Social Networks' Traffic Stabilizes, Facebook Nears Yahoo!

Facebook Up Slightly, MySpace and Twitter Flat to Down
Despite November being nearly half over, the monthly traffic statistics from October have just been released by Compete.com, and it looks like there are no major surprises in the social networking arena. Despite the recent improvements and continued hype, traffic to Twitter.com decreased slightly, by 2 percent, month over month, tracking at the level it saw in June of this year, and lower than the previous three months. Facebook, the #3 site overall worldwide, behind only Yahoo! and Google, climbed more than 3 percent, to almost 129 million, while MySpace stayed steady around 50 million unique visitors (15th overall).


FriendFeed and Posterous Decline - While Twine Plunges
Where one saw more movement was in the lower tiers, as FriendFeed continued its descent following the Facebook acquisition, shedding nearly 7 percent of visitors, dropping below the 700k mark, from a one-time peak above 1 million, and Posterous dropped more than 12 percent, showing just under 1.2 million visitors. Twine, which once peaked above 2 million, is now just over 120,000.


Yahoo!'s Slow Decline Comes as Facebook Rises Toward the #2 Spot
Facebook's slow but steady growth actually has them looking less in the rear view mirror, toward companies like Twitter (who scored 23 million uniques vs. Facebook's 129 million) and more at the big gun right ahead of them - Yahoo!, which continued its slow descent, dropping just over 1 percent, to 135 million unique visitors. In fact, one more month with the same trajectory would have both networks tied at about 133 million visitors, so we could see a change in placement come November.


Google's Position at #1 Remains Unchallenged (Shown With YouTube)
Unsurprisingly, Google reported in at #1, again, counting almost 150 million unique visitors in the month, according to Compete (which in my opinion is probably low). In addition, the company's YouTube subsidiary tracked just under 85 million unique visitors, good enough for the #5 position worldwide on its own. GMail continued its climb to another 9.3 million visitors, up 98% from this point last year.

Surprisingly, GMail's position is more than 3 times higher than that of Hotmail.com, which has even been surpassed by Apple's Me.com MobileMe e-mail offering. Me.com sported 3.5 million visitors, growing 98% year over year, contrasted with Hotmail's 2.5 million, which decreased 7 percent, according to Compete.


LinkedIn Stays Hot - See Versus Twitter
Interestingly, during the recession, with high unemployment, LinkedIn.com traffic increased 3.3 percent in the month to 15.5 million unique visitors, up 89% on the year. Monster.com, the massive job site, tracked in with 41.5 million unique visitors, good for #20 in the world, up 47% on the year.

Some other sites of note:

• Apple.com traffic tracked at 21.4 million, compared to 15.5 million for hp.com and 13.4 million for Dell.com.
  
• Digg.com traffic decreased less than 1 percent, up 57% on the year, good for 43 million uniques.
  
• Technorati.com traffic was flat, with only 2.8 million unique visitors.

Disclaimer: Compete statistics are known to be imperfect, but they are always interesting.

Twitter Plucks Data Management Guru from Yahoo!

That Twitter is dealing with massive amounts of data flowing through its servers these days would be an understatement, as the service sees strong growth and significant mindshare. With the company having passed what looks to have been its rockiest struggles over the last twelve months, Twitter is now getting to focus on rolling out some significant new features, from Lists to geolocation, trend definitions and retweets. But the microblogging giant looks like it is taking extra steps to harness the power of its rapidly-expanding data set.

If the company's own team list is to be believed, they just picked up Utkarsh Srivastava, a highly respected senior research scientist at Yahoo!, who is best known for his work on building large-scale distributed systems, specifically his efforts with Hadoop.

Hadoop, similar to the Google File System, is a framework that enables applications to work over distributed server nodes and significant data sets - potentially ranging in the petabytes. Yahoo!, Google's off and on competitor, has been the company most associated with Hadoop. While at Yahoo!, Srivastava was one of the original designers of "Pig", an Apache project for analyzing large data sets, which leveraged Hadoop. (See also the research paper: Pig Latin: A Not-So-Foreign Language for Data Processing)

Srivastava, a PhD graduate from Stanford University in Computer Science, has been working at Yahoo! Research since 2006. (See his home page and LinkedIn profile)

Not knowing what aspects of Twitter Srivastava may be working on, it's premature to assume whether his efforts will be primarily focused on new initiatives, or simply helping the company scale its growth. I can dream and hope that he can be the missing piece that brings Twitter's high potential search engine fully online, but that is no doubt a big project indeed.

