Alphabet Soup

Is anybody interested in the world's languages? Good! I knew everyone would be. I found some interesting web sites pertaining to alphabets and ancient languages. There is even a font for hieroglyphics.

The first site is Omniglot, which gives a good background on the world's writing systems, language taxonomy and links to other interesting sites. The webmaster is Simon Ager and he lives in Britain. If I had my life to live over again, I would do exactly what he did. I have to see if we can exchange links.

I know the next question is whether there is a site dedicated to ancient Phoenician. Of course there is, and it is called Phoenicia.org. The webmaster, Salim Khalaf lives in the US and his site has over 1,600 pages. I think he's a genius because he knows English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Italian and Portuguese. There are some fonts there so you can generate documents in Phoenician.Again, some links will be nice in the future.

I know this is not enough for you, so I have more. For a paid font package for multiple alphabets, visit Juan J Marcos' website. He even has fonts for Cuneiform. The price is reasonable ($38) for private use. I really like the Olde English fonts.

There are hundreds of sites on this, it's making my head spin. My last entry for today is about Lawrence Lo and his website AncientScripts.com. This is some incredible stuff; Lawrence is a computer whiz and that makes sense. I really like that the best and most interesting material comes from and is expounded by enthusiasts. And he likes deserts and volcanoes, which makes him an official FindItByMe.com Fellow Traveler.

New Place Found for Free GIS Data

I found a new place to get OpenStreetMap data pre-compiled into nice country download units. It is at Cloudmade.com. You need to provide attribution if you use it, as it is available under the Creative Commons License.

You'll find data for places you never knew existed around the world. Check out the Spratly Islands. Might be a nice place to visit.

Enjoy the data!

North County Times

We are FindItByMe.com, a start-up Community Directory founded in Fallbrook, CA. We are looking for Area Specialists who know their community and would like to help their community and themselves at the same time. We are offering 50% commission on our starter plan for small businesses to the right Area Specialists. Visit the site www.finditbyme.com to get full details by clicking on the "Area Specialists Needed!" button. We have listings for all of California and Alaska so if you live in these two states we can get you started even if you are not in Southern California. More states will be online soon, visit the site often to get the latest news. Welcome aboard!!!

John Graffio, CEO

Press Release

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

FindItByMe.com, Inc. is pleased to announce the availability of its beta version Community Access Directory at www.finditbyme.com. As the company’s founder I would like to point out that this is not just a local search engine; we refer to it as a “Community Access Platform”. It will offer a whole family of technologies whose entire purpose is to help businesses, especially small businesses, reach new customers and communicate more effectively with their existing clients.

FindItbyMe.com is a high-technology company started in the small agricultural community of Fallbrook in north San Diego County, California. Our mission is to help stimulate the local economy in every community so that your neighbors can make a more informed decision on where to spend their money – preferably in your local community. While we may not possess the vast resources of other search firms, we also don’t have their overhead and that allows us to offer a unique service at an unheard of price.

Other “local” search engines expect the small business owner to spend all their free time updating their “listings” on dozens of sites, author blogs, go on Twitter and so forth. We can’t see how asking a small business owner to spend more and more time away from their business will help them grow. We do see that taking this burden off the small business owner is a great help and a great relief. We are currently bringing San Diego, Riverside and Imperial counties online. Those who would like to get involved can check the site for details.

Feel free to contact me at 760-801-8518 or by email at John.Graffio@FindItByMe.com.

John Graffio, CEO
FindItByMe.com, Inc.

Letter and Offer to Chambers of Commerce

FindItByMe.com, Inc. is pleased to announce the availability of its Local Search Platform www.finditbyme.com. As the company’s founder I would like to point out that this is not just a local search engine; we refer to it as a “Community Access Platform”. It will offer a whole family of technologies whose entire purpose is to help businesses, especially small businesses, reach new customers and communicate more effectively with their existing clients.

