Chris J. Politzki’s Blog

For those of you who know me, this post won’t come as much a surprise, but for those of you who don’t, well… let’s just say I have a mild fondness for the electric guitar and one of my all-time favorite guitar heroes would have to be Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin.

Happy Birthday Jimmy!

So on this January 9th, 2010, I would like to wish Jimmy a very happy and special 66th birthday celebration. Having recently appeared in the film, ‘It Might Get Loud‘ (which I blogged about earlier, just click the link to the left) it has rekindled the interest and desire to have a tour which includes Jimmy. It doesn’t matter which form or shape it takes. It could be with or without Robert Plant and John Paul Jones, but at least some live music from Jimmy to satisfy the fans, including myself.

Of course, I could think of no better way to celebrate, than by posting some of the magnificient photographs of Ross Halfin. Without further adieux, here are some of my favorite images Ross has taken.

Enjoy!

Jimmy Page in Oakland, 1977

Jimmy Page from the early 1980s with telecaster guitar

Jimmy Page in 2009 posing with Les Paul guitar for a magazine cover

Jimmy Page in Los Angeles, June 2009 for premiere of the movie 'It Might Get Loud'

Be sure to check out Ross Halfin’s web site for more spectacular imagery!

Chris J. Politzki
Studio 119 Degrees Web Design & Development Studio

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized, photography guitar, Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin, music, photography, Ross Halfin

Call me crazy, but I’ve become really fond of fractal imagery. I have used these images as my desktop picture on my computer for quite some time now and feel that they can really inspire me. When I’m thinking of a new design, there’s something refreshing, new and exciting about fractal images that re-energizes me for coming up with that next design. I’ve applied this to logos and web sites alike and there really is something to it!

What are Fractals?

They can be defined as, ‘a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole’, according to Wikipedia’s definition of fractals. They come in many different flavors, such as ‘Mandelbrot’, ‘Newton’, ‘Julia’, ‘Halley’, ‘Secant’, or ‘Dragon’ and I’ll not bore you with the various reasons why. All I do know is that they are wondrous images that also occur in nature, especially in snowflakes.

Fractals as Desktop Images

I’ll post up 3 fractal images here to get the ball rolling, so-to-speak. If there’s enough interest, I’ll post up more. Feel free to download them and use them for your computer desktop image, become inspired by them as I do, or share them with friends. Most of all, leave a comment if you’d like to see more of these.

Fractal image number one

Fractal image number two

Fractal image number three

Chris J. Politzki
Studio 119 Degrees Web Design & Development Studio

Tweet This Post

Design Related fractals, free desktop images, inspiration

Signed Up and Not Sure What to Do Now?

I recently posted something of an introduction to Twitter. In it, I introduced people to Twitter and asked a few questions to the SEO community. I still think people are struggling with where to start when they sign up though. I constantly get questions from friends and family on what Twitter is really about. It’s all about joining the ‘real-time conversation’ on any and everything that interests you. Such a vast collection of information may intimidate many people and I think this is why I’m asked the same question over and over, “What can I do with Twitter, what is it good for?”

Let’s Take a Look at Some of the Things You Can Do With Twitter

Try finding friends you already know first of all. There’s a great built-in tool that’s in Twitter called, Find Friends on Other Networks tool. If you have a AOL, Yahoo!, or Gmail account, Twitter can scan your contacts list and see if anyone you know is on Twitter that
you haven’t yet started following.

See a screenshot below:

There’s also an application online that helps you find who’s tweeting. It’s called Tweepz. There’s another one called Twellow and they both are very similar to a Yellow Pages site for Twitter. With either one, you can type in a topic you’re interested in and see who’s tweeting about that subject in your area and beyond.

The Tweepz.com search feature with 'SEO Denver' search entered.

The Twellow.com search feature shown above.

Yet another method of finding friends on Twitter is through Facebook. The Twitter Facebook App can inform you of which one of your friends is on Twitter and which ones aren’t.

Another great and often overlooked tool to find like-minded people to follow on Twitter is to use Twitter Search. See what people are saying in real time about a certain topic that interests you and begin following these people if you find their tweets interesting.

So as you can see, there are many different ways to find people to follow on Twitter. There’s also a few that I haven’t mentioned or tried yet, but feel free to do so if you so desire. These are WeFollow, Twubble and Twitterel.

