We’re big fans of the City of Boston run group Boston Young Entreprenuers, having received excellent advice and met tons of awesome people via BYE. The featured company for November’s meeting has been announced and it’s Emergent Energy Group.

Emergent is all about finding the best alternative energy sources for landowners, developers, businesses, municipalities and academic institutions. They began as a wind power consulting firm and have since expanded to solar energy and other sustainable resources. Emergent was recently named one of the Top 25 Young Entreprenuers of 2009 by Business Week.

They’re based in Boston and are led by four individuals. November’s BYE meeting will be held at WorkBar, a great little place that combines fun with work.

Here are a few more details on the Emergent’s BYE meeting:

Date: Wednesday, November 11th
Time: 6:00pm to 8:00pm
Location: WorkBar, 129 South Street, Boston
RSVP: Devin.Cole.BRA@CityofBoston.gov or on Facebook

Hope to see you at WorkBar on the 11th!

Member of The 42nd Estate, Justin Wright, today celebrates one year of self-employement. Head over to his blog and join in the celebration. He uses the occasion to drop ten self employment lessons he’s learned over the past twelve months that’ll come in handy whether you’re just starting out on your own or have been at it for a while.

Here’s two of my favorite lessons from Justin:

5. Money Isn’t Everything

However, working for myself quickly made me realize how unimportant money is. Yes we need it to survive, but that’s it. Other than food/water, clothes, and a place to sleep, we really don’t NEED much else. Instead, we WANT everything we see on TV. The key is to use your money wisely.

Very true. The less you spend, the less you need to earn, the less you need to work and the more time you have to enjoy life.

9. You Will Learn (A Lot)

Of all the things I’ve mentioned so far, nothing has been more enjoyable than learning. It’s absolutely amazing how many things I have learned over the course of one year. I can easily predict that I’ve learned at least 5 (maybe 10) times as much as I did from high school and college combined. I’ve learned valuable things about business, life, and everything in-between.

100% true. I’ve personally learned a lot more working at The 42nd Estate than I ever did in college or high school. A lot of people struggle with this concept of learning (more) after college, but it can be true. If you’re in a cubicle, you can slide by without learning anything new. With entrepreneurship/freelancing, it must be true or else your skills become irrelevant.

Congratulations Justin and here’s to another year for you and another year for The 42nd Estate!

This Monday (October 19), I’ll be speaking about SEO at a marketing workshop organized by the Boston Redevelopment Authority. Leighann Farrelly from Yelp will also be on hand to discuss social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, LinkedIn, and Plaxo. Two other presentations will cover negotiating a lease and organizing informational exhibits. It’s sure to be an extremely informative and useful workshop and the best part, it’s free!

This Monday’s workshop is the first of three. If you can’t make it out on Monday, check out the below schedule for all three workshop days and times:

Monday October 19, 2009

• 2:00 PM – 6:00 PM
• SEO Session: 3:30 PM
• WGBH, 1 Guest Street, Brighton, MA

Friday October 23, 2009

• 2:00 PM – 6:00 PM
• SEO Session: 3:30 PM
• Hampton Inn & Suites, 811 Massachusetts Avenue, Roxbury/Newmarket, MA

Monday October 26, 2009

• 9:00 AM – 1:30 PM
• SEO Session: 10:30 AM
• Suffolk University Law School, 120 Tremont Street, Boston, MA

Hope to see you there! If you’re attending one of these workshops and have a specific question you’d like me to cover, just let me know. I’ll put up the slides of the presentation online afterwards too.

As we wrote last week, The 42nd Estate got poked by Dart Boston last Thursday. The show was awesome. There was tons of great feedback and a few super-awesome tips that we’re working to implement.

Rather than going through the show, here’s a video of the three panelists, Andrew Hopper, Erica Farthing, and Aaron Gerry poking holes and offering advice.

Thanks again to Cortland, Dart Boston, the expert panelists and the awesome audience for some incredible advice and a great time at the wrap party!

A while back we blogged about one of our clients, Swagger Paris, being featured on the Pokin’ Holes podcast hosted by Dart Boston. Well, this Thursday it’s time for The 42nd Estate to get poked!

The show will be streamed live from the Algonquin Club at 217 Commonwealth Ave Boston, MA. Pokin’ Holes will kick off at 6:45 PM and wrap up at 9:00 PM. From there we’ll head over to Match on 94 Massachusetts Ave for the post show wrap party. The main topics that’ll be covered are our business model and how to keep growing, our branding, and any passive income opportunities.

