A recent post at the Yahoo Buzz Blog about popular menu searches contains some really good information for those in the restaurant business contemplating a PPC campaign. One of the knocks on some of the bigger conglomerates is they don’t really leverage paid search as well you’d expect and this criticism rings true for […]

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Companies may be having just as difficult a time figuring out what to do with blogs when people leave the company as they do in deciding when and how to start and support a blog initially.

Can Blogs Survive Writer Losses?

It’s one thing for firms to decide who can and can’t post at the company blog, and to change that lineup at a whim. But once content has been contributed by an author, should it stay up there when the author departs for another job?

The issue proves just as relevant to websites where an author’s work forms the reason for pages to be created and posted in the first place. Sun Microsystem’s chief open source officer Simon Phipps blogged about what he has seen from his former employer, IBM, when it comes to people blowing out of Big Blue.

Phipps left IBM for Sun in 2000, and although he had been mentioned in several places on IBM’s site, those references are being removed. He also noted the “father of Websphere,” Don Ferguson, has been subject to similar editing, evidently for the sin of joining Microsoft.

Websphere has been a fixture in IBM’s Internet strategy for several years. It is an important part of their corporate efforts to gain and keep customers not just for Websphere but for other products like the DB2 database.

Whitewashing Ferguson out of Websphere’s past seems petty at best, malicious at worst. Evidently it will not be a situation that repeats itself at Sun. Phipps wrote of the blogging strategy their CEO and well-known techie blogger Jonathan Schwartz have built to address possible Sun blogger departures:

In true corporate tradition, Schwartz even put a positive spin on this policy and employees who leave. “One of Jonathan’s motivations for this was also so that people could pick up where they left off when they rejoined Sun!” said Phipps.

If someone’s information was good enough to post in 2006, it should still be good enough to keep online. Disposing of content or of the acknowledgment of someone’s contribution to a company’s success seems like an idea that should be tossed out with the trash.

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Tag: Blogs

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As I was looking around the blogosphere this morning, I came across a number of good search engine articles I’d like to share with you. Most of these are of the helpful, SEO variety, but the last one is just weird.First off, there’s some news concerning Google’s spidering habits that you might find interesting […]

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Over at the SoloSEO blog, there’s a good post discussing five things you can do to find new SEO clients. The list features some easily executed ideas while going over some standard information - for instance, starting a blog. However, like many readers out there, I’ve always enjoyed how-to articles featuring informative lists […]

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In a new round of capital funding, Wazap has received an additional $7.9 million as part of its effort to expand its presence into the United States. Currently, the gaming search engine is only available in the Chinese, Japanese, and German languages, respectively.

Wazap Coming To America?

Wazap is scheduled to launch in the United States in February.

Partech International heads up the second round of funding, with additional support from Wellington Partners. Wellington contributed $4 million in capital to Wazap in the company’s initial monetary campaign.

Vertical and niche searches are becoming all the rage, and with the video game industry ripe for takeoff in 2007, the timing for a U.S. launch of the gaming search engine couldn’t be better.

An ECP article comments on the conceptual approach that Wazap has taken:

Wazap’s success in the U.S. will probably come as more of a challenge, given the established presence of widely popular online gaming portals such as IGN, as well as others.

Of course, Wazap’s strategy may not be that of direct competition with IGN. In fact, searching for game titles within the engine may lead directly to articles hosted by the IGN portal. The nuance here is that Wazap is an aggregation resource, not a content provider in and of itself.

So instead of going to IGN to get a review of a game, then navigating over to GameFAQs to get a look at the walkthrough and cheats, users will instead be able to search for a particular game and get the entire lowdown within a SERP page, cutting down the research time.

Well, this is the concept that Wazap is banking on, anyway. It’ll be interested to see what kind of success and/or fanfare the U.S. launch is met with next month.

Tags: Search, Vertical Search, Wazap, Video Games

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Yet another cross-site scripting issue has cropped up with Google, as their dominant place on the Internet could be starting to draw Microsoft-like attention from malicious hackers.

Google Gets XSS Wires Crossed

Even though Google seemingly has a license to print money with its lucrative search advertising business, it isn’t time to start minting coins with a motto of “In Google We Trust.” Curious explorations of the code for their web-based services have been revealing some scary potential within them.

Garett Rogers posted at his Googling Google blog how another cross-site scripting issue with Google has been discovered. This would be the third such problem found in the past few weeks.

