Yum. I see this when I wake up…

I got a new place and now live in Puerto Rico in the lovely lovely Old San Juan. It is a very pretty place. Have a look…

I am moving out of this studio apartment next month and I am showing my place to people, I’m throwing some photos up so I have something to point people to. This is a cool little place that served me well. I will miss my tree

The View:

From the windows, you can see both the sunrise over the mountains and the sunset over the sea. This is the view I see from my desk:

This is a window:

Window at night:

My desk / work area:

the kitchen area: the little window over the sink looks over the beach and boardwalk – doing dishes is notably less sucky when you can see the ocean as you do them.

the bed area: excuse the bare walls

bathroom corner:

The view from another window: Notice downtown, and the mountains. Yum.

Sunrise with mountains:

Okay, that is the place. My number is 323-350-8512. Schwinn not included. Rent is 1700 a month.

For those who don’t know it yet, I moved back to Hawaii. I am on the island of Kauai on a remote bit of the north shore between Hanalei and Haena. 

This morning I woke up to a call from my friend Zane and then I went to go for a swim. I swam a bit then got up to the beach and laid on the sand. I heard a noise and then watched as an endagered monk seal flopped it’s way out of the water and headed right towards me.

I love seals. Long story.

The seal came up to me and laid next to me. I was looking at it and the beach and thinking about how pretty it all was then I realized I was supposed to put up signs around it, a responsibility I inherited from the person in the house before me. I went back to my house and got the signs and set them up… 

I was wishing I had a camera, but I don’t so I asked my neighbor if I could borrow hers for a sec and I went back to take photos.  She said yes and so I get to put some photos up, and show you the seal, and the view from the deck…

and the beach outcrop in front where I go swim in the mornings, now with a monk seal and my handy work  

It is a good morning. Well, it is now noon. I have to go to my deck and work now.

My favorite blogger is one year prettier today. Lisa Barone (pictured with me on the left) is 25 years old.

Happy Birthday, and hopefully you will get something useful for your birthday, if I were Bruce I would give you 10 “Susan has to go outside” cards that you could hand to her and make her leave.

Kittens and robots… Can someone tell me how stoned you would have to be to make this video

Eric Ward wrote a friggen great article on Searchengineland today called A Portrait Of The Perfect Link Builder

It discusses the characteristics of good link builders and the very real challenge of knowing what to look for when seeking a link builder for your business. It is a nice piece where Eric shares alot of good info. He did, however, leave something out. Me.

The perfect link builder

It is with great delight that I help you with your quest to find the perfect link builder so you all may learn from my sweetness.

When seeking a link builder for your business, you should tailor your search to people who are similar to me.

Trying to find someone even remotely as extraordinary as I am is sorta the holy grail of the search industry, but you should try to do so anyway. You all seem so cute and I want to help you, so here are a few pointers to help you get on the right track…

The perfect link builder smokes cigarettes.

If a non-smoker is telling you that he or she is a link builder then you should point that person out to me so I can hit them repeatedly with a stick until they whine like the little lame non-smoker they are. [Editors note: "hit with a stick" is the copyrighted property of Lisa Barone]

The perfect link builder drinks alcohol.

If I do not smell alcohol on someones breath, I do not smell link building ability either.

The perfect link builder is shifty.

There should be something about the beady eyes of your potential link builder that kinda worries you.

The perfect link builder is good looking.

See picture above, or my About page

The perfect link builder inspires.

A true link builder hires minions and inspires them to work hard by buying them beer, pizza, and letting them smoke at their desk.

The perfect link builder does not work before noon.

I have seen link builders work prior to noon, but I have never encountered extraordinary link builders working before noon. Mornings hurt our heads and stifle our creativity.

The perfect link builder is a smart ass.

The one over riding sign of link building ability is a smart ass. If at no time during the interview process does the applicant make fun of you, then you have not found the perfect person yet.

The above pointers should start you off well, use them in your quest for link builders, but you should link to me if you do.

Thank you Eric for a wonderful article which inspired me to be a smart ass as I sat here smoking and drinking in the middle of the night writing this, shiftily creating an article for my own blog instead of leaving it in the comments of yours.

Luckily, I can get away with stuff like that because I am so good looking.

The internet is wonderful. I was looking for an image to use for an upcoming article and happened upon a page that made me laugh my ass off, over and over. It is a blog called Physics-Envy.

The page I happened across is full of articles from 2005. I had no idea it was old, this stuff is funny. Let me throw out some of the dozens of titles on this page…

Playboy in Graile (it really exists)

Global warming due to loss of pirates since 1800

Geek Gorgeous Calander- Women in Technology

Noise has no Reason Why

Lemur Named after John Cleese – Minister of Silly Walks

Is your Hamster Depressed?

Okay It may be because I have been up a long time, but this page was a delight and had two Einstein pictures. Love. It. It is nice to be online, even if your reading odd news from two years ago.

The page I found this stuff on.

I have been hearing, using, and reading the term “link love” so much that it has begun to creep it’s way into places it just isn’t welcome.

I was listening to the song “How Deep is Your Love” by the Bee Gees.

Shutup. The Bee Gees rock.

Anyway, I started replacing the meaning of love in that song with the meaning of “link love” and then the rest of the song sorta started making sense in an SEO way too.

Well that reminded me of a hilarious thing that happened one time when Adam Lasnik stopped posting for awhile in the Google help group.

People started grumbling, and then a certain SEO someone (JLH) started a joking parody thread that was entirely song lyrics replaced with pleas for Adam to return or about SEO terms.

