Here at Marketing Pilgrim, we're big fans of TechCrunch. You'll notice we link to a lot of their stories. Still, like others, we're not quite sure whether we like or hate their new design- and new logo . Of course, no one likes their favorite web sites when they change-just ask Facebook or Twitter! So, instead of adding to the many critics, we thought we'd pay homage to TechCrunch the best way we know how. With our tongue in our cheek,

It appears Facebook is built on a house of cards. Cards that rely on more than 4,000 MySQL "shards" or should that be sharts ? According to GigaOm : 'Facebook has split its MySQL database into 4,000 shards in order to handle the site's massive data volume, and is running 9,000 instances of memcached in order to keep up with the number of transactions the database must serve. And, citing database guru Michael Stonebraker' 'Facebook is operating a huge,

The very latest version of WordPress requires MySQL 5+ which is something Marketing Pilgrim was not running. No problemo, we simply contacted our host RackSpace and they scheduled the upgrade last night. In the meantime, we received notification that our site was not using the latest version of WordPress, from Google nonetheless. At first my phishing alarm bells went off louder than a hurricane siren and I deleted the email. Then,

To balance my opinion that being just like Facebook will not help Google+, here's a cartoon that sums up quite nicely why that may be all some people need as a reason to use it. As Mike Masnick points out , by simply not being as "evil" as Facebook, Google+ may win. We shall see.

So, last night, I lost about an hour of my life trying to figure out how to use Google+ , the search engine's answer to Facebook. I'll admit, it was an exciting hour. It always is when I get my hands on something shiny and new. But, after the initial euphoria of being invited to be one of the lucky early adopters, I closed the Google+ tab in my browser and headed over to Facebook. Here's why.

There's a reason why Trackur is calling its latest upgrade "Trackur 3.OMG" and it's because it's one of the social media monitoring company's biggest updates since its 2008 launch. Trackur Insights is the monitoring company's take on social media analytics. Focusing on the metrics users are most likely to use-and ignoring all of the useless eye-candy- Trackur Insights lets users quickly see what's going on across all of their monitored keywords.

What if a bunch of dentists predicted that there would be a 50% increase in the enjoyment of root-canal surgery by 2015, would you believe them? Or, telemarketers told us that there would be a 50% increase in the number of people looking forward to being called during dinner. Sound reasonable? How about if politicians told us that we'd happily donate 50% more to their election campaigns because of an increase in trust? No? Not buying any of that?

Who wants to provide an explanation as to what just happened in my Google Reader this morning? I subscribe to the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog's RSS feed to keep up-to-date with the 2-3 posts the team publish each week. Except this morning, the feed looked like this: What the fudge? OK, maybe I'm seeing things. Maybe this is not actually coming from the Google Webmaster Central feed. So, I went to "Manage Subscriptions" to take a look. Nope,

It appears Sony has bought a one-way ticket to reputation-implosionville, and seems happy to sit back and enjoy the ride. After the embarrassing hacks of its Playstation Network, the electronics giant is once again facing a multitude of security breaches. This time, Sony appears to either not have an explanation or just figures it's lost all credibility so may as well shut up. 'now that Sony's apology cards have been played and the hacks and breaches continue,

I know, I know, Facebook privacy rants are normally the stomping ground of our fearless managing editor Frank Reed, but I just have to bring to your attention that Facebook et al are trying to block a California bill that would make your social networking more private. Despite the feigned empathy towards those that are worried about the sharing of sensitive personal information, Facebook leads a group-which includes Google,

Grab some popcorn and pull up a chair because there's nothing quite like a conspiracy story that involves Facebook hiring a high-profile PR firm to spread a smear campaign about Google to the mainstream media. For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people's privacy.

"You Can Do Everything on the Web." That's one of the slogans you'll find inside the video announcing the public, mainstream launch of Google's Chromebooks -laptops that run Chrome instead of a normal operating system. And, with 160 million web users already surfing the web via Google's Chrome browser, the search giant is hoping there'll be a ready-made market for laptops that require no long start-up times, no software loading, no updates,

Depending on how you look at this, I'm either stating the obvious or going out on a limb, when I say that Google's rumored new Google Music cloud service will be a dead man walking. Why? Here's the reason: Google is preparing to show off a new music service at tomorrow's I/O conference. And like Amazon's launch earlier this year, the company is doing it without the approval of the major music labels and publishers. So,

One of my favorite tools for Twitter is Trackur ..sorry, old habit' Klout ! The service measures your influence across Twitter )and Facebook( and provide you with metrics and a handy-dandy score-out of one hundred. )We actually use Klout scores in the Trackur dashboard(. Anyhow, Klout has announced some impressive updates today: 1. Everyone has Klout : the all-new profile design provides better insight into your Klout score and persona 2.

Hopefully that headline got your attention. This is not some bizarre court ruling that's going to make it impossible for you to send out media pitches and press releases, it's a policy update from Marketing Pilgrim. As of today, any press release, media advisory, or "we think your readers will like this" emails will be marked as spam, if they are sent to andy AT marketingpil'com. Sound harsh? Well, you should see my inbox!

I recall the hype surrounding Yahoo Buzz, when it first launched. Those publishers that were lucky enough to get in on the beta, told stories of massive traffic surges, unicorns, and puppies. Those on the outside, were left wondering when they would get a piece of the traffic pie. By the time Yahoo Buzz launched to the masses , the traffic spikes had evaporated-an expected dilution when you open the flood gates to all blogs. A fact, I noted at the time' Now,

One of the irrefutable rules of reputation management is that, in the absence of any official statement by a company, rumor and conjecture will rule your reputation. Apparently Twitter co-founder Biz Stone subscribes to this philosphy because after Fortune wrote an article about the "Trouble@Twitter", Stone has come out fighting . First,

According to Google, you could earn $3 in offline sales for every $1 you spend on AdWords. According to Google, you might see in store sales increase by 1.7% if you spend money on AdWords. According to Google'.. OK, let's just stop right there. The video below is a nicely produced animation to encourage bricks-and-mortar stores to spend more money on online advertising. It makes a lot of sense, and I am sure many will be convinced by it.

Nothing makes me smile wider than waking up to find out that a social media monitoring vendor has just been acquired . But Andy, I hear you ask, you're happy that one of Trackur 's competitors has been acquired? How so? Well, it completely validates the social media monitoring industry and, when companies like Radian6 get acquired by companies like salesforce.com, you can't get much more in the way of validation than that.

And you thought Google's awesome Priority Inbox feature was an altruistic attempt to help Gmail users better manage their email. Hah, the joke's on you. All along, it was just a sneaky way to get us all to help Google test a new algorithm that will ensure better quality ads in our inbox. All targeted based on the same technology used by Priority Inbox. OK, so I may have given this a more sinister spin than it deserves,