Reblogging Photos

The Community Color project suffers from a distinct lack of back links. So, I decided to start blogs on Tumblr.

I will reblog the images from ProtoPhoto along with other interesting photos found on Tumbr. I created three tumblr blogs which are:

• Utah Color will show images from the Beehive State.
• Arizona Color will show images from the Grand Canyon State.
• Community Color will show general images with an emphasis on Colorado and Wyoming.

I will be happy to follow blogs and reblog images from other blogs relevant to these areas.

Chirstmas Was a Bust

Income wise, Christmas 2012 was a total bust. The total income was $6.47.

October and November were pathetic as well.

Of course such was to be expected. Google removed me from their index because I (gasp) ask people who add sites to my directory to pay a listing fee.

I started charging the listing fee because it is pain to maintain local directories.

I am still getting several thousand visitors a day ... but they are all looking for local brick and mortar stores. So no commissions there.

Since the Community Color sites no longer make enough to pay hosting fees, I need to figure out what to do with them.

IMHO, they provide a community service by providing listings for the small local sites that no one else will list.

On the bright side. I now no longer have to worry about the effects of the fiscal cliff. I won't have to pay taxes because I have no income.

Linking is Fundamental

The World Wide Web is written in a language called HTML (HyperText Markup Language).

The defining characteristic of HTML is the hyperlink. The HyperLink is what differentiates the web from other forms of writing.

For that matter, the links to and from a web site matter almost as much as the content. There are massive new fields in which people study the topology of the hyperlink.

For example, Social Media is all about people linking with other people.

In many ways, linking is more important than content. Twitter is a program that uses 140 character posts and is primarily about linking.

Needless to say, there is an economic component to linking.

Good links on popular sites makes your site popular.

Google is a massive fortune 100 company that has made billions selling paid links.

Google is the dominant search engine. In October, Google announced that they will punish anyone who buys paid links.

I repeat. Google is a company that makes billions selling paid links. In October, Google announced that they will punish any company that engages in business with a competitor.

The hypocrisy aside. Google's direct attack on engaging in link development is attack on the fundamentals of the Internet.

Anyway, I was developing a collection of community directories under the brand "Community Color." It costs about $150 to host the collection of sites. To help offset the cost, I asked people who submit to the directory to pay a listing fee of $12.00.

Needless to say, after Google's announcement that they will punish anyone who does business with competitor, and the directories are now effectively insolvent.

I had started building community directories in 1999. I started up north with a collection of directories I gave away (Missoula.ws is the only site left from the original experiment.)  The idea behind the project was that linking is fundamental and that, for small independent web sites to survive they have to engage in active link development.

The best place to start is the local community.

If people do not link with each other, then large evil companies like Google will dominate and we will lose the independent web.

Disavow Tool

Google is on the warpath against small independently owned web sites engaged in link development. Google's current attack is against web developers that charge for service (gasp). In Google's view, everyone except them should work for free. Google's News Release states:

We send you this message when we see evidence of paid links, link exchanges, or other link schemes

What a bunch of hypocrites! About half the links on a Google search are "paid links." Essentially, Google is using its monopoly status to penalize websites for using competitors. If you do business with small local sites, Google will use its incredible weight in the market to kick you down. Of course, this is not new. Google has always been the thugs of the Internet.

Anyway, in the early days of the Internet, I became worried that the net would be dominated by just a few highly funded sites; so, I started creating local web directories. Maintaining the directories is time consuming and expensive; so I decided to request a listing fee to cover the cost of listing sites. The listing fee is currently $12. I usually get one or two listing fees a month. My hosting fee and web access costs are about $100/month.

My goal is to list web sites local to a given town or county. I actually look through each site to see if I can find a local address or reasons to list it in the directory. This takes about fifteen minutes for each listing in the site.

My goal is to make the most complete human edited directory for given communities. I troll the web to look for sites and list any site I can find related to a town.

Unfortunately, since I do the unspeakable and ask for a listing fee on my Add Link page, listing in the directory has become problematic for the sites I listed. Google requires that these sites disavow all links from sites like mine.

Anyway, I created a form that allows web owners to request link removal. Simply enter your domain name. If I have links to that domain, the program will give you the option of adding tracking to the link or a complete link removal. Adding tracking will put any clicks to your site through a redirect that blocks webcrawlers. You can also request full link removal.

