While this would have been a neat post to kick off my new domain (which currently boasts no content. At all), I must admit to not wanting a personal blog. In the traditional sense of the name, a personal blog tends to be a vanity domain of some sort (check) that a writer uses to document his or her life. Twitter without the weight limit. I like the professional-personal blog style a lot better. Bloggers taking this approach don’t write about what they cooked for dinner or whether their heating bill went up last month. People like Dean Chew and Kate Morris, who tagged me in this “7 things” series, combine their personal voices with professional subjects. I’m not even sure that I want my site to be a blog at all, but this could have at least been its About page!

However, I’m quite busy right now, moving to another country and thus I still don’t have a site of my own. What I do have, however, are seven small stories about myself. And who doesn’t like the sound of their fingers tapping away about themselves?

1. I swam 800m without stopping when I was three.
   It was the day before I turned four, but I swam sixteen lengths of Dunedin’s 50m Moana pool, non-stop, when I was still three years old. Just over twelve years later, I would win my first national open swimming medal in the same pool in the women’s individual medley. It was silver.
2. Eleven of my 24 birthdays have taken place “overseas.”
   Due to summer swimming competitions in Australia often taking place at the end of January, I spent my 12th, 13th, 14th and 16th birthdays in Sydney. Birthdays 19 through 24 were spent in the United States. I will fly to the United Kingdom to live the day after my 25th birthday.
3. My family lived in the Caribbean for two years.
   In April 2003, my father began working on the island of St. Croix, sixty miles from Puerto Rico in the U.S. Virgin Islands. It was a huge change from New Zealand. The island was very strange. On every second corner, there was devastating poverty, boredom and disrepair, but around the next, there were resorts and restaurants and orange drinks with pink umbrellas. My parents’ condo had a swimming pool, and on the other side of the swimming pool’s fence, a beach and the Caribbean Sea. However, three blocks away, there were knife crimes and derelict government buildings whose windows and doors had been blown in during a hurricane that took place in 1989. It was 85 degrees Fahrenheit at five o’clock in the morning, the mosquitoes were relentless and no amount of rum could kill the feeling of isolation in civilisation.

   This said, we had some fantastic times there. The rum! My God. The island is home to the Cruzan distillery, which makes highly-rated, award winning rum that I can finally find in the Northwest. It’s amazingly cheap at Christiansted bars. In fact, low-end stuff is so cheap that a Rum-and-Coke contains less Coke than rum because the Coke costs more. The beaches are as good as they are in the television commercials for Royal Caribbean cruises (even though cruise ships stopped coming to St. Croix years ago). My parents will tell different stories about St. Croix because they actually stayed there for the majority of those two years, whilst I came and went during university holidays. Good and bad, however, living in the Virgin Islands is something I’m really glad I did.

4. The first time I arrived in the U.S. was the day I moved here.
   I have a habit of doing that: packing my things and moving across the world. Well no, I’ve done it once and I don’t plan on doing it again for a while after I do it this once more. However, it is true that I’d never visited North America before I arrived in Seattle in August 2002 to go to university. I’d been to a majority of Western European countries (seriously), four or five places in Asia and a small collection of South Pacific islands. America, however, was unchartered, so what better way than to get to know these United States than to move to them?
5. I can be a bit of a wimp, but
   the most satisfying thing I ever said to someone who’d hurt me was to the former national coach of New Zealand swimming. When I was fifteen, he’d told me late one night after a long day of travelling that I’d never amount to anything as a swimmer due to a lack of physical ability and a bad personal coach. I should, he said, quit, as I was going to end up an embarrassment to New Zealand swimming. I was, to put it mildly, completely destroyed. We were well-conditioned to fear and admire and respect this guy, and he had a lot of power. He was a buddy-buddy, call me by my first name type on the surface, but he was nothing of the sort underneath. No official should have that sort of influence, but he did.

   Eight months later, at the meet where I won my first national medal at Moana pool, I noticed this national coach making his way to me across the pool deck. We were going to meet face-to-face. He’d opened his mouth, big cocky smile attached, to say hello. But really, fuck that. I wasn’t even going to let him get the “h” out. “I think,” I said, as I moved slightly to the right to pass him by, “that you and I should maintain our distance. Mr. Naylor.”

   The next time he spoke to me was two years later, presenting me with a gold medal at another national championship. He offered me a half-hearted, “congratulations”, but I like to think he was actually saying, “I was wrong.”

