Google Trends For Searches on Colorado

If you should do a Google search for either "Boulder Network" or "Boulder Networking", the links related to the Boulder Professionals Network group will show up in the first two pages of the search results. But does that really matter? How often do people search for these terms?
To do a comparitive analysis I used Google Trends to see the relative search volume of "Boulder Network" and compare it to other relevant searches.  To get some perspective I use "Denver Broncos" as the reference (as I expect this search to be more prevalent and more popular).  Here is the Google trend:

As you can see from the results, "Colorado Jobs" is the highest ranked search term after the most popular "Denver Broncos", with "Boulder Jobs" ranked distant third with one sixteenth of the search volume of "Denver Broncos".  Search volume for "Colorado Network" registered same volume as "Boulder Jobs".

I can safely state that search for Jobs is ranked higher than just "networking" or "social networking" specific to Colorado or Boulder. So coming up first in the Google search results mean very little if the search volume is negligible.  If I want to have a bigger impact with the pages, they should come up top for search phrase, "Colorado Jobs".

Interestingly, the search volume for "colorado relocating" is negligible, however, "Colorado Real estate" comes up comparable to "Colorado Jobs" and "Denver Broncos". If I were to use "Paris Hilton" as reference, the previously popular "Denver Broncos" is now just 1/13th of  Paris. 

Second Best Place to Retire?

U.S. News writers profile 10 healthy retirement spots around the country, and Boulder is ranked number 2.
Retire? Is that going to be good?

The list of top 10 are

1. Bella Vista, Arkansas
2. Boulder, Colorado
3. Eden Prairie, Minnesota
4. Green Valley, Arizona
5. Issaquah, Washington
6. Longmeadow, Massachusetts
7. Portland, Maine
8. Punta Gorda, Florida
9. Reston, Virginia
10. Walnut Creek, California

60% growth in the last 1 month

What a difference one month makes!
The Boulder Net Linked In Group  took six months to reach a milestone of 100 members.
But in the month of July it grew 60%, adding 60 members in 30 days.

What changed?  LinkedIn  finally added search functionality to the Groups. So when you search for Boulder, the Boulder Net shows up in the first page.

The other is the viral effect that is proportional to the number of members. As their LinkedIn status updates show that they joined the group, more people in their network see it and click on the group to join.

It will be interesting to see if this growth is just the initial bump or a sustainable one.

Google Closing Denver Offices

Blogscoped reports on Google closing its Denver (and Dallas) offices after an operational review. Google may have high cash flow and revenues, it may spend close to $54 million on food expenses to feed its employees, but it is practical in determining the business case for each office. If a location does not have a positive NPV or fit in its long term strategy, it does not to continue with it.

(quote from blogscoped)

Following an operational review, we are consolidating our offices in Dallas and Denver, as we currently have at least two offices in each of these markets. This reorganization is designed to ensure we are serving the needs of our customers, stakeholders and Googlers [Google employees] efficiently. These are the only two cities affected by this review, and all affected Dallas and Denver Googlers will be offered opportunities within the company.

Boulder Net Reaches Its First Milestone - 100 members

The group on LinkedIn was started in January and it took six months to grow to 100 members. Compared to most groups on LinkedIn this is a small group. The group could have been bigger if I had approved the requests from those "LION"s who join any and every group just to get access to LinkedIn members. I turn away those requests unless they show some Colorado in their past.

The Blog on the other hand gets no readers. It serves only one purpose now, to get Google search presence.

May be things will change in the second of this year.

Hi, I am Normal

In one of the Sponge Bob episodes, he gives up his quirks to become normal. As his behavior changes so does his contours and becomes perfectly smooth and rounded. Normal without his laugh. Normal, as in having nothing to talk about but "wonderful weather we are having". Normal, without any imperfections and sharp edges. Normal, as in boring.

In his new book How States Got Their Shapes, Mark Stein describes Colorado's borders as "boring" (compared t Maryland that has the shape of a squirt gun).

Why does Colorado have such boring borders? Disappointingly, many of the Western states fell victim to carto-conformity when Congress clipped and hacked aborning states to a rough equality of size. So Colorado was designed to have 7 degrees of longitude in width and 4 degrees of latitude in width. Stein says, "The northern and southern borders of Colorado are artifacts of something remarkable. Or perhaps they are artifacts of something we think is remarkable, but which goes on more than we realize. They are artifacts of foresight and planning by our elected representatives."

Get in! Get out! Get on with your life!

Web surfers are getting more practical and impatient. A new report that measured user web surf metrics shows that people are not biting the tactics that are designed t keep the user longer or subscribe to a service.

The annual report into web habits by usability guru Jakob Nielsen shows people are becoming much less patient when they go online.

Instead of dawdling on websites many users want simply to reach a site quickly, complete a task and leave.

Most of the time people enter the site in the middle, through a search engine, and not through your home page. So every page should be designed as a landing page to service the viewer else they are off. They are not going to spend time drilling down the pages. The other truth about reaching through search engines is that the domain name does not matter. It does not have to be memorable or catchy, users are going to find the site increasingly through search engines.

Dr. Nielson's next point makes me wonder if I should get rid of widgets like Newreel and slide shows from this blog.

Web users were also getting very frustrated with all the extras, such as widgets and applications, being added to sites to make them more friendly.

Such extras are only serving to make pages take longer to load, said Dr Nielsen.

Conservative Chair at CU

Does the person who runs the Boulder Net have to be a Boulderite?
Does the person who is running the Conservative chair at CU Boulder have to be a conservative?

Here is The New York Times blog article on the CU conservative chair:

[Chancellor G.P.Peterson] acknowledged that the professor of conservative thought didn’t have to be an actual conservative, and pointed out that many teachers of French “aren’t necessarily French.”

Foreclosure Hotspot

The Wall Street Journal finds foreclosure hotspot in Colorado along I-25 and I-70 corridor. The thesis attributes the causes to not only the buyer behaviors but also the builder's bet that people would be willing to live far away from where they work if they can afford their independent house.

Many of these homebuyers are underwater not just because they bought more house than their incomes could support, and not just because prices are falling. They were also betting on commute patterns and demographic expectations that are proving invalid.

These were bets on location, location, location – premised on the idea that people would be willing to live hours from anywhere for a chance to own a single-family home they could actually afford.

Do you LinkedIn?

I do not say this pejoratively, from my experience I have seen a consistent pattern in LinkedIn activities that can be tied to people's planned career moves or their expectation that something is not right at their current company. I did not do controlled experiments nor do I have hard data, but I have seen flurry of activities during layoff times. People update their profile, start making many new connections and seek out endorsements.

One thing I would say is to have your resume, LinkedIn profile and connections updated constantly and not in reaction to external events. The time to start networking is not when you need the job but when you already have one and is really looking to build a network that is not based on quid pro quo. It is very hard to make a withdrawal right away from a network. It takes time to nurture it.

So do not wait to network until you need it. In fact, the macroeconomic studies of unemployment numbers state that people who already have a job are more likely to find other jobs than those who are unemployed. This is attributed to exposure to other professionals the job provides and the stigma associated with being unemployed. When you reach out to others when you already have a job there is a higher probability of cementing a relationship because others are less worried about the give and take of the relationship.

You cannot cram an year worth of profile and network updates in a month, so pace yourself and do it more regularly.