Disavow Link
Domain

Personally, it wrenches my heart knowing that Google is now penalizing web sites because I went through the effort to add them to my directory. But, lets face it, Google has always been the bully of the Internet, quick to kick down private efforts to enhance the value of the Internet.

Link Development

This is disappointing. The site ChefMoz.org bit the dust. The epitaph for the site reads: "Thank you for visiting ChefMoz.org. For more than 10 years, ChefMoz was the largest international online directory of restaurants and reviews, covering more than 300,000 restaurants in 142 countries."

A lot of people threw effort into that project hoping to improve local restaurant selection. Now, it is gone, Vanished. Poof!

There is, of course, little money to be made in local link development which consumes substantial time and resources.

I've been worried about the fate of all small and pop web sites. I figured the best bet for helping the community would be to create a link directory for small local web sites. For the last ten years, I've been maintaining link directories for towns in the Mountain West. I currently call the project Community Color.

The sites cost me $150 a month and are time consuming; My goal is to list all the local sites I can find. It usually takes me about 15 minutes to review and add a site. The goal is to list local sites, I have to search through reams of submission requests to determine which ones actually are local.

I was doing it for free. I started asking for profit sites to pay a listing fee of (gasp) $10. I raised the fee to $12 in September in celebration of QE3.

Unfortunately, last month Google declared war on small firms engaged in independent web development. Google and Bing are now penalizing web sites that attempt to engage in link development.

I started this link development project well before Google became the ringmaster of the Internet. Personally, I think the main problem with the internet is that there is not enough people actively engaged in link development.

It makes me sick that Google is now directly engaged in trying to destroy the last remaining small independent sites.

Anyway, i am currently working on a tool to streamline the removal of links from the Community Color sites. I hope to have it up in the next few days.

Formatted Option List

Darn. Formatted drop down lists only work in FireFox.

The category lists in the Community Color sites had become somewhat unwieldy; So I decided to add some formatting to the HTML <select> form element. I list the categories in a hierarchical structure with the first level bold and subcategories indented. </select>

The three forms below show the category structure for Grand Junction, Denver and Ogden. Click on the select list. It shows you the full hierarchical page structure. Select a page a press the "View Category" button and you go to that page.




People are not used to using the <select> lists for navigation, but the navigation is so tight and quick I think I will add it to all my sites.

Relief, Responsibility and Funky Food

Hurricane Sandy reminds us of the need to have emergency food on hand. Utah prides itself on being a leader in the Food Storage Industry. Apparently, Utah preparedness shops are having a mini boom as people follow the hurricane and clean up.

I like the buckets of freeze dried food as they stay dry in adverse conditions and are easy to move about.

The one problem with dedicated food storage is that even freeze dried food ages. The bucket might have a 25 year shelf life, but you want to have it rotated out of your food storage shed well before reaching that expiration.

So, I thought I would end my blatant sales pitch for preparedness supplies with the actual worthwhile suggestion that anyone with old buckets of unexpired food storage to donate the food to your local church, foodbank or relief agency.

Times are tough and that funky food you've been storing could be put to good use by families in need in your community or by people made homeless by the storm.

Post Event Web Site

One of the odd things about the Internet is that event based web sites often get more traffic after the completion of the event than before the event.

I know, this the exact opposite of what web developers and event promoters want. As a promoter, I want a great deal of traffic the week before the event. What happens in cyberspace is that is that all the reviews, youtube videos and tweets related to an event flood in after the event is complete.


A smart webmaster or event promoter should plan in advance for the post event traffic. It is wise to have a post event publishing plan set well in advance of the event. Immediately, after the completion of the event, it is wise to thank participants and quickly post any recaps, scores and photos of the event.

You might want to link to reviews of the event. Linking to post event reviews builds web traffic to the next event.

Many people today use electronic calendars. While the event is on a person's mind, they will add it to their calendar even if the event is a year in advance. Having your event in a calendar followed and maintained by your users is the absolute most effective advertising in the universe.
A good post-event web site will have information about upcoming events or action items for the people who missed the event.

If you are hosting an annual event, it is wise to have the date of the next year's event up online immediately after the completion of this year's event.

A final note on events. Always include the year of the event. Search engines have a nasty habit of caching information. If you just have the date and month of an event on your page, the search engines might cache this information and your patrons just might get confusing information about your next event.

Halloween Links

It's that time of year when all the ghosts start coming out of the attics.

