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 One
of the issues facing the search engine industry is privacy. People aren’t necessarily
keen on the fact search engines store each and every query executed as well as
the applicable IP information. Remember
the AOL debacle? In light of those events, you’d have to think active search engine users would welcome a command that ensures their
privacy.
Thanks to the guys at poundprivacy.org
(written as #privacy), we may soon have one.
The #privacy approach is pretty simple. What they suggest
is if you wish to make a query private (the search engines won’t store it), you
end the keyphrase being searched with the #privacy command. For example, a private
search for online marketing would look like this - online marketing #privacy.
As you can see, this is a relatively simple exercise. The only missing element
is acceptance from the search engines.
Their site explains further in an open
letter to the Big 4:
>>> Read
the full post and share you comments.
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YouTube
Dumps 29,549 Japanese Videos
Copyright concerns expressed by a Japanese rights-holders group resulted in YouTube
removing thousands of videos from the popular sharing site.
Edelman,
Karma's Not Just For Earl Anymore
Fortunately, for all things pure and noble, this new free marketplace of ideas
works as a circle - what goes around comes around eventually. Wal-Mart and Edelman,
meet your blogospheric comeuppance, served with a side of cold irony.
Google,
Microsoft Surrender To Belgians
Microsoft and Google have agreed to remove content managed by Copiepresse of Belgium
from their indexes, with Google further being requested to pay nearly $43 million
in fines.
An
Alternative to Wikipedia
In a Tuesday press relese, Wikipedia founder Larry Sanger announced plans to launch
a rival site to the online encyclopedia.
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Friday, October 20, 2006 |
There are certain guidelines that companies should bear in mind when undertaking
new ventures into the blogosphere. For starters, an effective blog should be a
springboard for conversation as opposed to merely an information resource.
Editor's Note: Vincent Maher, a journalism lecturer at Rhodes University, has come out with an interesting list of guidelines that bloggers should be aware of if they want their blogs to achieve success. They are all relevent and very specific, but I think that a good number of them speak to the underlying principle of transparency that is so paramount in the success or failure of a blog. How would you apply this to your blog? Let us know what you think at WebProWorld.
The blogosphere has become a virtual hotbed of information dissemination in today's digital landscape.
Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, Matt Cutts… the list goes on and on of industry insiders who provide a deepening glimpse into the realms of technology and search by means of their widely popular blogs.
Major names such as Google, Microsoft, and Intel have also taken up residence in their own respective corners of the Blogosphere.
It's clear that the blogosphere is playing an increasingly important role in the realm of e-business. Questions, however, are beginning to arise in the blogging community concerning what actually constitutes an effective business blog.
Vincent Maher, journalism lecturer at Rhodes University, outlines eleven distinct aspects of effective blogging in terms of building an interactive community. All of the items can be found here, but I want to touch on three of his observations that bear significant mention.
Write tight headlines that encourage interest
Remember that many readers will be scanning your RSS feed along with many others, so the poignancy of your headline is critical. If the headline doesn't grab a reader's attention there is little likelihood they will click on it.
Every day I probably scan through 700-800 articles in Google reader. Obviously, I don't have time to read them all, so it all comes down to marketing.
If your headline doesn't spark my curiosity, I won't be reading your blog.
A blog entry is a stub for conversation
One of the key ways to create a loyal audience for your blog is to create a community of readers who interact with each-other on your blog. This means that your blog entries should be structured in such a way that they start conversations. This means they need to be short and punchy, with a clearly defined point or set of points.
The blogosphere is not a stage to present oneself to an audience; it's a community within which to interact and learn.
Maher makes an assertion with which I completely agree, "Unlike print media, the process only gets going once the blog post is published - a blogger is more like a community managter than a writer, in the greater scheme of things."
I believe this concept is the key to the life (or death) of a blog.
Getting people excited about the products and services your business has to offer is the entire point of the word-of-mouth platform that blogging represents. If a company blog doesn't offer anything worthy of sparking conversation, people are going to simply find something else to talk about.