6. I’m crazy about Top Gear.
   This is well known to my friends and a number of the people who follow me on Twitter. I really love the British TV show featuring Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May and would give up a minor holiday (but not Christmas) to go to a filming. It’s one of the more popular shows in the UK and has quite a following abroad, but given that I don’t watch much television, my love of Top Gear is out of the ordinary. I have an unimaginable crush on Richard Hammond and can accurately recall the outcome of most of their challenges, especially those which involve cross-city or cross-country races. I didn’t even notice when Jeremy made those terrible lorrie-driver-prostitute-killer jokes at the beginning of Season 12. Why were so many people surprised? It’s Jeremy!
7. Despite the places I’ve lived and my dislike of my accent, I’m a proud, and typical, Kiwi.
   We don’t go home much and we hold residencies, citizenships and visas for numerous countries. I really don’t like my accent. However, we bore our friends by pointing out New Zealand wine and beer in the supermarket and we stay up all night to watch any New Zealand-related event on TV. We only figure out what New Zealand’s like once we’ve not lived there for a decade and then we’re sort of fascinated by it. I get a lot of shit for having lived all over the place and now having a ticket to somewhere else, but where I come, I’m just normal. We do this. So I’ll keep saying “sweet as” and not understand why you want to know what is comparably sweet, but the next international plane ticket I have is to Heathrow.

And now to tag some other people:

Lisa Ditlefsen
@LisaDitlefsen

Julie Joyce
@juliejoyce

Rob Kerry (who probably won’t do it, the lazy bastard)
@evilgreenmonkey

Ciaran Norris
@ciaranj

Tom Critchlow
@tomcritchlow

Kalena Jordan
@kalena

Michael Motherwell
@motherwell

I’m speaking at the free conference W-Tech about Managing your Online Profile. I do hope you’ll come for the evening networking if not the day of talks as well.  Not only are tons of businesses hiring, i-level is hiring too (including jobs not listed on the site) and I’ll be happy to let you know about the company and what jobs we have on offer.  Since this is a day about work and jobs for women, it got me thinking about my personal experiences of discrimination within IT as a woman and what I’ve done to overcome them.

One thing I’ve had to overcome is the sense that I need to have mastered all skills required for a job in order to apply for it.  Most employers do not expect an applicant to match the skill set exactly and most men will apply for a job if they have 50% of the skills required.  A woman will only apply if she has mastered 80% of them.  A re-education is required on both sides but that is one reason there are less women in IT.  If job descriptions were crafted with this in mind, more women would be captured by focusing on only core essential requirements and focusing on what is actually needed.  Many jobs are currently a wishlist employers know will never be filled.  I blogged about these kinds of jobs, praising reasonable ones and mocking unreasonable ones.

One of the things that continues to shock, annoy and anger me is the disparity in pay between men and women for the same work.  When comparing like to like – so a marketing director to a marketing director, women are *still* paid less than men for doing the same job.  I was shown an article in, I believe, the times saying the Equality Commission was guilty of paying women less than men for doing the same job.

If you look around, you’ll see a variety of excuses being made about why women make less than men for the same job, including lifestyle choice.  Problem with that is that comparing job with job and ignoring age women are still paid less. Worse yet, sometimes the reason is a lie.

One problem I have found, reiterated by my wonderful boss at Gordano is that women are less likely to ask for a raise.  They may feel grateful or even that the boss will be equitable and offer a fair raise if the woman is deserving.  One thing I learned from my specialised honours degree in psychology is that women are more likely to go for a lower skilled job they can do easily, rather than risk failure at a more difficult one.

Don’ let these things be barriers for you.  Be aware and push beyond them and make sure you are being paid what you are worth.  You have experience, knowledge, expertise and drive. Don’t let anyone undervalue you.  Come join me and over 400 other women already going to W-Tech 2009 and find just what you deserve!

Just so it is clear, I love working at i-level.  It is about as close to my dream job as I am going to get.  I work with a group of fab people, in a great area, in fantastic offices and I’m having a blast.  I cannot emphasise enough how much I love working at i-level and I’d recommend working here to everyone!

Ok,so I was going to leave it, not going to get all het up about it. But nah….I’m a Viking, my brain explodes if I don’t say what I think.