I just updated the Salt Lake Halloween and Denver Halloween pages. I was surprised to find that many of the haunted houses are already up and running. The Halloween season seems to start earlier and earlier each year.

I suspect that the Internet is part of the cause of the trend. There is generally a lag between when you make a website and it appears in the search engine. So, if you want your web site to show up on search engines, you need to have it up and running several months before Halloween and you need to aggressively seek links to the site in September.

Shipping is the big problem for online costume shops. Online costume sales peak ten days before the holiday. To get those sales, your advertising has to be in full swing at the beginning of October.

The result is that what was once a single day event has prolonged into a long Halloween season.

Anyway, I cleaned up my Halloween links. After doing so, I checked the sites link report. The report shows that I've deleted 10,000 broken links to date. The report says I current display about 24,000 links and have deleted 10,000 of the links. About 30% of the sites I've added to the directory through the years have gone dark. That's sad.

Pubcon Anyone?

I was just looking at the web site for pubcon (This is a social media conference taking place in Las Vegas in October.)

The event looks like it will be a hoot. So, I need to figure out how to justify going to the event.

Well, I just happen to have a super fun social media business model in my back pocket. The business model is for a social networking sport.

It is a casual sport designed specifically for people who love social networking and media. People would meet periodically, like once a week (or once a month) play a fun game and meet new people while building web traffic for their business or blog.

Okay, the sport is called Juggleball. It works as follows: Everyone in the game is assigned a pair of numbered balls. If you get the number 1234, then you have the balls 1234 and -1234. People meet at a location then play a fun game that involves tossing the balls about and running. (The game lends itself to people of all activity levels.).

At the end of the game people leave with a different set of balls.

Each game will have a host. The host will record the balls at the beginning and end of each game. So, you might enter the game with balls 1234 and -1234 and end the game with two different balls: perhaps 765 and -456.

If the game catches on, the balls will start making an interesting social network map.

Needless to say, the first people who play the game will get in at a founding level. After we get a couple hundred players involved, I will form the International Juggleball Association. The people who get in at a ground level will be playing a founding role in the organization.

Participation in the game costs very little. I would have to make enough money to pay for a hotel in Las Vegas (I like the Days Inn), the balls and for the gas to drive to Las Vegas. I need to make about $300. If I could find 10 people interested in joining a social networking game at the ground level, I would want to charge about $30 to play the game.

Anyway, if you are going to Pubcon and would like to have a founding role in a new social networking game, or if you ever wanted to own your own professional sports team, please contact me. Give me your name and phone number.

PS: I really love the badlands of Utah. If you want to visit the National Parks of Southern Utah (camp in the desert) in the days before Pubcon, I would be happy to meet you at any number of locations in Utah.

Domains for Sale HeberCity.biz and LinksAlive.com

I am taking a final stab at auctioning off HeberCity.biz on eBay. I moved the contents of the site to wasatch.utahcolor.com.

I also decided to like LinksAlive.com on Bido.com. If this domain sells, I will move the contents to a different domain.

Casual Exercise

Americans don't get enough exercise. When we do exercise, we have completely over the top expectations of our actions.

All of the popular team sports were designed to over-emphasize competition. The field of individual sports is dominated by absurdly long endurance sports like Iron Man Triathlons, multiday relays, etc..

The non-profit community hosts wonderful fundraising events that draw thousands of people once a year for a fun run in the park. But a 5K walk once a year is not enough.

There is an massive market in the United States at the moment for a new casual sport that takes place on a regular basis that helps keep people fit.

Imagine yourself starting a business where you met with fun people once a week, to engage in a physical activity. The cost of the sport was modest, and there was a money making component built into the sport so people needing a little extra cash could make a little extra cash?

Owning a reaction business opens up the opportunity to travel. If you owned a for profit "sports team" you can deduct travel expenses when you go to play games at the destination of your choice.

Anyway, if a group of people got together and did ___________ they just might be able to crack the lucrative recreation sports market.

I emphasize the cost of starting a ____________ sports team is negligible. The first people who are brave and respond might make some big bucks for taking a change.

If you contact me (giving me your location, name an phone number) I will give you info about the sport.

NOTE: I live in Utah. I will be traveling to Spokane in early August.

We Need A Business Revolution

I read a blog post from a Ron Paul Supporter who appeared to be disheartened.

I confess. Although my sympathies lie with the free market message of Ron Paul, I was not an active voice for the candidate during his run for the presidency.

