Another Wordpress Blog

Dear Jason,

I was visiting your “Mahalo” search page result for Chicago. It’s so exciting to see our fair city has not been overlooked by your spiffy new search engine!

A few things caught my eye, and I wanted to shoot off a few small editorial tips:

1. Denver is not actually in Chicago. Therefore # Metroblogging Denver likely does not belong on the Chicago search results.
2. Northwestern University is also not in Chicago. It’s in Evanston. If you wish to give this wonderful University an SEO boost, you might want to edit the heading to read “Chicago Area Colleges and Universities.”
3. Having grown up watching the Cubs and Sox on Channels 9 and 32 respectively, I am saddened you overlooked WFLD ond WGN on your list of Chicago television stations. You instead listed Manhattan based ABC.

I know these glitches are minor and quite difficult to catch. After all, many who arrive in Chicago find themselves looking at the terrain and saying, “Look at these mountains. I must be in Denver!”

I wouldn’t even mention these annoying items if there weren’t other oddities — all of which tend decrease my confidence in Mahalo search results for unfamiliar cities I may someday visit. Maybe that’s just me.

In any case, I know you want to have a great search engine, so I thought I’d let you know.

By the way, I couldn’t help noticing the “Chicago” page was written by Evan who tells us:

I grew up in the Philadelphia area, went to music school in Boston, and now live in Los Angeles. I also briefly lived in St. Andrews, Scotland as an exchange student in high school.

You know, at first, when I read Evan’s bio, I wondered why you, Jason, assigned creating the Chicago search pages to a young man who appears to have never set foot in Chicago.

After all, who in their right mind would never assign the task of writing crochet search results to someone who does not crochet, right?

Then, I thought about your need to keep wages low and to rely on locals near you in Manhattan. At that point, echoed the words I read in your recent post, “oh, I get it now.”

Still, can I make a helpful suggestion?

Chicago is a largish city; many struggle to find decent jobs. Some may even be wiling to work at the slavishly low wages Mahalo offers. Out of the goodness of your heart, maybe you could hire a Chicagoan to help Evan complete his results?

You might also find a Chicago resident to help Laura in LA improve her Chicago restaurant and vacation results. Chicagoans love their “Chicago Style Pizza”, and it might be nice if at least one pizzeria appeared. It’s also unlikely a Chicagoan would have overlook “Navy Pier” when listing attractions; it’s rather more frequently visited than “The Art Institute” (a lovely place, and within walking distance of Navy Pier.)

On a personal note: Thank you for linking to the post I wrote about Mahalo yesterday! You will be happy to know I also got 500 unique visits yesterday. Granted, the hits were unrelated to my post about Mahalo or your link.

Nevertheless, I’m sure you will be happy for me! After all, that’s more that I got during the whole month of June and I know you will be as excited for me as I am for Mahalo!

PS. I see you are requesting stumbles, diggs and a variety of other little boosts for your “How To” pages and providing specific hyperlinks to encourage your readers. That is so thoughtful and disinterested of you. I can’t imagine why some are accusing you of being the biggest SEO of all time!

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 2nd, 2007 at 5:05 pm and is filed under Dreams of Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.