Online Marketing Blog

Traffick reports on the over-hype of Google Autolink and I agree. Autolink is just a tool. You have to turn it on to make it work. If you don’t like it, turn it off. That’s from the user perspective.

From a web site owner’s perspective, I can understand some concern, but no where near what some bloggers are ranting about. If you really don’t like it as a site owner, add the Autolink blocking JavaScript. I think that’s reasonable.

If you don’t want Google to index all or part of your site you have to add a noindex meta tag and/or modify your robots.txt tag don’t you?

My pop was showing me how he has been documenting the history of Holdingford, the small central Minnesota town he lives in (think Lake Wobegon) scanning in town council meeting minutes since 1897, documenting businesses that existed, city council members and city officials in a spreadsheet and also interviewing “old timers” recording the audio on his Mac and scanning in photos. It’s a pretty ambitious project, even for a small town.

My dad has always been very progressive regarding computers and Internet so we talked about how he could publish all this information he’s collecting.

Here’s a recent release we helped with from MarketingStudies.net: “RSS Marketing May Overtake E–mail as Top Info Delivery Tool - RSS News Feeds Provide Effective Two Way Communication”

Rok Hrastnik, author of the new RSS marketing e-book, “Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS,” is warning marketers that email may no longer be an effective form of delivering information to customers.

According to DoubleClick, only 34.3% of all e-mail messages are ever opened. AOL currently blocks 75% of the 2 billion e-mail messages received daily and sends another 4% – 7% to the bulk folder.

Next week is the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York. Am very much looking forward to it. Jerry Yang from Yahoo is doing the Keynote with Danny Sullivan. I will be posting as I can, but I’m sure there will be pretty complete coverage by Rusty Brick in the Search Engine Watch Forums.

Tags: Search Engine Strategies, Conference

Update: SiliconValleyWatcher confirms a Yahoo Flickr deal is in the works - but nothing signed yet.

Kris Krug posted a Flickr acquisition poll with some interesting comments. Looks like Google is in the lead.

Om Malik posts some follow up on the Flickr rumor. Co-founder Caterina doesn’t really come out and deny the rumor, but certainly doesn’t come clean either. I like this post from Matt on the Flickr blog: “That’s correct, Restiffbard. Yahoo! is either buying or not buying flickr.”

Tags: Flickr, Yahoo

Barry beat me to it, but the newly elected SEMPO Board of Directors list was sent out via email today.

Ron Belanger, Carat Interactive
Chris Churchill, Fathom Online
Barbara Coll, Webmama.com
Koichiro Fukasawa, Wasabi Communications
Gordon Hotchkiss, Enquiro
Kevin Lee, Did-it.com
Mauro Lupi, Ad Maiora SpA
Jeffrey Pruitt, iCrossing
John Sanchez, Zunch Communications
Jessie Stricchiola, Alchemist Media
Julienne Thompson, Advertising.com
Dana Todd, SiteLab
David Williams, 360i

“Officers of the organization (such as President, Vice President, etc. and the Chairperson) will be elected by the new Board once it is installed.”

Am looking forward to seeing who is voted in as officers.

A Consuming Experience provides an excellent introduction to Technorati tags. It’s more than an intro, it’s quite complete. Via Sifry

Tip: Technorati tags get picked up by Google as search results.

Tags: Technorati, tags, folksonomies, SEO

Brett Tabke announced this evening on WebmasterWorld that the next Search Conference will be held in New Orleans June 21-24.

This is a must see. I went to the last WMW conference in Vegas and it was excellent. It exceeded my expectations tremendously. If you’re involved in search marketing at all, I highly recommend you attend.

Tags: WebmasterWorld, Pubcon, Search Conference

Om Malik posts on the Business2.0 Blog that Yahoo is ready to purchase Ludicorp, the company behind Flickr. Apparently the Flickr founders received offers from both Google and Yahoo. An announcement should happen March 1.

MSN recently announced a partnership with Picsearch to display images and Yahoo recently announced the increase of it’s Yahoo, Flickr, Google, Images, Search Engine

You don’t talk about seo club. I Want You to Hit My Site as Hard as You Can From Stuntdbl. This cracks me up.

Thomas pointed out a new feature on Google posted on Google Blog today. It’s a movie search feature. Just enter movie: and your zip code and it will show movies playing in your area. Or you can enter a line from a movie and it will return movie results. I tried “go ahead punk, make my day” and it worked pretty slick.

Tags: Google, Movies