SEO Chicks has been going now since June 2007, ok so 1 ½ years isn’t THAt long, but in the blogging world we could have already come and gone. SEO Chicks has done really well (or so we like to think), the bloggers we now have on board are fantastic. Our reputation has grown and our goal has been achieved, yep we are chicks and we know search ;p

When I first looked for domains for the blog I was quite set on wanting to call it “SEO Chicks”, but the domain seochicks.com was taken, it had been bought a while back but nothing was on it. I had to make a decision, should I think of another name or should I chance it? I chanced it and bought seo-chicks both .com and .co.uk But it HAD to bite me in the ass one day, I’m not stupid, I knew it would. But I remain the right to still get pissed off about it (I’m a woman after all). The people that own SEOChicks.com has now finally decided to go live with something on the domain BUT funnily enough the site has pretty much the same colours as ours (ok so a different shade of green)! And It’s 5 women offering SEO, PPC, Social Media etc, but as opposed to blogging about it they are actually offering out their services. But I can’t help but feel a bit cheated, that they are jumping on the success of the “brand” that we worked hard to build. Although SEO Chicks was never meant to be an agency or similar, they aren’t technically saying they are us, but it’s still a bit cunning. I must admit I’m not keen on people thinking these are THE SEO Chicks. Maybe I should buy “THEseochicks.com”, oh wait, I just did!

Ok I will stop moaning now, I just want to make it clear to everyone that seochicks.com has nothing to do with THE SEO Chicks.

Cause we’re the real SEO Chicks, yes we’re the real SEO Chicks
All you other SEO Chicks are just imitating
So won’t the real SEO Chicks please stand up!
Please stand up, please stand up?

I want to refer back to a post Julie wrote a couple of months ago about writing in SEO. I’ve struggled with this a lot recently, because sometimes it’s just torturous to come up with something new. I get to work at about eight-forty-five every morning and leave sometime before six, and I do SEO all day. Sometimes I do extra things when I get home too, but there is often just nothing noteworthy to say about it. I fix mashed up redirects. I figure out who should link to what from where. I do things that interest me, but do you really want me to write blog posts about the merits of dropping IIS servers off of cliffs? Well maybe that wouldn’t be a bad post. But I, too, get “so bored with the SEO.”

It’s not a boring job, but it’s boring to watch people justify their constant stream of blog posts about it. The situation is even worse when you get into social media blogging. In total honesty, I want to read and write more posts like this, composed in a fit of genius by my coworker Rebecca. I am so bored with the endless rattling about things that don’t matter: If a blogger has nothing important to say, at least do something funny. Please don’t compose another trail of drivel about corporate social media efforts. Even when I don’t read them, I know they exist, just like I know Sarah Palin exists even though she’s not going to be Vice President. (Can I get a hell yeah? Ahem. Excuse me.)

In that vein, I’m not going to write about SEO. I’m going to pretend that this is a more generic technology blog (which it often is, really). People often write lists of predictions for the new year, and this fits into much the same genre. Technology of all types, but especially of the Internet related variety, has changed my life in astonishing ways in the last two and a half years. Here are more things I see changing soon, and some things I don’t see ever changing.

1. The end of text messaging. I pay way too much for an SMS plan that I don’t use. Nearly everyone who I want to contact in a moblie environment has a telephone that supports an email client. Most of them also carry Facebook and Twitter with them wherever they go. Why do I pay for a text messaging plan on my phone when I also have a data plan? The only solution for SMS plans’ survival is that they become incredibly cheap or free. As more “normal people” adopt BlackBerries, iPhones and other incarnations of walking laptops, more of us will realise that expensive texting plans are a ripoff.The only person who will suffer here is my Dad. He has email on his telephone but can’t use it. I still receive punctuation-free texts from Dad at seven in the morning on Saturdays. This will never change.
2. The end of small plastic cards. I am old enough to remember when New Zealand switched from large, paper drivers’ licenses to plastic cards, and I assume I’ll also see such cards start to disappear. I also remember when my parents stopped using cheques and started paying with plastic. Given the right technology and security, we could put an end to this…

   

   … and introduce the era of this.

   

   I see no reason why this is a crazy idea. The technology that’s already gone into iPhones’ touchscreens allows them to do some pretty incredible things. My dear old BlackBerry Curve has a little way to go before it’s capable of paying for my shopping, but I can certainly see it happening in the relatively near future.

3. The complete and utter death of offline yellow pages. Forever. Gone. Out. Good-freakin-bye. They delivered copies of the yellow pages to my area yesterday. I came home and there was one outside the front door. In the past, they’d just leave them out by the street, near the letterboxes, and expect us to pick them up. No one ever did, so now they’ve taken to placing them on our doorsteps so that we have to at least move them before we can get inside. I begrudgingly brought mine in. Here is what it’s doing right now. It will do this until I take it to the rubbish bin.

   

   Can we please admit, finally, that the phone book should die? I’ll get people in comments who’ll say, “but I still use it!” Seriously: get a telephone that knows how to work teh Googles and save all all that paper. I guarantee that I can find something faster and more reliably on my laptop or mobile phone than I can in this massive book. Although people have been predicting this for years, the fact that they felt the need to drop the books on our doorsteps this year confirmed to me that offline yellow pages are suffering badly.