This is how the Twitter for Facebook App looks like.

Find Local Twitter People You Can Network With

I found Twitter great for networking. Along with all of the fore-mentioned methods of finding people, there’s a few other methods to really find worth while people to follow and possibly network with. Twitter Advanced Search allows one to limit results to a nearby location. There’s also other 3rd party apps, such as TwellowHood and Localtweeps.

Connect and Stay In Touch With People on Twitter

Now that you know how to find friends and other people who may share interests similar to yours, try downloading a free Desktop or Mobile Client. Keeping up with your ‘mentions’ and ‘direct messages’ within Twitter is somewhat cumbersome and that’s why I personally use TweetDeck. It helps you keep track of everything going on with your Twitter account even if you have multiple account to take into consideration. They’ve even built in a nice MySpace and Facebook feature to track things going on there as well.

This is how TweetDeck looks for managing Twitter, Facebook and MySpace

Other alternatives are Seesmic, and others you can research further in a 19 Twitter Desktop Apps Compared.

People who are on mobile devices such as the iPhone or iPod Touch can check out many of the iPhone Twitter Apps. There’s also web-based Twitter clients available that make Twitter easier to use on other Mobile devices such as Mixero and PeopleBrowsr.

Learn How to use Twitter Like a Pro

Twitter Help is a great place to start. Or there’s the Twitter Support Forum. Mashable.com also has a great Guide Book for Twitter. There’s also the Twitter App Directory where you can see some of the cool things you can do with Twitter. Most of all, enjoy tweeting and make it work for you.

Chris J. Politzki
Studio 119 Degrees Web Design & Development Studio

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized Facebook, MySpace, Search, Social Media, Twitter

SEO company and Web Design & Development studio collaborate

Our design & development studio recently completed a widget development project for a local SEO company here in Denver, Colorado. Together, we developed a strategy for creating the all-important backlinks to a Texas attorney’s web site. The group over at seOverflow here in Denver is quite a talented group of SEO gurus that assisted the Studio 119 Design & Development team with the preliminaries for creating widgets for the Jim Adler & Associates team in Houston, Texas.

What do these ‘Death Statistic Widgets’ do?

Good question! They simply track 5 different types of deaths across the United States. There’s a widget for Car Accidents, one for 18 Wheeler Accidents, one for Drunk Driving Deaths, one for Mesothelioma Deaths, and also one for Motorcycle Deaths. All five come in 3 different sizes; 300 x 250 pixels, 240 x 400 pixels, and 160 x 300 pixels. All perfectly suited to implement into your blog or web site. Each one respectively tracks the total death numbers to date for each specific type of death. Each day a new number is displayed and oftentimes these numbers are updated hourly using a javascript which deducts the current day, compares it to the national daily average of deaths and returns a total number to date for the specified year.

You can download these widgets at either of these two landing pages:

1. The Accident Awareness site.
2. The Jim Adler Death Statistics site.

Why create Widgets for SEO?

Yet another good question… and the answer is easy. ‘To Gain Valuable Backlinks to Your Site‘, simply put. In the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) community, we all know that if you are able to gain links back to your site you can gain some valuable exposure within the Search Engines. Strategically placing targeted keywords within your anchor text (the words that appear within the actual link on the page, for those of you who aren’t familiar with the term) also help the spiders that are crawling your site help determine what your site is about and how they should categorize it. Changing up the anchor text is also a common task. Backlinks also function as a sort of voting system in that they indicate that someone has taken the time to add a link back to your site and find your site’s content valuable.

The Death Statistic widgets have appearing on each one of them 2 and sometimes 3 backlinks. Two anchor text links and one image alt tag set on the image link. So as you can see, we’ve placed these within the actual widgets in hopes that people will implement them into their blogs and web pages to give us our precious backlinks to our site. A very unique strategy in my opinion and one that also worked well with our previously developed Dex Yellow Pages widgets.

It’s all done in the name of  ’Gaining Valuable Backlinks to Your Site‘.

Happy Widgeting everybody!

Chris J. Politzki
Studio 119 Degrees Web Design & Development Studio

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized crawl, development, Indexing, Search, Search Engine, SEO, spider, web design, Widget

John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin in action during the 1970's

Well, it looks as though the Led Zeppelin reunion tour won’t be taking place after all. As reported on the John Paul Jones web site on August 10th, 2009 he’s joined a new supergroup called, ‘Them Crooked Vultures‘.