Update: This hire has been confirmed by Srivastava and also covered by TechCrunch.

Apple's Dashboard Widgets Comatose As iTunes App Store Skyrockets

Prior to the debut of Apple's iPhone, software developers wanting to make miniature applications to reach Macintosh users had a direct route to customer's desktops through the development of Mac OS X Dashboard widgets. Billed as major functionality debuting in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) in early 2005, Dashboard, much like Konfabulator before it, featured widgets including weather forecasts, stock updates, calculators or simple utilities, like a dictionary or thesaurus. Over time, developers managed to make a number of creative uses for these apps, from delivery updates to flights' status, or even lightweight arcade games.

But four years later, Dashboard is dormant, while not yet completely dead. A quick calculation of the total number of widgets listed on Apple's Web site is just over 4,500, of which 820 are international. In remarkable contrast, Apple's iTunes Store loudly proclaims its haul to be more than 75,000, of which a massive 1,394 were posted just last Friday.

Want to know how many new Dashboard Widgets were posted last Friday?

Zero.

Interestingly, Apple's Dashboard Widgets site highlights the last 50 "Just Added" to the Web site, and for whatever reason, between September 9th and September 21st, no Dashboard Widgets were posted. Maybe the one guy whose job it is to get them approved was on a two-week vacation?

And in the week, starting with Monday, only 39 total Widgets made it into into the directory, including fascinating titles such as the "Iowa Hawkeyes Football Schedule" widget or the "Countdown to Thanksgiving" widget.

With iPhone app developers having a fast-growing audience of millions ready to spend real money on applications for their mobile phone, the idea of creating a miniature application for the desktop, for free, probably doesn't have much pull. It's no secret that the iTunes App Store's runaway success has played a big role in making any discussion about Dashboard completely unnecessary.


The louisgray.com Widget as posted in 2007
Just a few years ago, many thought widgets were going to be the next hot thing in desktop apps. Konfabulator was purchased by Yahoo! and turned into Yahoo! Widgets, which claims nearly 6,000 desktop widgets. And way back in 2006, I even made a dashboard widget for louisgray.com, which I later updated in 2007 and still works. But the talk of widgets faded, as people primarily chose to use the Web browser and their iPhones as the conduits for Web data, preferring not to have a gazillion little widgets floating about their screens.

Considering the dramatic drop-off in buzz around Dashboard widgets, and a corresponding meteoric rise in iPhone deployments and penetration, it's no surprise to me that you see this gulf, which now measures almost 20x in favor of iTunes applications. It's enough to wonder if Apple will ever bring up the Dashboard again, except maybe to provide a place where iTunes applications purchased for the iPhone today can sometime live. They won't kill it outright, but it sure looks like a dinosaur, after only four years.

RakedIn Takes On Portals With Focused Finance Site

Today, a good amount of the news we get about businesses and the individuals at these companies comes from horizontal portals and news organizations that have other priorities - be it search at Yahoo! and Google, or politics and entertainment, like at CNN. Meanwhile, social sites like LinkedIn and business tools like Jigsaw and Hoovers are accruing personal details about many companies. A new site, debuting today, called RakedIn, has launched, trying to interweave the personalities behind the businesses you watch with up to date stock and financial information, as well as company overviews, with key leaders and board members.

RakedIn, launched by Mike Yavonditte, the former CEO of Quigo, who left AOL following that company's $340 million acquisition at the end of 2007, says it now has a collection of more than 200,000 companies and half a million people covered on its site, on day one, a number it anticipates to continue growing over time.


RakedIn's Search Engine Finds Data On LinkedIn


RakedIn's Profile of Twitter, the Company
The site's front page displays featured headlines and an update on the day's stock markets, headlines from across a wide range of industries, and the day's biggest losers or gainers. Aiming to have the most up to date information available, you can dice the information by industry, or even by press releases, company filings, or other news. The site even helpfully tells you if there are more headlines that have loaded as you read the current news - saying they have "raked in" new updates.