4. The reintroduction of professional journalism.
   I say this as someone who contributes to multiple blogs and who spoke on a blogging panel a month ago at Pubcon in Las Vegas: I dislike blogging. I don’t like the word. The term “blogger” usually elicits emotions of disdain from me. There are too many hacks out there who publish crap. Additionally, I’m not the only person who feels like this. As more people take up the cause of writing about their fantastically boring lives, many people will react by embracing writing as a profession again.Writers will once more need some sort of credentials in order to be taken seriously. I don’t mean that they’ll need degrees. However, they’ll need some talent with language and knowledge of their field. Quality newspapers don’t hire people to write their technology articles who are borderline-illiterate and who don’t actually do any technological work. The idiot-blogger celebrity phenomena will go the way of the yellow pages.
5. Appliances and gadgets that are Internet-capable. Why can’t I upload photographs directly from my digital camera to Flickr? I can do that from my mobile phone, and I have to imagine that cameras with degrees of Internet capability already exist. However, I should be able to select photographs on my camera and send them directly to a Flickr account. I could be logged into a Facebook account, probably via an application similar to the one on my telephone, and create new albums on that site as well. This completely cuts out the “middle man” of my computer.Although they’re hellishly expensive, some appliances like this already exist. A Seattle coffee shop near the old SEOmoz offices had a coffee machine that “talked” to its fellow coffee machines in order to determine the optimal temperature and amount of water needed to make the best cup of coffee. It was sort of ridiculous, but a sign of future normalcy at the same time.Unnecessary, irrelevant applications and appliances will make their way onto the market, but it’ll be the small, sensible changes that make a big difference. Cameras that upload straight to the Internet aren’t revolutionary, but they’re logical and useful.

And now for things that will never change:

1. Search engines will never be defunct…… although I’m willing to admit that they may one day be very different. This said, the idea that vertical search and social media will completely take over from generic online search doesn’t seem quite right, at least not for a long time. Just now, I saw somebody I follow on Twitter ask a question that she could have “Googled.” She received an answer. However, we often overlook the fact that Google would have answered that question as well. What social media is good for are questions that people can answer quickly, and the additional information that they can provide. It still stands that traditional search will win when nobody knows the answer or is around to provide it. And holy shit, I included something about SEO in this post.
2. Retail stores will still bring in customers. I’d file my fingernails online if it were possible, but I still don’t fully embrace online shopping. The main reason for this is that I like to try things on and I hate sending things back. Therefore, if I’m going to buy clothes, I want to buy them at the store. There will always be people like me who like offline shopping.Additionally, I’m never going to buy something really important online, like a car. I want to take a look at something that expensive and important before I buy it. I’m sure people have bought and rented property online before, which is an awful idea unless geography truly prevents the person from visiting the location.
3. Geography will never cease to exist.
   It makes no difference that, in looking at my Twitter feed or Facebook home page or Gtalk IM client, I can talk to people in Australia, Florida, Auckland, Washington DC, London, Seattle, California, Texas and North Carolina. The Internet doesn’t make up for the fact that I am not there with them.
   I have a couple of friends whom I talk to daily. We joke that when we’re not face to face, we live in each other’s computers, but it doesn’t work like that. Nothing makes up for being sat in front of someone–no amount of video chat, Twitter, email or anything else. We’ve liberalised communication to the extent that I can contact someone in France as easily as my next door neighbour, but until we can email ourselves somewhere, geography still wins. I’ll still buy aeroplane tickets. We’ll still miss people with whom we have a constant line of communication, and we’ll never completely close the gaps physical distance creates.

And that’s about where I stand on these few random technology-related subjects. I won’t buy online, but I’ll pretend as hard as I can–and in vain– that my far-away friends are actually here. I’ll contradict the fact that I write blog posts with the statement that blogging usually falls in between boring and asinine. And, all the while, I wait for the day when my coffee machine knows how to make a better drink than I do.

The accusation was levelled at the SEO Chicks recently that they had become semi-rock stars and had no time for chatting to people. As a person who often wears themselves out trying to meet people, and has had various parts of her body assaulted at these events while meeting people, I was quite distressed that anyone would think that of any of us chicks.

At the last LondonSEO I spent time walking through extreme crowds, trying not to get my body touched in inappropriate ways while handing out chocolate. You’d be surprised what the poor thing gets subjected to on a regular basis. The chocolate lasted about an hour, part of which I was stationary for. I tried to chat and say hello to lots of people, some of whom I didn’t know. In fact, I described what I was wearing on Twitter and asked people to say hello.