The new group features Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age, former Nirvana drummer and current Foo Fighters leader Dave Grohl and no other than the legendary John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin. According to the official Them Crooked Vultures web site, they are slated to hit the road in October already. October 1st, they’ll be in Austin, Texas at Stubb’s and then they’ll be at the Austin City Limits Festival on the 2nd. Those of you who are familiar with PBS television will probably be aware of this excellent musical showcase program and hopefully there will be a broadcast of the event and performance of the band sometime in the near future. Check more Them Crooked Vultures tour dates to see if they are coming to your town.

It looks as though the web site allows you to participate in a forum, purchase an official t-shirt, sign-up for a mailing list and also explore a Google Earth feature that I’m still trying to figure out. I installed the plug-in, but I just get zoomed into an unknown location in France I think and can’t navigate out of it?

Here’s an image of the guys hard at work:

Live performance image of Them Crooked Vultures

YouTube videos of Them Crooked Vultures

There seems to be a lot going on in this realm at the moment and I expect more to follow soon. The teaser video sounds great! Song is called, “Scumbag Blues”. No images of the guys in the band, all visuals of vultures walking around in a very graphical layout. Quite engaging!

I would strongly suggest subscribing to their channel on YouTube to keep up-to-date on what they are doing. Here’s the link to the official Them Crooked Vultures YouTube Channel. There’s some pretty cool in-studio material plus some live fan videos. Here’s a studio video:

And yet one more glimpse from a secret gig at the Brixton Academy on August 26th, 2009:

Pretty interesting sounds, but it probably puts the Led Zeppelin reunion tour rumors to rest, which is unfortunate.

Chris J. Politzki
Studio 119 Degrees Web Design & Development Studio

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized dave grohl, foo fighters, guitar, john paul jones, josh homme, Led Zeppelin, music, nirvana, queens of the stone age

Ace Frehley Anomaly Album Cover

Hello again! I posted about Ace’s arrival to the world wide web back in April of this year in a post entitled, ‘Ace Frehley finally has an Official Web Site!!!‘. And now the time has come to mention that his newly recorded album is slated for release in just under two weeks! That’s right earthlings… the Aceman has been hard at work preparing us for his latest endeavor. September 15th, 2009 is the date the new recording hits the streets!

Ace Frehley Press Kit for Anomaly

The new album / CD is entitled ‘Anomaly’. Ace has put out an electronic press kit… check it out here:

Or check out the commercial:

Different Packaging for the Album

Pretty cool stuff for collectors as there is 3 different packaging options. One for Walmart, one for Best Buy, & one that’s just standard, but they are all pretty nice. Take a look for yourself! Nice job by the graphic design team, I must say.

Walmart Packaging of Anomaly from Ace Frehley

The Walmart packaging of Ace’s CD contains an Ace autographed tattoo!

Best Buy Packaging for Anomaly from Ace

The above Best Buy layout is printed on silver stock, like the Double Platinum Album from Kiss!

Standard Packaging for Anomaly from Ace Frehley

Anomaly from Ace Frehley is also available on iTunes!

That’s right… you won’t get any of the fancy packaging pictured above, but at least you’ll have the latest from one of the most influential guitarists of our time. Ace Frehlely Anomaly on iTunes.

Track Listing

1. Foxy & Free
2. Outer Space
3. Pain In The Neck
4. Fox On The Run
5. Genghis Khan
6. Too Many Faces
7. Change The World
8. Space Bear
9. A Little Below The Angels
10. Sister
11. It’s A Great Life
12. Fractured Quantum
13. The Return of Space Bear (Dedicated to Tom Snyder and an iTunes exclusive)

Go out there and support our spaceman who has so kindly graced us with his presence on September 15th with his first album in over 20 years!

And be sure to check out his web site as well: the official Ace Frehley web site.