Be active in your own conversations
Don't sit and watch the comments streaming in and do nothing, get in there! Unlike traditional journalists, the blogger's role is to steer and be part of the conversations they start.
One of the main draws of a blog is the opportunity for the average consumer to feel like they have a voice that is being heard. As a business, the best and most effective way to let people know you're listening is to become an active participant in the conversation.
Let those within your particular blogging community know that their voice isn't falling on deaf ears.
Maher's eleven points provide very specific advice for bloggers. I believe, however, that these points echo a deeper, more fundamental blogosphere principle: transparency.
People want transparency from bloggers. Dishonesty and misinformation will kill a blog faster than you can say Edelman.
Time is a valuable commodity to the average Internet user. With so many options at their fingertips, people have to make clear choices on how they will spend their time online. If people choose to spend a portion of that time reading and interacting with your company's blog, they expect to be told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
This mindset is a little naïve, perhaps. Nonetheless, it's an undeniable truth of the blogosphere.
If you want honest feedback from your consumer base, you have to give them an honest representation of the company.
Ultimately, creating and maintaining a company blog is serious business that comes complete with a new set of rules and, if one isn't careful, potential pitfalls. However, a thriving community inhabiting a corner of the blogosphere could be the gust of wind that breathes new life into your business.
About
the Author:
Joe Lewis is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. |
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The
Virtually Taxable Imaginary Economy
 By
Jason Lee Miller
Staff Writer | WebProNews
If you thought your virtual assets were safe from government pick pocketing, think
again. You know that pretend sword you sold for $500? The US government wants
its cut.
Congress is unsure, though, how exactly you tax zeroes and ones -- or even if virtual assets can be taxed.
But you know, where there's a bill, there's a way.
Reuters' embedded Second Life virtual reporter, Adam Reuters (is there an Eve Reuters?), is reporting that the so-called virtual economies of MMORPG games like World of Warcraft and EverQuest are booming. People buy and sell goods just like you would in the real world, except that the goods are imaginary, even if the money's real.
"You could argue that to a certain degree the law has fallen (behind) because you can have a virtual asset and virtual capital gains, but there's no mechanism by which you're taxed on this stuff," Joint Economic Committee's senior economist Dan Miller told Mr. Reuters.
One day, they'll find a way to tax profitable ideas - while they're still in your head.
Maybe they can put that tax money toward social programs like MMORPG Anonymous,
a future offshoot of Families
Against EverQuest.
Continue
Reading
About
the Author:
Jason Lee Miller is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. |
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What Makes Sites Disappear?
You've all seen these posts before (however, that doesn't mean they aren't pertinent),
you know, the "where has my site gone" or "was I banned from Google"
posts that are prominent on every message board dealing with search. While these
posts are quite popular, the question needs to be asked, why is my site gone from
Google? What would cause such an event to happen? Did I get banned or did my datacenter
just puke? Take a look at what's going on below and see what you think.
Subscribe
to the WebProWorld Feed 
|| Chris||
On
Page 1 Yesterday, Totally Disappeared Today
In the past couple of days I made some slight tweaks to the title tag and meta tags on my real estate school site.
All I did was change our title from "Online Florida Real Estate License Courses"
to "Florida Real Estate License Courses" and cleaned up a few meta tags to remove
some off-target keywords. On Monday we ranked 8 on Google for "real estate school".
On Wednesday we moved up to 7th place for "real estate school". Today we have
totally disappeared. I went through every page of results and then noticed a link
to "repeat this seach with ommitted results".
I clicked the link and our site was listed right where it should have been the
first time. I then repeated this just to make sure, and it appears that our site
is now removed from the ommitted results too. Needless to say, this has killed
our business overnight and I'm freaked out. Aside from uploading an archived version
of the page and requesting a respidering, I have no idea what to do. Matt Cutts,
if you're out there, please help.
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