Posts Tagged With: interview
· August 19, 2008 at 5:12 am · Personal, Web Hosting
Hey for those of you who wondered what it is do for a day job, here’s your chance. Was looking back this morning at an interview I did for the Lunarpages monthly newsletter. Here is how things start out…
Hey Mitch! Thanks for taking some time out from writing our Newsletter articles to handle a quick interview.
Not a problem. Nice to be on the other side of the content stream every once in a while in front of my close and personal amigos, the always awesome Lunarpages clients.
You’re another one of those people who work for Lunarpages and does just about everything in every department. So what’s your official job title and what do you do for LP?
I don’t know if I have ever been given one? I guess officially I would be considered a Level One Customer Service Representative, Senior Forum Moderator, Content Writer, Sales Guy, Blogger and Official Odd Jobs Associate. Think I almost got everything covered there.
You can check out the rest of the interview on the web site. Had been a while since I had done any sort of interview, hope I wasn’t rusty. I guess what they say about, “time flying by when your having fun” is true. End of next month will mark my two year anniversary of being with the company, and hopefully I’ll have many more years to come.
· March 31, 2008 at 5:19 am · Interviews
There is no doubt in my mind that Internet marketing and search engine optimization are playing a larger and larger role in a webmaster’s life. A few years back, you would put up a web site and hope for the best. These days though, you must really study and learn several aspects of the marketing game if you want to stand a chance.
Marketing in general has really always excited me, so I thought it might be a good idea to talk with somebody who does this as their day to day business. Daryl Kennedy is the VP of Operations over at TechWyse Internet Marketing. When approached about the interview - my first thoughts were “Whoo hoo! Now I can pick the brain of somebody who really understands this Internet marking stuff” and I have to say I was not disappointed.
How did you find yourself in the Internet marketing world? Most people on the web want to get to the top themselves in popularity. You guys specialize in helping other people make a name for themselves.
Daryl: Getting into the Internet marketing world for myself was quite by accident. I have always been a resourceful person. I have always enjoyed efficiency and understanding new technology. After being in the business of developing web sites, I decided it would be far more resourceful to learn and understand the newer search engine phenomena then hit the streets cold calling which was far more traditional.
After studying search engines for about 6 months, I quickly found that by following search engine principles I could get our own company on the first page of Google, Yahoo! and MSN rather easily. Ironically, many other companies across North America and especially Toronto, Canada began noticing themselves! Since this was clearly a way for companies to begin to generate revenue they began asking me to help them in the same way.
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· March 18, 2008 at 5:47 am · Hot Web Topics, Interviews
I have been a big fan of Mashable since day one, and it continues to be a place I check into daily (as well as a regular RSS subscription too).
So when the chance came up to talk one on one with Adam Ostrow, the editor over there at the social web juggernaut I couldn’t let the chance to pick through a Mashabler’s brain.
Mashable got its start being more based around the social networks out there, and since then has spun off into covering anything that is tech-worthy or Web 2.0ish related. Why the change what I guess you could consider a bigger tent?
Adam: I can’t really speak to our editorial policy pre-early 2007 or so when I joined up with Mashable, but I have to imagine the shift was due to the fact that there is just simply so much more going on in the space than social networking now.
First you had the tools that plugged into social networks – widgets and things of that nature – from companies like Slide, RockYou, etc. This was one of the initial trends that Mashable picked up on. Then, there were applications that integrated on a deeper level with social networks – starting with Facebook and its application platform, and now, most of the other big social sites too. Finally, now we see social features being integrated into virtually every type of Web service – from search, to maps, to mobile. So, I do think there is still a little bit of “social” laced into most of our stories, though, perhaps not as singularly focused on social networking sites.
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· January 28, 2008 at 5:00 am · Interviews
Emory Rowland of Clickfire.com is one of the legitimate good guys out there in the web development and hosting world today. He has also been around as long if not longer than some of the other big names in our business.
How did you get your start on the Web?
Emory: My path into the web began in the mid 1990’s. I was a fairly uninspired surfer and email user until I discovered online multiplayer gaming. Meeting others and competing with them in a virtual world fascinated me. I spent a lot of time gaming back then when I should have been reserving domains like games.com. Looking back, I guess you could say that playing multiplayer games was my first online social networking experience. But, instead of the polite introductions we have with today’s social networking sites, you broke the ice by joining a game and chasing people around, taunting and blowing each other up.
Soon, I started building my own user maps. The next thing I knew I was learning to create graphics, then my first Web site which was a Duke Nukem fan site that had an address of something like someurl.com/~emory/dukenukem/, then writing PC game reviews for Gamezilla and UGO and just generally enjoying the whole Internet experience.
Who is the bigger star, Emory or Clickfire?
Emory: The best way to answer that question is by comparing the number of people who stop by my place to visit (friends, magazine salesmen, mailmen, etc) with the number of people who stop by Clickfire to visit. Emory might get one visitor per month. Clickfire gets many thousands. Clickfire can serve a lot more people than Emory ever could. It really makes you think about the leveraging power of the Internet. I could be standing on the street outside my home with a sign that said “Free 100 dollar bills” and I’d never get as many visitors, solve as many problems or meet as many cool people as Clickfire allows. Creating and maintaining my own Web site has has been one of the most enriching of life experiences.
