About

vi-ral:
-adjective
An online strategy that encourages people to pass on a  message

pun-dit:
–noun
a learned person, expert, or authority

It all started in the fall of 1996. As a freshman off on his first year of college I was suddenly exposed to the internet in a large way. I obviously knew what the internet was, but my family never had a home computer and certainly had no access to the internet. Moving into the dorm on campus my roommate had a cutting-edge PC and we had very good internet connection via the University. As I went to college in Maine there was a large percentage of the year that we spent inside and so my education on the internet began.

I quickly realized that the major I was pursuing was not a passion of mine and I found myself intensely drawn to these new emerging medias that seemed to be exploding every day.

I always tinkered with websites and HTML quite literally starting with the “Building Websites for Dummies” book, and as a reminder I still have it on my desk.  The engineer in me loved to code (I was initially pursuing a civil engineering degree).  The cause and effect algorithmic relationship of coding was very natural to me.

My first website was launched in the fall of 1998 and it was basically a blog, the term just hadn’t been coined yet.  It was centered around our group of friends and what we were doing and the antics we were up to.  It included digital pictures (one of the first cameras mass released) and a forum.  Some people have said it was sort of like a precursor to a social network.  It got pretty popular and we enjoyed it quite a bit.  This website showed me the power of websites and the internet and through a lot of trial and error started to figure out how to make some money off websites (remember this wasn’t always a forgone conclusion).

Around this time came the advent of viral marketing and we would see things that would start on the net and explode into the national media and be huge pop culture phenomenon and then burn out.  One such time we happened to be in the right place at the right time having just been crawled by Google for an article we wrote.  Literally a week later this person was all over the news and it exploded onto a global level and our website was in the top 5 results for search terms.  We saw a massive increase in traffic.  We struggled to keep it online and quickly learned how to optimize a website and server.  In the end we learned a lot and made a sizable amount of money.  This showed me  clearly that there was a lot of money to be made with websites, you just had to figure out how to harness it.

From that day I have been an avid study of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and Viral Marketing.  I had seen lightning strike and I wanted to figure out how I could make it happen consistently.  Today that type of stuff is taking place in new and exciting media.  Probably the most popular environment is social media with services like Twitter and Facebook, but certainly not limited to them.

The internet has turned a lot of business ideas on it’s head and continues to do so.  Though many people have claimed to have done so, we are largely still trying to figure out how to harness the power of the internet.  Thats what I try to move towards every day.   Figuring out how to make things happen on the internet.  How things work.  How things relate.  And how we can pull the strings to enable us to extract the most value from all the new media emerging every day.

This blog will be where I discuss thoughts and ideas from a daily, in the trenches, perspective.  Hopefully you will find it interesting.  We would love to hear your ideas as well so feel free to comment regardless of if you agree or disagree.  The internet is hardly an exact science.

You can also follow me on Twitter by following @ViralPundit.

You can also always email me at: viralpundit [at] gmail.com.

Thanks for your time!