Archive for February, 2009
Friday, February 27th, 2009
Facebook Releases New Terms of Service for Feedback; Allows Users to Vote on Changes
After enduring controversy over a new Terms of Service, Facebook has released another new version – this time with a whole new vision for its implementation. The new TOS is open for feedback, in the spirit of being transparent.
There are two documents being released. One is “Facebook Principles,” which defines the rights of members. The second is a “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities,” which replaces the Terms of Service. Facebook also says their users will be notified of and get to vote on changes made to the documents.
When testing occurs on the social network, it will not be subject to notification or voting.
With today’s announcement, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg assured users that his social network doesn’t own data, the users do.
Related Reading:
The Fuss Over Facebook: Hype or Cause for Concern?
Aussies Show Facebook Can Become Dangerous Kangaroo Court
Facebook Reaches 150 Million Users Worldwide
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Friday, February 27th, 2009
Google India SearchMasters Conference
Tomorrow in Bangladore, India, Google is holding its Google SearchMasters Conference 2009 which is an opportunity for hte Indian webmaster community to interact with Google staff and learn about its publisher tools.
The Google SearchMasters 2009 lineup is quite impressive, with local Google India team members and top Google spokespeople and engineers, like Adam Lasnik.
Vivaik [...]
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Friday, February 27th, 2009
A Rose Translated Into Another Language Can Be a Thorny Thing
To truly understand marketing internationally, and international search marketing in particular, you need to get out and travel. What you read, or even gather from trips to major world cities, really doesn’t prepare you for how things differ once you step away from the well-marked path. …
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Friday, February 27th, 2009
Google Still Working On Making Blog Search More Relevant
It has been almost three months since Google Blog Search began indexing full text of the page and since then, there have been numerous complaints from searchers and webmasters.
The majority of the complaints are that Google Alerts are coming up for i…
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Friday, February 27th, 2009
HubSpot Announces Link Grader Inbound Link Tool for Its Internet … – Trading Markets (press release)
 SYS-CON Media |
HubSpot Announces Link Grader Inbound Link Tool for Its Internet …
Trading Markets (press release), CA For marketers to get found in search engines, it is important to build more inbound links, especially those of higher quality. A high-quality link is one that passes SEO (search engine optimization) value, offers context within the anchor text and … HubSpot Announces Improved Website Editor for Its Inbound … PR-Inside.com (Pressemitteilung) all 18 news articles |
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Friday, February 27th, 2009
Can You Make Money with AdSense for Domains?
Google AdSense for Domains lets domain name owners set up AdSense links on a parked domain which if it receives traffic, will serve relevant ads to the domain name (or popular categories).
I have not tried AdSense for Domains myself, but after digging through some forum threads on the AdSense Outage the other day, I ran [...]
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Friday, February 27th, 2009
My1Stop.com President Michael Del Chiaro Interviewed by … – MSNBC
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My1Stop.com President Michael Del Chiaro Interviewed by …
MSNBC In particular, Entrepreneur.com relied on Mr. Del Chiaro for expert advice to its readers about the relevance of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, to building a customer-centric, search engine-rich ecommerce presence. Customers can read the entire … |
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Friday, February 27th, 2009
Google AdSense Outage Confirmed by Google
Only a couple days after the great Google GMail Outage of 2009 (and hopefully the last), Google has confirmed that AdSense, their contextual ad network, also suffered from an outage on Wednesday.
According to the Wall Street Journal, a Google spokesperson confirmed that AdSense was indeed down for about 90 minutes, but did not affect [...]
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Friday, February 27th, 2009
Check Your Site Backlinks with LinkVooDoo
SEJ good friend Ryan Clark of Linkbuildr shared his new free SEO tool with me and quite naturally I decided to share it with our readers. The tool is LinkVooDoo – a backlink checker and website evaluator.
The link diagnostics part is what I am going to focus on first as quality link-checkers are few and [...]
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Friday, February 27th, 2009
Google Translate Adds 7 Languages; Now Up to 41
Google Translate has added 7 more languages. They are:
- Turkish
- Thai
- Hungarian
- Estonian
- Albanian
- Maltese
- Galician
This brings the total number of languages on Google Translate to 41. The available languages reach the ones spoken by 98% of internet users.
Last September, Google added 11 languages and last summer, Google “went live” with human translation as a service.
Related Reading:
Google Explains the Nuances of Language Translation
Google Translate Adds Widget, Notranslate Code Snippets
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Friday, February 27th, 2009
The fourth estate is dead; long live the fourth estate
Back in May 2005, Linda Rutherford sent me an email with the subject line: “Demise of the fourth estate.” Linda is now the Vice President of Communications and Strategic Outreach at Southwest Airlines, but she is a former a reporter for the Dallas Times Herald newspaper.
In her email, Linda wrote, “If you have a few moments, please take a look at this short video. It’s an interesting short movie from the Museum of Media History predicting the demise of the fourth estate.
“The scenario is entertaining, a bit frightening and not too far-fetched.
“It hints at the monumental changes afoot in how consumers will learn about news and form opinions about brands.
“Thought given your role you would enjoy this creative prediction of what’s to come.”
Linda was right. The 8-minute video by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson is a bit frightening. And the scenario it depicted was not too far fetched: “In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline. The Fourth Estate’s fortunes have waned. What happened to the news?”
The same day that Linda sent her email, The New York Times Company announced a “targeted staff reduction program that will include approximately 190 employees at The New York Times and the New England Media Group, which includes The Boston Globe.”
While the staff reduction represented less than 2% of the New York Times Company’s total workforce back in 2005, the cuts didn’t end there.
In its report on The State of the News Media 2006, the Project for Excellence in Journalism, asked, “Will we recall this as the year when journalism in print began to die?”
In December 2007, I wrote an article for Search Engine Watch entitled, “Blogs are the new trade press.” I observed, “In many industries, the trade press has imploded.” In our industry, I reported that online publications and group blogs generated close to 88 percent of the coverage of SES Chicago and PubCon. (The remaining 11 percent was – you guessed it – press releases.)
A year later, I reported on the battery of online video crews interviewing speakers between sessions at SES Chicago 2008. I also interviewed Abby Johnson of WebProNews about this trend. Abby is a pioneer in the field and has been producing videos for the WebProNews Video Blog for years.
Abby Johnson, WebProNews, discusses the top trends at SES Chicago
We’re now halfway between 2004, the year that Museum of Media History made its predection, and 2014, the date when it predicted the demise of the fourth estate.
So, I think it’s time to declare: The fourth estate is dead; long live the fourth estate!”
Yes, print journalism continues to implode. The Rocky Mountain News, Colorado’s oldest newspaper, is publishing its last edition today. The Chicago Tribune and LA Times have filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The Christian Science Monitor is going “all digital.” US News & World Report is now published every other week. PC Magazine is going “all digital.”
Even in my home town, The Boston Globe is cutting 50 jobs in its newsroom, fifth newsroom staff reduction since 2001. At its peak in 2000, the Globe newsroom had 552 full-time jobs. When the latest cuts are complete, there will be about 300 full-time newsroom and editorial employees, plus another 29 news employees at Boston.com.
At the same time that print media are imploding, blogs are exploding into a global phenomenon that has hit the mainstream. According to eMarketer, there were 22.6 million US bloggers in 2007 (12 percent of Internet users) and 94.1 million US blog readers (50 percent).
And comScore Video Metrix reports that Nearly 150 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 96 videos per viewer in December 2008, or a record 14.3 billion online videos during the month. This means 78.5 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video in December. The duration of the average online video was 3.2 minutes. So, the average online video viewer watched 309 minutes of video, or more than 5 hours.
Now, this doesn’t mean that all of the predictions in the Museum of Media History video turned out to be right. For example, it predicted that Google would acquire TiVo. It didn’t. Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion instead.
