans need to learn to appreciate the blessings in our lives whether that be normal feeling balls or greater blessings such as friends, family, and the gift of the Gospel. May we come in and share with you a bit more about the mysterious ways God may work to help lead us back to Him?”

He was baptized 6 weeks later . . .

The rest of the story… My companion shared the experience with a group of over 100 missionaries at the mission meeting a few weeks later . . . half the group roared in laughter the other half stood sheepishly as they listened to the Mission President lecture me on how that was a less effective approach and not the Holy Spirit. I was transferred to Rawlins, WY (i.e. mission hell) at the next transfer. Whatever . . .

The sign of a true friend.

It is Irrigon, OR a hell hole in northeastern Oregon with the only redeeming quality being that it resides along the Columbia River with some of the flattest waterskiing water you’ll ever know. Most people are dating the same people in high school that they dated in Kindergarten. Very few people move in and very few people move out. I’m chatting with my best friend about how I’m giving up that Sandra is ever going to breakup with her boyfriend in Richland, WA and I can’t handle doing whatever it is that she and I are doing. I need to start dating someone else.

He does what any best friend would do in a situation like this . . . he offers up his sister as an offering unto his best friend by stating, “Hey. My sister isn’t dating anyone and neither are you so . . . you should ask her out.”

I marry her almost 3 years later and she divorces me nearly 10 years later. But my best friend and I are still great friends . . . now that’s a friendship. Though it has been discussed as to whether or not he owes me a portion of the resulting alimony and child support.

I hope I am right that the statute of limitations was three years

During my good financial times of just a few years back, I made the midlife crisis decision to lease a 2005 Dodge Viper SRT-10 Mamba Edition Convertible. That car was a blast for the approx. two years that I leased it for $1,500 a month. My cousin came down to visit one weekend and we took the Viper for a little spin . . .

Here’s the resulting video:

http://www.brentdavidpayne.com/paynephotos/Viper/ViperRollerCoaster.wmv

OMG, is it really 1:30am . . . doing a lame 7^th one then . . .

Although I have a million other things I could be doing that would be much more beneficial to my career, personal life, or just stress management . . . I stay up until 1:30am writing this blog post because I get caught up in some type of Meme . . . ugh. Len Kendall . . . you owe me 2 hours of my life.

Now for my seven people:

Jeremiah Andrick
@jandrick

Tony Adam
@tonyadam

Joanna Lord
@joannalord

Amanda Maurer
@acmaurer

Kate Morris
@katemorris

Kristy Bolsinger
@kristyann

Amanda Coolong
@acoolong

And my alternate in case one of these people already did this . . .

Bill Adee
@bill80

P.S. No way I am proofing this post at 1:30am . . . sorry for any grammar or spelling errors . . . good night.

I was craving some spaghetti tonight, so I did what most 32 year old males do (cough, cough) . . . I asked my Twitter followers to help me out.

Now, first . . . you have to know a thing or two about my twitter followers.

1. They are the best.
2. They are the best.
3. They are the best.

I’ll get into details some time about why they are the best but . . . just know, that they are.

After sending out a Tweet of . . .

Looking for some really good spaghetti in Chicago for tonight (preferrably downtown). Any recommendations? Meat sauce more than meatballs. about 2 hours ago from twhirl

P.S. If you want to be part of them, follow me at http://twitter.com/BrentDPayne

It was a typical Tuesday night and Brent was on Twitter.com being strange as ever.

Then TheNanny612 said a hilarious tweet that made Brent laugh and respond in a similar fashion.

However TheNanny612 was even more clever and she re-responded back to BrentDPayne.

This made BrentDPayne cry and he shared this fact with her. TheNanny612 found great joy in this fact.

BrentDPayne chastised TheNanny612 realizes how wrong she was and claims she is hanging her head in shame.

BrentDPayne, in typical Digg fashion, claims that it didn’t happen unless there is a picture to prove it.

TheNanny612 then posts her picture of her hanging her head in shame.

BrentDPayne being the egotistical asshole that he can be at times, has to gloat about how he managed to get the picture of such head hanging shame.

This gloating then backfires wherein TheNanny612 and KristyAnn both request an image of BrentDPayne actually crying.

To which BrentDPayne sends a picture of him crying.

I’m getting some friends and co-workers of mine telling me that the http://www.brentdavidpayne.com/bleet/images/Top-News-Sites-Stats.pdf PDF I created about the different newspaper.coms and how they are doing year over year is getting passed around quite a bit out there. I can’t tell because I don’t have analytics tracking on a PDF page. I guess that is a lesson to me to put PDF files on a landing page from now on, huh?

At any rate, I wanted to point out a couple of things that I saw from the data.

