It’s an alternative Christmas! If you’re sick of Michael Buble and Mariah Carey blasting on every radio, in every store and resonating in your head – check out my top Alternative Christmas Diddies playlist and rock out this year:

Check out the playlist at Seeqpod

’08 Playlist Tracks

Best Modern: The Christmas Song THE RAVEONETTES

Best Emo: Yule Shoot Your Eye Out FALL OUT BOY

Best Ska: Oi To The World NO DOUBT

Best Surfer Song: Sleigh Ride THE VENTURES

Best Indie: Baby Please Come Home DEATH CAB FOR CUTIE

Best Old School Hip Hop: Christmas in Hollis RUNDMC

Best Punk Rock: Father Christmas THE KINKS

Best Cheesy Boy Band Song: Funky Funky Christmas NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK

This is my entry for the Miss604 iTunes Giveaway!

There are certain GraphJam entries I really heart. This be one of them:

Moosejaw Mountaineering saw a niche podcast and jumped on it. This episode documents a Granny’s struggles signing up for Facebook.

It’s funny because it’s true – this is what novice internet users really experience when signing up for your social network, your mailing list, your special club or whatever.

Design for Grannies. Viva usability.

This post is in response to John Chow’s contest for a free pass to Blogworld Expo. To enter, you just have to write a post on why you want to / deserve to go. Because Top Eleven Lists are the new Top Ten Lists, here’s my top eleven reasons why I should win this pass…

11. I recently won a Marketing Pilgrim blogging contest which includes free passes to the fabulous SES San Jose and a Future Now workshop in an exotic location to-be-announced, I believe lightning can strike twice in one summer, and that I can also win the Blogworld pass from Vancouver’s and the world’s favorite dot-com-mogul, John Chow.
10. I’ve got lots of blogger friends on Facebook, Twitter, MyBlogLog and StumbleUpon and it would be really cool if they got to meet me 😛
09. Because every year Linda doesn’t get to go to Blogworld, someone kills a kitten.
08. Blogworld needs mo’ ladies.
07. My soul is only worth $400, and if I don’t win this pass, I will have to sell my very soul for the pass. Trust me, el diablo’s not hard to find in Vegas.
06. Because I was disqualifiedz from da Cheezburger contest cuz Iz Canadian.
05. Armed with a Flip Camcorder, I’ll be podcasting! (If I can find one in Canada…)
04. What goes on in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Except, if I go to Blogworld, I’ll apply my newfound knowledge on GetElastic.com.
03. I’ll be in Vegas already Sept 15-17 blogging for the Shop.org Blog. And if you’ve ever experienced a rainy September in Vancouver, you understand why I want to extend my stay in the desert!
02. My co-blogger-in-crime, Jason Billingsley, will be a speaker at Blogworld this year. I want to be there to live-blog his session for GetElastic.com.
01. Because I’m the first post out of the gate!

Image credit: Heather Champ via Flickr

more graph humor and song chart memes

Oi!

Strumming my pain with your fingers, singing my life with your words you are…

Except for Scrabulous 😉

Just a quick update, I’ve entered a blogging contest at Marketing Pilgrim with an entry called 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics.

It gives step-by-step instruction on how to create filters for traffic that isn’t really relevant to your business (and how to determine what’s not relevant traffic using your analytics), plus a few more tweaks you can make to your default Analytics implementation that will track your visitors better. For example, rewriting your session ID urls so that the same content doesn’t get tracked separately (maybe your blue-widgets page had 50 visitors and 25 conversions, but the session IDs were counted as different pages).

I wrote this because I believe you can get more out of your Analytics, and that most people would never find this info on their own because Google’s help section is a mess, and it can be hard to find where to make the changes in your account.

So you’ll have to check out the entire article over at Marketing Pilgrim to find out the 8 reasons, as per the contest rules, I cannot post the article here (find link below after reading the instructions!)

You can help me out in the contest by visiting the post, reading it, bookmarking it, Twittering it, sharing it by email etc. If you do click through, please read the whole article which should take at least 2:30 minutes (there is a bonus for low bounce rate and “high engagement” meaning someone reads the whole article, and this is probably the best way to gauge if someone actually likes the content)

OK, here’s how you can help!

* Follow the link to read the full entry: 8 Stupid Things Webmasters Do To Mess Up Their Analytics
* Read the whole thing, I promise you’ll learn something. If you don’t please share your tips in the comments!
* Link to it or share it through social networks if you like, Stumbleupon it if you can!!
* Subscribe to Marketing Pilgrim, it’s a fantastic blog!

Thank you so much!

About Image X

I’m really excited for my friends at Image X Media. They launched a redesigned web site last week complete with a shiny, new web design and development blog!

Image X Media is a top-notch Drupal development and web design studio out here in BC. The team plans to get their hands dirty with this thing we call blogging and I know they’ll do great. Who knows, you might even find some guest posts from yours truly every once in a while, so go on and subscribe 🙂

I had the privilege of working on design and usability planning for a number of Image X clients, as well as SEO and other Internet marketing programs for a handful of them from 2006-2007.

Social Networking Rockstars!

Being the social media cheerleader that I am, getting the opportunity to work on social networking design and development projects was a blast. I also got to learn a lot about Drupal which is an open source CMS (content management system) that has won many awards and recognition for its flexibility, its quality, its passionate development community and even its SEO friendliness. Many companies and educational institutions are seeking out Drupal development companies for redevelopment and redesign as a result.

I know first hand how honest, hard-working, funny, creative and talented the Image X team is. I can’t recommend them enough. And they’ve now got a full-time usability consultant on deck so you know your information architecture is going to be solid. They’re truly a full-service design firm.

Recent Social Networking Development and Design Projects

Image X has really developed a knack for creating social media sites, and has built up an impressive client list of social networks on the Drupal platform including:

Discovery Education

Sun Microsystems’ Fresh Brain

Creative Pro

Arizona State University

Wishing Well Giving

Global Oneness Project

Puppet Hub

UC Berkeley

UC Berkeley

Peace Portal Alliance Church

Fantasy Sports Matrix

PSST

You can check out the whole Drupal portfolio here.

What better place to celebrate the most mischievous day of the year than swinging by the Vancouver Exhibition and Convention Center for the Massive Technology Show? While you’re schmoozing with the technorati, you can also catch me and the rest of the New Media: Collaboration in Business panel.

I’ll be joined by Warren Baxley of Intercall, Rebecca Bolwitt aka Miss 604 and Rob Cottingham of Social Signal – with the fabulous Monica Hamburg keeping us in line.

Hey, even if you don’t give a hoot about tech, marketing or da Internets – admit it, you’ve never seen a better lookin’ panel.

We’ll see you there.

Hey with Rebecca on the panel, who oh who is going to live blog the session? Maybe you?

I had the awesome privilege of attending September’s Shop.org Annual Summit in Las Vegas – staying at the lovely Luxor and enjoying the most amazing ice cream from Svendsen’s.

We don’t have Svendsen’s here in Canada, so all I can hope is that someday I win a caption contest for ICanHazCheeseburger plus $500 spending money. With Svendsen’s double scoop at $6 a pop, I can almost haz 100 servings of ice cream. Then I can haz Jenny Craigs when I get back.

What else is cool is this contest was the idea of Neil Patel, who also did a neat little social media webinar with us last year, and was also kickin’ around at Shop.org, rockin’ the social media panels.

Here’s my entry and link to vote for me! Please spread the link to your friends if you like, it’s my birthday on Thursday and that would make an excellent virtual gift from my virtual friends.

Vote for Me!