Babysitters and Apple Pie: Part of the American Fabric

I just came across this interview in the New Yorker of Miriam Forman-Brunell, the author of “Babysitter: An American History” which I thought you would all enjoy:

"The expansion of suburban communities, the influence of feminist ideals, and a rising divorce rate that drew more women into the formal economy also played a role. Unlike house cleaners, grandparents, and others who had historically provided childcare, teen-age girls became more readily available. While the rise of a commodity-based youth culture provided girls with a financial incentive to babysit, the expectation that, as females, girls are naturally maternal diminished parent-employers’ apprehensions about hiring teen-age girls."

Also, since I know we talked about the role of male babysitters in light of Lisa Belkin's comments, I thought this point was worth highlighting:

"I was surprised to learn of the number of boy babysitters before the nineteen-sixties, and that they were depicted as more competent, reliable, and responsible than girls at babysitting. From the Great Depression to the New Millennium, Henry Aldrich, Donald Duck, Archie Andrews, Tom & Jerry, Carl the Dog, and numerous other males who babysat on radio and TV shows, in cartoons, and in children’s books, were unfailingly portrayed as helpful heroes. As such, they bolstered the more unfavorable view of teen-age girls as irresponsible, irrational, and unreliable, despite the fact that, in reality, teen-age girls are the least likely to perpetrate crimes against children in their care."

Enjoy the rest of the article here!

Or go ahead and buy a copy of her book:
Babysitter: An American History

What texting while driving can teach us? Get some help!

We know that many of our users fit into the category of people who are just trying to fit a little too much into their every day schedule. And if you're like me, you end having to continuously multitask--which often includes the popular technique of texting while driving.

Well, our friends at the New York Times just put out a a little game so we can all better understand just how bad a driver we become when we start trying to get those text messages sent off while we're still behind the wheel. If you haven't seen it yet, you should definitely check it out.

Once you have, if you're like me (and apparently like the average user having tried it out before me), you'll be feeling as though their point was made pretty clearly... Maybe we should all take the hint and get some help.

So before you get in your car again with a million things on your mind that you just have to get done, hire one of our great personal assistants and get him/her to take a few things off your plate so you can at least wait until you get out of the car to start texting again.

Going abroad? Don't let food allergies stop you

For those of you planning on going abroad in the next few months, we hope you'll take advantage of one of our great language tutors. Whether you want to learn the basics or you need a quick refresher, nothing better than a few one-on-one sessions to get you prepared before your trip.

For those of you learning the basics, we know it's not easy. And we definitely know how stressful it can be if you have a food allergy and you're still not quite confident in your skills (or at least confident enough to always get the wording exactly right). So we thought you'd be interested in maybe getting some help from the people at selectwisely.com. They can get you a food card in more than few languages so you can let anyone know what it is that you can or can't eat and that way you can focus on more important vocabulary with your tutor.

Happy travels to all!

Modern day babysitting (it's for everyone)

So we're back after having spent the last few months putting together some new plans for myJambi that we will be releasing over the next 8 weeks. We are incredibly excited about them and hope you will enjoy them too!

In the meantime, we'll be sure to highlight items we come across that we hope will help you more easily and efficiently buy and sell services. As always, please keep the feedback coming and don't hesitate to let us know if you'd be interested in contributing a piece or if there is something you think we should be talking about.

To get things started again, I thought you'd enjoy Lisa Belkin's piece from last week on her recent adventures in childcare (hopefully next time Lisa needs some childcare help, she'll check out our NY babysitter booker:)). The new economy definitely seems to be leading more and more people to consider part-time work--we hear it every day from our users.

Men Answering My Childcare Ad
By LISA BELKIN

I posted an ad on Craigslist this week and found myself in the new economy.

With my older son leaving for college soon, I need to hire afternoon help, someone to drive my younger son from school and to activities, and to do cleaning and shopping and errands to round out the job. It has been more than a year since I last looked to hire for a position like this, and I expected many of the changes out there — more people answering the ad, willing to work for less money, bringing experience that far exceeds the job requirements.

