Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Hey there readers of Geek Girl Blogger!

This Thursday night (28th August) Tim and myself will be attending a Geek Girl Dinner in Brisbane.
We are looking forward to meeting a large new range of female bloggers. I personally am looking forward to seeing some bloggers in real life. Proof that they really do exist. All we know about them is what they write ... online ... what if they’re robots? What if they’re not actually girls? It could all just be a lie. So, to see them in real life and interact with them over a meal should be rather interesting. I will report back after this insane event. However if you never read another article by me again... assume the worst. It probably means it turned out they weren’t really what they seemed... aliens perhaps! I’m prepared for anything!

Anyway.

Geek girls… out.

aManda

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is paying off for me.

I have an unfortunate name. Tim Miller is a pretty common name. So when you do a Google search for me you cant find this Tim Miller, instead you find a whole bunch of other people. This is part of the reason I have promoted my blog as SpyJournal. Its a unique name and its the name I use for most of my social websites and so on. Our business names also of Jethro Management and Jethro Consultants are pretty unique.

  So when I do a Google search for SpyJournal, every single entry on the first page is me. Jethro Management is the same, and Jethro Consultants has the second last one only as not me. 9 out of 10 or 10 out of 10 results is pretty good. I think I have a pretty good chance of getting found with my company name. By the way I would be interested if readers in other countries could try the same thing and let me know in the comments what you find. Feel free to use other search engines, though Google is of course the main one. I cant remember the time I needed  to try a different one!

The next step for me is to keep working on my keywords, specifically Drupal and Excel and Excel VBA.

I have received numerous jobs recently through from people who found us with Google searches here in Australia. More in the last 6 months than in the rest of our business history so far.

I have something like 20 or more websites open in browser that I want to be able to review or recommend. I haven’t got time so I will link them here, tag on delicious and clip into socialmedian as appropriate.

Here goes.

Microsoft

• Windows Live One Care for Server. Free trial. Works on Server 2008 Standard 64 bit, SBS 2008 Standard and Premium.
• File Dialogs – adding My Places in the File Open and File Save As dialog boxes. Quickly find frequently used locations on your PC or network.
• Adding signatures to email in Windows Live Hotmail
• Plugins – Flickr for Live Writer, Flickr for Outlook, Flickr for Word. Zemanta for Windows Live Writer. Hat tip to Sarah Perez from Channel 10 for this. (see our Geek Girl profile on Sarah)
• Another from Sarah is the Circle Dock Application launcher. Go straight to Circle Dock.
• How to share large files without attaching them to email
• Bulk convert old documents to new Office 2007 format from Digital Inspiration. I will be trialing this with a set of copied documents to test the results.

Name: Rebecca Bollwitt
Screen Name: Miss604
Personal Blog: www.miss604.com 
Social Networks: Flickr, Friendfeed, Twitter, Pownce, Facebook
Current Employment: Self employed: Senior Partner, sixty4media
Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada

What is your reason/motivation for blogging?

It started off as a passion for writing about the region and sharing my local knowledge including a love of history. Combine that with my technical background and my love of all things social media and I have managed to turn blogging into a full time job, which in itself motivates me more and more each day.

 What is it that you find yourself blogging about, mostly the same stuff or does it vary?

Miss604.com is focused on my life in Vancouver, which involves unconferences, meetups, walks in the park and hockey games, among other things.

What style of blogging do you do, short and regular, or not so regular but long, other? And is your blogging just text or do you also use audio or video?

  I try to use at least one photo with each post, I find it's easier to tell a story that way believe it or not. I also try to incorporate short video clips usually max 90 seconds (Flickr video size).

How Rebecca became a Geek Girl Blogger:

In 1997 I started an online fan site for my favourite band at the time, using Netscape Communicator and I was instantly hooked on HTML. From there my passion for all things web grew and saw me dabbling in online audio, streaming and editing until I was hired at the world's largest webcaster of financial audio. This career move, based on my digital media hobbies at the time, lead me to Boston where I oversaw online production (the recording, editing, encoding and live streaming of audio).