Paid Search Mania

Today's Spin is on irrational, ego-driven bidding on PPC search engines. There's another thing that kind of bugs me about search as well. In the rush to stake out the top positions on PPC engines, advertisers are sometimes forgetting how important brand advertising is. While it makes sense to fish where the fish are, so to speak, people have to know about your brand and your company before they can become familiar enough with your company to search for it.

Too often we forget this. If your company is reaching diminishing returns with its search campaign, perhaps one thing to do is to examine where your brand and product awareness levels are and what can be done to improve them.

New Project

We've been trying to empty stuff out of the basement at the house to have more room for storage. There's a bunch of plumbing stuff down there that isn't used any more, including the tank for our old water softener, some stuff from the well, and this old pump. The pump used to filter our hot tub that we yanked out when the contractor started work, so it's not being used for anything.

After watching our pool-cleaning guy a few weeks ago, I noticed he had a portable vacuum rig that basically used the same setup. So I pulled the pump out of the basement and built a little dolly for it. I got the scrap wood around the house and the plywood from out back behind the shed. I got the casters, screws, fittings and electric cord at Home Depot. Unfortunately, all I had time for this weekend was building the dolly, mounting the pump to it and putting the fittings on. Next weekend, I'll wire it up so it can be plugged into the outlet out back. I'll also run and get a vacuum head and 50 feet of flexible hose for it.

The fittings on there right now are just two 3/4" hose bibs, just so I can hook up two garden hoses to the pump and see what it puts out once I get it wired. Hopefully, all should work well and I can use this rig to vacuum the pool.

Fishing Stuff

Dad and I didn't have much luck with fishing for fluke. I caught two, but they were short of the limit.

When we switched over to porgies, though, we had a lot better luck. They're a tough fish to catch - when it feels like your sinker is dragging along the bottom, that's actually the fish nibbling on your bait, so the best thing to do when you feel something - anything - is to try to set the hook.

One of the guys on the boat filleted these fish for us and did a great job - porgies are usually quite bony if you don't fillet them right. I fried these up in a corn meal/egg batter and they were delicious.

Backpack Searching

I watched the backpack searchers at Penn Station yesterday for about 10 minutes while waiting for my train. I'm keeping tallies of how many people they're stopping and noting their physical descriptions. I hesitate to share details just yet, as I want to watch this in action for the next few days, but I will share this: The only search station I saw was on the main concourse, covering one entrance, which was the entranceway to the LIRR coming off the escalators at the entrance under Madison Square Garden. There is plenty of opportunity for someone to avoid this station if they wanted to, simply by coming in through one of the many other entrances like the one at 34th Street and 7th Avenue, from the subway or from any of the other entrances feeding into the other concourses. Perhaps these are only spot checks, because they're certainly not comprehensive. I'll post an update after I've had a chance to observe searches in action over the next few days.