A Sample from RakedIn's Financial Data Headlines


RakedIn Also Shows Detail On Individuals Across Companies
Like Yahoo! Finance and Google Finance, you can dive down into any specific company, such as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! or any of the Dow components. A company page, assuming it is public, will highlight the latest news, insider trades, employee compensation and other personnel highlights - as well as where the company ranks versus its peers. (For example, Microsoft has the highest earnings in Washington State and is the 88th largest employer overall tracked)


RakedIn's Profile of Microsoft's Steve Ballmer
One of the biggest aspects of RakedIn is the benefits of near real-time. During market hours, you can see stocks rise and fall, and headlines slot their way in to company pages. And the site even tracks your most recently viewed pages, giving you fast access should you want to return.


My Recent Activity on RakedIn Is Tracked
And for the largest companies, you can see how their extended families operate. For example, for EMC Corporation, you can see its related businesses, including VMware, Iomega and Documentum, as well as their estimated revenues, profits and employee counts.

RakedIn has a wealth of information, especially for a inaugural debut. And their focus might give people a very real alternative to the portals who are simply aggregating data from everywhere. Check it out at www.rakedin.com.

Do Not Blame Google, Newspapers Have Not Evolved

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

I have tried to avoid the newspaper crisis, and the AP's comments for as long as possible. Today, a TechCrunch post got me thinking a little more about what is happening. There have been complaints that Google is killing newspapers and all other sorts of silliness. However, the biggest online driver of news traffic is Yahoo!.

According to comScore, Google News attracted 16.2 million unique visitors in the U.S. in February, compared to 42.3 million for Yahoo News and 46.2 million for the sites operated by New York Times Digital.

This means that the whole "Google as middleman is killing newspapers" idea is misguided and Yahoo may be the true culprit. Of course, this is if you believe that an Internet property is to blame. Google as a search entity does not steal traffic from anyone because it is only indexing the content on the Web so that it is easily found. Obviously, this cannot be the reason that people would blame Google.

If Google is not to blame, and you are not buying the Yahoo News idea, then who is to blame for newpapers demise? The newspapers themselves. A long time ago, television came along, but did not kill newspapers. You had a handful of channels that would show some news and some other programming. Then cable came alive, and we got specialized channels for sports, music, movies and more. So far, newspapers had not seemed to be affected, but they had not changed anything. On the TV side, we got more 24-hour news channels, and they did not kill newspapers either. Is the internet killing CNN or MSNBC? No. If anything, they are stronger because they are leveraging the internet.

So, why are newspapers dying? If you followed the TV analogy, you will see that TV has continuously evolved. Newspapers just got bigger, but did not change much. Many newspapers have Web sites, but they are just the online version of the newspaper. Where is the evolution into something better?

The Internet as a whole has been slowly killing newspapers because they are not taking advantage of what people are doing. We are in a fast-paced fast-food culture now, and newspapers are definitely best when slowly consumed. If newspapers were smart they would join forces to become a major internet player. For most newspapers, much of the content is sourced from wire services like the AP and Reuters. So why don't the newspapers use this to their advantage to become specialists. The Wall Street Journal has been a business and finance specialist for as long as it has existed.

However, I do not think that newspapers want to adapt because change is scary. The only thing you hear is that they are looking for ways to find revenue streams online. That is a band-aid that will only help for a short time. Like many companies that go into bankruptcy, they need to reinvent themselves. The problem is that they think they are fine.

Image courtesy of Jacob Whittaker

Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.

The Time is Right to Kill Google (If They Don’t Kill Themselves First)

Guest Post By Matt Dickman of Techno//Marketer (FriendFeed/Twitter)


In your opinion, what is Google’s differentiator as a company? Can you remember when you switched from Yahoo! to the new, fresh upstart Google? For me, it was seamless. One day I woke up and was just using it. I do, however, remember why I started using it. Google put users at the center of their business. They added value to the search experience by cleaning up the interface and presenting information in a clean, concise manner. They learned early that search was a replacement for the directory-based engine that Yahoo (still) hangs on to, not a supplement.

For the past two years I have written a blog post about the ways that Google attaches itself to my life on a daily basis (here is last year’s version). I’ve welcomed this life-integration with the company because I felt they were adding value. They weren’t doing any evil.

Lately, however I’ve felt a disturbance in the force. I still use all of the same Google products that I mentioned in the post, but something had changed. The company that innovated search by focusing on the user has lost its focus on the user. Here are two examples that you may, or may not, have noticed and I welcome your feedback.

First, Friend Connect. *sigh* This really was my tipping point with Google. (You’ll notice there are common threads between this example and the next one.) Back in mid-December I came across a blog post on this new Google platform extension. On the surface, I liked the idea. Everyone with a Google profile (most of us) could join the site and engage with each other through what Google calls “social gadgets”. My plan was to add ratings at the end of each post, however I ran (and continue to run) into a problem.

The initial set up was cake. I added the community widget to the side of my blog and waited for people to join.

My initial experience with that module was poor. The invite function wouldn’t let me add new users. Actually, I just checked and it still won’t. Worse yet when I tried to invite my friends and the page gave me the error, something weird happened. All of my Gmail chat contacts disappeared. My Google reader contacts as well. Not cool. I’ve been rebuilding this over time, but some people I have been permanently severed from. To add fuel to the fire, when I try to add the social widget to the post, I get the image below where the widget should be. I have everything set up right, it just doesn’t work.

You would think that, upon launching a new platform extension, Google would be all over the support site. Not the case. From when I submitted my post to the next Google rep to answer any questions was about three weeks (and they didn’t answer my question).

Scenario #2, FeedBurner. I think the entire blogosphere has a love/hate relationship with this service. From the time Google acquired the Chicago company until now it has been a rollercoaster. FeedBurner started out with a narrow focus and they executed well. Google acquired them to extend their advertising/analytics offering. However, subscriber stats would often fluctuate wildly, dropping to zero on some days, bouncing back if you were lucky. Google always claimed that they were “working on it”, but I didn’t believe it until a while back when I saw that they were transitioning to the Google platform.

In theory, this is a good thing. More scale, more stability, more happy people. Wrong. The transition was not explained well and I saw a wave of panic slowly crushing the blogosphere. A couple of us took the plunge and made the move (I even recorded a video to help people understand the process). In the process, my subscribers dropped by half. No explanation. Hundreds of posts to the support forum and no replies from Google. My stats did bounce back, but the service’s reputation is shaky now. People use this as a key metric, companies track it and people get paid based on it. Sadly there is no alternative (yet).

Google has lost sight of the user. They have neglected us for too long, concentrating instead on advertising. I get that it is their lifeblood, but what good is an ad that nobody sees because you alienate your community. I think that a company that attacks with the right mission and focus on users could make a dent in Google’s armor. Killer customer service powered by social platforms could allow a new set of players to emerge.

I would love to get your take on this. Have you seen the same trend? What would you do if you were Google to stand up and put your foot down?

Read more by Matt Dickman at Techno//Marketer.

10 Predictions for 2009 In the World of Tech

Following on to last year's 10 Predictions for 2008 In the World of Tech and the recent results: My 2008 Tech Predictions Look Bad As Year Nears a Close.

1) The Real-Time Web Will Become Critical for News and Information Discovery

Delayed news will no longer be acceptable for early adopters, who will gravitate to the quickest sources of news, wherever they may be. As tools like Twitter Search and FriendFeed real-time offer people to rapidly broadcast their updates, reactions and news with true immediacy, a segment of the population will adopt these real-time sources and favor them ahead of delayed or filtered engines, including RSS, and of course, edited mass media. At the same time, while many of us early adopters may be fairly noisy about this development, we will remain in the significant minority, even as the mainstream becomes more aware of these options.

2) Businesses Will Be Expected to Be On Social Media If They Have Web Sites

In the mid and late 1990s, there was a land rush for domain names, as every company jumped in and procured Web addresses and built out Web sites to establish their electronic home. Although many of these sites were rudimentary at best, they knew they needed to be there to participate. In 2009, it will be expected that brands and businesses will be similarly established on social media, using tools like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FriendFeed and YouTube.

3) Apple Will Introduce A Succession Plan for Steve Jobs as CEO

While Steve Jobs is not likely in imminent danger, the continued unsettled rumors, as well as a good level of common sense will push Apple to present a succession plan for Jobs, which will not take place immediately, but over the space of a few years. One to three names of potential in-house replacements will be named, as well as a timeline, as Steve fades to the background, but continues to wield tremendous power over Apple's vision and deliverables.