FindItbyMe.com is a high-technology company started in the small agricultural community of Fallbrook in north San Diego County, California. Our mission is to help stimulate the local economy in every community so that your neighbors can make a more informed decision on where to spend their money – preferably in your local community. While we may not possess the vast resources of other search firms, we also don’t have their overhead and that allows us to offer a unique service at an unheard of price.

Other “local” search engines expect the small business owner to spend all their free time updating their “listings” on dozens of sites, author blogs, go on Twitter and so forth. We can’t see how asking a small business owner to spend more and more time away from their business will help them grow. We do see that helping the local business community take advantage of technology will help.

We are eager to work with the Chamber to leverage our technology in a way that benefits the Chamber’s and community’s needs. Beyond the site itself, we are currently working on web site controls that allow our search technology to be “embedded” in a Chamber’s existing web site. These controls would help drive traffic to your site. We are also doing live map integration and will soon offer this on all listings for consumers to get driving directions to and from local businesses. We offer our search technology and service at no charge to any Chamber of Commerce that requests it.

While our website demonstrates one way of viewing the listings, our OTHER technology is at work in the background syndicating a business’s profile all over the Internet. Our system carries more than just name, address and phone number. That why the whole process needs accurate and complete listings to get started. We would like to propose a strategy and an opportunity to your Chamber that is a win-win situation for you and the local business community:

1. Employ the Chamber’s existing resources to notify local businesses of our special offer of $19.95 per YEAR for our “Bronze” plan to existing Chamber members.
2. FindItByMe.com will split the sign-up fee 50-50 with the Chamber. Participation takes place only THROUGH the Chamber; businesses that sign up through the Chamber would bear the Chamber’s logo on their listing and would appear first in search results for their categories (and other searches) before non-members (both on our site and on our search controls you may deploy on your own website).
3. When non-chamber members want to sign up for our services in your area, they must submit their information to you and make their payments to you. It benefits us greatly having you as a single point of contact for everything in that we can keep our overhead low and our service levels high.

We’re here to help. Why not take advantage of us?

John Graffio, CEO

Picking up where...

I left off. The site is taking its final form. I'm liking the context based location search look and feel. Now to fix the categories and fill in the functionality for all the buttons that are unhooked. The points of interest will be no problem, but the rest of it will take longer. But I'm happy with it now.

Until tomorrow...

Page View Flea Markets

Search Engines 101 Series, Class #1

As I was going through my list of all the "local" search engines that have been cranked out and are still running, I finally realized something that was hiding in plain sight: all the blind alleys I always have to click my way out of when I use the "local" search feature and any search feature in general.

Click my way out of?

If ANY search engine actually could deliver significant results in one or two clicks, there would be nothing to sell on the Internet. The more page views I can deliver, the more money I can make renting out my page-real-estate. So page views are really flea market stalls that I rent out for as much as I can. If I can deliver an answer to a search in the least number of clicks, I can't rent out my stalls or demand big rent from the flea market vendors. The more I lead a user on through a maze of clicks, they are forced to look at the vendors renting space in my page view flea market.

The beauty of this scheme is that everyone uses it (almost everyone) and nobody notices how dirty their browser windows have become. Someone emailed Yahoo and asked why their local search results had so much outdated information. He indicated that he was stonewalled and got no answer to this question. The reason is simple: accurate data = less clicks = less page views = less money.

Remember this when you do searches of any kind from now on. Count the number of sponsored links and other flea market vendors cluttering up your search result pages. Then you'll realize the Internet is not free, you are paying for it by agreeing to be bombarded with virtual flea markets.

Is there anything wrong with this? No...as long as you know how the deck is stacked. As long as I'm paying to display pages, I should be able to rent them out if I see fit. But you shouldn't be misled into thinking someone has data that is useful to you when in fact it is not. That is what the "local search" sites without exception attempt to trick you into believing.

Next class: comment bombs defused