Recently in Intellectual Property Category

We all want to look our best. I have some particular needs regarding health and beauty that I think any and all readers should get something from. I am writing this after doing some meal plans and reading up on the latest findings on food and nutrition as it affects bloating, water retention and other nagging things which undermine self confidence.

Don't skip breakfast. Drink things that contain lots of water, no alcohol. It's Sunday. I may break that rule on alcohol. The key is moderation in all that I do. Since I have goals, I sometimes really plan out what I'm going to have. I am lucky enough to have a grocery store in my building. I don't have to plan very far out.

This morning, I knew I had some wheat bread for toast, a tomato and a little yogurt in the refrigerator. That doesn't sound like much. It's fairly well-balanced though, all in all. I also had one serving of Kashi cereal left. That's actually all that I have save for coffee and tea. I tread lightly when I can.

Nutritionally, the wheat toast gives me carbs for energy and mood balancing serotonin. The cereal adds fiber and additional carbs from the grains. It also contains protein and omega-3 from flax seeds. The main thing I'm missing, I can easily make up for at lunch time. I'm missing protein.

Eating flax seeds is not the ideal way to get any of the nutrition, since they should be ground up and not whole. They are whole in the Kashi cereal. That's no good. Grinding causes them to deteriorate within 8-hours, and it's messy. I don't enjoy grinding flax very much these days. I used to a decade ago.

I still have a dedicated grinder for when I might use it for a meal. It goes well with yogurt, on cereal or salads. It adds good nutty flavor and a load of fiber and nutrition. The yogurt, with it's probiotics, is really good for digestion and reducing water retention weight. Avoiding sodium and eating Potassium rich foods will help balance this.

For lunch, I should prepare something like a baked potato and something that will add to the protein for the day. I'm actually looking at new recipes now, planning a trip to the store. It's too hot for Lollapalooza. Maybe next year. I want to stay in the cool building and do some development work today.

Stay tuned.

Powerful words must be in your copy. Make it real copy. Use subject matter that you get to write about authoritatively. Speaking of subject matter and good writing, one fascinating thing about how we grow as people living the cultural life, wherever we are, is that our use of language shapes the very essence of our being. Words are that important.

Language affects the attributes of our life skills. Choose good words. This should come as no real surprise. That is why there is no glory in being proud that one can't write or spell correctly. It amazes me that that has any cache, especially in an industry that is so strongly tied to business success as online writing and marketing. It's the very unruly nature of the Web that allows for this.

The power of the medium actually allows people with little to no writing skill to write and appear authentic or smart, no matter if they really are. Don't get caught in the trap of playing along, silly. It's short lived success with a glass ceiling at best.  Be authentic without showing off any inability to spell correctly, not without true wit. It does not come across well to the right sort who can see through it.

Words are seriously powerful. They can affect how you live your life. Words have already probably shaped how you are. In a Newsweek article, I read about evidence that our language has an influence on our very abilities, our skills with living in this world. That means the higher the language abilities that you can attain, the better odds you have for achieving greatness.

Don't shy away from learning to write better. Read from those whose prose speaks to you. It'll help define you and your style. If your style is about celebrating the heights that you can reach, versus cashing in on darkness and deceit (as search marketing is so often accused of doing), then you can operate on higher levels and succeed while enjoying the good life.

Stay tuned.

Updated March 11th, 2009



I can only ask that ShoeMoney delete his entries and quit polluting my name. He continues to publish bad info (using Heather's name is wrong on many levels) and it is still ranking. I'll repeat myself from below: If you want to work in a professional setting, people will Google you. If you plan to go out on a date, people will Google you. It's personal, and it's important.

The next time I sell Reputation Management services, I am going to use myself as an example of someone that pulled the trigger under great duress and spent resources during the economic crisis to defend my good name. Despite that I have succeeded in bringing it down six positions in Google after three weeks of work, it's work that I wouldn't have otherwise had to do.

Less than a month from Jeremy's original publish date, with some three weeks of online actions, my query is recovering fairly well. Jeremy is obviously blissfully unaware of the strife he caused me with bad facts and a complete disregard for respect towards me, his elder in this industry. It's a shame, really.