The three panelists for tonight’s episode are:

• Andrew Hopper – Interactive Marketing Technical Lead at PUMA
• Erica Farthing – Blog & Social Media Director for CondoDomain & Rockin Event
• Aaron Gerry – Writer for College Mogul and Entrepreneur Enthusiast

What a great group of experts! We’re really looking forward to tonight’s events and hope to see you there!

In the meantime, check out my pre-show talk with Cortland from Dart Boston.

You may have heard that, finally, Yahoo and Microsoft have teamed up in the search engine arena. That’s all well and good, and actually a smart move by both companies. The new Bing engine from Microsoft is nice and a huge improvement over Microsoft’s previous search engine. Meanwhile Yahoo rocks at providing great services like Flickr, Yahoo Answers, and Delicious (or at least buying them and allowing them to keep rocking).

By allowing Microsoft to focus on Yahoo’s search technology, it frees up a lot of resources at Yahoo to focus on improving its service offerings. It also strengthens Google’s greatest search competitor by consolidating the second and third place engines. While we at The 42nd Estate love Google and all of its search and secondary service offerings, strong, healthy competition is a good thing for everyone involved, including the search engines and their users.

That leaves us with one remaining problem.

Branding.

Bing + Yahoo = Yingoo

Continuing to run with the Yahoo and Bing brands will only serve to confuse consumers, who know that they are really one and the same.

So, even though Microsoft just underwent a huge re-branding campaign, we say it’s time to re-brand again.

To better explain why, let’s first talk about Google. Their brand name has become so synonymous with search that people routinely refer to searching for something as googling for that term. It’s a brilliant piece of branding that has enabled Google to permeate our subconsciousness. We no longer tell people to go search for a topic, we tell them to Google it. There’s even phrases and acronyms that have built up around the name, such as “Google is your friend” and “lmgtfy” (meaning Let Me Google That For You).

For the Bing-Yahoo engine to take the next step, they need to go into a similar re-branding mode and verbize their name [yes, I just made up a word there]. Let’s see how each of the three brand names works as a verb (this is crucial!).

• I Yahooed you

Terrible, does not roll off the tongue. Has connotations of corralling someone, putting them in a box, not discovering them.

• I Binged you

Better, but still not so good. Sounds like you’re flicking someone off. Reminds me off Chandler Bing from Friends (not a good thing).

• I Googled you

Near-perfect. There’s a reason Google as a verb has taken off, it rolls off the tongue, sounds slightly perverse and is extremely fun to say.

• I Yingooed you

Nice! Sounds a little esoteric and mysterious. Is fun to say. Doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as well as googled, but certainly better than binged or yahooed. It’s also unique and has no relation to this guy.

Yingoo also has the added benefits of being close to the term Yin Yang, giving a connotation that combined together Yahoo and Microsoft deliver a perfect union of services and searches. Plus, it has the word goo in it, which might just be the real reason Google has taken off (after all, who doesn’t like saying the word goo?).

Building a technically sound search engine that delivers solid results should be at the forefront of the MS/Yahoo search engine, but giving it a name that acts as a verb, is fun to say, and includes the word goo will help push them as a true competitor to Google. Assuming, of course, their search engine begins to compete with Google on result relevancy.

FYI.

Tonight from 11 PM to 11:59PM Eastern Standard Time we’ll be performing a few configuration edits on our server, which may cause the server to temporarily experience downtime. To avoid frustration, we’re advising to not try to write comments during this window as they may or may not be lost.

It is a one time configuration edit to improve the speed and stability of our server, which by all metrics has been stellar so far, but as we like to keep improving we’ve scheduled this maintenance window to implement a few edits.

The following sites may temporarily go down as we push through these edits:

• The 42nd Estate
• Sports Fan 4
• Swagger Paris
• Swagger New York
• Adam Pieniazek
• Only The Internet’s Best Reviews
• We Demand Videos
• My Last Name Means Money
• Seba Art
• The Joy of Erin
• Zoop Media

Follow us on Twitter to know when all the edits are done and you’re clear to write comments without fear. Sorry for any inconvenience. In the end these edits will serve to only make our sites faster and more stable!

