GoodBuyGuys Blog

  I came across an interesting article in last week’s Wall Street Journal regarding the continuing strength of commodity prices based on demand in China.

This article speculated that a lot of the Chinese buying was a stockpiling of material for which China’s manufacturers had no real demand.  If that’s true, then the Chinese buying binge may be over.

This may well explain the recent downturn in copper prices after a steady rise over the last six months. This rise made little sense in light of the overall worldwide decline in manufacturing.  If this downturn is real, it could be a harbinger for lots of commodity price reductions.

Why do we care?  The cost of extension cords (copper and rubber), mic stands (steel and aluminum), tape (cotton, oil and chemicals) and batteries (tin plate and many minerals) are all tied to world commodity prices.

Lets hope that if this recent reversal in commodity prices is real, that we will see it passed through to the products we sell.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Hosa and Entertainment One extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands.   Click here to sign up for our newsletter.  Lots more good ideas at our Twitter feed.

I said I’d get back to you with a report regarding Google “knol”, their new project to build a knowledge base.

I posted two knol articles back at the end of April to see if Google was ready to take on Wikipedia. I’m proud to report that my knol posting about microphone stands has had a total of 42 page views, several of which I am sure were me.

No one has bothered to rate it and no one has made any collaborative contributions.

While it appears that I might be right about Google not being in a position to challenge Wikipedia, I am certainly wrong about Google using knol as another way to display relevant ads.

The google ads on my mic stand knol page are about cell phones.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Hosa and Entertainment One extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands.   Click here to sign up for our newsletter.  Lots more good ideas at our Twitter feed.

I find that I have gradually moved from being amazed at how many great media services I can subscribe to on the internet to being just distracted.

The time required to keep with with online subscriptions to  Netflix, audio books,  The New York Times,  satellite TV, Itunes, Pandora, etc. has become a time issue.  It makes me less and less interested in taking the time to look into the next newest, greatest idea.

Just keeping up with the passwords is a chore, never mind the payments.

Why not a media aggregator that could handle all the details of every media account you subscribe to.  You would log in to a single account to access all  your services (premium & free)and make a single monthly payment that the aggregator would distribute to everyone you owe.

A single log in would quickly tell you how much you are spending and remind you that it might be time to cancel or downgrade a service that you longer provides real value.

The aggregator could potentially increase their revenue by making suggestions about new services or changes in service level based on an analysis of your current subscriptions.

Unfortunately, right now I’m too busy to get rich.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Hosa and Entertainment One extension cords and OnStage Stand mic stands. Sometimes we have some interesting ideas about web development too!  Click here to sign up for our newsletter.  Lots more good ideas at our Twitter feed.

Yesterday, I posted some comments on Google knol and I have already gotten a couple of questions answered.

While the articles don’t show up in search when the key words are used by themselves, when you combine the key words with the term “knol” the , mic stand article pops up number one.  Yesterday’s blog posting is returned in google search as well.  I certainly never had a posting show up and go to #1 so quickly, regardless of what it was.

I returned to the knol on microphone stands using another browser and discovered that I was able rate it.  Needless to say, I gave it four stars.

If google allows the writer of an article to control who can edit it and allows the author to rate his own article, I doubt if knol will be around for long.

Rest easy, Wikipedia.
GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Hosa and Entertainment One extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands. Sometimes we have some interesting ideas about web development too!  Click here to sign up for our newsletter.

Have you heard of Google knol?  I hadn’t either until yesterday.

Knol is an acronym created by Google, and it means “a unit of knowledge“.

Knol is a new content creation index from Google that has a lot of similarities to Wikipedia.  Individuals are allowed to post articles on any subject of their choosing and then the articles can be commented on and edited by other users of the service.  Unlike Wikipedia, knol will allow the creation and viewing of multiple articles on the same subject and the author can control how his or her work is edited.

I first came across it through an online posting by Jason Calacanis, a highly regarded web guru.  Mr. Calacanis went to great lengths to draw interesting and accurate between KNOL and traditional content creators like the New York Times.  These parallels led Calacanis to determine (and I agree) that this project was Google’s latest attempt (not unlike YouTube) to get into the content creation business.

It should be obvious that a business that has become the defacto provider of indexed search results faces potential conflict of interest problems if it is the creator and controller of the content it returns with its search results.

Since we are currently indexed at the top of page one for a number of  Google search terms,  I have created a couple of KNOL articles on microphone stands and gaffers tape to see how quickly Google might index them and how high they might rise in search rankings.

You can take a look at these articles here:

microphone stands

gaffers tape

If you’re interested in whether this test turns up any interesting results, check back here from time to time.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Hosa and Entertainment ONe extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands. Sometimes we have some interesting ideas about web development too!  Click here to sign up for our newsletter.

I spend my entire day online staring at four computer monitors.  It is not exciting as life was when I was a special event producer, but it is a heck of a lot better way to get my childrens’ tuition bills paid.

That’s the idea that led to the launching of goodbuyguys.com.

After almost thirty years in the special events production business, it just made sense to develop a web business that could take advantage of what I had learned from three decades of “hands on” experience.

A good part of my time is spent monitoring forums about audio visual and stagecraft discussions,  looking for info about how the products we sell are being discussed and used in the field.

Unfortunately, most of the moderators of forums that cater to those in the sound and lighting business take exception with the idea that you can combine a production career with supplying products that you used successfully when you actually used what you sell now.

It seems that if those who control these forums think that you make a living selling something, then you are automatically disqualified from posting useful information to their forum.

