User:Michael Martinez
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Michael Martinez is an author, Webmaster, search engine optimization specialist, and frequent contributor to many Web-based forums and other online discussion communities.
Michael's online career began in 1993 when he joined the Compuserve discussion community for a software firm's customers. Expanding to the Compuserve SFLit Forum, Michael joined a budding writers group called the Compuserve IMPs. As Compuserve expanded its services to include access to the World Wide Web and the news groups, Michael directed his attention to the growing Internet.
A fan of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, Michael became active in Tolkien news groups and mailing lists. An active participant in the news group community for several years, Michael helped to launch and promote news groups such as soc.history.ancient, alt.fan.created-worlds, alt.tv.hercules, and others. He also launched his own Web-based forums for Andre Norton, Tolkien and the Inklings, and other popular science fiction and fantasy topics.
In the summer of 1998, Michael was invited to join the contributing editors staff at Suite101, writing a bi-weekly column on Hercules and Xena fandom. In August 1999, Michael switched topics to focus his attention on J.R.R. Tolkien and Middle-earth, turning over the Hercules and Xena topic to Josh Harrison. Michael continued to write for Suite101 until early 2002, when he turned over the Tolkien and Middle-earth topic to Charles Douglas Rapier.
Among the more than 100 essays Michael wrote for Suite101, several achieved widespread acclaim among Tolkien fandom and/or were quoted by newspapers and magazines around the world. Michael's review of the April 2000 special Internet Preview for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies was the first published review in the world and it was quoted extensively by newspapers in the United States and New Zealand. Two essays that have been reprinted and/or cited on numerous Tolkien fan sites are "Legolas, you're just so darned...cute!" and "Celeborn Unplugged".
Several of Michael's writing projects have been translated into languages including Polish, Italian, Spanish, Hebrew, Greek, Hungarian, and Portuguese. His research into the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and Andre Norton, and the television show Xena: Warrior Princess, has been cited in dissertations and scholastic research papers around the world. Michael's first domain, Xenite.Org, won numerous awards and recognition for its unique and thorough content in the late 1990s and early 2000s, including recognition from Britannica and Total TV.
In 2000, Michael republished several of his essays on Tolkien and Middle-earth in a book titled Visualizing Middle-earth. A self-published book, it has sold well through the years and is recognized as a successful self-published work. In 2002, Michael published a free eBook, Parma Endorion: Essays on Middle-earth, 3rd Edition, through Free-ebooks.net. Within 3 weeks, after 25,000 downloads, the eBook was named most popular download of the year by eBooks'n'Bytes. Since then, more than 1,000,000 copies of Parma Endorion have been downloaded from Free-ebooks.net and other distributors. The eBook has been pirated on file swapping and binary news networks and illegally sold through eBay and print-on-demand services.
In 2003 Vivisphere Publishing released Michael's third book, Understanding Middle-earth: Essays on J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. The book has been nominated for a Mythopoeic Society Award in 2006.
Michael became involved with the search engine optimization community in 1998. His contributions to SEO research have been numerous and in a few cases far-reaching, but the field of search engine optimization is constantly changing. In 2006, Michael was invited to join the blogging team at SEOMoz, a new resource for search engine optimization specialists which earned world-wide recognition for its innovative Beginner's Guide to SEO and Search Ranking Factors articles. In late 2005, SEOMoz was profiled in an article on search engine optimization by Newsweek magazine.