The reason is that I did not support Paul was because I realized that we cannot restore America through politics.

The American experiment was one with a limited government and unlimited people.

Sadly, our educational establishment fails to give students the tools they need to achieve their potential as a free people. Modern education teaches people they are entitled slaves and not free people.

To restore America, we need a business movement that helps people rediscover their potential as a free people.

The easiest way to accomplish this goal is in recreation.

Currently, the world of sports and recreation is dominated by the state or crony capitalists.
Look at high school sports and the NCAA: Most of the teams are owned by state entities and play in government owned arenas.

In professional sports, we see that most professional teams have exclusive contracts with local governments. They play in coliseums arenas which receive varying degrees of state funding.

State run sports is both static and exclusive.

Everyone needs to engage in exercise and recreation.

If we wish to fight the leviathan, the area of sports and recreation is prime playing field.

People who are disillusioned with politics could take to the playing field and excel.

Step back a moment and imagine yourself as the coach or owner of a professional sports team that you ran a couple weekends a year?

Would you enjoy owning a professional sports team?

Would you enjoy traveling to towns (of your choice) to meet and play with other people?

Would you enjoy having the name "Founding Member of ________" written after your name?

Would you like to engage in an activity that is all but guaranteed to feed ten of thousands of hits to your web site or blog?

Would you like to make a YouTube video that received hundreds of thousand of free links?

Would you like to engage in an activity that will put your name in the local newspaper or that will raise funds for the causes you find important?

Would you like to engage in an activity that raises awareness of the values of the free market and a free society?

Would you like to play a founding role in a company that requires little capital but has an unlimited potential?

Would you like to tell your grand children that you made a difference?

Anyway, I will free franchise to the first people contact me . Please give me your phone number and tell me where you are. I will contact you with more information on this chance of a lifetime.

I happen to live in Utah (I am not LDS). I will be traveling to Washington State in August.

NOTE: The sport is actually a game in which we create a social networking market. The game is physical discussion about the way markets work. The game involves simple physical activity and relay races.

Index of Indices

Dang. Revenue for Q2 was even worse than Q1. This was due largely to several advertisers going bankrupt. I am now in a desperate search for new advertisers.

I want to increase the exposure to the events in the calendar. I added a column to the master index that shows community events. The page Recreation Index is an index to the directory page titled "Recreation." It shows both the links and events on that page.

If I make a big effort to be consistent in categorizing the events, this feature will become useful for it will show the total number of links and events by state.

Unfortunately, I have some systematic inconsistencies. Specifically, when a directory becomes large, I start splitting it into subdirectories. If there's only one running club in town, I list the club in Recreation. If there are several, I create a subdirectory called Running. The result is that I list the Grand Juinction Rim Marathon in the "recreation" category and the Salt Lake Marathon in the "running" category. This means the master index fails to provide a comprehensive list of running events in a state.

As I play with the new program, I figure out a way to overcome that problem.

To get my revenue numbers back in the black, I probably need to show more shopping events and auctions..

Rating Engine Change

The goal of the rating system in the Community Color sites is to help the best sites surface to the top.

The site had a rating engine and the rating engine would improve the profile of sites in the directory. Sadly, the engine was inundated with spam ratings.

I recently revived the rate engine. To rate a site, you must login.

If you log in, you will see a rate button next to each link. If you are not logged in, the program will show a rate link for any site receiving positive rates. Essentially, if you give a positive rating to a site, the directories will automatically give a second link to that site.

If you give a bad rating to a site, it might remove the second link.

My hope is that this rate engine will help give an extra boost to the best sites.

In Page Popup

I created my first inpage (css/div) popup! If you look at the Salt Lake Calendar, you will notice that the box for June 16, 2012 says that there are 8 items for the day. If you click the words "click here to view" the page will dim the calendar and display the eight items in the center of the page. 

Clicking anywhere restores the main page.

The code for an in page pop up is a bear. Regular popups are easier, but the in page variety is slightly better for end user navigation.

Having added my first in page popup, I will probably add more.

An Invitation to the Great Northwest

I've been staring at maps of the Northwest.

Would anyone in Washington State, Idaho, Western Montana, Oregon, Northern Nevada or Utah be interested in engaging in a recreational activity that will cost you about $20 and has the potential of making you some money.

The activity involves social networking and recreation. You will have to sell a product, but that's the way the market works.

