Ace of Trump: By way of introduction, I’d just say that I’m a 42 year old glaucoma specialist who’s been practicing in Illinois for 11 years after training in New York and Philadelphia.
Simon Owens: As a doctor, how efficient do you think American health insurance companies are compared to other countries?
Collision has an awesome post about urban schools using cornrows to teach math:
Such as … cornrow hair braids. Some educators realized that cornrows were a great example of fractal geometry, and developed some software that illustrates how it works. Ron Eglash of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute wrote about it on his web site:
Yesterday I got the chance to interview Aaron Pratt from SEO BuzzBox. This man is, in my view, the king of interviews. He is one of those rare people who know exactly which questions to ask, and he has been able to pull off some amazing interviews within the SEO community. It’s been great fun reading his blog over the last few months.
While preparing for Aaron’s interview I went back through all the archives of the interviews he’s done and also managed to stumble upon some of his personal sites, including one where he sells recycled rain barrels made out of plastic. Pretty interesting stuff, but don’t let that fool you – with Aaron there’s always a suspicion that there’s more than meets the eye.
On to the interview:
Hello Aaron; thanks for the interview. It’s ok if I call you Aaron, right?
Yep that’s me!
In our email exchange you called yourself a “social networker” - what is that like? How does it tie in with SEO BuzzBox?
Well to be honest I am just a regular guy with a few environmental sites who is tired of being misunderstood by Google. My sites are in “blog” format so they were heavily scraped, duplicated and thrown in the trash during the Jagger updates, but my frustration goes back much farther. Here I am in 2003 bitching and moaning about something that Matt Cutts now calls “Canonical Issues”, it was my first website and I might have sounded a bit clueless but do you notice something? I had a legitimate question and it has taken 3 years for Google to finally do something about the issue. You know who helped me better understand how to get my website marketed in these broken search engines? SEO experts! My blog is about and for them.
The “social networker” thing is a little personal joke I have but in reality it is who I am; my skill is in understanding others which is how I do my interviews and learn new things.
I’m starting to question why people blog. Part of this has to do with seeing so many interesting blogs go unnoticed. Even sadder is the case of ghost blogs – they’re writing, but no one’s coming by. The future looks even bleaker – with more and more blogs being created everyday, there is too to read, even if some of it is remarkably good (for an example, take Steve Pavlina’s blog on personal development – almost every post is eye-opening and useful to your life, but reading it all would take a month!).
I thought it would be fun to list all the different reasons people blog for - I’ve posted a few below, but I’m sure you can come up with more reasons.
It’s a sensitive issue, and one that has sparked many bitter arguments, but none lesser than the street riots and mass protests in Pakistan, Iran and other Muslim countries.
Inevitably, this has also created a lot of debate in the blogosphere – in the rest of this post, I’ll try to dissect the different arguments, and tell you what we can learn from all this.
Even though I’ve been blogging at Bloggasm since the very beginning, I haven’t formally introduced myself. So here I am:
My name is Simon Owens. I’m a 21-year-old college student in my senior year. I’ve been published in a variety of places (you can read one of my stories over here). I have a story forthcoming in Horror: The Best of 2005, which will be my first Year’s Best appearance.
I’ve worked on a variety of online projects, the most active one being Bloggasm, which seeks to interview a ton of cool bloggers. I’m also the moderator for LitHaven, which is on hiatus right now but I plan to kick-start it up again sometime in the future.
Ahmed and I plan on posting here regularly, and watch this place to see our new installment: Blogger Opinion Poll, which will be launching in a week or so to go along with our interviews.
Bloggasm is a blog run by Simon Owens that focuses on the media, with an emphasis on online media and journalism. It often features interviews with prominent bloggers, authors and journalists. If you want to request an interview, just drop us a line.