1. Tribune is actually doing fairly well. We are holding our own against the likes of NYTimes.com. Sure they are pulling ahead of Tribune slightly but considering the wins they have publicized about SEO, their considerably larger circulation, and stronger brand name…you can expect that a little. Give us some time to catch up on their SEO and some time to redesign our papers to be more exciting to a wider audience…we’ll catch up.
2. Gannett, a company that seems to be a friend and foe [scratch foe, replace with perhaps competitor…but it didn’t sound as good] of Tribune’s at the same time, seems to be stalling online. I find that personally interesting considering they seem to be the most similar to Tribune. How? They have a few large brands (well, they may actually only have just one) and a lot of smaller publications. This is similar to the Tribune Network of sites.
3. A real shocker to me is Fox. Those guys are charging onward and upward. Granted they have some pretty cool stuff happening. For example their Fox.com domain (which probably isn’t included in this report…but I don’t know for sure) is well designed, albeit a bit flash-y, and offers the best user experience of the major networks for watching full length shows. I personally just finished watching Terminator Season 2 episodes 1 & 2 back to back in full HD glory and in full screen. They offer their shows within 24 hours of airing while other networks make you wait a full week or more. I’m definitely taking notice of their success online. I’ll be honest…it’s a little concerning.
4. Another shocker to me in not such a positive way is USATODAY.com. Why in the hell aren’t they doing better? They have insane circulation numbers (#1 in the country, yes they beat NYTimes.com too), they are nationally focused which is HUGE for search engine optimization, and they have great brand recognition. Why they aren’t doing as well as Tribune or NYTimes.com is baffling to me. Anyone care to enlighten me? Seriously. I am new to the media industry so I’m sure there is a worthwhile reason that I just don’t know about.
5. Obviously, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention TheHuffingtonPost.com. They are growing like a weed (and yes, I chose weed wisely). Plus, they are doing it with very little overhead. I know that Tribune papers get honorable mentions on Huff and we notice the spike in traffic when we do. They are a great partner if you want instant page views and visitors, but a few more months of growth like they experienced in August and I think they could well eat any of the big paper’s lunch. Of course, there is one catch . . . they don’t have the mounds of content without people like Tribune, Gannett, and the NYT to provide it for them. What is up with their site design though? Ugh.
6. Google News didn’t grow as swiftly as one would have expected. There may be reasons for that or perhaps they just had an off month. Frankly, I didn’t realize they were as small as this list states they are, but…they can sure drive some great traffic if you can get on the top of the Google News homepage for a nationally popular news story. Otherwise, most of the traffic you see from them comes via their integrated results in Google Web queries, which can be quite significant at times.
7. Oh yeah . . . MSNBC.com grew. Duh! Olympics. NBC. MSN. That’s a given. Talk about the dream team of companies and events. Lucky bastard to whoever is handling their SEO.

Glad to hear that people are finding the PDF helpful (even if I can’t tell how many people are finding it helpful).

P.S. This was a long Bleet . . . I probably should’ve made it a blog post. Shame on me. Abusing bleets like that. LOL

I noticed today as I was looking at one of Tribune’s smaller newspaper websites (I’m the SEO Manager for Tribune) that there was a significant spike in traffic from Microsoft. It made me take notice of them for once on the pretty little graph within Omniture. Then I thought, “Hmm. I wonder if they could do this on a daily basis?” If Microsoft were to take the top 5% of queries that have the highest number of results (pages to choose from) and simply serve up results starting at page two or page three, would there be a lack in relevance? I’d think for most of the very popular queries that there would be 50+ relevant sites that make sense. Maybe a happy medium would be to serve up the same top 5 but toss in other sites from deeper in the index into the next 5 positions. What will happen? For the sites that can’t seem to break into the top ten results on Google, they will start seeing a higher percentage of traffic from Microsoft and thus they’ll want to do more to tout that, partner with them, etc. Couldn’t Microsoft just gain mindshare with Webmasters, Marketers, SEOs, etc. by employing such a strategy? What are your thoughts?

I am trying out Twubble for the first time ever and I see and interesting message pop-up on the screen.

“Twitter is taking longer than expected. If it doesn’t respond soon, refresh and try again. If Twitter is working and you still see this message, contact @crazybob”

The funny part about this isn’t the message it’s the fact that he puts a caveat in the message that states, “if twitter is working”. It’s pretty bad when a service is so unreliable that error messages have to point out that the problem may well be that the entire Twitter network is down. Can you imagine Google posting a message on Google Desktop, “If Google.com is working, feel free to visit our help site.”

Maybe it’s just me . . . but I found that interesting.

My uncle use to love screwing with our heads as children. He’d be driving along in the Volare and we’d be all rowdy (no seatbelts, half of us in the back cargo area) and he’d say, “Hey boys! How’d you like to go by some ice cream?” We’d get all excited (of course) and then he’d tell us that we need to sit and be real quiet and we’d go by some ice cream. About 15 minutes later he’d point out the ice cream store (Baskin-Robbins) and he’d drive by it. We’d ask why we didn’t stop and he’d say, “We went by some ice cream. Now you can even say good-bye ice cream.” Isn’t that torture? L

I’m constantly torn between having one personality online or having several. ‘Back in the day’, which is until 2005 when the wheels on my life can flying out from under me, I had about 30 profiles on line. I kept a spreadsheet of the personalities. I assigned them children, types of cars they drove, their computer types and configurations (I was selling computer memory and flash cards at the time). I would often times start a thread in a newsgroup or forum with one personality and then reply with another personality. Then even toss in a third one to get the thread going. Most of the time the ‘real’ public would then kick in and a long thread about the product I was trying to promote would ensue.

I began getting conflicted about this during my divorce and lots of discussions with marriage counselors about honesty etc. So I flushed them all. Their user names, their personalities, etc. All TOAST! Now I am wondering if there isn’t a happy medium though. Afterall, do I really want to have my personal life and my business life all wrapped into one online identity? I have some pretty ‘out-there’ ideas on things and can really get rolling on some less than politically correct topics by just a nudge or two from the community.

What do you think? What’s your stance on online personalities? Where does ‘honesty’ play a role?