I am interested in people who own or who want to own a small business (franchise). This activity can work with any existing business. It would be great for people who want to have a booth at the farmer's market, or for other small businesses looking for clever ways to expand their market.

So, anyway, the idea is that you will own a business that organizes games and sells the product I provide for the game. You will need to get a sales tax ID and pay taxes on sales.

If this idea sounds interesting, please contact me. Here is my contact form.

So, why am I looking at the Northwest?

Well, My niece is getting married in Washington State on August 3rd.

I live in Utah. (no, I am not LDS). Anway, I was thinking of driving up either I25 or US93 to Missoula then take I90 into Washington.

I happen to have a long lost relative in Oregon to visit. On the way back I would drop into central Oregon. I could drop as far south as Nevada on the way back.

BTW, I also have a wonderful presentation on free market health care reform called "The Medical Savings and Loan."
 
If you knew of a group interested in free market health care reform in Idaho, Western Montana, Washington, Oregon or Utah, I have a great presentation that argues that insurance (group funding of individual consumption) is the problem and that we need to restore a system of self-funded care.
 
The MS&L and this game are related but different activities.
 
If you contact me, we will need to arrange an activity that meshes up with my niece's wedding on August 3rd in Northwest Washington State ... either before or after the big event.

The Rating Game

I turned the Community Color Rating Engine Back On.

Originally, I worked with some people who were adamantly opposed to login screens. So the rating engine accepted anonymous reviews. This was a big mistake! Spambots kept flooding the system with fake reviews.

I tried manually reading and removing the spam and finally capitulated by turning the engine off.

I really miss the rating system. The ratings program helped direct traffic to the best sites.

The Internet works on positive feedback. If you link the the best sites, they surface to the top.

I designed the rating system so that, when you give a site a positive rate, it gets an extra link!

If you went through the directories and gave good rates to the top sites, they would get more traffic.

As I no longer have a prohibition against requiring a login, I am turning the ratings engine back on for registered users. I will delete the reviews for any user that is clearly spamming the system.

Your Community Color User ID and password works for all sites in the Community Color family. I would really appreciate folks trolling through the Community Color Sites and rate the best local sites. Right now I have directories for communities in Utah, Colorado, Arizona and more.

A rating will stay active for 600 days (sites and businesses change every year or so).

The Ratings by Community Report shows a summary of recent ratings by community. It is super small right now because I just turned the rating engine back on.

PS: I will rate a bunch of sites under the user name kevind and yintercept just to test to make sure everything is working. While I am testing, I might accidentally break the screen, because I am engaged in the time honored tradition of cowboy programming. Yep, I program in production because I am one person with no financial resources.

Link Ratings

The Community Color sites have an unfortunate history of being attacked by spammers.

The sites featured a link rating and comment section that was being hit hard by spammers. As I was working on a different project. I turned the feature off.

The spam bots finally subsided, and I decided to add the rating buttons back on the site. This time, the site only accepts ratings from registered users.

I found it impossible to separate the spam from the info; so I deleted all of the ratings and comments from anonymous sources.

There is now a rate button next to each link in the directories. If you are registered and logged in, you can leave a rate. To prevent spam, I can delete ratings by user id or by IP address. The iFrame below shows the rate screen for the link rating page for this blog. If you are logged into gjct.com you will see the rate button. If not you will see a summary of ratings. I put in one test rating.

I admit, the primary reason for the rating page is that it gives each web site an extra link.

To Sweeten the Deal

It is so beautiful outside. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a summer opportunity that let you make a little cash while playing a social networking game out in the sun?

Wouldn't it be fun to be the boss instead of just a working stiff?

Wouldn't it be fun to own a business that involves the possibility of travel?

Did you know, if you owned a business that required you to travel, you get to deduct your traveling expenses? So, lets say you had a business that required that you travel to San Diego for a weekend to play a game on the beach,

Imagine an opportunity in which you organized games, sold a product to the people playing the game and kept most of money from the sales (minus the cost of the products and whatever the venue charges to reserve the playing field.)

Do you enjoy social networking. Wouldn't it be fun to have a business geared to social networking and recreation?
As this is a social networking game, I will sweeten the pot by giving the first people who respond a free web site and I will show you how to run your own web site (HTML, PHP, and all)
I am in Utah, but travel alot. To contact me, use This Contact Form. Leave your name, age (The first people should be over 18) telephone number and place you live. If you are traveling through Utah, please tell me when you are traveling. I will then call you and give you more detail.