

HN Member on Frontpage of Today's NY Times - breck
http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2009/03/14/pageone/scan/index.html

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gstar
Congratulations, aandon!

I'm curious though, and I'd love it if you'd share - did you get this awesome
press through PR, contacts or serendipity?

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breck
Another roommate of ours met the reporter at laidoffcamp in San Francisco last
week and mentioned Alex and his Jellyfish business. The reporter called and
came by the house to do the story.

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tlrobinson
Link to the actual article:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/technology/start-
ups/14sta...](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/technology/start-
ups/14startup.html)

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katz
Looks awesome!

Maybe try and mention your name on the front page of your website?

The NYT article only mentions your name and jellyfish. Searching for "Alex
Andon jellyfish" does not show your webpage in the first result - I think that
the NYT article can be a pretty good advertisement.

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amichail
Do jelleyfish have much awareness of their environment? Would they care much
about the size of the tank? If so, how can you tell if they think the tank is
too small?

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tjmc
Jellyfish are extremely primitive creatures. Words like "awareness", "care"
and "think" are probably about as relevant for a plant.

~~~
radu_floricica
You're assuming awareness requires a nervous system. If a plant dies because
of lack of sun or water, you can be sure it's aware of its environment.
Conversely, even if a mammal is aware of something doesn't mean it has any
meaningful effect on it.

Living things tend to be complicated systems, and assuming the nervous system
the only part capable of interactions is just a bias. Lots of subsystems are a
lot more complex then a primitive cortex (the immune system comes immediately
in mind)

~~~
brlewis
It looks to me like he carefully phrased it not to assume anything.

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leoc
It's like a race. How many other HN people can get on the front page of the
Sultzberger NYT? Only, oh, perhaps 200 or so front pages to come.

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breck
He's the one in the picture with the jellyfish.

User andon11, who posted his startup story here a few weeks ago:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=466497>

~~~
aandon
I got a new website up since the last post. Hm readers gave me great feedback,
would love to get some more: <http://www.jellyfishart.com>

I'm building some simple software to go into the site soon to automate a lot
of the marketing

~~~
neilk
This is a huge improvement! And congratulations on landing the NY Times.

As someone else said before, now you have to get <http://jellyfishart.com/> to
be a top hit on Google for your name, and/or the concept of jellyfish tanks.
Unfortunately the NYTimes didn't mention the domain name or the company name.
(I wonder, can such things be negotiated?)

Link to the NYTimes story on the front page of your site. Maybe start a
"Links" section; this is also useful for trading links with other
entrepreneurs to build page rank.

Just curious, why no phone number? If I were you I'd put that in the footer of
every page.

Funny, but I see very few pages at all on Google for your company. Maybe you
should try Google's webmaster tools.

<http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard>

Since you probably can't afford the services of an SEO consultant (and most of
them do shady things anyway) perhaps the best thing is to find a lot of
business directories and make an entry for your company, with links back to
your website. Also your YouTube channel or any other avenues you can think of.
Ideally this should have been in place before the article came out but you
still have time if you work on sites that Google crawls quickly.

There are a few mistakes on the page which a browser will render ok but may
cause Google to give up. Use <http://validator.w3.org/> and you'll see what I
mean.

I'm guessing that you're using some kind of tool to create HTML - these tend
to suck for getting Google rank, since the structure is visually pretty but
hard for Google to understand. For instance, search engines can't determine
what's a heading and what's not unless you use the standard <h1>...<h6> tags.
Also, adding an alt="something" attribute to your images tells Google what is
in the picture (and that's required for XHTML anyway, which you seem to be
trying to support)

~~~
aandon
working now on getting to be a top hit on google. I put up google ads right
before the article came out since I am nonexistent on organic results, but a
bunch of my competitors probably got a lot of clicks too I'm working on SEO
now, got a programmer helping me. Also, the site was made with dreamweaver, so
my room mate (current YC term) just cleaned up the html to make it easier for
google to read

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kqr2
Related HN thread:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=515526>

