I guess now is a good time as any to have some fun on this blog. I was browsing other SEO-focused sites and ran across a very amusing cartoon on Jason Calacanis. See for yourself:
If you do not know who Jason Calacanis is, here is a bit of information on him. I got it from [...]
More: continued here
Cause and effect research papers explain why something happened. A writer who is writing a cause and effect research paper will narrate how an event, trend of phenomenon happened and will assi…
More: continued here
Let’s look at how you can tell if you’re already a technical writer. Or if you want to become a technical writer.
The first question, of course, has to be: What is a technical writer? There’s…
More: continued here
Topics and Types of Papers
Your topic is largely determined by the type and length of the paper you are to write. In most cases you will be asked to write a literary, an argumentative, a position, o…
More: continued here
Breaking down a process into smaller chunks is one of the foundations of technical writing. In this exercise, you can apply this principle to breaking down a project and learn how to manage a project….
More: continued here
Nikki Catsouras has achieved Internet immortality. She was an 18-year-old college freshman living in California with her parents and two sisters in 2006.
Nikki Catsouras loved to shoot videos on her camera, according to ABC News, and ironically, it a camera would memorialize Nikki's life and death as a gruesome and macabre joke on the Internet.
Photos of Nikki Catsouras in death are now the top search results in Google. Even Wikipedia has a page dedicated to the gory car crash.
Search engines, in our view, are neither good nor evil. How people use search engines determines whether the engines benefit society.
So when the Nikki Catsouras story broke today, we weren't surprised. It's not the first time MySpace or other social media sites have been caught up in seamy stories.
She borrowed the keys to her father's Porsche 911 Carrera, a car that goes zero to 60 miles an hour in less than five seconds. She had never driven the Porsche before.
According to state highway patrol reports, at approximately 1:45 p.m. last Halloween, Nikki Catsouras was traveling 100 mph on State Route 241, near Lake Forest, Calif., when she clipped another car and lost control, going across lanes over the median and slamming into a concrete tollbooth. She was killed instantly.
"Her head was more or less cut in two and sort of cleaved and then smashed. It's nothing that anyone should ever have to see," said Michael Fertik, the founder of ReputationDefender, a company that helps clients such as the Catsouras family remove items from the Internet. The Catsouras family was told they should never see the photos from the scene of the horrendous accident.
As the Catsouras family was grieving for their daughter, the accident scene photos showing Nikki's mutilated body suddenly appeared on the Internet.
A fake MySpace page was created, which at first looked like a tribute to Catsouras but also led to the horrific photos.
The pictures, taken by California Highway Patrol (CHiPs) officers and e-mailed outside the department, became so prevalent that Lesli Catsouras stopped checking her e-mail. Nikki's younger sisters were forbidden to use the Internet, and 16-year-old Danielle was taken out of school to be home schooled for fear her peers might confront her with the photos.
A lawsuit against the California Highway Patrol for allegedly releasing the accident scene pictures has been filed by the parents of Nikki Catsouras.
Of course, not only search engines and the Internet spread stories like this one. ABC News has a Primetime special on the Nikki Catsouras story tonight.
Google search results photos and images after the jump:
Click to read the rest of this post...
Local.com has announced a new advertising partnership with White Directory Publishers, a division of Hearst Holdings. Through the agreement, Local.com will be able to sell its online display advertising inventory to White Directory's national sales channel. The ads will appear on Local.com as well as White Directory Publisher’s Talkingphonebook.com and Area-wide.com sites.
“This partnership allows Local.com to reach out to large businesses with regional presence through a leading feet-on-the-street sales force,” said Peter Hutto, Local.com vice president, business development and sales. “This partnership will give Local.com better reach into the small business market, and provide White Directory with a large online distribution channel for their advertisers.”
"This is a tremendous opportunity for national advertisers to extend their reach to local consumers on one of the leading local search sites that consistently ranks in the Top 100 in traffic generated,” said David Bowling, director of national sales for White Directory Publishers. “This is an innovative approach to the sales and targeting of display ads to local consumers by national advertisers with local points of presence."
Related Reading:
Local.com Renews With Yahoo As Search Partner
Local.com to Distribute Superpages Ads
Hearst Jumps on Answers Bandwagon, Acquires Answerology
Hearst to Acquire Social Shopping Site Kaboodle
Google has a slew of announcements about its advertising products, including AdSense, AdWords, and DoubleClick.
First up, AdSense is no longer accepting referrals. They're advising users to remove the code from their sites, but to save the data collected through the referrals. Meanwhile, AdWords is phasing out the AdWords Pay-Per-Action program. Both programs have the last week of August as the expiration date.
Users of AdSense Referrals and AdWords PPA are being pointed to the Google Affiliate Network, formerly known as DoubleClick Performics. Performics was previously both an affiliate network and a search marketing company. Google divested itself of the Performics search marketing business for the obvious conflict of interest. The affiliate portion of the business is what is being rebranded.
Advertisers will be able to set CPAs for campaigns or design custom payments to affiliates. Publishers must apply and be accepted to the program, similar to the application for Adsense.
Finally, while the three remain separate programs for now, an integration could be in the future. Trevor Claiborne, writing on the Inside AdWords blog, "The Inside Adwords blog The Google Affiliate Network is currently a separate product from AdWords and AdSense." (emphasis mine) That sounds like a hint of things to come, don't you think?
Yahoo has announced its latest search index update. So, if you see a change up in your rankings, now you know why. But earlier news of new crawling abilities for Adobe Flash don't appear to be part of this update. Instead, expect to see those updates in the future.
“Yahoo! is committed to supporting webmaster needs with plans to support searchable SWF and is working with Adobe to determine the best possible implementation,” said Sean Suchter, vice president Yahoo! Search Technology Engineering.
Yahoo's last update occurred on May 28, 2008.
Are you seeing any changes in your Yahoo rankings? Let us know in the comments.
For years SEOs have been about the inability of search engines to crawl flash pages. But now Adobe is making an effort to keep Flash in the web development toolbox. They've announced the provision of Flash technology to Google and Yahoo in order to facilitate the indexing of sites and pages created with Flash.
“Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the Web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the Web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users.”
Over at the Google Webmaster Central Blog, an FAQ was posted offering up more details about the update. Here are some highlights:
Google says it can't crawl images, videos or FLV files because they do not contain text content.
What do you think about search engines crawling Flash? Are you more inclined to use Flash on your sites now? Leave your reaction in the comments!
