Today I became aware of a very unfortunate branding issue with a new social media platform called Posterous (pronounced Post-Er-Us). First of all, you should know that Posterous is a killer application that I have little doubt will soon be a leading social media property; I will have a follow-up post outlining the reasons. Now onto a sad yet humorous (IMO) lesson in branding; Posterous appears to be commonly misspelled (and even mispronounced ) as Posterious (Post-Ear-E-Us).

by Sage Lewis Microsoft's Steve Ballmer has some pretty extreme views for the business world. I think he might be looking in the mirror too closely when he talks about the business world as a whole. Check out our small business news site.

by Vera H-C Chan Ready to celebrate the Fourth, old-school style? First, declare war on Britain (ok, you can Tweet it if you prefer). Get some people to sign on, set a bonfire on the lawn, burn some King George III effigies, and stock up on rum, applejack, and salted meat. If it's a bit too late to get the applejack on short notice, a fireworks compromise will do. The recession has forced cities and sponsors to cut back on the pyrotechnics this year,

It's been a week since we announced that a new version of channels is coming, and we wanted to give you an update on our progress. Well over a million of you have now opted in to the beta, and many of your channels are looking really good - we were just admiring shotscience 's and muzik4machines 's designs. Your feedback over the past two months has shaped - and will continue to shape - the evolution of this whole site and particularly your channels.

Honestly I didn't notice the difference until I read from Mashable that Google have changed the way it displays search results. As usual, I couldn't find any announcement about it at the Official Google Blog. So, I take it to mean that Google may still be ironing out some kinks related to this "enhancement." So, what are the changes? There are three "unnoticeable" things actually. First,

So while U.S. Anti-Trust Regulators are planning to investigate Google's deal with book publishers to settle copyright issues amounting to $125m, Google continues to make Book Search a better and worthwhile service for their users. If you've been following this issue which has been dragging on since perhaps the day Google Book Search's inception, you'd remember that Google has received so many criticisms because of this project.

In January, four trade groups announced that they would be developing behavioral advertising standards . The groups are The American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA), The Association of National Advertisers (ANA), The Direct Marketing Association (DMA), and The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB).

At SES San Jose 2009, I've been asked to make a solo presentation to kick of the Search and Community Track. The title of the session is " How to Optimize for Search & Engage the Community ." I've been working on my presentation, but it lacked a compelling case study that illustrated how a community organization had used search engine optimization and YouTube video to generate measurable results.

July 4 is Independence Day here in the States, which, for most of us, entails the risk of losing: your fingers to cheap fireworks; your waistline to hot dogs; your liver. All of which, as a red-blooded American, I support wholeheartedly. But if you're spending today celebrating the country's independence, how about putting some attention on your own personal independence? It might be independence from a day job, or financial stress,

Update July, 3rd 2009: Added 12 local SEO & search resources suggested by readers in the comment section and on Sphinn + some newly researched links. The most obvious trend when it comes to SEO is "going local". Ever since Google introduced Google Maps and Local Business Center and later added local search results to Universal Search displaying them on top of everything else businesses everywhere strive to be there.

Posted by great scott! Crawling and Indexing. Without them you can't rank. If you can't rank, you can't get search traffic. If you can't get search traffic, your online marketing efforts are going to suffer; and in our industry that is a colossal FAIL. This seems like simple stuff we all take for granted,

Buzz has been building about real-time search. Of course, you can search real-time Tweets on Twitter, Facebook is testing search on its live Feed, and Bing just added limited Twitter search to its engine. Now, FriendFeed is launching real-time search and it has the potential to be the mackdaddy of them all. Here's why. FriendFeed is a social aggregator. It's a one-stop shop to check and update a bunch of different networks, blogs, etc. Now,

Google recently wrote a post on its Webmaster Central Blog addressing site architecture and traffic . Specifically, items addressed include Duplicate content Affiliate programs Hacking and malicious malware Robots.txt And rel="canonical" URL attributes This may come as a surprise to you, but affiliate program content and duplicate content do not necessarily cause a drop in traffic. But you have to understand where Google is coming from here.

by Vera H-C Chan Given the continued Search interest , amusement parks will a Fourth of July weekend destination for many. Those headed to Orland's Magic Kingdom on Independence Day might want to stop by a revamped Hall of Presidents, where an animatronic Barack Obama â€"AKA Robobama â€"makes his debut. Animatronics is, as HowStuffWorks puts it, a " mechanized puppet ." The administration apparently is so tickled by this honor,

Now that ex-Google employees start-up Friendfeed has real-time search, you can feed their engine with a keyword like google and embed it elsewhere, like below (I could refine this search by restricting it to results which have X comments only, or have Likes, or which are only from my contacts at Friendfeed, and so on): PS: If you want to subscribe to my links at Friendfeed, it's there . [Hat tip to Websonic !

Creating new landing pages for testing is getting cheaper. And scalable. So there are fewer and fewer reasons for SMBs not to be testing their landing pages and sites to optimize conversion rates. Testing landing pages has long been a preoccupation of mine, particularly because of the traditionally prohibitive costs. Even if you use a design contest at a place like 99Designs.com , you're still paying $300 - $500 for a good graphic look and feel.

This week we feature the interview with Fraser Kelton , working at new and exciting social media project Glue , developed by AdaptiveBlue . 1. Please share your background. What brought you to the Web 2.0? Also please tell us a few words about your [other] projects you were doing before joining AdaptiveBlue. I'm originally from Hamilton, a beautiful Canadian city, an hour southwest of Toronto.

Nothing innovative here really. Just some functional features which should have been added a long time to Google's Blog Search. Then again, better late than never.  So, Google has just added RSS/ATOM subscription, list of  the most popular terms that users are using, and latest blog posts from, I guess "more prominent" blogs indexed by Google Blog Search? The RSS/ATOM subscription is nothing new really.

This is the second in a series of blog posts focusing on Microsoft Advertising Intelligence (formerly Microsoft adCenter Add-in Beta for Excel), coinciding with the launch of Microsoft Advertising Intelligence in the UK. Last week I covered the Keyword Extraction and Keyword Suggestion tools ; this week I will be looking at the Keyword Research tools. The Keyword Research tools provide up-to-date traffic and demographic data for your selected keywords.

Hello, Here are the most viewed adCenter API topics on MSDN for June 2009. Microsoft adCenter API Version 5.1 (Start migrating to V6 and use Microsoft adCenter API Version 6 instead !).