September 2008

Google made some updates to their services.

Google just released a free service called Google Moderator. This is a port to Google App Engine of an existing tool, internally it was called Dory (after the fish who asked questions all the time in Finding Nemo).

What does Google Moderator do? When you have company-wide meetings, it lets anyone ask a question and then people can vote up the questions that they’d like answered.

The interface looks like this:

It’s good for prioritizing which questions are most important.

There are many tools to use, and Yahoo for example has their excellent Yahoo User Interface Library, Yahoo Pipes, or YSlow. Its just nice when companies release code or tools that benefit lots of people on the web.

Google Moderator is a free service, so give it a try sometime.

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Came across this URL that breaks down the success metrics for a winning title for Digg.com.

It can also reveal the keyword effectiveness, see that here.

Dan Zarrella is a viral marketing scientist, and the title check for digg can be found here.

It will make you think about how to create more compelling titles, and let you see what Dan says should work for you, based on previous entries and keyword use.

If you are really hard-core Digg’ing… you should get the Digg alerter. You can download that tool here. (Windows)

To stay on top of more stories that may hit front page and go into “hypermode” - use http://socialalerter.com/

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Popular social networking site Facebook has undergone some major
renovations, but not all users are pleased with the changes.

CNN.com reports that it has received more than 200 unsolicited
emails from Facebook users, complaining about the new Facebook,
and that several petitions are circulating online, asking
Facebook execs to give its users the option of going back to the
old format. One petition, begun by Scott Sanders, a student at
Austin Peay University in Clarksville, Tennessee, has more than
1.5 million signatures.

The new look was first introduced in July, and users were
initially given the option of switching to the new format or
keeping the old one. This transitional period expired two weeks
ago, when the old version was eliminated.

“It’s tempting to say we should use both designs,
but this isn’t as simple as it sounds,” Facebook
co-founder Mark Zuckerburg on a September 18th blog post on his
site. “Supporting two versions is a huge amount of work
four our small team and it would mean that we would have to
build everything twice.

In 2006, Facebook was the target of protests when it introduced
a tool called “news feeds” which automatically
broadcasts users’ personal details.

Facebook founders are hoping that this current protest will
eventually subside as users become more familiar with the new
format.

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I’ve checked with folks at Google and they confirmed that http://too.blogspot.com/ is Sergey Brin’s blog. The name “too” reflects Sergey’s additional life outside work. One of his first posts is about the fact that he might be more likely to develop Parkinson’s Disease when he’s older. That’s based on data from 23andMe, the personal genetics company co-founded by Sergey’s wife Anne Wojcicki. It’s a serious reminder that healthiness is one of the top issues for anyone.

I’m sure that lots of people will flood Sergey with advice like “Add Google Analytics to that blog!” or suggest how to tweak his blog template or offer him free SEO tips. Personally, I’m just glad that Sergey is blogging. I think it’s a great idea and I hope that he keeps doing it. Sergey, welcome to the blogosphere.

Update: I didn’t even think to check before posting, but Sergey already has Google Analytics installed on his blog. He’s ahead of the game.

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A few neat Chrome things that I’ve seen recently:

CrossOver ported the open-source Chromium browser over to Mac and Linux using Wine. Bear in mind that this is more of a proof-of-concept and not the official version, but you can still download the binaries and play with it.

If you like the look and feel of Chrome but can’t leave your Firefox 3 extensions behind, someone made a Chrome lookalike extension so that Firefox looks like Chrome.

Or if you want to go the other direction, you can make Chrome look like Firefox3:

Lots of different places, including ChromeSpot, talk about how to do other themes, from “Galaxy” to the Boston Red Sox.