“I will not give you details as to how the exploit works until it has been fixed - but I can tell you that it is extremely easy for anyone who knows HTML to exploit,” he wrote.

Google has been quick to patch these flaws when identified. The nature of this one has Rogers advising people to completely log out of their Google Accounts while surfing the web.

That’s the kind of advice Google will not enjoy hearing, even though it is appropriate to the threat involved here. Building trust among their users takes a hit when someone has to log out of a service like Gmail or Google Reader, to say nothing of Google’s profitable AdWords clients.

Rogers wrote of the vulnerability and noted that “another XSS vulnerability that easily and without the victim’s consent can steal cookies and hijack your Google account.” Imagine the chatter on the blogosphere if someone who profits nicely from AdSense discovered a criminal changed the name and address of the payee account, and got a revenue check redirected by exploiting a cross-site flaw.

The trio of exploits that have been revealed were all found by people who were more interested in seeing them fixed. Those with a more criminal bent won’t be so quick to drop Google a note about security issues. If criminals step up their attacks on Google, will 2007 be the year people lose their trust in their services?

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Tag: Google

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I’ve been pondering my stance on Digg recently. When I saw Christian Mezei’s Unofficial FAQ regarding the Digg algorithm, I began to ponder the entire concept of social media, especially given the recent controversy surrounding which content makes the front page, and which gets buried.

Is There A Reason You Are Buried On Digg?

It was quite an informative article, and I’ll try to touch on some of the main points here, but I highly suggest reading the entire post if you get the chance.

Three notable items that caught my eye have seem to have a large impact on whether or not a story makes it to the Digg frontpage:

It occurs to me that these items bear absolutely no correlation as to the quality of the story being reviewed. It seems to be all about making friends, hoping they digg your articles, and not pissing anyone off - consequently compelling them to bury your articles.

So this bears the question: Is Digg a true news site, or just a glorified social clique? Or worse, is it a vehicle for unwarranted censorship?

To answer these questions, let’s consider the example of Lee Odden, who found last month that his site had been completely banned from Digg on the premise of spamming. Lee’s Top Rank SEO Blog wasn’t the only site to suffer this penalty, but the interesting point to take note of here is that the “malicious content” in question wasn’t spam at all, not even close.

So why were these sites buried and banned? Simply because influential Diggers decided the content was “unworthy” of inclusion within their precious little sphere of social media, elitist style.

Michael Graywolf’s article outlining “Dirty Digging” goes into great detail into just exactly how Diggers can rally together to bury and ban domains for which they disapprove for seemingly arbitrary reasons. He also goes on to explain why A-list Diggers are able to get away with this type of discrimination:

It’s valid to claim that getting on the Digg frontpage comes down to a popularity contest, and I think one would have to be pretty nave to completely disregard the idea that status has a significant impact on an article’s ranking.

More than that, however, bloggers and journalists now have to live in fear of saying the wrong thing, lest they be expelled from the site altogether. All of this leaves me wondering when the First Amendment suddenly became null and void according to Digg, a place where now anyone can be squelched on a whim, so long as it pleases the elitist Diggers.

I guess at Digg, it’s liberty and justice for none.

Nevertheless, Digg is indicative of the ever-growing paradigm shift in news coverage.

News is becoming viral, socially contextual, and is increasingly less dependent on the validity/quality of the source material involved.

So, if someone with a lot of virtual charisma makes a statement like, “Google is awesome and they’re going to over the world,” he or she would stand a better chance of making it to Digg’s front page than a well-researched piece containing commentary from reputable Wall Street insiders and industry analysts, but written by someone who is isn’t a part of the clique, as it were.

And if you mention SEO in the title, you might as well prepare to be buried and most likely banned. Why? For no other reason that the Diggers just don’t like you, that’s why.

If Social Media is just going to become another vehicle for censorship and elitist agendas, then you can count me out. I’ve no interest in becoming part of Discrimination 2.0, even if it means sacrificing page clicks or name recognition, if membership requres that I cater to the socialite bureaucracy of Digg by avoiding topics whimsically decided to be “unsavory” to their sensitive reading agendas.

Perhaps I’m one of the few who actually still believes in free speech, even if I don’t agree what someone has to say.

Tags: Digg, Discrimination, First Amendment, Free Speech

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Start out the New Year by learning what tried and true marketing methods work on-line. Use already existing resources like blogs, e-zines, article directories and more to push your business to the top!

