Tag: tech

Why Is SEO Marketing For Media Topics So Hard?

Hi, I’m “Penguin” Pete Trbovich… and you overthink SEO!

You have a great idea for a moneymaking website: You’re going to write a fandom blog for your favorite media, be it movies, TV shows, music, video games, books, comics, manga, anime, whatever. And then you’re going to post affiliate links from your site to Amazon, etc., so that fans will read about this stuff and hopefully buy some of it with a commission for you.

What a “passive-income” prospect! All we need is some content marketing, and the rest takes care of itself. People Google for this stuff all the time, so you know it’s a popular topic space.

What fandom do we pick to write about first?

Star Wars is popular, we can cash in on that fandom! Let’s see how competitive writing about Star Wars is:

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New at GeekyDomain: Geek Nostalgia

Had a heck of a week over at my GeekyDomain gig.

First there was 80s action figures. All the top action figure franchises launched with their own cartoon, back when toys were cool. I dunno what happened to toys now. Tell me something named “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” would have made it if they came out in the 2010s. Most people never even know that they were originally done as a parody of comic book franchises. To see more of the action figure 80s including the really arcane stuff, see my IMGUR gallery.

But then, as if that weren’t enough geek nostalgia, I noticed that Radio Shack / Tandy post-mortems were all over the web… but they only told half the story. As a Generation Xer, I have a duty to document my unique observation point of view in history, so I made the most definitive retrospective on Radio Shack’s rise and fall you’ll ever see online. With a gallery of Tandy handheld electronic games!

I got around to ramblin’ about the legendary Trash-80 as part of that, so for those of you looking for a broader gallery of computer nostalgia, I also did an IMGUR dump of computing history focusing on the home desktop revolution.

You see, we Gen-Xers are a sparse lot, wedged in between the teeming masses of the Boomers on one end and the Mills on the other. Gen X is the only generation with a point of view bridging the period in between. Historians decades from now are going to be pawing through records trying to find Gen-Xers, who aren’t always marked by their appreciation of prosperity.

 

An Online Freelancer Breaks Down the UpWork Top 100

UpWork, which is pretty much the definitive online freelancing platform now, just gave us all a great resource that I think hasn’t gotten enough buzz. I’m talking about the UpWork Top 100. It’s a ranking of the top 100 skills that clients seek in the freelance field.

What does it mean to me as a freelance writer? Not much at first glance – the web still needs content, I type content, there will always be a job for me. But secondary influences come into play here. My greedy little gold-plated heart wants to chase every market as it comes up. When cryptocurrency was big (the infamous BitCoin bubble of 2017), I blogged crypto. Now that legalized cannabis is hot, I’ve jumped into that market. I go where the money is.

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1980s Arcades Revisited

So I notice Millennials and Generation Z (or younger folk, if you’re sick and tired of these arbitrary generation definitions that nobody agrees on) seem to wax nostalgic for the arcade times. This, even though they may have been born long after the arcade heyday. There’s ever a word for it: anemoia, nostalgia for a time you’ve never known.

So I figured to either sharpen or alleviate some of that with an IMGUR gallery time capsule of 1980s-era video game arcades. Not so much focused on the games as on the arcades themselves, the chains and one-offs that we encountered in malls and boardwalks across the land. Then one of my freelance clients clamored for their own arcade nostalgia experience, so I posted a far more elaborate arcade rat memoir there.

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New at 123ish: Amazon Prime Day, your corporate overlord report

Yes, I know, worshiping the temple of e-Commerce is a bit far out of my usual wheelhouse, where I’m typically frolicking with Cthulhu or posting unhinged rants against palm trees. But guess what, chicken butt: Your humble author has to eat too, and articles about Amazon Prime Day brings in the bacon.

It’s funny, too, because for all the vitriol Amazon draws, it’s really just the online version of Sears-Roebuck. Present your case, John Oliver:

Now my case:

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New at 123ish: I review lots of Android stuff.

Maybe ya’all haven’t noticed yet, but *I* *freakin’* *love* *Android*! It’s the spawn of a union of two of my favorite technologies, Linux and Google, and while it’s never perfect, it’s damn near the “year of Linux on the desktop” we all yearned for.

So I reviewed a stack of apps for Android, just paying homage to the stuff that’s privileged to stay installed on my beloved tablets. There’s the top games on Android, mostly free with a couple paid-for honorable mentions. And the top free non-game apps on Android, focusing on free apps that you may not have heard of.

 

New at 123ish: The Biggest and Best Lego Sets Ever

Hey, I never did get around to writing about Legos! I loved them, my kids loved them, and there’s a nice wholesome culture of Lego hobbyists and collectors out there. So I thought I’d round up the most impressive sets released in Lego history and blog about them. Good luck tracking them down, some of these are highly sought-after collector’s items!

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You know what I haven’t blogged about in awhile? LINUX!

Anybody out there remember the elder days of yore on the web, when I was one of the few bloggers to talk about Linux and FOSS? I figured it’s time to update distro recommends for a new generation. So here’s the top five Linux distros for every kind of user.
As usual, I dodged the trendy meme distros in favor of time-honored practical systems for anybody from the most clueless newbie to the salty veteran power user. Wow, it has been a long time!

Follow on for one of my classic Linux essays, the final battle report of the Microsoft vs. Linux wars:

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IMGUR dump: Vintage Science Fiction from the Golden Age

My latest IMGUR image essay is a tour of Golden Age Science and Speculative Fiction. It’s a nostalgic trip through sci fi as I discovered it growing up, from TV series to movies to magazines to the glory of paperback novel hounding at used bookstores. It was a damn fun post to throw together and I hope everyone has fun remembering the classics or discovering the forgotten gems from the sub-Atomic Age of Sci-Fi.

UPDATE – Related science fiction stuff:

 

New at 123ish: If You Mourned NASA’a Opportunity Like A Lost Pet, This One’s For You

Why do humans anthropomorphize inanimate objects? Here we are on the brink of advances in AI, and we’re still failing the reverse Turing test with a simple shell script from the 1960s. Let’s explore the curious twists and turns of how humans relate to technology and get to know the Eliza effect. And maybe you won’t be impressed with Eliza, but you won’t be forgetting Laurie B. Andrews any time soon…

Related: My previous nattering on how much power AI is getting over us even now.

More stuff about robots and AI: