Sponsored Google Results mingle with Google Maps

AccuraCast has great coverage of a very intriguing Google AdWords experiment in the United Kingdom: Google sponsored results accompanied by maps and phone numbers.

Whoa! That’s certainly a boost of easy accessibility from the regular sponsored links. While these maps and phone numbers are concealed in a dropdown “Plus Box” until clicked upon, it is simpler than surfing through a website for said information. To get an idea of this AdWords enhancement, check out the screenshot below, graciously taken from AccuraCast:



(Maps and phone numbers were previously only featured in organic search results, as the bottom of the screenshot indicates.)

The article stressed that Google is merely experimenting with this feature and that it remains a “very limited closed beta test.” There is no word yet whether or not the feature will become permanent or if it will be introduced globally.

This topic is also discussed by Barry Schwartz, and I agree wholly when he writes, “I wonder if Google charges for clicking on that plus sign? If not, advertisers can save a lot of money with this feature.”

News Corp. to buy Dow Jones for $5.6 Billion

News Corp. said on Wednesday that it agrees to buy Dow Jones & Co. for $5.6 billion.  This purchase would add The Wall Street Journal to News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch's media empire and end a century old family-run business that prospered as one of the top U.S. business news sources in the world.

The Wall Street Journal and other Dow Jones possessions will contribute to Murdoch's immersive media empire, which includes such properties as the Fox television, the MySpace online social network, and the American Idol singing talent show on Fox network, just to name a few.

Under the terms of the agreement, being approved by the boards of both companies, the Dow Jones shareholders will receive $60 in cash for each share of common stock or Class B common stock that they own, the companies said.

This is a big and important purchase in the media industry, especially to Rupert Murdoch.  This purchase has enabled him to achieve his decades-long dream of running the highly respected financial daily.

Read more of the story...

Microsoft Office Live offers free website, but does not support Firefox?

The software giant is now offering small businesses a hosted website solution. Office Live is in Beta testing offering:

• Free domain name and Web hosting
• Easy-to-use Web site design tools
• 500 MB of Web site storage space
• 25 company-branded e-mail accounts
• Web site reports
• Search advertising tool with $50 credit*   

So intrigued by this offer I clicked on the "Get it for free button" only to be given this error message:

It seems that Office Live does not consider Firefox a browser, makes me wonder if the website will work with browsers other than Internet Explorer.

Despite my disappointment, I opened up Internet Explorer and tried to signup, however this time I found that a credit card is required field.

Why would you need a credit card for a free service?

Microsoft states:

Even though Microsoft Office Live Basics is a free service and Microsoft Office Live Collaboration is free during the beta period, we still require a credit card in order to validate that every customer is a legitimate entity

So how long will the beta last? How long before Microsoft charges my card $1000/month. I will never know, the disclaimer and non-support for firefox turned me off instantly.

Good try Microsoft, better luck next time.

Duplicate Content – A Big No-No

Yesterday a client of ours asked if we could search for particular terms on the Internet that relate to their business, copy any pertinent information that we could find and paste it into the new site we are designing and developing for them.

"Hold on!" I said.  First of all, my business would never copy content from another website unless we had permission to do so; as this would be a violation of copyright infringement - plus it's just wrong.  Second of all, if we did this, it is very likely that his website would be recognized by the search engines and determined to be "Duplicate Content". 

Duplicating content on a website for your own benefit is not positively perceived by the search engines and will most likely get your site penalized or even banned from the search results completely.

In terms of SEO, writing unique content for your website is the most effective way to drive traffic.  Copying and replicating other's content for your own benefit is not ethical and will never get you the exposure you're looking for.

If you do not have the time to effectively write your own unique content then you should not be spending the time or the money to build a website and run that business... Just my .02.

MySpace: home to nearly 30,000 sex offenders

According to a Yahoo! News article, MySpace.com has discovered that nearly 30,000 of its accounts belong to registered sex offenders— a significant increase from its last census four months ago. Several attorney generals, including Roy Cooper of North Carolina, insisted that MySpace disclose information on the amount of sex offenders registered with the site as well as their location. The article stated that “after initially withholding the information, citing federal privacy laws, MySpace began sharing the information in May after the states filed formal legal requests."

 

Illegal solicitation of minors via the Internet is a serious concern in need of attention from state officials and parents alike. Addressing this matter, Cooper is “pushing for a state law that would require children to receive parental permission before creating social networking profiles, and require the Web sites to verify the parents' identity and age,” the article said.

 

Since its initial creation in August 2003, MySpace has become one of the most popular social networking sites; in the past four years, the site has acquired over 180 million user accounts. MySpace provides a great social environment to meet, communicate and share common interests with others, but like any virtual community, it must be protected and its users-- especially minors-- must have assured safety. With each proposed protection law, we can help make MySpace a safer place for everyone.

Joining forces to squash cybersquatters

Just this morning my aunt was talking about how smart it would have been to buy a bunch of generic domain URL names when the Internet was just starting out—and then sell the domains to big companies for a lot of profit. Apparently, she wasn’t the only one with the idea. It's called cybersquatting; and for big name companies, it's grown from nuisance to threat.

In an attempt to counteract cybersquatters, top businesses such as Yahoo, Coca Cola and Hilton are pooling their resources into the Coalition Against Domain Name Abuse.

As Barry Schwartz states, “Cybersquatters purchase domain names that are similar to trademark names, such as yahooemail.com and hilt0n.com. Some use that traffic to earn an affiliate commission on sales from the trademark owners, but others may use it for criminal activities, such as phishing for passwords, bank account details and other personal information.”

Concerning the coalition’s priority, CADNA President Josh Bourne states, “To effectively combat cybersquatting…and other Internet-based fraud, CADNA will work at the national and international levels to make these practices difficult to establish and unprofitable to maintain.”

Ask.com assuages anxieties with new privacy feature

For those of us who fear Big Brother is living inside our computer, Ask.com has announced the creation of AskEraser, its new privacy feature.

AskEraser will allow browsers to erase all search history and, in accordance with its 18 month data retention policy, will conduct searches without logging IP addresses or cookies which could lead back to browsers.

“Anonymous user data can be very useful to enhance search products for all users,” writes Jim Lanzone, CEO of Ask.com, “… but we also understand that there are some who are interested in new tools that will help protect their privacy further, and we will give them that control on Ask.com.”

AskEraser will be available in the US and UK later this year and will launch globally in 2008.

More coverage at SearchEngineLand.com.

e-Business 2.0 emerges alongside Web 2.0

Web 2.0 has changed the way we think about the Web; whether you believe that Web 2.0 is a valid name or just some coined term by Tim O'Reilly used to define the "newer" websites that function as web-applications.  According to Tim O'Reilly's article, "What is Web 2.0?" the difference between the initial Web and Web 2.0 lies within the following example:
   

Web 1.0		Web 2.0
DoubleClick	-->	Google AdSense
Ofoto	-->	Flickr
Akamai	-->	BitTorrent
mp3.com	-->	Napster
Britannica Online	-->	Wikipedia
personal websites	-->	blogging
evite	-->	upcoming.org and EVDB
domain name speculation	-->	search engine optimization
page views	-->	cost per click
screen scraping	-->	web services
publishing	-->	participation
content management systems	-->	wikis
directories (taxonomy)	-->	tagging ("folksonomy")
stickiness	-->	syndication

Tim goes on to explain that Web 2.0 is thought to be a core set of principles and practices that tie together one or many groups of websites.  These websites contain these sets of principles and stem from the core at  various degrees of distance.  The image below shows a "meme map" of Web 2.0 that was developed at a brainstorming session during FOO Camp, a conference at O'Reilly Media. It's stated that the image below is very much a work in progress, but shows the many ideas that radiate out from the Web 2.0 core.

As we can see, Web 2.0 has truly emerged as a new set of features and functionality that encompasses modern websites as compared to the websites of the past (Web 1.0).  Some popular technologies that are utilized by Web 2.0 websites include: Blogs/Weblogs, Podcasts, Video Streaming, RSS feeds, Social Networking, Social Bookmarking, Tagging, and other forms of communication and social web-based tools.

But with the birth of Web 2.0, emerges the beginning of e-Business 2.0. 

What is e-Business 2.0?  In the simplest terms, it is the concept that e-Business processes have changed vastly over the last few years and are delivering a new core set of practices and functionality- practices used by some of the larger and more successful corporations of today.  Because the Web has emerged into what's now being referred to as Web 2.0, members are requiring greater functionality to keep them active within websites; customers are requesting more advanced features and capabilities for product ordering, account management and customer support; and website owners require more advanced functionality to control, monitor, manage and statistically track their users and customers in one centralized environment.

Because of these requirements and expectations, technologically advanced systems are considered necessary to control/manage Web 2.0 technologies.  Such examples include Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, Content Management Systems (CMS), sales automation systems, proposal-automation tools, automated submission processes (products, RSS feeds, sitemaps), Customer Support Systems, e-Newsletter Systems, Blogging Systems, Online Payment Solutions with invoicing capabilities, and much more. 

These core set of systems are necessary to manage and maintain websites that utilize Web 2.0 features.  They are generally easier to access by larger corporations and are frequently more difficult for the smaller business to incorporate into their websites and back-end administrative systems. 

Although it is developing, e-Business 2.0 is still in the beginning stages and I predict it will not be available to the masses for at least another five to ten years.  Many Web Development companies that target the smaller business find it difficult to offer these solutions in a cost-effective manner and this is why my company, Hudson Horizons, is focusing all of our attention into developing e-Business 2.0 solutions for the small business.   We successfully provide e-Business 2.0 solutions in an affordable manner for our clients, and our focus is to continue and offer advanced solutions that help our clients manage the growing needs for offering Web 2.0 features to their customer and members.

Moving into the future, I foresee Web 3.0 becoming a hot topic of discussion- as Web 2.0 is today- but not for at least another ten years.  And with this I predict a following of e-Business 3.0 solutions to successfully manage these new breeds of websites.  Yes, these may just be coined terms, but I think it's a great way to easily categorize the features of the Web and allow Web professions to straightforwardly discuss and analyze the Web in an effective manner.  I'm excited to see where Web 2.0 takes us!

Sitemaps and Robots.txt files

Want to make your site more visible?

Want to create a way to let search engines know about all of your pages?

Want to let Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Ask and other know about your content?

Well now you can by implementing two easy tasks:

1. Create an XML sitemap
2. Create a robots.txt file

What is an XML sitemap?

An XML sitemap is a listing of all of your websites pages in a simple xml format. The file contains xml markup to define the URL of the page as well as other features. The main point in creating an XML sitemap is to capture all of your websites pages. If you have a dynamic website that is constantly growing with new products: member registration, products or blogging; then you need to constantly update the XML sitemap to let the search engines know of your new pages. If you need help creating an xml sitemap check out this automated xml sitemap submission service. After you have created your xml sitemap then you only have one more step adding a robots.txt file.

What is a Robots.txt file?

Every search engine has robots also known as bots, crawlers, spiders, etc. These applications are constantly communicating with websites in the hope to find new content to index. However, some webmasters do not want all there content indexed. This was the first reason for a robots.txt file, to limit robots from crawling various directories. Recently the robots.txt was upgraded to include the sitemap location. Basically informing the robots of a list of your pages.

If you do not have a robots.txt file, simply open notepad and type the following:

Sitemap: [Sitemap_Location]

Where [Sitemap_Location] = http://www.youdomain.com/sitemap.xml

When you are all done, upload these two files to your root folder so you can get to it in a web browser by going to:

• http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
• http://www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt

If you have any questions about increasing your page visibility let us know.

 

Hudson Horizons adds writer images to its blog

We have been kicking around the idea of how to personalize a blog. The articles, tone and satire are good, but how can we put a face with an article? Then the idea hit us like a ton of bricks how about pictures of our writers. Needless to say when I put the email out requesting images, I received all the writer images within a few hours. What does this mean, image of writers on your blog are a good idea!

Why is it good to add writer images to your blog?

1. It puts a face with the name
2. If you have subscribers they can related more to your writers
3. Your writing staff will love it, its all about that, "10 minutes of fame!"

Why is it not a good idea to add writer images on your blog?

1. You only have one writer? Might look a little creepy with the same picture over and over, perhaps you can move it over to the Bio page.
2. You do not have a picture, you're not photogenic or you like your privacy. Even if you fall into one of these categories do not worry: do a quick Google search for your name, guarantee you find someone you wouldn't mind looking like.
3. You don't have a blog! - well if that's the case click here to find out how to get a customized blog for your business or personal use.