April 2006

The Archives

• personal

  Getting into a cab at the Beverly Hills Hilton

  04.06.06 | Permalink | Comments Off on Getting into a cab at the Beverly Hills Hilton

  Three hot women step out of a cab, followed by a pimped out guy. I get in.

  Cab Driver: Hey man, is there something going at this place or something?
  Me: Yes, the Canada Media Marketplace
  I’ve been driving people back and forth all night
  Yes, that’s right, we had an event somewhere in the hills
  That’s right, at the Playboy mansion right?
  Uh no.

• personal

  3,500,000 kids watch me snowboard a year

  04.02.06 | Permalink | Comment?

  
  Troy, my brother in law, made this picture of me a couple of years ago and I posted it on my blog. Soon after, it showed up on the first page for a Google image search for snowboarding, and almost #1 for snowboard jump. So two of the highest entry keywords for my blogs are these two keywords. Next, a few kids used the image to dress up their page on myspace. Then myspace became the social network of choice and now the picture of me taking a jump on my snowboard has spread all over myspace to the point where the picture gets accessed almost 10,000 times a day. That’s 3.5 Million times a year. Now THAT’S funny. And kinda flattering to. I wonder if these kids know it was a 34 year old who was holding his breath and hoping he wasn’t going to break every bone in his body. But I did land the jump. Some of these myspace pages are pretty funny. Here’s the top 50. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50

• Internet

  Google Analytics, where is my invitation?

  04.01.06 | Permalink | 8 Comments

  So it’s been months since Google introduced Google Analytics, a free web analytics package. I’m plugged into the internet community reporting on these things so normally I would have been one of the first to sign-up. But the announcement came when I was on a month long internet-free vacation. And in typical fashion, Google limited the number of users to be able to scale it’s service in a controlled fashion. It’s a free service so I understand that they can’t open to floodgates. But now here we are, months and months later and I still haven’t received an invitation and as far as I can tell, almost nobody has received an invitation since the initial launch. In my job I send hundreds of thousands of dollars on Google AdWords and even privately I spend money on AdWords. But I haven’t received anything. And the Google Analytics website is doing a good job marketing the service. A service you can’t use. It’s getting frustrating and it’s not in Google’s best interest to frustrate a large number of people who are in positions like myself.

William Bakker's Destination Marketing blog