weissblog

Looks like Yahoo! is playing tit for tat with Google again. Yesterday Google announced a new addition that would allow webmasters to see most of their incoming links. Then this evening Yahoo! comes out with a similar service, and even offers a badge for you to add to your site so you can show off all your links (note: I did attempt to add said badge, but WordPress choked on the javascript).

Add this to the way Yahoo! changed their bid/rank structure in their search marketing division and I’m about ready to suggest Yahoo! change it’s name to Google Jr. But, like I said in the post on Google’s linking addition, I’m glad to see the search engines helping webmasters for a change.

Yesterday afternoon Google announced the release of a new link reporting tool (here and here). It’s long been known in the SEO community that doing a simple link search (i.e. link:www.your-domain-name.com) only displays a small sampling of the sites that link to you. Now webmasters will be able to get a better picture of who all is linking. Google still isn’t going to display all the links, but it will display many, many more than the link search does. For example, here’s an excerpt from Danny Sullivan’s article on this:

That’s showing about 3,000 links to the Search Engine Land web site (note, for some people, you might see no results, due to an apparent glitch). In contrast, the new system within Google Webmaster Central reports to me that I have 57,000 links pointing my way. From 3,000 to 57,000 links — what a different the new system makes!

So, as you can see, this could be a huge help for those who are trying to build their rank via linking campaigns. It’s an exciting change to see Google (or any search engine) build tools to help webmasters work toward better rankings in the SERPs.

I just read where “Turner Broadcasting System and Interference Inc. have agreed to pay $2 million to make amends for last Wednesday’s guerrilla marketing scheme that led to a bomb scare in Boston, the Massachusetts attorney general said Monday.”

For those who didn’t hear about it, Cartoon Network (owned by Turner) hired Interference, Inc. to do some advertising. Interference had some ‘light boards’ built that resemble a character off of Aqua Teen Hunger Force and then had the boards placed all over Boston. This resulted, supposedly, in a mass scare with people thinking they were bombs, evidently.

Let’s think about this. If you were a terrorist and were going to place bombs all over a city, would you really make them light up with a cartoon character? As a former police officer I must say this makes absolutely no sense to me. And while I’m sure Turner Broadcasting can easily afford their half of the fine, I honestly don’t think it’s reasonable. The only thing I feel could think of that Interference or Turner should be fined for would be for possibly violating local sign ordinances.

It should also be noted that the devices had been in place for two to three weeks in Boston; New York; Los Angeles, California; Chicago, Illinois; Atlanta, Georgia; Seattle, Washington; Portland, Oregon; Austin, Texas; San Francisco, California; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and none of these cities listed them as suspicious devices. Maybe Interference should have conducted a random sampling of the Boston public’s IQ before placing the devices.

It seems everywhere I’ve looked today, MySpace has been in the news. First there’s the news (that I missed in December) that MySpace beat out Yahoo! as the most popular website (ranked by pageviews). But then I learn that teenagers are flocking to a other social networking sites such as Xanga, FaceBook, and Bebo. And who can blame them, since a press release published back in October shows that 62.3% of people on MySpace are 25 and older. After all, no teenager wants to hang out at the same site as their parents.

So, what’s a company to do? They’re now the most viewed site online, but they’re losing their market. Oh, and let us not forget the lawsuit that was filed by Families of abused daughters where the parents are seeking millions because… Well… Because… Umm… Oh, yeah, because if the court agrees with the parents then surely they can’t be bad parents, even if they didn’t pay enough attention to their daughters and allowed their daughters to go online unattended. After all it’s MySpace’s job to raise their children, when they’re not being raised by their school teachers that is. But, that’s a soapbox for another day.

So, now MySpace is losing their original target market, but their picking up an older, wealthier market. That’s cool. But they’re being sued for millions. What should they do? How about sue someone else for millions! Harry Maugans says that MySpace is filing or has filed suit against 20+ ad networks for “exploiting the bulletins system in MySpace to send spam to millions of users.” I still haven’t been able to verify who all is being sued or for how much, but the buzz around the sphere is 20+ ad networks with a goal of 20 mil each.

All this fuss over a fairly simple (and poorly design, IMHO) website. Time for another TLA. I hereby announce the usage of MMM to stand for more myspace mess. Go ahead and learn it, you’ll have plenty of chances to type it into you IM windows when you buddies keep you abreast of all the law suits.

Thanks to Stephan Spencer and Denise Wakeman for helping me get caught up on the MySpace news.

Okay, after a couple month hiatus I’m back. I’ve moved my hosting away from 1and1.com finally and I’m loving my new host. With the switch I finally got away from Movable Type for my blog. With the exception of MT I haven’t programmed in Perl in years and I’d like to keep it that way. I’m now using Wordpress 2.1 (PHP power baby!). I’m new to WP though, so if anyone has any suggestions on plugins and such, please let me know.

In other news, my company Blue Phoenix Consulting is up and running pretty well. So if anyone needs some help getting their website to actually ‘do’ something (as opposed to being a money pit) drop me a line.

And, in closing, I’m looking for research, articles, and examples of professionals using blogs as their primary website. By professional I mean real estate agents for example. Do they really need a full blown website just like their company? Or does a financial adviser really have to have her own site or would a blog be better? Anyway, I’m sure someone has studied this, so if anyone can point the way I’d appriciate it.