Category: gymnastics

breaking all the rules …

On By Rick McIn gymnasticsLeave a comment

We gymnastics coaches are Mavericks.

After breaking every other rule at the posh Couer d’Alene Resort beach cabana, Lisa climbed the rafters. Also against the rules.

I climbed up too, … but only to convince her to climb down.

Gymnaestrada highlights, Switzerland

On By Rick McIn gymnasticsLeave a comment

This is what I am enjoying all this week.

National Evenings are designed to give participating FIG member federations an opportunity to present a range of Gymnastics for All activities, featuring a blend of folkloric and culturally specific characteristics.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

in praise of bloggers

On By Rick McIn Apple, audiocasts, blogs, blogs Rick reads, economics, gymnastics, internet, product endorsements, things getting better1 Comment

My second and third favourite sources of information in 2011 are audio:

• Audiocasts
• Audio books

I pretty much always have an audio book or two in progress, buying most of those from Audible.com. … Sadly not every book I want is available in audio.

Audio podcasts are still quite crude. The most evolved, however, are superb: RadioLab, This American Life, CBC Spark, Economist Editor’s Highlights, and On The Media. Almost all audio podcasts are still free.

But my main sources of information … my most trusted … my most detailed and nuanced … are blogs.

The best are labours of love by passionate, often amateur writers. Most bloggers are unpaid, spending thousands of hours focused on a specific topic simply because they love that topic.

more photos of bloggers

For example, the best Apple blog is Daring Fireball. I don’t pay much attention to any other.

I do whatever I’m told by Michael Geist when it comes to Canadian government regulation of the internet. A big election issue right now.

There are 4-5 essential blogs on gymnastics, but if I only was allowed to read one blogger it would be Blythe Lawrence.

If you read Kraig Becker, you’ll know more about outdoor adventure than you’ll ever need to know for one lifetime.

… Those are just a few examples. Leave a comment if you’ve got a blog that I should follow.

(blogger photos via Spark)

Google delivers you CRAP

On By Rick McIn Google, gymnastics, product complaints1 Comment

eHow is an online how-to guide with more than 1 million articles and 170,000 videos offering step-by-step instructions on how to do things.

It’s much criticized as a “content mill” or “content farm“. Low quality crap written to get a high Google ranking, pushing Google ads deceptively.

Hows that working out for them?

My gymnastics site is the best on the web on the topic of “gymnastics coach” and “gymnastics coaching”.

eHow got the #1 rank for a Google search = “Gymnastics Coach”.

(I reset the Browser so there was nothing in the cache or history.)

The content on that eHow page is crap written by someone who doesn’t coach gymnastics.

Why doesn’t Google rank content farms lower?

… Maybe they like all that Google ad revenue.

Google has launched one counter attack. I doubt that’s going to work.

They lashed back at critics in a Jan. 21st post:

… January brought a spate of stories about Google’s search quality. Reading through some of these recent articles, you might ask whether our search quality has gotten worse. …

I’ll believe Google has fixed the problem when eHow is not on the first 100 pages of results.
_____

In a Bing search, eHow was #1, as well. (And Bing results are consistently worse for me on any specialized search term.)

The new Duck Duck Go browser filters out all eHow results. My site was #1 there.

related – TechCrunch – Search Still Sucks

Wikipedia has blacklisted all eHow articles.

… as for me, I’ve downloaded the free Chrome browser extension Personal Blocklist and BLOCKED all eHow sites from my personal search results. If enough people do that, that content farm will die.