Michael Sparks was shopping in a thrift store in Nashville last March. He noticed a “yellowed, shellacked, rolled-up document”. Upon asking the clerk “how much?”, the clerk labeled it $2.48.

Through a little research online Michael learned that the old document he bought happened to be 1 of 200 official copies of the Declaration of Independence commissioned by John Quincy Adams in 1820.

The document is up for auction on March 22nd with an opening bid of $125,000 and is expected to go for at least twice that.

When asked to comment, the clerk that sold the Declaration continuously smacked himself in the face.

Design Meltdown mentioned an appllication yesterday that was new to me. It’s called Community Server and seems to be heading in the direction that my original post stated.

Community Server is a content management system that allows you to combine blogs, forums, photo galleries, file sharing, Wikis, etc… What makes it different from Joomla and the other popular CMS apps is the way everything is integrated. It features a single login and the navigation and style stay consistent across the site.

Telligent is the name of the company behind the app and they have quite a few large clients using it: Xbox Forums, MSDN, The Hive, and BET.

Unlike WordPress, Vanilla, and the other popular platforms, Community Server is built on ASP .NET, not php and mySQL. That alone might make it difficult for it to reach a larger audience.

A few of the sites Design Meltdown mentioned that use CS were quite nice. BlogMailr, FX Best Practices, and Channel 9, integrate a blog, forum, and other sections, somewhat seamlessly.

So why haven’t I spent the past several hours planning for YGG’s conversion? A few reasons.

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In the new March issue of Fast Company brothers Dan & Chip Health kick off a new column “exploring how and why ideas succeed or fail” with a great read called The Myth About Creation Myths. (You need to be a subscriber to read the whole story online, or purchase a copy at your local newsstand)

…Or keep reading below for a short summary of the article and one man’s viewpoint on the subject.

This first article for the new column is focusing on “the power and perils of a great backstory.” Using examples of iconic start-ups like Apple and YouTube, the Heath brothers explain why we love a great story… even more than the truth.

We all know the stories, we dream about them at night when we drift off to Entrepreneur la-la land. A place where we fantasize of the days when we too will be the heroes who triumphed over great odds… but just how great were the odds for Apple and YouTube? Over time stories become greater and greater, but was Apple started by two geeks in a garage?… or by two high-level programmers at some of the biggest tech companies of the time?

As for YouTube…
“Consider two of the founders of YouTube, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley. Both cut their teeth at PayPal–in fact, Hurley was one of PayPal’s first employees and even designed its logo. (He is also the son-in-law of James Clark, who founded Netscape and Silicon Graphics.) Top-tier venture-capital firms were calling them, offering money, counsel, and connections, within months of launch. That’s not quite as uplifting as hearing that twentysomething buddies created a cool site to swap videos with friends.”

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We have just sold our fourth TLA and I wanted to see if they’ve benefited the advertisers in SEO. The easiest way to test that is to search on MSN’s Live Search (link:www.thedomain.com) for the sites linking to each of the advertiser’s domains.

First up, H&R Block (Tax Software). This is a gigantic company so there are obviously tons of sites linking to it. Surprisingly enough, Mike Rundle’s Business Logs (9rules) shows up on page 10 of the results, Mind Petals page 11, Tyler Cruz and YGG on page 12. Not too shabby for such a large company.

Next, Levenger (Briefcases). YGG shows up on page 4 along with Innovation Zen and just after Shmula. Pretty impressive.

Third, Safe-T-Water (portable water filter bottle). We are the third from the top of the first page. The first being GoBackpacking which features Safe-T-Water via TLA as well.

Last, Franchise Gator (Work at Home Opportunities!). TLA sold this ad less than an hour ago, so we obviously don’t show up in the results yet. But other bloggers like Yaro Starak (page 1) and Mind Petals (page 9) do, thanks to Text Link Ads.

For the larger of the four companies, H&R and Levenger, someone would’ve noticed that their search results weren’t accurate and/or not too many sites were linking to them. In steps TLA.

For the smaller two, Safe-T-Water and Franchise Gator, TLA seems to be an easy way to get larger sites to link to them and in the end, improve their PageRank.

When it comes to Text Link Ads effect on search results and keyword relevancy, a simple search on Google is the ultimate test.

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I wonder how many times that headline’s been used before?

Anyways, I was having a conversation with a fellow young go getter well into the morning last night. We are both interested in creating an advertising agency at some point down the road, and have different directions we’d like to take them.

That discussion triggered a memory of a campaign from last year for Volkswagen. For anyone that hasn’t seen the spots for VDubs Rock, they were offering a First Act guitar with the purchase of a new VW. The custom guitar was made to match your vehicle and you could connect the guitar to your car stereo and play it wherever you wish.

Until seeing some pictures on rm116 yesterday, I hadn’t seen any detailed pics or known of anyone personally that received one of the guitars.

Through a little more digging on Flickr I found quite a few pics that focus on the details of the guitar and the box it arrived in.

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