Dear Accoona

Stop spamming my forums with your worthless pathetic attempt at viral marketing.
Innovative search is it? Strong debut eh? Clinton helped?
Worthless bunch of pants.
Accoona forum spammers - go tell your dumb corporate marketers to at least learn something about online communities, not least how they work, before thinking it’s big and clever to go about forum […]

Yahoo! popularity going mainstream

Om Malik reports on Yahoo!’s upturn in popularity, and provides good commentary of how Yahoo! are winning back the hearts and minds of webmasters.
I’ve already reported on the problems that Google have been experiencing, and the resurgence in Yahoo! as a choice for webmasters. However, Om Malik fails to mention that many developers are […]

Switching from Microsoft to Open Source

So, the Fellowship Church developed a web presence using Microsoft tools - but after 3 years are now moving to open source.
They had originally built using a suite of Microsoft developer tools, such as ASP.NET, using MSDN C#, IIS, and SQL Server - but are now developing their online platform using Linux, PHP, PostgreSQL and […]

Happy Employees vs Unhappy Employees

So get a load of this transcript: Work Relationships Matter
The short of it: Microsoft employee John Porcaro has to spend a period in hospital, after suffering third degree burns. He ends up in a shared room.
At one point, a nine-year old boy with a cracked head is in the other bed - knocked from his […]

The really big secret about the internet

So I asked how I view the internet - and replied “as just a metaphor for the hundreds of millions of people using it - it is a virtual community”.
True, that’s the people on the internet, who you see through the websites they build.
But the internet is more than that.
Something I often used to […]

Blogging is an art

So that’s taught me already. Apparently, blogging is an art.
There are a couple of articles covering this, such as How to Write Killer Blog Posts and More Compelling Comments and How to Write a Better Weblog both providing useful and insightful comment.
So here’s a summary paraphrasing and adapting both sources, with a few additional thoughts […]

Sony Vaio VGN-FS115S

So, with some travelling coming up, not least the Threadwatch meet at Stansted, and SES in London, I needed a labtop. As I also want to use it as a back-up PC, after the horrible incident of my main PC failing on New Years day, that meant I’d have to go for a fairly good […]

Precott Pentium: the hair-drying processor

Geez - I’m sat here running through the various news sources for stories to go on the news section, and nearby baby Maya lays restlessly asleep while the MMR vaccine she had a few days ago finally expresses itself in her system.
And - lo! and behold - the P4 processor on my relatively new machine […]

Google’s continuing irrelevancy

A search on Google.co.uk UK-only searches for internet news currently brings up the following results:
1 - 404 error at Oxford university
2 - Sky.com
3 - The Guardian - internal page
4 - A university directory (BUBL)
5 - A German Yahoo! site
6 - Sussex uni list of UK newspapers
7 - Andalucia.com reprinting BBC headlines (underneath those cocktail recipes)
8 […]

Google Sandbox revisited revisited

So, Rand Fishkin asks about the Sandbox, and posts some interesting comments from the New York SES, trying to piece together suggestions from Matt Cutts, that Google maybe is applying an automated filter known as the Google Sandbox, and that the results may even come under human review.
I can only see Google implementing an automated […]

IR researchers on SEO

Xan is one of the more interesting posters at the Search Engine Watch forums. He apparently comes from the Information Retrival side of search - the research rather than webmastering side.
What I find most interesting is that he is apprently quite fascinated by SEO, and goes so far as to consider it as possibly even […]

Blog Spam and Google Autolink

I kept thinking about the autolink feature from Google, and how webmasters are generally angry about it.
However, something that struck me the other day is that how self-confessed blog-spammers have been particularly vociferous about the matter.
In particular, blog spamming is a method of adding advertising content to websites, without the webmaster’s permission. And that is […]

Google AdSense: publishing stats

So Fred Wilson has openly published Adsense statistics on his site, including analysis of them.
And then John Battelle complains about the lack of transparency in AdSense publishing - not least the restrictions on not using other contextual advertising networks, or even discussing its figures.
Not sure these people have thought it through, though.
I guess the reason […]

Google facing struggles

So Nick Wilson expands on comments by John Battelle about a coming backlash against click-fraud, and especially points out comparisons with Yahoo!’s business model.
The first problem is that Google have been sitting on a bubble of hype and expectation for some time.
Let’s look at the current situation:

Google shares are hopelessly overvalued

Googl’e search algo is […]

Pissed off with Google

Google may normally present great search - but as a company they have often seemed very aloof and inconsiderate to webmaster concerns. In fact, Google has increasingly looked reclusive and inept at addressing the webmaster industry as a whole, and distinctly lacks the human touch.
Even GoogleGuy, the company’s human face in the webmaster community, […]

Yahoo! publishing

So, Yahoo! look like they’re about to release Overture results in a form similar format to AdSense? About bloody time.
It’s incredible to think that Yahoo! and Microsoft have left Google to build a massive advertising empire for themselves across the net via AdWords/AdSense. Heck, at least Yahoo! can be expected to enter in soon - […]