What I didn’t expect was the number of men who’ve applied.

See the rest of the article

Guest blog: Anita S. interviews myJambi user Jennifer

Things have been crazy in a good way around here. From a plane landing in the Hudson River here in NYC, to the estimated 2+ million people who attended the inauguration of President Barack Obama (we get to call him that now!) there certainly is a special feeling in the air. Not a single person was arrested during the entire procession. I am still amazed and so proud of the message that people are sending across the world.

As we move forward as a nation, I'm reminded that we all need to stay active to make a small difference to help our country and our people. Jennifer, a myJambi user from my hometown of Milwaukee, WI is an ambitious spirit. She is our featured user of the month. For more information, check out her profile.

So Jennifer, tell us a bit about yourself.
I am 24 years old, currently living in Milwaukee, WI. I am a single mom to a 9 month old girl. I am going back to school for nursing. I
eventually want to get into medical school. I have a variety of skills and interests from music to art to photography.

How did you find out about myJambi?
I had been trying to find jobs in where I can work at home and during my own hours because of my newborn. While on Facebook, I
stumbled onto a link for myJambi and the rest was history.

What inspired you to join?
Seeing how unique and inventive it was compared to other sites. I've seen sites like Craiglist, etc.. but I never heard replies from people
and I never found something I could do. myJambi was a great place to connect with others as well as to help one another out.
I have a variety of services. Why did I chose so many? I honestly love helping people. I love meeting new people. All the
services that I have chosen meets both of those. I love being a part of something important to someone else. Make someones life a little bit easier.

Have you hired myJambi users in the past?
No, I haven't yet. It seems like a lot of people using myJambi are around the New York area. So that makes things a bit difficult. I would love to see myJambi more nationwide. I think others will highly benefit from the services from the site.

What other sites besides myJambi do frequent?
Well I am frequently on facebook. I also use gonannies.com. I just recently got into blogger.com. I just love blogging.

Anything else you'd like us to know?
I am still looking to help anyone who doesn't mind a long distance service. I've done CDs and made a cheese list for people in New York. I am willing to work something out and I am very creative.

In the spirit of change and giving, I'm curious to hear what activities you are up to. How do you plan to stay active and involved in 2009? Comment below!

Want to be featured on the myJambi blog? Got a cool service you want to promote? Talk to use below in the comments! You can also just say hello. We love to hear from you.

-Anita

Searching for myJambi

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can make a big difference to the success of a young site like ours. We've been looking for ways to increase our own search engine performance, but like many start-ups, we wanted to find an affordable way to do it. Of course, we could always buy help ourselves out by buying key words on Google searches via AdWords, but that can get pricey, particularly as you go for highly competitive keywords, such as "babysitters New York" or "SAT Tutoring." We also didn't want to go the Black Hat SEO route and engage in any frowned-upon search engine tactics: that doesn't seem like an effective long-term solution.

So what can a start-up like myJambi with limited resources do? We identified a few steps to take.

First, at a tech networking event here in New York, we met John Murch of SEODrop. The site is still in stealth mode, but John was kind enough to come to our office and run us through what he does. That initial presentation was very helpful and John has continued to be a valuable resource for the myJambi marketing team along the way. We've also integrated the SEODrop reporting into our weekly metrics update.

As an easy second step, we signed up to Google Webmaster. This allowed us to get a better idea of how Google viewed us and gave us the opportunity to submit a site map. That definitely seems like an easy and obvious step in the quest for search engine domination (yeah, right –- but hey! We're trying).

Inbound links from other websites to ours can be incredibly valuable in improving PageRank and search engine standing, so we've been working on getting listed on various directories. Here, our rookie mistake was to (wrongly) assume that commenting on blogs and forums would count in terms of boosting the number of inbound links Google would recognize. We soon learned that this was not the case - these are known as "no follow" links, and they do not help you page ranking. An apology is in order here to our spectacular intern Daphne for wasting her precious work hours.