Original Post March 7th, 2009:

Medium-term plans for Reputation Management with [Disa Johnson] are paying off within three weeks of starting concentrated work. The story unfolded with quick rankings via Twitter, which I can now relax a bit and stop using my query in all the messages. That will come as a relief to my main followers, and Danny Sullivan.

Other short-term strategies, getting profiles up at various social media sites also paid off relatively quickly. The Google search engine fancies these sites for navigational queries, the most personal of all reputation management needed. If you want to work in a professional setting, people will Google you. If you plan to go out on a date, people will Google you. It's personal, and it's important.

The number one spot is a neutral listing. If someone is looking for the volleyball player, they deserve to get her. I like volleyball a lot, incidentally. Having a listing like that is like Danny Sullivan, the race car driver on the Indy 500 circuit. He deserves to be in Danny's result set.

I've owned number two (and sometimes three with a folded result) using Twitter within 2 days of starting optimization, just by tweeting a lot. I solidified that ranking fairly well using 'Disa Johnson' in my messages. It worked like magic. I also published some quick domains that were on idle, and bought some more to flood the result set.

I do *not* recommend flooding as a tactic. If you find your name polluted by an idiot, like Jeremy, perhaps it can make sense. It's dangerous. Be forewarned.

This is where the medium-term strategy started kicking in. It's almost 3-weeks. I previously owned several domains without content, and I put quick bio HTML pages up in a directory on my webserver. I then pointed DNS settings for various domains at the folder. That meant that there will be content to crawl under new domains. This works particularly well for Microsoft's Live Search.

I then started this blog with another domain name (AirDisa) and began blogging as much as I could under the circumstances (full-time work load). This whole thing has turned into quite a little catalyst for getting me out of my dark SEO cave from the past several years. I really hope you like it in the long run.

Anyway, the medium-term plan has started to pay off. Now I own 3 of the top ten domains showing up. I influence 3 more via social networking profiles, I influence 1 additional (SMX bio page) and 1 site is friendly to me (Danny's Daggle post). The top listing is neutral, and only number 4 is an irritant that I hope to knock out soon or have the author delete.

Search Return is also number three - thanks at least in part to a new link from my friend Eric Ward. We've been working together on our Link Building application called Squid, and now I have links pointing in from his website. Search Return began at number 9 and within a day of Eric linking, the listing jumped up to number three - ahead of the offending post.



My long-term plans? Now that sites which aggregated the offending post have faded into page two and beyond, I've gotten the main ranking to move down a couple of positions. I intend to apply pressure regarding the inaccuracy of the entry. I might persuade it's deletion. He should remove it as a gesture, an acknowledgment of messing up and in apology.

Since the sites outside his control will never delete the content, he can never make up for his bad judgment, but he can delete his own entry. I can use the power of the pen. The basis of the offensive ranking includes Heather's name - and it shouldn't. Including Heather was and is totally crass and just plain wrong.

In fact, I can talk about it on the air, write about it in blog entries, and tweet about it in Twitter all day long. I have far more energy to protect my name than he does for sullying it. The fact is, it is all due to ShoeMoney's violation of Intellectual Property ownership.

Stay tuned.

It was a fiasco alright.

The thing that was most disappointing to me, was that Jeremy Shoemaker and Shannon Poole did not limit their discussion to me. They chose to include my relationship to Heather. Heather is (and has been) my very best friend in the search community. My relationship to Heather is none of their business. They got all of it wrong. They were also in the wrong.

As posted in Tweets the afternoon of Tuesday, February 17th.

I must say how proud I am of our search industry. Response from SMX has been really great! It's also interesting to see who gets it wrong. Some people seem to refer to me, post about me completely false information without taking the time to care about facts before publishing.

This is like old school versus new school. In the old days, no one would write about a colleague without fact checking first, reaching out. Without the correct information, people would be highly embarrassed going on record and talking about or writing about something false. Why is it that today, some people feel compelled to raise their star by reporting instantly anything they hear?

Is it the immediacy of blog? Is it RSS propagation madness where readers look at the same headline 15 times with small variations by SEOs looking to score limelight? I-Search was rational because there was time before a post went live, and the authors had time to catch me before I published it. Plus, they trusted me to look after them. I had the readers and posters best interest at heart.

