Image by Steven Combs via Flickr

Copy/paste this string (in bold) into your Google search bar: “crm database” “manager” (intitle:resume)
Yup that is me. The number 3 result on a Google search for CRM Database Manager. Read on for tips on how people can find you online. I imagine this will be helpful to job seekers.

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Like anyone else, I am interested in what the outside world thinks of me – especially when I do not have to solicit directly from them. Part of the beauty of the web is that, with the right tools, it is really easy to get a variety of statistics about the visitors to your website. My blog is a pretty basic operation and, though there are a trove of utilities out there, there are three places I primarily get my data analytics from.

One is my WordPress Dashboard under ‘Site Stats’ as well as two plugins I installed – WassUp Keywords and WassUp Stats.

Two is under my cPanel (a backend site maintenance utility provided to me by my web host). There are a number of packages there, but I typically use Awstats.

Third is Google Analytics.

I used to have a casual relationship with the statistics of my site. It is a personal blog. There is no commerce. It is interesting to see who is visiting from where, what they are viewing, my most popular posts, etc.

It is also interesting to check out what terms people are using to get to your site. For example, the following search engine terms are a small example of terms people used to find my blog.

I took a look at the below key phrases a couple weeks ago (I am way behind on finishing up and publishing drafts of some posts) and here is what came up.

While it is totally awesome that I rank as the number one Google result for ‘singing rice cooker‘ and number four for ‘circadian rhythm test‘, the biggie here (and thrust of this post) is that all of the traffic was driven to my site by the ‘-inurl’ search operator mixed in with some job candidate requirements.

These people landed on my site because they were looking to fill a position and were specifically targeting attributes of potential candidates.

What brought them there? What else, my resume. Not from Monster.com or another job site, but from the very humble kitlas.com.

So, what are these search operators? A basic description from Copernic Inc.:

A search operator is an instruction that joins keywords to form a new, more complex query. It enables you to look for several words at once by telling …. how to link keywords. The most common search operators are the three Boolean operators (AND/+, OR and NOT/-), which allow the inclusion or exclusion of documents from the search results.

So, what does the ‘inurl’ command do?

If you include inurl: in your query, Google will restrict the results to documents containing that word in the URL. For instance, [ inurl:print site:www.googleguide.com ] searches for pages on Google Guide in which the URL contains the word “print.” It finds pdf files that are in the directory or folder named “print” on the Google Guide website. The query [ inurl:healthy eating ] will return documents that mention the words “healthy” in their URL, and mention the word “eating” anywhere in the document.

There are tons of advanced search operators that are laid out beautifully by Google Guide. You can find them here.

These are tools in the proverbial toolbelt. There is a lot more to being found on the web than making a blog and posting resumes. I got lucky in that what I was doing was obviously right, but luck is not necessary. Using these operators to test your content can help greatly in your online presence.

You need content, you need it online, and it needs to be very purposeful. If you look at my resume, you will see very little ‘fat’. I also take a lot of time working on it. Sometimes every week I make changes. Whether it is a new skill I picked up, relevant coursework, or a new piece of software I have mastered, I post it.

The moral of the story is that, if you want to be found online, you need to:

• help people find you by making yourself visible
• find out where they are looking for and compare to what you have and see how well you match up
• tweak as necessary

As you may imagine, I have now moved from having a passive/casual relationship with my site statistics to a very active one.

Related articles

• How to Find Relevant Link Targets (searchenginepeople.com)
• Hands-On Tips For Link Building (seomoz.org)
• How Hackers Use Google Search For Hacking (myassgeek.wordpress.com)

VIEW THE FULL REPORT HERE

Like many others, I have concerns about how the forces around (and inside) me affect my performance in various events as well as my day to day well?being. To date, I have kept track of my well?being using a rating system which I have developed, a grocery list, and my memory. There are effective elements of this system and elements that do not carry enough data or create enough influence to be effective.

Although the system has highlights (the rating system) the other elements fail and the system needs complementary components to capture more data and turn that data into a useful information system. The present system is essentially a failure and has been long in need of an intervention.

I took the opportunity of this field study to do a comprehensive analysis, restructuring, and reinvention of the information system. I initially had concerns that a week wouldn’t be long enough to properly test and make appropriate refinements to the system, but after only two days I experienced significant and startling results. Given that my observations and reactions were so marked, I stayed with the study and tested it until the morning of Tuesday, March 29, 2011, at which time I began to compile all my notes, inputs and observations to create this report.

VIEW THE FULL REPORT HERE

5 email accounts, 56 RSS feeds, NOTHING in the inbox. Scrubbed clean. Not even read mail. This took me a couple hours to complete, but was well worth it. Take a look (click for a better view).

