Cameron Olthuis

This just happened down the street from my house, a San Diego man was attacked by a shark this morning and bled to death. Apparently this is the first fatal attack in 50 years in my area. This is pretty scary considering I was just about to paddle out for a surf.

I have never really worried about attacks around here just because they are so rare. I guess now I will have something to be cautious of. This is sad news and my thoughts go out to this man’s family.

All you business and website owners listen up and listen well. Avante Gardens, an Anaheim Florist, is going to school you on building loyal customers, links, and positive buzz all in one shot….

So how many of you remember my story about FTD Sucks and how they screwed me over on Valentine’s Day? If you don’t the click over and read it really quick so you can be up to speed.

So, there is this super bad-ass floral shop up in Anaheim that took notice of my post and decided they’d use my bad experience to their advantage to win over a new customer, me. Shortly after I checked into my hotel for SMX I got a knock on my door. It was a room service dude that had a bouquet of flowers for me. At first I thought maybe I had a secret admirer that wanted some lovin’ or maybe the SMX crew was just going the extra mile for their speakers. Nope, I was wrong. The following note was included in the flowers…

Dear Cameron, After reading your plight with FTD during Valentine’s Day, I just want to put in a plug for local florists. I’m looking forward to your presentation.

Wow! My heart melted. I was in love. I thought this was one of the coolest things ever and couldn’t believe someone remembered and cared about little ol’ me.

I just snapped that pic of me with the flowers. The ladies tell me that’s a super nice bouquet. Huge thank you to Avante, you effin rock and I love you.

Hope you all learned something. This would have been a great opportunity for FTD to step to the plate and make good with me… they didn’t and now they can kiss my badonkadonk. I will never order from that piece of crap company again and have told as many people as possible not to as well. They obviously don’t care about their customers. Now, on the flip-side - you all know a good florist.

For all you skiers: Simon Dumont set a new world record for the biggest quarter-pipe air EVAR!!

Chalk one up for the skiers….

Aw, the joys of running a content site. I’d almost forgotten how bad it gets with people ripping off your content and reposting it on their own sites word-for-word. This last weekend I’ve spent countless hours chasing down these villains and trying to get them to remove our original work. It gets time consuming and because we have a relatively new site that doesn’t have a ton of authority with Google, I actually do worry about it quite a bit. I’ve already noticed a few that show up above us in the SERPs and that is no-bueno.

This is something I’ve never really worried about too much with this blog. Mostly because it’s my personal blog and I don’t monetize it, nor do I have plans to ever do so. So now I have another hat to wear at my company, content police. Although I have to admit, I do slightly enjoy it when I find their phone numbers and I can actually call these people. It’s pretty funny.

I haven’t logged into my Feedburner account for at least a good 6 months, probably more like 12. I just happened to log in and I’m pleasantly surprised to discover I have over 800 people reading my blog, 830 to be exact. I seriously thought the number was going to be around 8, not 800. That number’s high enough that I can be proud of it, so I displayed the little chicklet there on my sidebar. Now I’m kind of fired up to get that number over 1000.

I’m curious, how did you all find my blog? I’d also love to hear your feedback on what you think I should be blogging about. What kind of stuff are you guys/gals into and what would you like to hear from me?

PS - I’m expecting about 826 more comments… ummkay

So I’ve been using Twitter now for a couple weeks and to be honest with you, I can’t say that it has provided any real value. Actually, that’s not totally true. I did get an intro to someone that ended up interviewing me about 5ones for a blog. Other than that though it’s been a pretty big time waste so far. Maybe I just need to stop checking it so much. I’m going to give it a couple more weeks before I make a decision to stick with it or drop it. If you’re on Twitter you can follow me, my name is @Factive. I also have one setup for 5ones.

I can see how it would provide tremendous value if you have 10,000+ followers, like Mr. Calacanis. But lets face it, I’m just not quite as popular as Jason which is evident by my 50 followers compared to his 10k+.

If you’re a Twitter user I’d love to hear why you use it and what value you find in it? Also, drop me your name and I can add you to my follow list if I’m not already.

5ones is a project that first began last July. It all started when I met Chris Bennett from 97th Floor at last year’s SMX Advanced. We quickly hit it off, partly because we both share a deep passion for surfing and other action sports. We talked a lot about how the action sports industry is pretty lame when it comes to the web. For an industry that’s generally pretty forward thinking, it’s amazing how many years behind they are with this online stuff. After the conference we kept talking about projects that we could work together on in this space and eventually we settled on 5ones.

What exactly is it? 5ones is an action sports news and information site covering surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding, and other industry happenings. Right now what you see on the site is just a small taste of what’s to come in the future.

Although technically started last July, due to both of our busy schedules it didn’t take long before the site was placed on the back burner, as neither of us could find the time to keep it regularly updated and give the TLC it needed. It’s around this time that I started to realize I was taking on too much client work and I needed to slow down or I’d never have time to focus and build out my empire. So that’s what I did, I started to make the time and refocus on doing this thing proper.

Fast forward to Jan ‘08. I hired a couple writers, gave myself the position of Editor in Chief, and started pumping out regular content again. Although we originally launched the site back in July ‘07, we feel that we didn’t really start the site until the first of this year. Since then we’ve been keeping the site updated regularly. We just finished the redesign and now we’re launching what we call version 1.0. I must say that I am very impressed with the design, which was done by Pat Bennett from Modern Web Design. I would highly recommend using Pat for design work as you can see he did a fabulous job with 5ones. He also did all the custom WP hacks/programming.

One of the questions I get a lot is - what’s the meaning behind the name? To be honest, there isn’t one. As most of you know, finding domain names is pretty damn hard these days, most everything we wanted was taken so we just brainstormed, that name came up, and it stuck. I wish I had a good story about how the name came about but I don’t.

5ones is the first of many projects that I’ll be releasing through Factive over the next year. It’s a joint project in partnership with 97th Floor, who will also be involved in one other Factive property that is expected to launch this summer.

I also want to give a shout out to the wonderful staff of writers we have on the team. I am very pleased with their work and their desire to step it up and progress with the site. We have had tremendous success with traffic and growing our audience in just a few short months and much of that is because of the quality of content our writers have produced.