There are pushes to minimize the need for passwords , but after the Gawker leak fiasco who wants to have a common shared single point of failure for passwords? Sure managing passwords sucks. But friction is a tool that helps cleanse demand & make it more pure. It is why paid communities have a higher signal to noise ratio than free for all sites. Any barriers will annoy people, but those same barriers will also prevent some people from wasting your time.

Bloggers as Media Have you ever noticed that a lot of blogs want to be seen as being the same as the media? And media companies are responding by hiring bloggers . But why is emulating the media so exciting? After all, the same media is so big, bloated & redundant that it is buried in debt . How is it possible that a humor blog network built on open source software would ever need to raise $30 million ? The problem is that it is hard to stay different and operate at scale .

One of my favorite approaches to save time online is to use multiple web browsers for different purposes. It allows you to combine speed + reliability with also having quick access to tons of valuable tools & data. Firefox I set up Firefox fully loaded with bookmarks and extensions ) all our free & premium ones , User Agent Switcher , Web Developer , Greasemonkey , Roboform , Colorzilla (, but realize that as a result it will often be a bit slower & crash more frequently.

In the past I have highlighted how hype-driven hard launches often lead to hard landings . But what is even more challenging than launches is relaunches. Some relaunches are just flicking a switch, done mostly as a marketing gimmick. But those that are real changes are brutal, largely because you have already built up expectations in the past and have to manage expectations, even while everything is changing, and many things are not in your clear control.

I have never been a huge fan of correlation analysis. The reason being is that how things behave in aggregate may not have anything to do with how they would behave in your market for your keywords on your website. Harmful High Quality Links? A fairly new website was ranked amazingly quickly on Google.com for a highly competitive keyword. It wasn't on the first page,

Over the past year or 2 there have been lots of changes with Google pushing vertical integration, but outside of localization and verticalization, core relevancy algorithms )especially in terms of spam fighting( haven't changed too much recently. There have been a few tricky bits , but when you consider how much more powerful Google has grown, their approach to core search hasn't been as adversarial as it was a few years back )outside of pushing more self promotion(.

Google's Take On SEOs Google likes to make SEOs look like fools. Some are , but some are simply privy to less information. Or, in some cases, thrown under the bus by a new wave editorial policy in the gray area. Inconsistent enforcement is a major issue, but even if you go beyond that, the truth is most businesses have a range of revenue streams from pure as can be to entirely parasitic .

We were hoping to launch today, but we still do not have all the bugs worked out for all our modules/plugins to make them compatible with Drupal 7. Further, our programmer mentioned that some of the Drupal 7 documentation is missing, which makes the above task even harder. He is making great progress with the upgrade, but between the design coming in a bit late + me getting sick for a long while + all the integration issues we are going through,

Microsoft Revenue Per Click Equals Google's Microsoft adCenter has recently increased their revenue per click to match Google, in spite of having a small chunk of the search market share )maybe 25% between Bing and Yahoo! Search to Google's ~ 75%(. All we hear about Google's love for the scientific method , the superiority of their relevancy algorithms , them creating the best thing for advertisers, etc. has prettymuch been reduced to fluff.

In a "oh what is the brown stuff oozing from my pants" moment for some e-commerce site owners, Google has quietly entered the space of pulling in manufacturer data directly into Google product search : To make these pages even better, we plan on working with suppliers and manufacturers to get product data straight from the source. We are starting this effort through a business partnership with Edgenet, a provider of product data management solutions.

A lot of folks have been hammering away at sending out automated link exchange emails for Wordpress driven sites.

We got our member's area fully paused out on the 25th of December & on the 26th I got probably the worst flu of my life, losing 15 pounds in 3 days. As a bonus, I got a respiratory tract infection that still has me coughing 2 weeks later! I am starting to feel a bit over the hump )and like I could be normal within a couple days(,

We got our member's area fully paused out on the 25th of December & on the 26th I got probably the worst flu of my life, losing 15 pounds in 3 days. As a bonus, I got a respiratory tract infection that still has me coughing 2 weeks later! I am starting to feel a bit over the hump )and like I could be normal within a couple days(,

There has been a lot of talk in the SEO Community about Social Rank And some talk that it might die soon . What Is "Social Rank" As far as the SEO is concerned, social rank is the idea that Google, and other search engines, use social networking indicators in their ranking algorithms. If you get mentioned and linked to often, from social media profiles, this helps your site rank in the search engines.

Netflix's Risky Position One of the fundamental keys to monetizing third party content is finding a way to do it while keeping your earnings data abstract. A huge problem that hits pure plays like Netflix is that as soon as companies see the profits the cost structures change. Comcast is looking to get some funds from Level 3 ) for distribution of Neflix content (,

I mentioned this in our last post but it probably deserves a post of its own. ;( Google has long claimed that search results inside search results are a poor user experience. They also claim their use of your content is fair use because it is only for ranking and distribution purposes. Take a look at Google's deskbar subdomain.

Search engines are powerful because they are an editorial filter which encourages relevancy. But frequently we are marketed to that any errors or omissions on the part of search engines are not due to bad algorithms, but rather do to unscrupulous spammers . Webmaster guidelines are arbitrary & ever-shifting, and preached like gospel. The 'or else' fear mindset is a primary component of the algorithm .

When Google switched to their new keyword tool a lot of advertisers were ticked off by how it went from being quite granular & focused to being more broad and presumptuous. It defaulted from allowing you to drill down in a specific area to assuming that you wanted to buy a broader basket of keywords than you asked for, which particularly doesn't make sense when you think about how Quality Score punishes irrelevant ads.

As Google creates a thin review layer to displace some of the directories they are driving into bankruptcy , some of the wiser middle men are telling Google to go get stuffed. TripAdvisor reviews disappeared from Google Place pages due to a technical issue,

Open = Good For years Google has championed the concept of an open web. Some took it as an altruistic sign, while others thought it was a convenient angle to commoditize complimentary business models . Google pushed for net neutrality but made wireless connections an exception . Why would they do that? Could it be they are invested in disrupting that market elsewhere ?