Currently Chrome doesn’t have support for extensions such as Greasemonkey that lets users do client-side modifications of web pages. But Kazuho Oku has written a neat way to get Greasemonkey-like functionality out of Chrome. Oku calls it Greasemetal. How does it work, when Chrome doesn’t support extensions yet? I’ll let the author tell you:

1. setup a local web server that sends userscripts to Google Chrome
2. launch Google Chrome specifying the browser to connect its AutomationProxy (an interprocess communication channel of the web browser implemented for automated UI tests) to Greasemetal
3. periodically execute JavaScript in each browser tab that inserts

(hat tip to Mashable on Greasemetal)

As you might imagine, all of this stuff might break in various weird and wild ways, but that’s part of the fun of tinkering. If you want to play it safer, you can read great Chrome tips from Lifehacker, Google OS, or Google Blogoscoped.

And since you’ve read all the way to the bottom, let me mention a tip that I haven’t seen widely mentioned. In Chrome, Control-V will paste from your clipboard and preserve formatting. If you use Control-Shift-V, only the text will be pasted.

Let me show you what I mean. There’s a site called Sphinn that lets you comment on search news, but the comment box allows rich formatting. In this image, I’ve highlighted a comment about Chrome and pasted the whole thing into the comment box with Control-V:

Now if I only wanted to paste the raw text that I highlighted, here’s what happens when I use Control-Shift-V:

This can be handy for some programs such as Google Docs that let you paste rich objects like images and formatting–but sometimes you want to paste only the text.

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I have previously covered ways to organize your keyword list depending on your purposes. Still there is no limit to improving your organizing skills. Besides, key terms are so numerous and diverse that I for one can spend hours trying to manage them to full potential.

So, as usual, to find new ways to organize your keywords and more options to get help with the overall keyword research, I turn to 2 desktop tools - both offering handy keyword list managing options. (more…)

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Today I want to share something on SEO. Here I am comparing SEO with Doctors, Farmers, War and Cricket.

• SEO is like Doctors
• SEO is like Farmers
• SEO is like War
• SEO is like Cricket

[Note : This is a fun Friday piece from Gunjan, it may not be the best grammar, but the comparisons are cute - Loren]

SEO is like the Doctor:

Why I am comparing them with Doctors? There are so many similarities in SEOs and Doctors. Doctors analyzing the health of the Human body. While SEOs analysing the health of the Website like how much pages site have, how many back links site have, how many years old website, What is PR of the website etc.

After the analysing the health of the human body doctors gives the medicine or treatment and after the analysing of website SEO gives the treatment to website like need to increase back links, need to change meta details, need to change content etc. Sometimes the doctor can see the result of medicine if that medicine is not effective for that human then the doctor will change the medicine.

Same is the case of SEO they will also see the result of their work after some times. If that treatment is not effective for website then they will start other treatment or experiment. Sometimes for doctors some of diseases are new and there are no medicines for that disease, same in case of SEO sometimes there are some of issues are new and may be there are no cure.
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Last week Jane posted a must-read overview of various URL shorteners and WebproWorld.com forum thread discussed the SEO benefit of TinyURL and similar services (there is no SEO benefit by the way). I think this is hot enough topic to discuss it at SEJ also.

Why URL Shortening Services Exist?

• For usability purposes: most people are more inclined to click a shorter URL (example: email clients will break a too long URL up by line making it less clickable);
• New technology oriented: with social networking or “microblogging” sites (e.g. Twitter and Plurk) that have strict character limits per message, URL shorteners allow to send over long URLs or say more within one message.
• To disguise destination links: to mask affiliate links or ad-tracking codes.

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As expected, the latest data from comScore shows that Google once again got the biggest chunk of the search market share for August and even managed to register a 1.1% increase from last month’s 61.9% to 63%. And we don’t have to guess who suffered from Google’s gain, Yahoo with a .9% decrease from last month’s 20.5% to 19.6% and Microsoft with .6% decrease from 8.9% to this month’s 8.3%.

Both Ask Network and AOL got a slight increase with .3% (4.5%-4.8%) and .1% (4.2%-4.3%)  respectively . (more…)

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