Allen Stern of CenterNetworks has gone too far. Frustrated by getting buried on Digg and TechMeme, Allen is executing some new black hat technique called SMO, Stern Media Optimization. 

He has already taken over my SERP and MG Siegler’s as well. Someone call the Cutlets please before this gets outa hand. I’m terrified that soon I’ll find the blogger king throughout my Google Alerts.

Ok really its the new Wordpress thumbnails within Google feature, Steve Rubel has a nice post covering the update.

My Business Cards

First big congrats to Allen Stern for launching CloudContacts. A notable tech blogger, Allen makes a smart move by rolling this ecommerce business on the side. I’ve done the same the last few years and it has always provided great side revenue, sometimes even surpassing my day job pay check as well.

So what is it?

CloudContacts takes your stacks of business cards and turns them into something useful. You mail in your business cards then they scan and provide the data to you via a web interface. I can’t think of how many times I’ve been somewhere and needed access to information found only in my pile of business cards. Of course those are at home, rubber banded together, in some long forgotten about place. Now I can just hit up the website or better yet export the data and toss it into my address book. Finally the service provides easy access to the social network profiles of these contacts, a great way to connect and reinforce the real life to virtual connection.

I just placed an order to check it out, I’ll let you know how it goes!

I can’t help but enjoy doing interviews. Frankly, most of the tech scene interviews these days are just painful to watch. I like to inject my own style and keep the interviewee on their toes. I guess you could say its a mixture of what John Steward and Howard Stern both do so well.

So I’m going to put together a small list of individuals I want to interview before the year is over. Hopefully some of you will find this via an ego search and setup a time. Those that don’t, well sorry I can’t let you off that easily. Just remember if you see me, the red light on my flip camera means its working.

The List:

• Allen Stern
• Duncan Riley
• Calley Nye
• Eric Rice
• MG Sieger
• Robert Scoble
• Tony Hsieh
• Mike Arrington
• Jason Calacanis