It is difficult to understand how bringing practical knowledge to the marketplace somehow disqualifies the seller from being able to answer questions and comment on forum user postings.  Would you rather buy your gaffers tape from someone who has taped down enough cable to go to the moon and back, or someone who has spent their entire life in a sales office.  The sense that selling a product discounts the value of the sellers experience means that the real loser is the person who posts a forum question.  They are denied access to what may be a lifetime of experience just because the email address of the person answering their questions points to a domain that sells the product.

As the web continues to build a larger and larger database of links back to the sellers domain, it becomes even more likely that the forum administrator will disallow postings from an experienced seller with real world experience.

The end result of this sort of thinking means that the forum subscribers are denied access to a lot of valuable information.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Hosa and Entertainment ONe extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands.  Look here for good information about web development too!

If you want something you have posted on the web to be found by search engines, one of the most important aspects of that web page is your choice of keywords.  Keywords may not actually appear in the text of the page, but they are placed in the page’s code in such a way as to allow “spiders”, the agents of search engines that constantly crawl the internet and report back to the search engine’s indexing function, to figure out what is contained in the page.

If you want your pages to be found, the quickest way to decide which key words to use is to look at the key words used by the pages with which you are competing.

Do a quick check of your competition for the information you want to be found by the search engines.  Open the top scoring pages and then “right click” on those pages.

What you will see is the underlying code that makes up the page that you are viewing.  This is very different information than the web page you were just viewing and this is the information the search engine spiders will use to decide what is on your page and how to deliver it to those looking for your information or product.

When you search for “microphone stands”, our #1 scoring page “buymicstand.com” appears at the top of Google results.  When you right click on that page, among a lot of other nonsensical information, you will see:

 <META NAME=“KEYWORDS” CONTENT=“microphone,mic stands,boom mic stands,microphone stands, straight microphone stands”>

This tells the search engine something about what is contained in the page and how it matches up with your search criteria.

While you may need to be careful using some copyrighted material found in the keywords of a page’s source code, for the most part there is no reason that you can’t use the same keywords on your page that your competitor uses.

There is no quicker way to starting on getting your pages found by your potential customers’ search.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Hosa and Entertainment ONe extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and lots of other useful production supplies.

  I have battled for a couple of years with a notebook computer I bought before going on vacation.  My notebook had died, and I knew I would need a computer to keep in touch with my office.

I could find nothing available that ran Windows XP, so I took the plunge and bought a computer that ran Windows Vista.  I have regretted it every day of the last two years.  What an awful operating system!

I was delighted to learn that Acer’s new line of netbook computers used Windows XP, so I gave their Aspire line a try.  I love it.

Having a tiny computer that is designed primarily for internet based work makes a lot of sense and the Aspire One speaks directly to this new approach to personal computing.

The cost of a fully featured netbook (1 gig of ram/160 gig hard drive) has fallen below $300.00 and this segment of computing is ready to blast off.  Using a browser like Firefox to access online applications like Google Apps for word processing and database managment minimizes the compromises created by this Netbook’s lack of an optical drive for loading software. Minimizing the number of applications actually residing on the computer means faster startups and less time in changing your activities.

Unfortunately, Microsoft has already announced their plans to offer a version of upcoming Windows 7 specifically for netbooks.  XP works great for this type of computing.  Why not leave well enough alone?

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Hosa and Entertainment ONe extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands.

We built our online and catalog business with the support of many small local and regional arts groups, and their health is essential to our ongoing success.  These are not the best of days for this kind of organization.

I was intrigued by a story on NPR’s Morning Edition today about an arts group  called  Fractured Atlas.  Fractured Atlas, a non-profit based in New York, provides much-needed support to artists and arts organizations so that they can function as more effective businesses.

We know that many valuable arts groups will not make it through these challenging economic times, and Fractured Atlas is playing a key role in helping those groups most challenged.  They offer a broad range of programs and services, including professional development, access to funding information, insurance and arts advocacy.

Our business has been built on extending credit to arts groups of all sizes, and I have never regretted those decisions.  The financial health of local theatre and dance companies, orchestras and performance venues is critical to our own success. We applaud the efforts of Fractured Atlas and others who provide this type of support.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Permacel gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Hosa and Entertainment ONe extension cords, OnStage Stand mic stands, and lots of other useful production supplies.

Anybody who has tried to us a web service called RSS (Really Simple Syndication) to subscribe to online news, podcasts, blogs, etc. knows that the first “S” in RSS stands for anything but “simple“.

In theory, by subscribing to a RSS “feed”, updated information is pushed at you by the website hosting the new information so that you don’t have to go looking for it.  Setting up this service has been really confusing and a lot of people don’t take advantage of it.

A version of Google called iGoogle has finally made the “simple” part of RSS really simple.

If you haven’t tried iGoogle, you ought to take a look.  iGoogle lets you set up a personalized version of Google which can is customized for each user.

In addition to things like local weather and links to favorite web sites, you can also use iGoogle to subscribe to as many RSS feeds as you want.  When information is updated in the feeds you have subscribed to, this information shows up on your iGoogle page.

We have RSS feeds generated by GoodBuyGuys.com which sends out new product information, and a feed from this blog that is distributed to anyone who wants to subscribe to it.

I include these RSS feeds in those I can see on my iGoogle page, and when we update something, it shows up on iGoogle within minutes.

Already got an iGoogle page?  Here’s a link to very easy instructions for adding RSS feeds.

GoodBuyGuys.com is your online source for Shurtape gaffers tape, Duracell Procell batteries, MagLite flashlights, Nashua duct tape, Bay State wire ties, Electratrac and Coast Wire extension cords , OnStage Stand mic stands and “value added” customer service.