A friend, and colleague, of mine, Aidan Henry has written a great SEO ebook called SEO Quick Fix.

He gave me a copy to review at Northern Voice 2009 and my life has been so crazy lately that I hadn’t gotten the time to share it with you.

If you don’t know a lot about SEO this book will be a godsend. If you are well-versed in SEO it’s a great reminder of best practices and I’m sure you’ll learn a thing or too. It’s definitely $25 well spent!

There are a couple of interesting events coming up in the Vancouver tech world:

• WordCamp Whistler
• Northern Voice 2009

Hope to see you there!

It’s been a crazy busy fall so far but I like being busy. The only downside is that the frequency of my blog posting has dropped dramatically. I’ve been using Twitter a fair bit, and you can find me there on a daily basis: Jeremy Latham Twitter.

I’ve also launched a few new websites for clients recently:

• Deanna Collins: Cortes Island Real Estate
• Literacy For All
• Campbell River Cystic Fibrosis
• Vacation in Ixtapa, Mexico

I’m hoping to get a round of golf in tomorrow at one of the local courses, if the weather holds. But generally I think it’s going to be a fairly relaxed long-weekend. We’ll have some time to catch up on errands, chores, and sleep!

Have a great long-weekend. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Having worked with ExpressionEngine (EE) for over a year now, I’m particularly excited to sit in a room full of people who also use it. Reading through the forums is great, and solves a lot of problems, but there’s really nothing like face to face discussion about topics of interest. Big thanks to Monique for making it happen!

And thanks to everyone who puts in the hard work to organize these events!

Common Craft has released a new video, Electing a US President in Plain English. As always, it is clear, to the point, and entertaining. Check out their site for all sorts of informative videos in Plain English.

I took it and so should you!

Leave a comment if you took the survey!

At the Rogers Store on Broadway this morning for the iPhone 3G launch. We stood around for about 2.5 hours and the line didn’t move a whole lot. Breakfast consisted of a granola bar and water. Rogers would give us any info about the number of units until almost 10am, well after the media had left. There was a chance that I’d be able to pick up an 8GB iPhone. But it looked like hours of processing time. And I had work to do. It turns out had I gone two mins from my house I could have walked in and picked one up at 10am – but the drive back to Langley took an hour so I missed out.

The only reason I’d attended the downtown launch was because I had to drive my brother and his wife to the airport for their honeymoon. So I figured if I had to get up at 5am, I might as well get something out of it.

It was just too bad that the Rogers reps at the launch didn’t level with us about numbers when we got there, as I’d easily have been able to get to the local store in time to have picked one up.

It was also kind of funny that when they were interviewing the first guy who got an iPhone (and they were having network problems) the backdrop was a poster claiming the fastest high-speed network.

All in all, the people in the lineup made it a good time. But things could have been run much more smoothly.

No worries – there’s be more on Tuesday or Wednesday.

I’ve had my Pearl for a little over a year now…actually, I’ve had a Pearl for a little over a year now – my first BlackBerry Pearl was recently replaced on warranty due to a sticky little Pearl (rollerball). Apparently it’s a common problem.

Since I got my phone, it has called 911 from my pocket between 10-20 times. This is because of emergency access when the phone is locked. When the Pearl is in locked mode, touching the rollerball will bring up a menu that says: “unlock”, “emergency call”, and “cancel”. Touching the rollerball when on this menu has a 33% chance of dialing 911.

This always happened to me when I was out of the house and my BlackBerry was in my pocket, where it usually lives when I’m on the go. So I always forgot to resolve the issue when I’d get home – eventually getting another call from 911 asking if there was an emergency. The same way you always forget that you don’t have any butter until you need butter.

I did a quick search on Google for: “disable emergency call blackberry pearl” and the first page returned gave me the answer I was looking for: The Pearl has a standby mode, which you access by holding the “mute” button down for 2 seconds – it’s on the top left of your Pearl. This will allow you to receive calls but it deactivates any input from the user’s end, so you can carry it in your pocket without any call-out consequence. It was exactly what I was looking for.

from Pinstack.com:

…I also use the “standby” mode. My phone is always in my pocket and I find the “standby” mode to be much easier to use and pushing a button, while in standby, doesn’t flash the screen and wear the battery down while sitting in your pocket. Just hold the “mute” button on the top for 2 seconds and press the same button once to get it out…

Over the last week I’ve seen Clay Shirky‘s Cognitive Surplus presentation mentioned in many really smart people’s blogs (Darren Barefoot, Jeremy Zawodny, Warren Freyburg, Lifehacker…). The presentation took place at Web Expo 2.0 in San Francisco.

I’ve been so busy lately I wasn’t able to find the 15 minutes to watch Shirky’s presentation until this morning. It was really worth watching! Take the 15 mins away from a sitcom rerun to watch Shirky speak. Or read the transcript: Looking for the Mouse.

“He does such a good job at explaining how and why watching TV is no longer the de-facto spare time activity that I’m going to simple force people to watch it when they claim not to understand how I have no time to watch television.” -Jeremy Zawodny

To sum up Shirky’s presentation – we’ve been spending years in front of the TV instead of participating. He believes that “doing” is better than not. That the future lies in interactive media, because that is what we want and the younger generation expects; to participate. To give you an idea of how much time we spend in front of the TV when we could be doing something, he points out:

“So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus.” -Clay Shirky

So it seems we’ve got a huge surplus of time on our hands that we spend in front of the TV. If North Americans were to give up their American Idol / Canadian Idol habits and do something with that time, I wonder what we could accomplish?

If you were to spend 30 minutes less time watching TV every day, what would you fill that time with?

I learned about this from the Simplebits RSS feed:

50 Ways to Help the Planet

Great roundup of fifty little things we can all do to help. Part of Wire & Twine’s The Green Line.

Check it out – most of the changes are indeed pretty simple.