Across Clickfire.com you cover lots of different web developer topics and discussions. What is your favorite area of the massive tent of web development and why?
Emory: I am still having a great time playing around with RSS/XML. Every major social site these days has a feed for the mashing. WordPress has individual category, post and comments feeds. I like to pull pieces of them from my own site and present them on a static page. Then, there is the mobile side, which I haven’t even begun to experiment with yet.
I would say you’re one of the longest running webmaster resources, with your roots going all the way back to 1997. What has made you want to stay in the game so long?
Emory: I enjoy it. Why I enjoy it is something I’ve thought about a great deal. I like having my own “place” online where I can do creative stuff like writing reviews and building free tools. Visitors read the reviews and use the tools and comment; that makes me like doing it more. I can earn revenue by adding affiliate marketing into the mix. So I enjoy it even more. I can increase that revenue with SEO. Now my career is in search marketing and I’m having fun and getting in even deeper. So, I meet even more interesting people like yourself who inspire me to be creative–the cycle starts again.
Are you afraid your going to wake up one day and have the sudden urge to quit and sell shoes at the mall?
Emory: I have no talent outside the Web, so I am sure that will never happen. Besides I can’t sell. I’d probably offer the customer an objective review of the shoes and then give him a pair for free. If I had to make money the brick and mortar way, I’d be broke. Being a webmaster is too much fun.
As far as web hosting goes, which two web hosts out there impress you the most and why?
Emory: You saved the toughest question for last 
. It seems that all the big shared hosts are offering more bandwidth than you can shake a pipe at. As I’m sure you are well aware, webmastering can be a lonely job and often keeps you up late into the night. If your site goes down at 3:00 AM, you can’t scream. Opening a support ticket online doesn’t seem to satisfy the human need to know that someone is listening and just might care. It’s probably no coincidence that the only two web hosts that have ever won 5 out of 5 Clickfire stars both have 24 hour phone support lines, BlueHost and HostGator. I will say that Lunarpages was the highest rated host we reviewed last year and I really like LP’s pro customer attitude. I am also hosting some sites on HostDime, which I like so far. And HostICan seems intriguing, which we are reviewing now. I think that’s more than two so I’ll stop and bid farewell before I get carried away.
Thanks, Mitch, for giving me the opportunity to share with your readers. And thanks for the free therapy because I have learned some new things about myself now. Keep up the great work with the Web Hosting Show and Mitchelaneous.
· December 13, 2007 at 6:38 am · Hot Web Topics, Interviews, Popular Posts
Your start page says a lot about you. Do you like tons of information flying your way - or do you like to keep it short and simple? I recently got the chance to have a quick chat with one of the leaders in the start page arena Dan Cohen, CEO of Pageflakes. From taking the start page idea of out Pageflakes to what his favorite pagecasts are - I tried to cover it all with minimal fluff.
How important is user feedback and experiences (good and bad) when it comes to the Pageflakes product?
Dan: It’s extremely important and we have ongoing dialogues with our users through the blog and support forum. We monitor this full time and read & respond to every email. Our product plans include user requested information by way of reviews and feedback. We always have a representative from customer services support team involved in our product sessions.
This is to not only know how our site is produced & written, understanding sessions etc but also to represent the user base and their comments/suggestions into our future plans. They aggregate the most popular requests and common denominator feedback so we acknowledge this as paramount in our product plans. Ongoing dialogue internally and with our users are taken extremely seriously into our product design development strategies.
Start pages have a history of being something that people spend five minutes on, get caught up on whatever they want to watch - clocks or kitten saying funny things. Why should somebody invest the time to spend more time with Pageflakes?
Dan: A great number of users spend more time on Pageflakes than email and social networking sites. The old generation of personalize pages i.e. my Yahoo would result in people clicking for a moment and then visiting another site. But the old RSS information was sports, news and stocks related so if the user wanted to read more, they’d click through or venture to other websites.
With Pageflakes, users can check bank balances, email, network, visit social networking flakes so the interactive elements on Pageflakes is richer and includes flakes that users couldn’t do before. We are revolutionizing what people are doing on the Web. Technology has changed and Pageflakes is more of an engaging experience by definition to keep users on the page longer. They are learning and digging deeper into topics individually and interacting with other like minded individuals.
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· June 13, 2007 at 10:17 am · Web Hosting
For the second year, I was able to get George Roberts (the guy behind the magic at HostingCon) on the Web Hosting Show for an interview.
I have been a big supporter of HostingCon since day one. I think it is an excellent event and it has quickly become the biggest event of the year for anybody who has any interest in the web hosting industry. Each year about this time I get just a little more excited because for web hosting enthuists this is almost as good as Christmas. (more…)
Tune in to episode 110 of the Web Hosting Show to hear the full interview.