Without further ado I give you Peter Gabriel and his classic “In your Eyes”, or as JLH put it…

“In Your SERPS”

Adam, I get deindexed, sometimes
days pass and this emptiness fills my site
when I want to run away
I log off my account
but whichever site I go
I come back to the place you were
all my redirects, they return
and the link scheme, so soon will crash
without a noise, without a sign
I banned from the index again
in your SERPS
the right to be
in your SERPS
I am complete
in your SERPS
I see the doorway to a thousand pages
in your SERPS
the resolution of all the fruitless searches
in your SERPS
I see the right to be
in your SERPS
oh, I want to be that complete
I want to touch the top
the spot I see in your SERPS
Adam, I don’t like to see so much spam
so much wasted and this bandwith keeps slipping away
I get so tired of working so hard for our inclussion
I look to the time with you to keep me indexed and ranked
Then all my redirects, they return
and the link scheme, so soon will crash
without a noise, without a sign
I banned from the index again
in your SERPS
the right to be
in your SERPS
I am complete
in your SERPS
I see the doorway to a thousand pages
in your SERPS
the resolution of all the fruitless searches
in your SERPS
I see the right to be
in your SERPS
oh, I want to be that complete
I want to touch the top
the seat I see in your SERPS
in your SERPS in your SERPS
in your SERPS in your SERPS
in your SERPS in your SERPS

There are more songs in this Google webmaster help Group Thread

Go to the bathroom before reading this, I almost pissed myself when I read it. JLH provided some much needed comic relief when he did this. Sampling of songs? “Send in the Clowns”, Pink Flloyds “Wish you Were Here” etc. Oh yeah, also “Turning Japanese”

Got a song parody? Let me know. We can post them all on JLH’s blog (if he wants) and make some musicbait. Hmmm, JLH, this sounds like a contest…

UPDATE: JLH posts all the songs on one page and adds Youtube for good measure

Update Update: JLH remakes “How Deep is your Love” 

Also of SEO and music, Danny Sullivan is putting together a SMX sound track.

Digg is getting talked about.

Even when people are talking specifically about Digg not being the only website out there, they still pretty much only talk only about Digg.

Neil Patel and Eric Enge come out with a podcast about Digg, which I found out about while reading the Searchenginewatch blog article about Digg and after reading the search engine roundtable weekly Digg digest I wasn’t sure how on earth I could hear anything else about Digg today until I saw an article with the title of Intel and Digg.Â

I am sick of Digg, and Digg treats me like poo.

More seriously, it is probably very wise to take full advantage of the way people are not taking advantage of other social media sites. So for any of you out there who want to use something other than Digg (which maybe, just perhaps is kinda saturated) I wanted to give you a few options of other social media out there.

But then I realized that would be alot of work. ewww

Someone has already done a great job of providing an introduction to the dozens of social media websites that are out there. I got alot out of this guide to social media sites by Jane Copland of SEOmoz. It sorta got my head spinning with ideas, and gave me a better grasp about all the sites that I sorta knew about.

I have been wanting to write up some things about how I got into SEO and what some of SEO crowd mean to me. I have read about SEO for years, I have blogged for about five days.

As a way of introducing myself to everyone I am probably going to meet at SMX (my first search conference ever in the whole wide world) here begins the “Pat Tells All” series.

I am able to attend SMX, it is worth noting, because I won a full conference pass from Aaron Wall of SEObook yesterday.

As I was thinking about this, I was on Cartoon Barry, the blog of Barry Schwartz (the news guru of Searchengineland). More exactly I was reading his post about linking to and discussing the posts at Search Engine RoundTable when I remembered something, Rusty Brick is where I first read about SEO. Really. It was a long while ago. I remember that I saw his PageRank prediction tool. I didn’t know what Google page rank was, and starting reading about page rank because of that tool.

How I got into SEO

I was eating sunflower seeds in Portland Oregon when I decided to move to Hawaii. Only problem was I had no money (I sold paintings on the street or at Saturday Market) except twenty dollars.

Like any wise person does, I put that twenty dollar bill into the slot of a video poker machine to see if my Hawaii idea was a good one. I ended up with 750 dollars that night and I was on a plane in a couple of days to Honolulu. I ran completely out of money after two days in Waikiki, but I had my hostel room for a few more days and I noticed a sign that said that you could work for a few hours a week instead of paying rent. Cool. I was a sweeping mopping really tan guy living less that two blocks from Waikiki beach.

Well, they had a computer that you could use for free at that hostel, and use it I did. I was curious about how search engines worked, not because of SEO, but more just cause I thought it was neato that Google could sort through things the way it did.

The hostel had a website that sucked. The general manager noticed how I was always on the computer and asked me what I was doing. I told him. I was making websites with frontpage and seeing what happened. He asked if I would look at their website and see if I could offer any suggestions.

I was an SEO!

Okay, I wasn’t even aware of the term SEO yet, but by goly, I had an honest to goodness website to play with now. I began researching SEO heavily, very very heavily. The first thing I did was read every page of Barry’s RustyBrick.com . My first two memories of SEO were his tool page and an image that showed the inter-relationship of search engines that I am not sure if it was on his site or not, but I remember that image.

That was my first SEO research which led to me discovering an enormous amount of resources that were out there. The website of the hostel was eventually redesigned and has enjoyed top ranking for years, and I made some good money out of it. That was my first SEO “job”

So Barry, thanks and I look forward to meeting you and saying hello at SMX.

Techcrunch posts this article about Joost invites, which is basically just an announcement of this thread on the Techcrunch forum where you can get a free invite (they had 999 to give away) to watch Joost in Beta.

In about twelve minutes or so (slight exageration) there was like 350 responses. This is a huge response for a Sunday and is telling of the buzz that Joost is enjoying.