Ask Kalena

Thanks to all of you who entered our Design the 2010 Search Engine College Tshirt Competition and especially those of you who took the time to vote for your favorite finalist out of the ten in our poll.

From the very beginning of the poll, a clear leader emerged.

This morning, voting closed and here are the results:

• Tee Design 8 (by Cindy N)
  38 % of votes

• Tee Design 3 (by Matt Burgess)
  17% of votes

• Tee Design 1 (by Michael Motherwell)
  14% of votes

My hearty congratulations to our winner Cindy N (whose design is pictured) and the two runners up Matt and Michael.

Seems that Cindy’s tag cloud design appealed to a lot of people and the way she had highlighted Search Engine College in green within the cloud – well, we thought that was inspired!

Cindy, as winner of our tee design competition, you get the following cool stuff:

- a 2 day conference pass to SMX Sydney 2010.

- a t-shirt sporting your design

- the kudos of seeing your design printed on t-shirts and distributed to all attendees at SMX Sydney 2010.

I’ll be in touch shortly with details on your prize pack. Thanks again to all who entered and voted and see you at SMX!

So this week we threw down a challenge. To have you guys design us a new Search Engine College tshirt for 2010.

Now we didn’t get a great deal of entries – I blame myself for blogging about it so late – but hats off to those of you who managed to come up with something with only 48 hours notice.

To make up the deficit, I’ve thrown in a couple of last year’s entries that I felt were worthy contenders.

Here are the finalists in random order:

• Tee Design 1 (by Michael Motherwell)
  
• Tee Design 2 (by SEC Staff *)
  
• Tee Design 3 (by Matt Burgess)
  
• Tee Design 4 (by SEC Staff *)
  
• Tee Design 5 (by Natter)
  
• Tee Design 6 (by SEC Staff *)
  
• Tee Design 7 (by Ninja)
  
• Tee Design 8 (by Cindy N)
• Tee Design 9 (by SEO Nottingham)
  
• Tee Design 10 (by Mark Leggett)
  

* Not eligible to win prize

You can vote for the design you’d like to see win by taking THIS POLL. The design with the most number of votes will be used on our t-shirts and win the 2 day pass to SMX Sydney, UNLESS the winning design is one of those submitted by SEC staff, in which case the runner up will win the conference pass.

You’ve got until next Monday April 12 to cast your vote and you can only vote once (your votes are logged by cookie and IP so no cheating). The winner will be announced on April 13.

Get voting now!

Last year we held a competition to design our 2009 T-shirt to help promote Search Engine College at SMX Sydney.

Well it’s that time of year again! We’re looking for some inspirational designs for our 2010 Search Engine College t-shirt. You can suggest a design within the comments of this blog and I’ll set up a poll for readers to vote for the winner.

The person behind the winning design will be announced on this blog and receive  a 2 day pass to SMX Sydney. [This is a single conference pass only and does NOT include travel, accommodation or a ticket to Under the Bridge.]

The winning design will be will be issued to all students who graduate from our Certification Pathways in 2010. If I get my act together in time, it may also be printed on our t-shirts scheduled for distribution to all attendees at SMX Sydney being held on 22-23 April.

Grab the blank tshirt front / back and the SEC logo and go play. Need some inspiration? Check out last year’s tee design finalists.

Competition rules are as follows:

1) Your design or slogan should be suggested within the comments of this post. You can link to a design on your own site or simply suggest a slogan in your comment.

2) Designs need to work on a white tshirt and should be no more than 2 colors.

3) The SEC logo and/or URL should appear somewhere in the design (on the back is fine)

4) Keep it clean. Unfortunately, some conference attendees and some of our students, may be offended by the use of curse words. If you need to curse, use an asterisk to censor your design somewhat. (Grrrr, I know I know).

5) Apart from the restriction of 4) your design can be as witty and creative as you like.

6) Due to my extreme procrastination and resulting print deadline, entries MUST close this Thursday 8 April 2010 at 5pm NZ time (GMT +12).

7) 5 finalists will be chosen by staff of Search Engine College and blog readers and Twitter followers will be given the opportunity to vote for their favorite finalists via a poll to be announced Thursday evening.

8 ) The final design winner will be announced on Monday 12 April 2010.

9) You MUST comment here to enter.

Good luck all!

Post Script:  Some of you have asked which tee won last year’s comp? It was the clever LOL Cat by Pete Newsome. I should also mention that we liked last year’s tee submission from the very talented Andrew Ballard so much, that we adopted his concept (with permission) as our new SEC logo. A revised web site featuring the new logo is in progress now. Thanks Andrew!

If you were given the task of coming up with an idea for raising money for your favorite charity, using only your influence to fund the idea, what would YOU do?

Here’s what Evan Carmichael decided to do. He took the popular hobby of baseball card collecting and leveraged his connections with 33 leading bloggers to create the Entrepreneur Heroes Trading Card series to raise money for Kiva.

Evan asked 33 top bloggers to name their favorite entrepreneur and provide a reason why they inspired them. The result is a unique collection of trading cards featuring famous entrepreneurs such as:

• Steve_Jobs
• Seth Godin
• Martha Stewart
• Jeff Bezos
• Steve Wozniak
• Richard Branson
• Ev Williams / Biz Stone
• Gary Vaynerchuk
• Walt Disney

Each card has a picture of the entrepreneur on the front, with some facts and a quote from them on the back, together with a quote from the blogger who nominated them. Featured bloggers include people like Danny Sullivan, Guy Kawasaki, Darren Rowse, Tim Ferriss, Chris Brogan and Tom Peters.  Evan and his team have produced a very collectable set of trading cards for exchange at conferences, events or just to add to own your private collection.

Profits from the sale of the cards will go to support entrepreneurs in Africa through micro-lending organization Kiva. To date, over 825 new business owners in Africa have been helped through the efforts of Evan Carmichael and his team.

The Entrepreneur Heroes trading cards officially go on sale tomorrow. But you can pre-order your packs today and save 20% off the regular price – only $3.95 per pack of 5 cards instead of $4.95.  There’s free shipping if you order three packs or more, plus you’ll receive a limited edition gold hologram Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak card for every three pack pre-order. There’s also a chance to win a baseball signed by Steve Wozniak.

As an Evan Carmichael Elite Author, I’ve been given 12 limited edition, perspex-framed, hologram Steve_Jobs and Steve Wozniak cards (pictured) to give away. In order to win one, please tweet about which Kiva entrepreneur you think deserves support, making sure to include @kiva and @kalena somewhere in your tweet. For example:

“Hey @kalena, I think @kiva entrepreneur Evelyn Paquino deserves support because she is providing a valuable service to her community.”

Every day for 12 days starting 1 April, I’ll choose a winner and post out a limited edition trading card.

Don’t want to risk missing out? Order your trading cards right now.

Using a special animated logo, Google has paid tribute today to the English physicist, mathematician and astronomer Sir Isaac Newton who was born on this day in 1643.

It’s widely recorded that Newton *discovered* the concept of gravity (and the resulting science of physics) as a result of observing apples falling from a tree. In tribute, the drop apple theme is mimicked on Google’s global Home Page today.

The Google logo is partly obscured by the branch of an apple tree. After a second or so, an apple drops from the branch to the bottom of the home page. It’s unusual for Google to create an animated tribute Doodle and it makes a nice change from the static images. See the logo in action below:

Clicking on the logo takes you to SERPs for the search query “Isaac Newton”.

Apart from his wide influence on modern physical science, Newton also made great strides in mathematical research, chemistry, history and theology.