Chocolate is my way of saying “hello” while still hiding behind something, much like I hid behind LisaD when Vanessa Fox said hello. Not my most shining moment but to me she is still a major rock star and I’m still just a shy fat kid who can never hope to have a conversation with her about encouraging more women in to high tech despite that being something we both dig. So as Vanessa approached us, I fled, hiding behind LisaD and Jane despite wanting to say hi and have a conversation about the work Girl Geek Dinners was doing encouraging girls into technology at high schools. I’ll be posting here about various chocolates I love with suggestions to help for the holidays if you’re looking for something different to give.

Lisa does get surrounded quite quickly by fans of SEO Chicks. I have seen her swamped by people almost instantly upon entering a venue and watched as she politely tried to get a drink or dinner or something. Far from being unapproachable, she is warm and open and friendly. I strive to be more like LisaD. She rocks in being a wonderful, caring person and someone anyone can chat to. I think that’s why she’s been interviewed so often – she is a wonderful person and everyone wants to hear more.

Julie is amazing. She is a strong independent character and gave me chocolate when I was upset last time I saw her. She can seem aloof simply because she radiates this strength in her personal aura. She is far from unapproachable and she’s always got a friendly smile. If you say “Hi – I love reading your blog posts and think Adam Ant rules” I am sure you’ll get a lively and animated conversation from her. It can be hard to feel comfortable approaching someone whose blog you’ve been reading but I’ve done it and it’s great when you make a new friend that way.

Jane Copland is a wonderful, warm person who would welcome anyone saying hello. I know she’s a bit of a rock star from her SEOmoz job as well as being a Chicklet but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to chat to everyone. She is a wonderful, warm and open person and has a bout of shyness just like the rest of us – especially when being put on the spot in a presentation Jane is so darn friendly I think she’d probably starve if she did what she wanted to and chatted to everyone.

Beyond those of us who were at LondonSEO and SMX London, I can say from having met Stephanie that she is a wonderful person who gives a lot of herself to everything she does. I’m sure we’d love to see her blog here more often but she’s also rocking the world of social media and working hard just like Anita who is constantly head down, working. Anita was at PubCon last year and after having to spend 30h in transit I was shocked she made the trip! She is such a friendly and wonderful person I’m sure if you want to chat with her you’d find yourself instantly engaged in a fun and interesting conversation. Donna is a joy to email and she’s a powerhouse of information. She is just so extremely smart and she’s been around forever it can be a bit overwhelming to talk to her but just pick a topic, say hello and chat. I am sure she’s going to have a huge amount of great info and if you but say hello you’ll find yourself swept into a conversation. And Lauren is so friendly and so much fun I cannot imagine her being unapproachable. She was great when I was in NY for the first time in my life and helped me find my way around, accompanied me around and was with me at the very end as I tried to shift the stuff in my bags around. I was under my luggage limit by less than a pound so her efforts meant I didn’t have to do it at the airport

The SEO Chicks have not become unapproachable – far from it we work hard to be approachable. Pick a subject, say hello and engage us in conversation. We all have blog posts you can choose from or pick a recent topic or anything. Say hi, let us know you read our blog and chat with us. Please.

I’m speaking at the IMS conference which is free to get in to (but £15 on the door so sign up in advance!). I’ll be speaking on the Dark Side of Social Media along with other folks from the SEO community so come say hi.

It seems like years ago now that I moved into my own apartment and started looking at cable and Internet options. In actuality it was only two months ago. When I discovered that Verizon Fios was available in my location, I automatically went online to activate an account and schedule an installation. I wanted the fastest Internet possible!

The online activation was simple and easy to use. In about five minutes I put in my information and scheduled a date. One second later I got what I thought was a confirmation email. The email lacked any sort of number or code however. I called customer service to alert them about my order and their neglect on confirmation numbers. The customer service rep explained that sometimes ‘the system‘ takes 24 hrs to send a number and I might get the email tomorrow. I hate phone calls like this.

These sort of phone calls continued for a few weeks and I started to get really upset. I had to steal crappy internet at home and it was not fun! So I started expressing my Fios related sorrows on Twitter. Within a few minutes, I received a DM from the Fios twitter guy. Finally! We talked for a bit on Twitter (see pictures) and I got a call from a few new Fios people who helped me and got my Fios installed on A Sunday morning. Now I have the fastest internet evar!

The morale of the story is that if this Verizon Fios employee was not monitoring Twitter for brand mentions, my anger would have left me to some serious brand bashing. Instead of writing this nice blog post that includes a link to the Verizon Fios site.. I would have posted a negative blog post, continued to tweet about how awful they were, and possibly participated in forum bashing. Not that I have a huge voice but I’m louder than just a regular chick, because I’m and SEO chick!!