3 or 4 months ago I interviewed Phillip Lan the CEO of a new shopping comparison engine. After I posted the interview I was contacted by one Josh Stylman, the Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Reprise Media. Josh is the former VP of Business Development at AskJeeves and co-founded a small consulting & advertising agency. Josh contacted me because he had previously worked with Phillip Lan and wanted to personally wish him good luck on with the launching of his new company.

Well, long story short, I went to Reprise Media's blog [SearchViews] and knew immediately that they got it. I mean, they really understand what the difference between being a dime a dozen seo/sem firm and a true asset to a company's online marketing efforts. I enjoy perusing their posts and interviews, probably because they follow a similar theme as I do here [humor and sarcasm mixed with technology and marketing]. But also, I like the fact they talk about real business problems and offer good insight and advice on the search marketing industry. They stay away from the fligh by night opportunistic algorithm chasing threads that riddle search engine optimization forums and focus on stuff that's good and matters. Like site accessibility and Amazon.com's new site design. Yes, I was slightly sarcastic about stuff that matters and including talks about Amazon's new design, but the SearchViews blog team understands sarcasm and humor and they mix the two quite well in my mind.

One post I'm quite fond of is one about agency turnover in search marketing. I think another factor needs to be added to the agency turnover list though, employee competence and turnover rates. The good seo's are the ones that have built their own businesses using seo and learned how to do it right because they fed their family with the money they made from it. So they bring practical business experience as well as technical insight into the seo field that a recent college graduate isn't going to have. They also understand ROI and what it means to make every dime a client spends with you bring a return for them. The problem is that these employess are few and far between and don't like working for other people because they know what they know and can make more money on their own and not have to deal with politics and red tape.

So one key factor is the ability for top firms to retain key personnel and to train new employees using the wisdom that comes from the experience of these key hires. It's something that has yet to be done very effectively because of the cost associted with doing it right.

Anyway, I wanted to give props to Josh and his team and let a few others know about a good blog that's updated regularly and chocked full of good info and not just a rehashing of the moreover news feed or Google news. So go now and read them, they're pretty good and smart and funny. Tell em large Marge sent ya!

I've been meaning to post about the possibility of borgs at Google but just now got around to it. What the heck is a borg you ask? Well, that's a good question and I have no idea what a borg is but I found a referring url that pointed to an old wifi post I put up some time ago. The referring url was http://borg.google.com. If you try to access the url you'll be denied by Google's firewall so I'm assuming it's just a personal blog or something. Especially since there has only been one visitor logged from that url anyway but I thought it was interesting.

Of course I could ask one of my buds at Google what the domain points to but sometimes it's more fun to speculate. Maybe I'll ask them later but for now, just know there are borgs living at Google.