The body of James Kim, a senior CNet editor who left to find help two days ago after he and his family had been stranded in the Oregon wilderness for more than a week has been found today with the help of helicopters. Mr. Kim’s family was rescued with little wear or tear two days ago, and CNet has further details of the Kim family ordeal, but suffice it to say, its a sheer tragedy.

Sadly, it seems like when news like this breaks over the blogosphere, there don’t seem to be any happy endings; Rob Scoble and Shel Israel wrote about a similar tragedy in their book, Naked Conversations, about an individual lost to the wilderness, which found its way to the blogosphere and through it, the mainstream media.

I didn’t know James Kim, but he seemed like a great guy, and the-every-geek who made good on a major tech network. There are other things floating around the blogosphere this afternoon, but today, my prayers are with him and his family.

If you’re looking for the perfect antidote for the utterly ridiculous hype around Second Life, here’s a temporary salve. The Register reports that in Second Life, real world organization “World Development Movement” has set up a counter that registers the number of preventable deaths since 2003 — and a child loses his life every 3 seconds. Without sounding overly preachy in light of the holiday season, I think particularly its particularly choice to remind Lindizens, or whatever they’re calling themselves, that life exists beyond the virtual one — and maybe transferring some real world dollars to real world causes is possibly (maybe!) a worthwhile way to spend your time and energy.

Blogs are a great way to get your site indexed, and to show up in SERP’s.  However, it looks like they may be beta testing a new feature where Blog Results in and of themselves might get a separate spot on the Google results page.

This is really cool if you’re a blogger — not only can your site get listed organically for all the reasons Google loves blogs … but they could also get listed AGAIN or separately under a different area (at the bottom).

It sort of reminds me of how Yahoo! is inserting Yahoo! Answers at around the 7 or 10 position for certain keywords; it represents an a potential opportunity for bloggers interesting in maximizing their SEO results — and another good (future) reason to blog if you’re not doing so already.

Let’s hope Google rolls out this feature for real and for sure.

So, the snarky amongst us rejoinder “but who really has any control over anything?”, to which I would swiftly apply a boot to the head. Second Life, the most successful “Virtual” world with a “real” economy is fascinating in many aspects – the most of which is how many companies are taking this so seriously. What with the Interwebs evolving so “fast”, and this all being so “new”, I would be interested to know what a real economics nut has to say about the whole issue of a virtual economy where software can be written to copy virtual goods.

And more to the point — trying to establish a business in a existing reality which is created by someone else, and is given over to the dictums of that someone else. Sure, they have to have the appearances of being impartial for fear of angering the paying virtual folk, but let’s face it. A corporation runs that plane of existence that you’re trying to do business on.

While the idea of virtual dollars are dancing running through your mind (SecondLife has over a million subscribers, and something like in excess of 5 or 6 figures of real world dollars are exchanged per day), I find it fascinating that no one has extended this line of thought to create something to hedge that risk.

Of course what I’m talking about is Virtual Insurance.

(more…)

In one of those self evident facts that one never fails to remember (or, perhaps its just me at least), its important to remember that around the holidays people use keyword searches that involve the Holidays! Google does have some affection for me (20% of traffic is from Google searches), but its fleeting (still PR zero) — why not create some holiday affiliated loving in about … oh, say less than a months’ time to take advantage of it?.

Unfortunately, the problem is that you’ve got a lot of competition. Courtesy of the boffins at Neilsen Buzzmetrics, you can see the spike in blogs that use the word “thanksgiving”, and no surprise, it spikes right around … Thanksgiving.

But it does give one something to think about — for example, do keywords that are bid upon in AdWords suddenly change their value right AFTER a holiday? And if your site isn’t indexed fast enough before, because you’re in the Sandbox, what then? …. hmmmm … hmmmm ;)

tip: Matt Hurst, Chief Boffin at Blogpulse 

(In Canada, its also we have a similar event on Boxing Day, or the day after Christmas)

Prince “Chartreuse” Campbell, of Chartruse the blog, which soon morphed into Chartreuse2, the paid blog, which lasted all of two weeks, has apparently disappeared.  While he appeared on the scene much earlier on in the year than when I first started (a few months ago), he did draw some attention for his closing down his successful blog to start up the paid one.

[Over at the BlogHerald, I questioned a little snarkily how successfully a subscription based blog would work -- particularly since that model hasn't really been shown to work in the past, and there was also a "coolness" test, where you had to show knowledge of Mr. Campbell and his blog in addition to ponying up the cash to subscribe. It sounds like it didn't work.]

At any rate, it seems as though he’s gone missing.  With a history of a medical condition, it is particularly concerning.  No matter what your opinion of the man, if you hear anything try and direct questions to his family.
For more details see Loren over at 1838, and Matt over at the BlogHerald