We started paying attention to the keywords we use in the meta data section of the major pages on myJambi. Not only did we take a good look at the keywords we're choosing for own site, but we also did a rudimentary analysis of other interesting sites in our space. Simply by clicking View and then View Page Source, we identified keyword patterns, such as whether there was an average number of keywords we should aim for, whether we should worry about misspellings, which words to emphasize. We found that there are no rules -- we saw a whole variety of approaches. Some had many keywords, some were more restricted. Some anticipated visitors typing in the wrong name, some did not. We decided to go for a middle ground - we would include some misspellings in the future and increase the number of keywords.

Another trick we picked up on is that the first keywords always have the most value and that their value diminishes the more keywords you add. So if you have 10 keywords, the first is much more powerful than the last. That means that we tried to figure out ways to move the most important or relevant words for that page to the top of the list. This would involve some restructuring, some of which is still to come, but we think it's probably worth it.

There's some controversy over the extent to which relevant key words in your meta tags influence your search engine standings. (In general, there is a wealth of literature out there on search engine optimization and not seldom does one renowned author contradict another, leaving newcomers somewhat bewildered.) However, it's also pretty widely acknowledged that spending some time on your meta tag keywords won't ever hurt your site and can only help. Yahoo, for instance, is reported to still pay attention to key words.

This is particularly true if key words featured in the meta tags are repeated on the actual web page, which brings us to what we think is going to be our most important SEO initiative by far: relevant landing pages. Currently, myJambi does not have many landing pages that are focused by location and service category – rather, most of our search and browse pages to date are general results pages that are then filtered down by our users according to what they are specifically looking for. However, in the future we will be introducing a number of targeted landing pages for people looking for child care in New York or language tutoring in the Bay Area. It's going to be a good chunk of work, but we think this will help us a lot when it comes to optimizing our site for search engines.

In sum, there is a ton to learn in this field and we have only scratched the surface. However, the golden rules seem to be to have relevant content, choose your keywords carefully, and try and get inbound links from trusted, relevant sites. If you follow these, even broadly, you'll be on the right track. We're not SEO experts, but we know a lot more now than we did when we started.

Explore myJambi in a new way: See what's out there and get inspired

As the year gets started, we're offering our users a new way to explore myJambi.



Click on the explore link in the top nav and you'll get taken to the new standard view of all our listings. This new view will provide you with the basic information (price, location and BIGGER photos which seem to be a #1 request) so you can get an easy feel for all the different opportunities in your area and in your network in a simple and structured way.



Once you've narrowed things down a bit you can then hop over to the advanced view and find the perfect match by taking advantage of the advanced filters; maybe you're looking for a specific price, a user with a certain rating, or you just need to make sure that the person you want to work with can make it on a specific day.



We've also tried to help you out a bit by creating some pages that we hope will inspire you as you try to make the most of myJambi. Are you a parent looking to get some help around the house? Take a look at our 'For parents' page. Need to get a gift for a loved one? Visit our 'Gift Ideas' page. Need a break? Treat yourself to the one of the services on the 'Just for me' page.

As you know, we try to make changes to the myJambi site every week or two to build the site that fits your needs but we can only stick to that promise by getting your honest feedback on a regular basis so be sure to keep it coming.

Happy exploring and happy new year from the entire myJambi team!

Finding help you can trust

As you probably know by now, myJambi helps you tap into your trusted network of friends and colleagues to buy and sell services. We understand that it's hard to find reliable people. If you're like us, you've probably tried using other sites and had some weird experiences. Sometimes that doesn't matter too much - if you're buying a hat from a myJambi service provider and it comes in a slightly different color than you ask for, it's annoying but nobody got hurt. If you hire a babysitter to look after your kids and they don't show up at the right time, it probably will matter quite a lot.

Every week, more of our users get rated by other users. You can read those ratings and see who you can trust. We at the myJambi team also like to keep an eye out to make sure that our users are matched up with each other. If you have something in mind that you'd like to get done or a service you'd like to offer but you haven't found someone appropriate, let us know - we're happy to help you by reaching out on your behalf. You can email us at kristina@myjambi.com.