Lee Odden

Interesting posts regarding Microsoft/MSN recently:

Dvorak says Microsoft’s marketing sucks – from Scobleizer (and he agrees). Put the ad money into making a better product like Amazon and Google have.

MSN Search – Flop with Search Community – from Threadwatch. NickW stirs things up.

Does the New MSN Search Hold Up? – from Google Blogscoped (OK, this was from last week, but it seems to fit) Search comparison between MSN, Google and Yahoo.

I was very optimistic about the new MSN search, hopeful really, that something new would come out and provide a worthy alternative to the current dominance in search engines. Not because I don’t like Google and Yahoo search, I use Google many, many times a day and Yahoo.com is my homepage. It just seems that at the moment, MSN search isn’t doing the WOW thing (accurate search results) as much as I thought it would.

Steve Rubel posts about RapidFeeds, a tool to create, publish and syndicate your own RSS feeds. What’s particularly useful is the tracking options.

The IceRocket search engine has a very similar RSS creation tool called RSS Builder but without tracking.

RSS creation tools offer promising applications for sites that want to promote newsletters, press releases, etc via RSS but do not want to do so through a blog. Although, I think it makes more sense to use a blog for that type of promotion so your content can get picked up by search engines as well as RSS directories and news aggregators.

Tags: RSS, feed, blog, blogging, marketing, SEO blog

I’m trying out Become.com, a new shopping research search engine that avoids ecommerce sites in favor of informational web sites. The site is designed to help you locate difficult to find information. Search results display much like any other search engine (plus Google Ads on the right side) but what’s pretty cool is the list of suggestions at the bottom of the search results.

From the site: “We find buying guides, articles, forums, reviews, specs and information from across the web to help you buy the right product.”

Become.com was founded by Michael Yang, founder of mySimon.com and Yeogirl Yun, founder of the Wisenut search engine.

Heads up from MarketingShift

Google recently launched a beta version of Google Maps:

“Google Maps is an online service that allows users in the U.S. to find location information, navigate through maps, and get directions quickly and easily.”

Includes features for viewing maps, local search within the displayed map area and driving directions. For example, I entered in my city/state and Google Maps quickly showed a map of the area. Then I searched on “hardware store” and the map was redrawn with icons and a list of locations to the right. Each results shows options for the web address, additional matches and directions to or from the location.

What’s really cool about Google Maps is that they’re dragable. You can use your mouse to literally move the map to see areas outside of the viewable window without having to do another search.

Very nice post by SEO Book, I mean Search Engine eBook, ah how about Search Marketing Guide? 🙂 about Latent Semantic Indexing. The idea is related to what I’ve seen described as “contextual relavency” where a search engine (like Google) ranks a document in part based on the related concepts in the page as a whole and compares them to other related documents in the index. What this means for your SEO efforts is explained in more detail in the post, but one take-away is to be sure you mix up your anchor text as well as keyword useage on-page.

Additional resources on this topic are posted at SEO Roundtable.

The first voting script for the Business Blogging Awards apparently had some issues, so a new voting system is in place and any votes prior to today have been scrapped.

So please take a moment and cast your vote for Best SEO Blog
Our blog is listed as: Online Marketing SEO Blog

Additional categories to vote for include:
Best Overall Blog
Best Group Blog
Best New Blog
Best Law Blog
Best VC/Entrepreneur Blog
Best Financial Industry/Investment Blog
Best Personal Finance Blog
Best Blog by a Small Business
Best Blog About Small Business
Best PR Blog
Best Tech Company Blog
Best Media Blog
Best Real Estate Blog
Best Marketing Blog
Best Project Management Blog
Best Leadership Blog
The Picasso Award (Best Design)
The Peacock Award (Most Self-Important)
The Chris Pirillo Award (For Shameless Self Promotion)

I just took a Google Advertising Professionals survey and there were some interesting questions that suggest some enhancements may be in store:

Potential Google Advertising Professionals Program Enhancements:

• Ability to have Google bill your clients directly and pass on a service fee to you for managing their AdWords accounts
• A means to verify whether or not someone is a Qualified Google Advertising Professional
• A Microsoft Windows-based tool for more easily uploading and downloading AdWords campaigns
• Technical support by phone for a fee
• Ability to add your company’s logo into reports within My Client Center
• Directory listing of all Google Advertising Professionals on Google.com
• Ability to be a tester for new AdWords features and functionality before public release

Potential Tools Offered by Google to Help Sell AdWords:

An ex-Microsoft employee who now works for Google started a blog which has interestingly been removed from the Google index.

From various sources including SEO Roundtable

An interesting post from one of the blog posts that was removed includes a comment after attending the Google sales conference:

“so after the interesting financials, the products team gave presentations reviewing product performance in 2004 and giving sneak peeks of the products we’ll unveil in 2005. if you guys thought gmail and google groups were cool, you ain’t seen nothing yet! ”

Full content of the blog can still be viewed at bloglines.com

As a follow up to the post on Nick’s excellent post on Folksonomies, here are some additional notes on sites that use tags to organize information.

Tagsurf – In the tagging spirit of Flickr and Del.icio.us, Tagsurf is an online message board which uses tags to help organize subjects instead of threads or channels. Currently in “Alpha” but seems to be picking up steam. Definitely worth checking out.

Furl – I list this one because Technorati tag search results are now pulling tag data from Del.icio.us and Furl. Furl allows you to archive web pages and provides up to 5 gigabytes of storage. Your collections of archived pages can be private or public and you can “share” ie promote, your archived pages via email or RSS feed. And, uh, it’s part of Looksmart.

Google, Yahoo, MSN, several major blog software services are supporting the implementation of a nofollow link attribute in an effort to quell comment spam. Of course this relies on the owner of the blog or web site to actually implement the tag properly or at all, in order for it to be effective. As far as blogs go, I would expect the 80/20 rule probably applies in that the smaller percentage of blogs recieve the majority of traffic. Those bloggers are most likely to be very savvy to the comment spam issue because of their visibility and involvment. They’re most likely to start using such a tag. But it will take a long time without mass acceptance which appears to be happening.

Some interesting Google facts from a BayCHI lecture at PARC given by Marissa Mayer (Product Manager for Google) as posted by Alan Williamson.
“A very well attended (standing room only session), Marissa took us through a presentation geared around the user experience at Google and the efforts/lengths they go to.”

Some interesting facts came out:

1. The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact that the founders didn’t know HTML and just wanted a quick interface. Infact it was noted that the submit button was a long time coming and hitting the RETURN key was the only way to burst Google into life.