Clean Inbox

I’m pretty late to the game on this but I’ve had a lot of fun reading up on Hadoop and Cloudera. As I understand it, Apache Hadoop is a freeware/open-source software package that allows a lot of data-intensive computing systems to play nicely together and analyze large amounts of data. This is a top-level project from Apache who as you probably know supports a ton of software and web-related projects. Cloudera are the commercial Hadoop experts.

What strikes me as most interesting here is that the Hadoop system can bring together so many disparate functions – even during a system failure. Yes, it is self-healing. Interesting. It even does this working side-by-side of existing/legacy systems. Seems very pertinent to the ever growing mountains of data generated daily.

Massively Parallel Processing

Though I haven’t been living under a rock, today was the first I heard about Massively Parallel Processing. I honestly thought it was a joke (a strange-sounding name, to me at least) but apparently it’s very real and is, essentially, a multiprocessing architecture that uses up to thousands of processors.

Our dear friends at WikiPedia have this to say:

Massive parallel processing (MPP) is a term used in computer architecture to refer to a computer system with many independent arithmetic units or entire microprocessors, that run in parallel. The term massive connotes hundreds if not thousands of such units. Early examples of such a system are the Distributed Array Processor, the Goodyear MPP, the Connection Machine, and the Ultracomputer.

Some years ago many of the most powerful supercomputers were MPP systems.

In this class of computing, all of the processing elements are connected together to be one very large computer. This is in contrast to distributed computing where massive numbers of separate computers are used to solve a single problem.

The earliest massively parallel processing systems all used serial computers as individual processing elements, in order to achieve the maximum number of independent units for a given size and cost.

Through advances in Moore’s Law, single-chip implementations of massively parallel processor arrays are becoming cost effective, and finding particular application in high performance embedded systems applications such as video compression. Examples include chips from Ambric, picoChip, and Tilera.

The good people at Answers.com go into a little more detail (with images):

(Massively Parallel Processing or Massively Parallel Processor) A multiprocessing architecture that uses up to thousands of processors. Some might contend that a computer system with 64 or more CPUs is a massively parallel processor. However, the number of CPUs is not as much the issue as the architecture. MPP systems use a different programming paradigm than the more common symmetric multiprocessing (SMP) systems used as servers.

In an MPP system, each CPU contains its own memory and copy of the operating system and application. Each subsystem communicates with the others via a high-speed interconnect. In order to use MPP effectively, an information processing problem must be breakable into pieces that can all be solved simultaneously. In scientific environments, certain simulations and mathematical problems can be split apart and each part processed at the same time. In the business world, a parallel data query (PDQ) divides a large database into pieces. For example, 26 CPUs could be used to perform a sequential search, each one searching one letter of the alphabet.

To take advantage of more CPUs in an MPP system means that the specific problem has to be broken down further into more parallel groups. However, adding CPUs in an SMP system increases performance in a more general manner. Applications that support parallel operations (multithreading) immediately take advantage of SMP, but performance gains are available to all applications, simply because there are more processors. For example, four CPUs can be running four different applications. See SMP.

MPP and SMP Architecture

In MPP operation, the problem is broken up into separate pieces, which are processed simultaneously. In SMP, CPUs are assigned to the next available task or thread that can run concurrently.

An Integrated Architecture

This early Reliant 1000 from Pyramid (later Fujitsu Siemens) was an MPP machine that was combined with SMP systems to provide both kinds of processing. The SMP systems attached to the Reliant’s high-speed mesh interconnect, providing an unusual degree of flexibility and scalability. (Image courtesy of Pyramid Technology Corporation.)

ServerNet Interconnect

This is a conceptual diagram of the advanced ServerNet interconnect architecture from Tandem (later acquired by Compaq), which functioned as a high-speed switch between CPUs and I/O subsystems. It was used for both MPP applications and clusters of SMP systems. The purple and orange units are the processors and disks. The green pipes are the ServerNet mesh. (Image courtesy of Tandem Computers Incorporated.)

Berkman Center for Internet & Society

There’s been a lot of talk about Wolfram|Alpha’s Computational Knowledge Engine.

There’s a webcast from Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Here’s a blurb:

There’s been great anticipation around Stephen Wolfram’s ambitious project to create a comprehensive “computational knowledge engine.” The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University will host a sneak preview of the Wolfram|Alpha system, and a discussion of its underlying technology and implications. Participants will include Wolfram|Alpha founder Stephen Wolfram and Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Law.

Check out more here.