Still, I predict that you’ll be able to see the new fourth estate for yourself at SES New York 2009. There will be lots of bloggers and a bunch of videographers. And, who knows, we might even see a print reporter or two — attending sessions like “Publishers & Agencies: New Business Models for Changing Times”, “Video Search Engine Optimization: 2009 and Beyond” and “News Search SEO.”
I’ll be at all three of these sessions, so I’ll let you know if my prediction comes true.
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Friday, February 27th, 2009
Google Joins the European Trial Against Microsoft
Google declared earlier this week that the company would join Mozilla and Opera in the European Union antitrust trial that accuses the Redmond-based software giant to apply anticompetitive measures in the diffusion of its own Internet browser by tying it to the Windows operating system.
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Friday, February 27th, 2009
TripAdvisor Joins the Travel Search Space
TripAdvisor has launched a search engine where people can compare fares from various airlines and booking agencies. The site which is known for its reviews of travel destinations will also include a feature others have yet to add – the inclusion of bag fees, food and other items such as headphones.
“Nobody else has been able to give consumers clarity about what’s the true cost of travel,” Bryan Saltzburg, general manager of new initiatives for TripAdvisor told the Boston Globe.
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Friday, February 27th, 2009
Finding The Right Balance Between Search Marketing & User Experience
Yesterday a colleague asked me to find information on software application response times. I responded with some qualifying questions to refine my assistance but what it boiled down was this: the corporate powers wanted to know how much they could fud…
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Friday, February 27th, 2009
Google Launches Apps Status Dashboard To Address Outage Information
Google launched an Apps Status Dashboard this week, following the problems they had with Gmail, AdSense and other products.
Given many businesses now rely on these services, it was a smart move to give people an area they can go to check whether the outage or problems are local to them or something Google is experiencing on their end.
As they stated in their Enterprise blog:
“The Google Apps Status Dashboard represents an additional layer of transparency that we believe will be particularly useful for our business users, and it’s also relevant to users of our consumer products. The Status Dashboard is the best place to check for information on service availability for Google Apps anywhere in the world. In my role on the sales team, I regularly talk with customers to make sure that they’re getting the most out of Google Apps and I think that you will find this tool indispensable in managing your Google Apps deployment.”
TechCrunch mentioned the dashboard in terms of “Gfail” – funny how we all seem to be using the new Twitter-speak (the Fail Whale has become an icon).
While I am sure Google does not want to have an association with the up and down swing of Twitter – the fact that they launched this app was a smart way to take away the impact of their recent outages.
They also offered a 15 day credit to all enterprise level users of Gmail following the problems earlier this week. But given these users are paying $50 a year (per user) – the discount amounts to about $2 per person. If my dedicated server goes down for more than an hour I get a month credit as part of the contract.
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Friday, February 27th, 2009
How To Integrate SEO And SEM To Acquire Better ROI? – Promotion World (press release)
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How To Integrate SEO And SEM To Acquire Better ROI?
Promotion World (press release), CA by Kabir Bedi Search engine optimization is an efficient and powerful process of promoting web pages on the World Wide Web and attracting visitor traffic. By increasing web traffic towards your website, you can seek to have more customers and in turn … |
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Friday, February 27th, 2009
Online Marketing Company .Com Marketing Introduces New Referral … – Live-PR.com (Pressemitteilung)
 Live-PR.com (Pressemitteilung) |
Online Marketing Company .Com Marketing Introduces New Referral …
Live-PR.com (Pressemitteilung), Austria .Com Marketing’s new referral program features incentives for both Web site design and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) referrals. Individuals receive a referral finder’s fee of $500 for SEO and $250 for Web design projects. If a client contracts for … |
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Friday, February 27th, 2009
WSI and Rainey Chiropractic Engage in Search Engine Marketing – PR.com (press release)
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WSI and Rainey Chiropractic Engage in Search Engine Marketing
PR.com (press release), NY Focusing on businesses that specialize in e-commerce, web development and Internet marketing, WSI emphasizes the importance of search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), email marketing for traffic generation. These techniques are critical … |
