When I started blogging at this site, I threw in a Google Adsense ad basically to fill up a column. That was a year ago. Today, on a whim, I decided to check out my earnings. As you’d probably expect, I have about enough in the account to buy an 18 pack of domestic beer. Luckily, I like domestic beer. So I figured, I might as well take the payout. Why leave it with Google? They had an answer…
I’m ready to vent here. Are we, as community builders, becoming so lazy that we don’t want to take the time to build in the social media features we want for our sites, the way we want them? Do we really need to have Google package them up and provide them for us, the way they want them? Two days ago, Google announced they were releasing the Google Social Toolbar, which is really a misnomer, as it isn’t really a…
Google announced late last week that they were killing 6 of their services, Dodgeball, Google Catalog Search, Google Mashup Editor, Google Notebook, Jaiku, and Google Video. Additionally, the Jaiku service is going to be an open source project from here on out. From Informationweek: In addition to Google’s announcements about the elimination of 100 recruiting positions and the shutdown of offices in Austin, Texas; Trondheim, Norway; and Lulea, Sweden, the company said it would close Dodgeball, Google Catalog Search, Google…
I used to use Technorati to find compelling blog posts to share and comments. It was rather convenient to be able to go to one spot and find out what people were saying in blogs around the globe and to easily search. One of the most compelling features, for me, was that it was an application designed with blogs only in mind. This morning I was looking a set of compelling blog posts on the anniversary of 9/11. So I…
Traffic stats – the red headed step child of statistics, damned lies cloaked inside a slathering of untruth and then wrapped in that un-Godliest of file formats, xls and used to bludgeon all that is sane and rational out of your web strategy. This is the stuff that reduces grown webmasters, those mastadonian throwbacks of an earlier tech era, to tears, and enables the airline magazine reading, conference attending execs to think they actually have a handle on what’s happening….
Okay, we all know that social networks are out there and that we should be making use of them. But how do you monitor what’s going on in the vast ecosystem of Twitterverses, MySpaceDoms and FacebookVilles? David Churbuck has been doing just that for Lenovo for the past two years and he’s sharing the lessons learned in this post: “Try to Detect It” which I consider a must read for any web marketing pro or business owner/senior manager. Free: yup….
I recently rolled out the http://www.powerupgeneratorservice.com site and in reviewing the initial search results are very interesting. To begin with, some background. Power Up Generator’s previous site was a single page, which hadn’t been optimized at all. They didn’t every turn up #1 when you searched on their own name. My initial survey of the site brought forward a problem for search optimization: they do business across New England. Yet no one searches for “new england” when they look for…
Who’d have thunk it? An article in Wired Magazine entitled “Algorithms Are Terrific. But to Search Smarter, Find a Person.” notices the growing trend of search firms using real meat-space residents to fine tune their results rather than relying on algorithms. The dirty little secret: algorithms can be gamed while humans are tougher to fool. Personally, I’ve been using Mahalo, Jason Calacanis’ new company and I am really liking what I see. The results are pertinent, and spam/splogger free. Give…