Cameron Olthuis

Dead Paper - While the rest of us - and I’m guilty too - are chanting death to old media, Copyblogger is giving us lessons from it. Great post called Five Lessons You Can Learn From Newspapers. I recommend this to any blogger, writer, etc. Very helpful as I’ve recently found myself in the position of Editor in Chief - and who would’ve guessed based on the grades I got in English class? I’m reading this twice and then sending it to all my writers.

Slow morning, which is good because it’s Friday and it’s a beautiful day! I’ve been feeling really positive lately and happy with my progress. It’s important to be positive; I notice a big difference in both the amount I accomplish and the quality of work. Plus it’s just a lot more pleasant to the people around you when you’re positive. Hope you all have a good day and weekend!

I just setup a twitter account for 5ones. You can follow all of our action sports twitts here and stay up to date on our latest really good posts. I’m not going to twitt all of our posts, just the ones I feel are most interesting and most likely to invite discussion.

Another medium for those who don’t use RSS and would prefer twitts over email updates, etc.

Digg - Who needs Digg anymore? With the right kind of content, leveraging Reddit/Del.icio.us/SU can bring better results than the average Digg. We’ve done a few recent linkbait pieces for a client that have generated well over 2000 links, all without a single Digg. It all depends on the content… after a few mediocre Digg attempts, we took a serious look at the content strategy, changed it up, and haven’t looked back. Social news strategies have been changing dramatically lately with all the changes Digg has undergone. Time to adapt or fall by the wayside.

Sock Puppets - My friend Michael ‘Graywolf’ Gray has a great post about being more entertaining than a sock puppet. The post is really about is engaging and entertaining users through social media. I don’t really want to get involved in the drama this post is centralized around and once you read Graywolf’s post you’ll be up to date anyways. The point is that you really need to understand this (social media) medium if you want to play in it. Read the post and you’ll see the two great examples, one understands this medium and one doesn’t. Nice to see an SEO lay the smackdown on social media experts…. social media outside of linkbait.

Just a few items of note…

Starbucks - They’re finally stepping it up with their coffee. I’ve never been a huge fan of Starbucks coffee but I’ll definitely give them another try with this new brew. Never really cared for the taste and I always found it inconsistent, I guess that’s because they change their flavor every week and location. That would explain it. On the other-hand, I fully recommend illy, I won’t buy anything else for the house.

Shark Attacks - As a surfer, shark attacks are always on your mind. The reality of it though, is that you’re about as likely to be attacked by a shark as you are winning the lottery. News like this bodyboarder who was attacked and killed the other day always makes that thought just a little more eminent. Whenever someone comes to learn to surf, they’re always asking me about sharks and you can tell it’s on their mind and it makes them a little nervous. I suppose it’s good to always be aware of the dangers but there are far more things more likely to kill you then a shark. With that said, my thoughts go out to the boy’s family.

Party Bait - One of the funnest guys to party with at any SEO conference is hands down Chris Hooley. He seriously makes everyone step their game up and I’m hoping he shows up to SMX Social. It’s been ahwile since he’s blogged but today I cruised around and found a post he just put up. The post is based around relevance and how Google portrays you. What caught my attention though, is how he talks about how he hardly blogs anymore because his focused has changed. I can relate to this as I just recently went through a blogging drought myself. It’s seriously a whole other ballgame when you’re blogging because your livelihood depends on it. It becomes a job and starts to lose it’s fun. Chris, I know I just went off on a completely different tangent but here’s to hoping you become that crazy party guy again for a couple days and join us in Long Beach.

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.