Google sent massive waves through the web earlier today as it announced the Google Chrome Operating System. The OS will be based off the three tenets Google used while building the Chrome browser:

1. Speed
2. Security
3. Simplicity

To that effect, many applications that are traditionally bundled with an operating system, such as word processing, e-mail, music player, calendar, and so on will likely instead point to Google’s web apps. As our good friend Tyler Balliet points out, many people have already made the switch to using web applications for the majority of their computing needs.

Linux for the Masses?

The OS will be Linux based and open-source, which will allow anyone to tweak the code. Google is aiming to provide as basic a system as possible and will likely look to independent developers to add features.

We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web.

Sounds great! There are tons of computer users who fire up their operating systems purely to access their email and browse the web, so an OS designed with the web as its primary focus will be a great fit for a large percentage of the market. Ben Parr of Mashable is already wondering whether Google Chrome will kill Windows.

While it’s doubtful Chrome will wipe Windows off the planet, it’s highly likely that a large number of users will make the switch. Google is targeting netbooks right now as ideal candidates for the OS, and expect to have netbooks shipping with the OS installed by default next year. Personally, anything we can do to reduce the market share of Internet Explorer, the one major browser that rarely follows web standards, the better.

Linux evangelists have been touting that one day Linux will take over the mainstream desktop, and with Ubuntu and Google’s Chrome that day may finally be approaching. Chris Lang makes a great point that Ubuntu is already fast, so optimizing the OS to use the web as much as possible will only make boot times that much faster. With less bloat, you’ll be up and running in no time.

Now is a great time to also get started with Google Friend Connect, if you’ve yet to do so, as it’ll likely be the social communications backbone of the Chrome OS. Instead of Instant Messaging, e-mail, twitter et all, the Chrome OS will likely utilize Google Wave as a one stop communication portal.

A lot of great posts are flying around The 42nd Estate blog network lately. Here’s a few of the best.

Chill out!

The 42nd Estate member Justin Wright writes about the importance of taking breaks. The benefits he lists include:

• Time to think
• Time to do hobbies and work out
• Refresh the mind
• Increase your motivation

Check out the full post for tips on how to make the most use of your time off.

Twitter review

Over at Only The Internet’s Best Reviews, we posted a review of everyone’s favorite micro-blogging platform, Twitter! From the Twitter review:

witter is not the first social media site, but combining social media with mobile technology with near instantaneous communication was a brilliant move that continues to reap benefits for Twitter and its ever expanding community.

PageRank Sculpting and Social Media in Plain English

Over at We Demand Videos, there’s two videos I’d like to point you towards. The first is related to the recent news that Google tweaked their PageRank algorithm by changing how nofollow links affect Page Rank for internal links. In the video, Matt Cutts from Google discusses Page Rank sculpting.

The other video is a breakdown of social media in plain english by Common Craft. For anyone knew to the social media buzz, or just wants an easy way to explain the benefits of social media to clients, friends and partners, check out how ice cream is like social media.

Big Papi’s decline

The new addition to our blog network brings us the ever-changing opinion of Josh Gans on David Ortiz. He’s evolved his opinion from thinking David Ortiz did not use performance enhancing drugs, to everyone is innocent until proven guilty, to “I have a gut feeling that he [David Ortiz] did [use Performance Enhancing Drugs]“.

There you have it, five great posts from The 42nd Estate blog network. Share your favorite posts below.

Towel: check. Time to hitch a ride.

In addition to today being Memorial Day, it is also Towel Day in honor of Douglas Adams. For those who don’t know who Douglas Adams is, he’s a British science-fiction writer and author of the funniest books ever written, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Our readers will recognize those books as the inspiration for our name.

According to wikipedia, Towel day was first proposed by D Clyde Williamson a few days after Douglas Adams’ death on May 11, 2001. Chris Campbell and his friends then registered TowelDay.org, promoted it and the rest is history.

At this point, you might be asking yourself why a towel?

Great question and here’s the answer directly from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

A towel (…) is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value — you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand-tohand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindboggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you — daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitchhiker) discovers that a hitchhiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitchhiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitchhiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence a phrase which has passed into hitch hiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.” (Sass: know, be aware of, meet, have sex with; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)

Kudos to TowelDay for typing all that up.

So grab a towel, toss down a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster, and start hitching your way across the galaxy!

Thanks to Pragmagraphr for the awesome photo of him hitching a ride with his towel.

R.I.P. Douglas Adams.