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Auto-responders can generate sales, increase customer satisfaction and save you time. Get innovative ideas on using auto-responders and why your customers will appreciate you more for it.

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It’s safe to say the benefits of an effective social media marketing campaign are well worth the effort and commitment, but how about pairing these campaigns with traditional marketing (including online) efforts? Can a joint approach improve the exposure of the product you are trying to draw attention to?In a word - absolutely… In […]

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Does your eBay business target a particular niche on eBay? If so how about going one step further and writing an eBook or short report related to your business? This will boost sales and gain you expert status in your niche. And more importantly this will give you an edge over your competition.

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Recently, I posted an entry about social media attacking - a post focusing on the AntiSocialMedia.net blog that many felt was developed solely to harass critics of Overstock.com.Well, this is no longer a speculative issue because Judd Bagley, director of social media at the shopping site has admitted he is the administrator of the […]

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Some adsense sites are performing well and others just exist in the abyss of cyberspace. Make sure your adsense site is the successful one and keep it out of the abyss.

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The Internet Money Machine eSeminar - Attend an Internet marketing seminar from home!

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If you ever had to chase down prospects or deal with countless tire kickers and looky looos (the wrong people) to build your business than you need to read every single word of this article.

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Internet Marketing Articles provide real benefits to online businesses

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Drivers of the charming little Mini Coopers may be invited to sign up for an interactive billboard promotion called Motorby, where RFID equipped keyfobs will change the message as these drivers approach the billboard.

Do You Want Behavorial Ultra-Targeted Marketing?

The future is in personalization. While ‘Minority Report’ references will be everywhere about the program being promoted to Mini owners, the real news is the continued merging of technology, marketing, and personal information.

As an exclusive brand with the kind of cachet that Apple has in the world of consumer electronics, Mini can take advantage of that position and do these kinds of out of the box thinking experiments. While RFID has been used heavily behind the scenes in warehousing and inventory management, most people who know of it probably just heard how passports use them now.

Mini’s approach as detailed at MotoringFile takes a little bit of owner-contributed information, nothing too personal, and embeds it into an RFID chip. The RFID goes into a keyfob, and the keyfob goes to the owner.

The next time the owner drives the Mini past one of the electronic billboards in Chicago, New York, Miami, or San Francisco, and the message on the RFID chip appears on the screen. The billboards are placed over highways to pick up the RFID signal.

This application of technology and personalized information will be just for fun. Mini wants irreverence, to emphasize the quirky appeal of their little cars. It’s drive-by product evangelism, something that even Apple hasn’t pulled off yet.

We considered the prospect of changeable billboards back in 2005. That was from the context of Google driving its advertising to people everywhere, and the use of wireless technology and ‘electronic paper’ (which does exist today, developed by Fujitsu) to deliver ad messages to people anywhere that a paper ad could be posted.

Mini’s effort uses a digital billboard to display a simple text message. It’s a start, and one that we will probably consider quaint in five years. As for today, it’s a neat implementation of RFID, even though the privacy naysayers will express worries about it.

UPDATE!: I didn’t see this Engadget post about Google and billboards until a few minutes ago, but it looks like the future of Internet connected, interactive billboards could happen sooner than later. Could my prediction from August 2005 be closer to coming true?

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Tags: MINI, RFID, Advertising

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Tired of High CPC in Adwords? Beat Google at Their Own Game and Out Perform Your Competition at the same time. Pays $30 / Sale

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If you haven’t thought of online business marketing, then now may be the high time for you to consider pondering on it. There are just about a few exceptions but generally, most business marketing action plans benefit from doing it online. If you have noted, most of the corporate lines have secured their own portals in the Internet. Would you like to be left behind? Certainly, people who are busy minding their own businesses barely have time to spend for personal dealing …

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It’s being reported around the blogosphere that DMOZ is once again accepting site submissions; a move that indicates DMOZ is trying to get back to business as usual. The controversial directory suspended the editor and submission capabilities towards the end of 2006 - a move many thought signified the end of the ODP.However, […]

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Most people do not know what latent sematic indexing, or LSI, really is. A lot has been written about its use in search engine optimization, yet it cannot be ‘used’ on a website as such. It is a misunderstood concept, and people would be better forgetting about it spending their efforts on writing genuine, useful content and developing a sound marketing strategy.