Today, it's a free for all and hurtful to some. Flames would not get published in I-Search, and when I dust off Search Return Digest, I hope the audience listens, even if it's 24 hours old. I mean, what's so important to know about some slight change to SERPs that you have to know before 5pm today that tomorrow would be no good?

It was interesting to witness just how people react to me when I'm not staring them in the face. Anyway, they also seem to move too fast and take what doesn't belong to them. That's where it becomes fairly more serious. In all the immediacy of Twitter, blogging, Facebook and MySpace, the hasty need to be reminded: there are laws governing use of stuff.

So, if you blog, don't take images that don't belong to you, write something salacious about colleagues based on what you know nothing about. I have an interest in controlling my message, obviously, and the trials and tribulations dealing with it are very fascinating to me. I've been witness to awesome colleagues, who have treated me with respect before SMX West, and afterwards. Just amazing - thank you!

I had to go to the Web to find where people treat me unkind, use my news as a platform to make themselves seem somehow bigger. My story somehow just helps people shine, or illuminates the true nature of their beliefs. The most interesting part are the falsehoods. The best part are my friends and respectful colleagues. Thank you for everything - especially Danny!

The concept of intellectual property, including copyright ownership, ought to be a no-brainer for anyone in a tech business. Before someone grabs images from a commercial website and posts them elsewhere, they really need to get permission to do that.

Jeremy Shoemaker, aka ShoeMoney, heard about my appearance at SMX West, and made a misguided attempt to supply his own "before/after" using images of me he copied from the Web without permission.

Had Jeremy asked me, I would have told him that those images are proprietary, but would have supplied him with other ones. For that matter, had he attended the SMX conference he would have been free to take his own photos and use them.

The comments in the blog were really disparaging of me. That was in large part because the things Jeremy and Shannon said on air were sheer speculation, totally crass, and completely sensationalist. Virtually every "fact" they stated was incorrect.

Coupled with the comments, the posting is without any redeeming qualities. I can't do anything about people making fools of themselves for their opinions, but I can prevent them from using my copyrighted images when doing so - so I demanded their removal.

Jeremy failed to contact me before spreading disparaging speculation on air, going public made it a very public affair. A call by him before going public might have prevented public misconception. The onus for preventing the issue from getting out of hand in a public manner was on him, not me.

He showed no restraint about me on air. I could not gauge the seriousness with which he would reply, since I do not know him personally. An email or phone call by me could have been a giant mistake - it does *not* guarantee any rational response from a well-known branded link-baiter. In perfect keeping, he ended up publishing the letter from my attorney.

To me, that's indicative of behavior I can't control. If he was going to publish anything further, it might as well be my attorney's letter. That way, legal requirements are clearly spelled out. We included options for use of new images which in my opinion, was a professional courtesy that goes far beyond what I experienced from him.

Aside from getting the facts wrong and using proprietary images, Jeremy blogged and broadcast a radio show for his own commercial purposes. It certainly would have been more professional of him to contact me before going live and spouting falsehoods, all while I was minding my own business up in the air flying home to Chicago.

Jeremy had initially replied to my attorney's letter in Twitter, amazed he got a "lolable" demand to remove the images.  He is apparently as ignorant of intellectual property law as he is disrespectful towards me.  To claim that images are "fair use" because they were found on the Web is either disingenuous or stunningly naive.

Then he followed it up with another post, suggesting I should have contacted him before sending that letter. He has never contacted me about this matter. What initially was most amazing about this, was how people reacted on his blog. Most of the comments were from people that took Jeremy's side of things. That's obvious. They're his sycophants.

What became even more amazing, is that Jeremy himself talked about Intellectual Property in an interview that published days after the incident. Granted, the interview with Lisa Barone was prepared prior, but I would think these things should be top of mind with him. Especially since he was providing advice about matters of Intellectual Property.

Ironically for him, he recommends as step one: using a Cease and Desist. That is the very thing he complained about in his follow up post on the matter with me. Either way, in his interview, he provides advice I would argue he has trouble tracking when it comes to his own behavior. He was wrong to use my images without permission. He complained about behavior he recommends himself. He seems to be perfectly capable of dishing out what he is unable to handle graciously. He refers to several lawsuits of his while my attorney's legal notice to him was at that point: my first and only thing like that ever.

Stay tuned.