benrobb

GeoDefense Strategies: My Latest Blog

It’s been awhile since I wrote anything (it’s a personal blog, what can I say).  I’ve been working on a few things lately, mostly related to home (painting, selling old car, purchasing new car), family (kid #3 is coming up soon), and non-Internetty things (community choir with upcoming performance).  But one online thing I’ve been “working” on is my latest blog: geodef.blogspot.com.

GeoDefense is my favorite iPhone/iPod Touch game ever.  It’s a tower defense game if you know what that means, and if you don’t, then little bad guys run around the screen from one side to the other and you build stationary towers and try to kill them before they get to the other side.

GeoDefense is a fixed path game, meaning the Creeps (the bad guys) follow a set path on each level and you have to kill them before they get to the end.  The alternate form is a free-field game, in which case you build a maze with your towers while trying to kill the creeps at the same time.

In any case, GeoDefense is the best one I’ve ever played (that’s an opinion, not a fact).  After beating it initially, I went back through to play it again and beat each level without losing a single life.  That effort resulted in what I’m putting on my new blog, which is screenshots of how to get a flawless on each level.

I think the vast bulk of you are at this point wondering why you wasted your time reading this, or wondering if I don’t have better things to do with my time.  The answer to both is that it’s my effort to generate some money on the side and get a better understanding of the challenges that Publishers on the internet face when trying to monetize their content.  So yes, the site does serve ads (just one on the right side for now) and I’m going to see 1) if i can make some money and 2) how I can best gauge that, and optimize the site to make more money.

On the off chance that you have an iPhone/iPod Touch, then go buy GeoDefense and have fun playing.  Also, I’m trying to convince Alison that she needs to help me do the same thing for The Creeps (her favorite Tower Defense game, one that she’s much better at than I am).

Tags: geodefense

Weighted Companion Cube-o-lantern

I’m not the most creative person in the world, but every once in awhile I try. We were carving pumpkins for family night on Monday and I was trying to think of something besides the regular old triangle-nose-smiley-face-with-two-teeth pumpkin. Alison suggested I do the cube. She was referring to the weighted companion cube from a game called Portal in which you weave your way through levels of physics puzzles with your portal gun and anything else that comes to hand.

The weighted companion cube is one of the objects you use to get through one of the later levels and has a hilarious back-story to it. Anyway, here’s what the cube looks like.

And here’s my initial drawing on paper (Mr. Turner my 7th grade art teacher who often caught me tracing should be proud).

Here it is on the pumpkin after cutting the outline. Pretty happy with it at this point.

And the finished product. Not quite as impressive as I’d hoped, but maybe someone out there can appreciate it.

Tags: portal

Twitter: A Primer on the Madness

Call me a sellout (I’m ashamed already), but I have it on pretty good authority that in order to be a good blogger, you need to be on Twitter. Now that I’m taking this blogging thing a little more seriously (on the Omniture Blog), I went ahead and made an account.

The straight facts? It is a pretty good way to spread the word to a crowd of people with a certain interest, though it is annoyingly freeform and completely lacking in structure. Keeping track of a single conversation is next to impossible unless you happen to be following all participants, and even then it’s tough.

The Basics

Essentially Twitter is like Facebook status updates, with the limitation that it cannot be more than 140 characters. To get a feel for what it’s like, imagine broadcast radio mixed with TXTing abbreviations and the collective intelligence level of a 5-year-old with a bullhorn.

The @ symbol is used to direct messages to specific people, the # symbol is used to denote that your tweet has to do with a specific topic, and RT means retweet – essentially someone is repeating another person’s comment. When you follow someone, their tweets will show up in your stream, unless they’re replying to a specific person that you’re not following.

Why Do Intelligent People Who Value Their Time Do This?

It’s a fair question. The signal-to-noise ratio is ridiculous and without care, you can waste your life reading the world’s largest collection of non-sense.

Where I think the real (perhaps only real) value lies is in the hashtag (#). Communities of people form around particular hashtags, and whenever they say something about that particular topic, they’ll use the tag. Anytime someone uses that tag, it’ll show up in your stream. An example: a web analytics community has formed around the #measure hashtag, so they’ll put that somewhere in their tweets about web analytics, and anyone who’s interested can add those to their stream.

The problem with Twitter is that anybody can say anything, so the experience depends largely on the communities that you participate in and the relative intelligence level of the people that make up the community. I find it much easier to be part of the #measure community (web analytics) than, say, the Miley Cyrus community.

It’s Terrible, but I Can’t Look Away

If you’re interested in what’s happening on Twitter, but don’t want to participate (and who can blame you), I would recommend you take a look at http://friendsignal.com/ or http://trendistic.com/. FriendSignal makes a tag cloud of popular topics on Twitter which are links to pages that show you what everyone is saying about that topic. If you’re interested in seeing how a particular topic is trending over time, then check out Trendistic.

Bottom line: Twitter is not for everyone. I wish that my involvement wasn’t really needed, but I intend to make the best of it. By limiting the number of people and topics you follow it is possible to be a contributing member of a meaningful community. If you have trouble keeping up with your Facebook friends, then stay far away from Twitter.

If you’re getting into Twitter in any real way, then you’ll have to use an application of some kind to keep track of the madness. I was told to that TweetDeck is the best and I’ve not been disappointed (it also does Facebook). They also have an iPhone app if that appeals to you.

Tags: Life

Corporate Blogging

And the last piece that I was waiting for has fallen into place.  I’m now officially the newest member of the Omniture Blogging team.  Find my analytics related posts at http://blogs.omniture.com/author/brobison/.

Manager of Market Insight

Or Moving on Part 2

I was waiting for one last thing to become public before I wrote this post, but it’s not happening as fast as I thought, so I’ll leave it out and catch you up later.

One of the things I discovered about myself is that I am a designer at heart.  I love digging into a particular issue, understanding it from all angles, and brainstorming a solution.  When it comes to discovery and exploration, that is where my interest and talents are.

I’m not particularly bad at implementing things, I just don’t enjoy it as much, which means it doesn’t receive my full attention, and I find myself looking for the next challenge.  In the technology world, that always means I’m looking for the latest gadgets.  In the business world, it means I like small teams where roles are ambiguous, job descriptions are in flux, and there’s lots of changes to mix things up.

My new job has a little implementation and a lot of design.  Perfect.

In a nutshell, my job has three main responsibilities.  First, I’ve inherited and now own the Omniture implementation inside of the Omniture suite, measuring how our customers are actually using our applications (very much like an Omniture customer would measure how their users are using the website).  The current design was created during a day where everything was pretty much web-based.  It’s been extended a bit and we’ve got more mileage out of it than was ever intended, but it’s time to rethink a few things in an Omniture world that’s expanding beyond the web.

Second, I believe all companies struggle with data in silos.  Omniture has gone to great lengths to build a foundation where data is shared, and I’ll be working to define behavioral metrics, integrate them with the flow of information, and get them into the hands of decision makers.

Finally, I belong to a team known as the Emerging Business team.  This is a small team of extremely bright folks that are looking for new business opportunities.  They liaise closely with the business development team exploring technologies, running Proofs of Concept with customers, and various other things to see if new developments in the industry (online or off) could be a viable business.  The tie for me is that we hope to glean some insight into the trends taking place in the market provide some extra direction for out efforts.  And there are a few things I’m looking into myself.

So that’s the run-down.  Some of it I know I’m good at, some of it is completely new.  All of it is challenging and extremely interesting.  Success is defined very differently with long-term objectives and lots of rope to go with it.  But I believe I’m up to the challenges and I plan on giving it my best effort.