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If you are frustrated with your efforts of trying to drive targeted traffic to your website then read this article. Until you gain an understanding of how to properly promote your web site you will remain frustrated and your efforts will never reach it’s full potential unless you are making all the right moves. Search engines are the #1 tool people use when shopping for products, services or information online. Properly promote your site to search engines and watch your traffic will explode.

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During the early part of this century, many hi-tech workers lost their jobs as the economy went into a tail spin and the technology companies found they had no markets for all of their technology heavy projects. Thousands of people lost their jobs and had to look for employment or begin new businesses. The silver lining in this phenomenon was that these same people changed careers and also started many new businesses from home.

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Social bookmarking is one of the hottest Web 2.0 online trends. The concept of social bookmarking is about 10 years old, but due to it’s recent explosive growth, it has just now become one of the new internet “buzz words”. It’s important for internet marketers to understand social book marking and how it can help them promote their products and services.

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The internet is no longer a ‘new’ technology. More and more people are going online daily to not only play online games and other ‘activities’, but to conduct actual research and comparative shopping before making a purchase. People come to the internet for answers to questions or solutions to problems.

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If you want to produce a profitable web site, then affiliate programs are the most ideal approach.

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Microsoft released the results of an eye-tracking study focusing on the impact of search ranking, and more provocatively among industry experts, the impact of informational snippet length on user task performance. The early (and already debated) conclusion is that 1. a top 5 rank, not top 10, is crucial; 2. snippet length has a direct impact on search success.

Is Your Site Top 5 Material?

But snippet lengths produced different results depending on the task, according to the 13-page report (PDF):

In plain English, longer snippets significantly improved the searcher’s ability to find what they were looking for with informational tasks (i.e., average June temperature in Caracas). But when navigating for specific sites, longer snippets cluttered up the way.

Other findings:

1. Users scan four results regardless of where the best listing is (Though we also know from previous studies that the top listings are inherently trusted more, and it appears searchers consider results in couplets - one and two together, eliminating one, usually the second, and then skipping to three and four, suggesting odd-number results are superior to even-numbered results).

2. Users scanned more results when the best listing was moved further down the page, regardless of snippet length, indicating users know at a glance if the result is the correct one.

3. Users look farther down the list for navigational queries than for informational queries.

4. Users expect to find their desired information in the top five results (Other reports have supported that results appearing above the fold, or where scrolling is required, are clicked on with more frequency. In relation to that, Microsoft’s study showed click accuracy rates diminished for rankings 4, 5, 7, and 8. Note: Result six is not included as below the fold, six becomes rank one.)

5. Users examine, on average, eight results before changing their queries, meaning results 9 and 10 are pretty much SOL.

Over at SearchEngineLand, Danny Sullivan’s new magical search stomping ground, Sullivan makes his own conclusion:

Sullivan also echoed Microsoft researchers suggestion that, for navigational searches, URLs should be placed above the descriptions.

The question of the snippet, though, remains somewhat controversial. The authors of the study readily admitted that with longer snippets, fewer results are shown on a page. Plus, search engines would need to improve dramatically at distinguishing between an informational and a navigational query to better serve the intent of the searcher.

This is where Enquiro’s Gord Hotchkiss weighs in, cautioning about making dramatic changes based on one set of results:

It may be smart to suggest a sort of compromise, rather than either/or dichotomies. In a world of AJAX, it would seem relatively simple to settle the snippet debate with a more information mouse over. Or, dare I suggest, that Ask.com is ahead of the game here by offering website previews in the results.

Tag: Search, Eye-tracking

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Affiliate marketing and working with niche markets is the way to go today if you are young and eager to make a lot of money. The best thing about affiliate marketing is the freedom to work in a relaxing environment. No paperwork to shift around from one desk to another and the earnings are on par with the setting. The more effort youre willing to put in building a maintaining a nice website, the more money will come in every day.

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A blog is basically an online journal wherein you can digitally pen down your thoughts, ideas, opinions and practically anything that you want people to read. Blogs come in different styles, formats, and settings, depending on the preference of the user.

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As an online business owner, you know you must stay in touch with your email list on a regular basis if you want to have a successful and sustainable business. Publishing an ezine is one of the most effective ways to do so, but sometimes that can feel overwhelming and cumbersome. This article gives you 5 alternatives to putting out an ezine.

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