Chris J. Politzki
Studio 119 Degrees

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized Ace Frehley, graphic design, guitar, Kiss

Interesting Observations on Keyword Research

I recently was involved with a project at my internet yellow pages job that involved researching targeted keywords for proposed City Guides / City Landing Pages. We used a couple of online tools to see what the estimated search volume would be for that particular month. The data was probably from the previous month or earlier, but what was interesting was the fact that you start to discover how people are thinking when they approach the web and perform a search. Oftentimes geo indicators were included such as a city  or state name to narrow their search down a bit more. For the project’s purpose, we were focusing on how people were using these geo indicators to reveal how the content on the City Guides / Landing Pages would be created and what targeted keywords we should be using to gain more search traffic to our site.

For example, are people typing in ‘CO‘ as an abbreviation for ‘Colorado‘, or are they spelling out the entire state name? This was crucial information we needed to complete the project and know what content to implement on our proposed pages.

Tools Used for the Project

We used a few tools to determine what the estimated search volume on a particular keyword. Spacky.com was one of them, Wordtracker.com was another and a couple others I’ll mention, however, we did not use for this project. They are Grokker.com & Kartoo.com, but I’d like to hear from others if they use others as it would be useful information. I’ve been thinking that the new feature in Google Search called the ‘Wonder Wheel‘ might also be a tool to use for this type of keyword researching, but once again, wouldn’t mind hearing from others on their thoughts on this. Leave a comment below if you feel like it.

A More Recent Oberservation

I was reading a blog today that started me thinking. I know, I know… you’re asking yourself whether or not I think at all, right? Never mind the wisecracks, I seriously found something today that was interesting.

In a post from Sam Niccols, titled “TechCrunch Upskirt: Why Michael Arrington Blogs about Porn“, he brings up an interesting point. During the keyword research project for my internet yellow pages gig, we kept finding terms for porn keep showing up in the monthly search volumes. Even though we weren’t looking for them, they appeared. Some of these I can’t repeat here in this blog and I know there are tools to filter these items out, but it is interesting to find out that some cleaner and more legitimate sites unrelated to porn are posting blogs optimized for porn search terms. TechCrunch, Wired, Technewsworld.com, news.cnet.com and even the NYTimes site all used porn-related content within their blog posts. Makes one wonder if these sites are trying to bring in bigger search volumes through this tactic, if you can call it that. TechCrunch alone has 2,580 blog posts indexed by Google that contain porn-related content. Sam has a great graphic which splits down the ‘Pages with Porn in Text‘ amongst these various sites. While it may draw in some extra traffic, I really don’t think it’s going to bring in the ‘right kind’ of traffic… unless you are in the porn industry? If you are making money off of your ads on your pages then I guess this would be a great method to get clicks.

An interesting find needless to say and I guess I’ll find out how much traffic I get out of it from this blog post… I just hope it’s from people who aren’t shady characters. I think it’s about time I start with Google Ads to profit off of this!

I’ll do a proper post on keyword research sometime, but thought this tied in well and was worth bringing up for discussion.

Chris J. Politzki
Studio 119 Degrees

Tweet This Post

SEO Related Keyword, Search, SEO

Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, U2’s The Edge and the White Stripes’ Jack White together in a new film!

So call me dense or whatever you wanna call it, but this just slipped past me. I never even knew this was in the works, but once again, my following of the Ross Halfin web site uncovered this new film which is coming out soon. In Ross’ diary entry marked June 19th, he’s in Los Angeles with Jimmy for the premier!

The film is apparently about the history of the electric guitar as seen from the point of view of three significant musicians. The first being Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin fame, the second being the Edge from U2 and last, but not least, Jack White of the White Stripes. From the looks of the trailer, it looks like the film revolves around each individual guitarists personal style and approach to the guitar. From the looks of it, Headley Grange is visited by Jimmy and for those of you who are Zeppelin fans, you’ll of course know that the band recorded numerous time there and is especially noted as being responsible for the huge drum sound in ‘When the Levee Breaks’. Other notable bands also recorded or rehearsed at Headley Grange in East Hampshire, England. The song, ‘Black Dog’ by Led Zeppelin was named after a black Labrador Retriever which was found hanging around the during recording of their fourth album in the early 1970’s.

It looks like the film is scheduled for limited release in New York and Los Angeles on August 14th, 2009. There are some still shots viewable as a slide show at IMDB.com and here’s the trailer in HD below.

A recent magazine cover from the three guitarists in the film:

Jack White, Jimmy Page and the Edge

I will try to post more info here as it becomes available, until then, enjoy!

Chris J. Politzki
Studio 119 Degrees

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized guitar, Jack White, Jimmy Page, Led Zeppelin, music, Ross Halfin, The Edge

Yahoo Answers – What is it?

Yahoo!Answers is a community for knowledge sharing Q&A (Questions and Answers). It is a form of social networking/media and involves people asking questions to the community and then people responding to these questions. To participate, one only has to have a Yahoo account and can immediately begin contributing to the site. There are other similar sites out there that do the same thing. Sites like Answers.com, Allexperts.com, and Answerbag.com but Yahoo Answers seems to get the most ‘bang for the buck’ in terms of marketing your web sites in the Search Engines. Answers within Yahoo!Answers are quickly crawled by the spiders and show up high in the search result pages.

Using Yahoo Answers for Search Engine Optimization

So those of you who are new to SEO may not be aware of  ’off-page SEO‘. This, in it’s simplest terms, is a means by which you go out try to gain links pointing to your site. Links to your site act as a ‘vote‘ or ‘thumbs up‘ for your site and is well looked upon by the search engines, especially Google. Yahoo!Answers allows you to add your website in the Source box at the end of the answer you give. Although it does contain a no-follow tag, meaning the search engines won’t index the links. Another drawback is that you are not able to use anchor text to utilize the power of keywords in anchor text, but the ability to gain exposure for your site within the search engine result pages outweighs this. You are, in fact, building incremental traffic to your site and this is always a good thing to do. A great way to track this would be through watching your referral traffic either through server logs or Google Analytics and seeing when somebody is coming to your site via Yahoo!Answers.

I would suggest when signing up for answering questions to answer question which are pertinent to your web site or area of expertise. Try to choose a category within the site that you can easily return to everyday or once a week to check for new questions to answer. There is a points system in play on the site and when you answer a question, your earn 2 points. If your answer becomes the best answer, then you receive 10 points. While it may not be possible to become a so-called ‘Top Contributor‘, aiming to get a best answer will be rewarded by moving your answer up to the top of the page when somebody is also looking for the answer to the question you replied to and this is key in building traffic to your site.

I’d like to demonstrate the power of using Yahoo!Answers for SEO.

Take, for example, a recent question I answered. The question was, “How do I make a widget for my website?“.

Now go to Google and do a search for ‘How do I make a widget for my website?’ and see how high the result is for the Yahoo!Answers page is… it’s number two! Oftentimes, it’s number one in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). These pages are indexed by both Google and Yahoo and are a great tactic to build an audience to your web site or blog.

A word of advice, try mixing things up and sometimes drop a link to your site and sometimes don’t. Don’t appear like you are spamming the site and try to give a more natural appearance to the community. And most of all, enjoy yourself within the community as it will pay off in the long run.

Chris J. Politzki
Studio 119 Degrees

Tweet This Post

SEO Related marketing, Search, SEO, Yahoo!Answers

Vintage Ace Frehley circa 1977

Ace Frehley, spaceman from the rock and roll supergroup Kiss, finally has an official web site! Ace has inspired many guitarists throughout the years and is now entering the cyber world via his newly launched web site and other various areas of the internet.

Ways to Follow Ace Frehley on the Web

I recently saw that he is now on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and even Twitter! He’s definitely out there making himself visible to the world. All of the various ways to follow Ace on the web are listed on his ‘Into the Void‘ page on his site.

His first video blog from April 2009 I’ll post here:

His band is in the studio now finishing up their upcoming release called ‘Anomaly’. Sign up for exclusive updates from Ace and his webmaster. Here’s an exclusive video of Ace solo tracking for the track ‘Pain in the Neck’ in his studio:

He’s also posted some really nice rare photos from his spectacular career. The official Ace Frehley web site photos section, called ‘12 pics’ has a few photos here, but I would suggest also visiting him on Facebook and MySpace to see some other nice images of Ace in action.

Recent Ace Frehley Sightings

Ace opening up the New York Yankee Stadium Hard Rock Cafe - April 2009

Ace at the New York Hard Rock - Halloween 2007

Ace Frehley with his new band - New Years Eve 2008

So there you have it. Ace is back and he told you so!

Update!!!

A recent interview with Ace at Amoeba Record Store in Hollywood, California. Check it out:

Chris J. Politzki
Studio 119 Degrees

Tweet This Post

Uncategorized Ace Frehley, guitar, Kiss, music, web design