4) TechCrunch Will Acquire VentureBeat or Silicon Alley Insider

Mike Arrington's tech blog continues to be the influence leader in its space. Both VentureBeat and Silicon Alley Insider have forged strong brands with a financial bent which would be good additions for the TechCrunch brand as Arrington and team look to extend their umbrella and wrap up what he considers to be the best blogs. SAI in particular would offer an East Coast/financial bent that the Silicon Valley-based TechCrunch is currently not known for.

5) Android Will Have Less than 20% the Sales of iPhone in 2009

While commoditized PCs managed to put pressure on Macintosh and relegate Apple to a small market share percentage the Cupertino company is still trying to recover from back in the 1980s, history will not repeat itself, as Google's Android partners will be unable to knock the iPhone off its perch as the must-have smart phone for power Web consumers. BlackBerry will continue having a significant share in the enterprise, but it will continue to be iPhone eroding its share, not the Android, especially given the unmatched array of applications available for the iPhone which Android will not be able to match.

6) A Major Alternative to FeedBurner Will Emerge As the Service Stagnates

Google's mismanagement of FeedBurner has many people frustrated with how the feed service has been run since its acquisition last year, as the service continues to see slowness, outages, and recently went dark, shutting down their blog and being gobbled up by the AdSense team. Competitors will emerge, enabling bloggers to move their FeedBurner subscriber base and historical statistics to their new platform.

7) FriendFeed and Twitter Will Both Be Independent Through 2009

Despite Twitter's recent dance with Facebook, it will rely on its existing venture capital funding and find revenue that enables the company to stay afloat at least through the end of the year. FriendFeed, similarly, will not be acquired or merge with any other service prior to the end of 2009. The company, if necessary, will instead do a second round of funding, with its own internal sources providing much of the capital.

8) Companies Will Continue Budget and Staff Cuts Through the Third Quarter of 2009

The layoff parade in 2009 will not be limited to unprofitable companies, small companies or practically any category of companies. The doom and gloom that have hit the financial markets, advertising, real estate and almost every sector will continue through the first half of the year, before starting to see a rebound in the third quarter. You will see strong companies like Microsoft lay off thousands, and practically everyone will not be renewing contract positions that have concluded - even Google and Apple.

9) An Extremist Group Will Manage to Take Down or Deface the White House Web Site

America's political climate is extremely polarized, following the conclusion of two extremely divisive terms. As Barack Obama moves into the White House, the very features that make him a "first" will also make him and his administration the chief target for some incredibly angry and hate-filled groups. One will somehow manage to access the WhiteHouse.gov site and manipulate it this year.

10) eTrade, Digg, StumbleUpon, Skype and Yahoo! Will All Be Sold.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. eBay will want to ditch its non-core assets like StumbleUpon and Skype (I made the sale of StumbleUpon a prediction last year too). Digg, losing momentum, will sell cheap. Yahoo! will eventually be purchased by News Corporation, AOL, or even Google, assuming it passes regulatory approval, by the end of the year. Microsoft, still insulted, won't be back to the table.

Never Leave Your E-mail Again

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

A lot of bloggers are talking about the new GMail Tasks feature. I even had a mini rant on it as well. My opinion was that Google should have partnered or purchased a leader in the task management space, like Remember The Milk. However, comments in several forums have pointed out that RTM may be a bit heavy for people. In addition to that, the GMail Tasks feature is very simple. In my haste, I forgot about the power of simple.

In addition to simple, I overlooked something that could be big. I am not sure how I missed it, because it has even been a news item this week. Google has been preparing GMail to be your new home. Personalized homepages like iGoogle and MyYahoo are useful, but typically they are just another place that the user needs to go to. e-mail is something that people use all day and every day. We have seen the movement slowly with the integration of other frequently used items like GTalk and Google Calendar. The main reason I am shocked that I missed this is because Om Malik reported on this very same thing for Yahoo. In his report, he states that Yahoo is turning their mail application into a platform:

The program is expected to launch in beta relatively soon with half a dozen small applications running in a sidebar inside the Yahoo mail client (Evite is one of the services that is said to be building a nano-app for this new Yahoo Mail-as-a-platform). Users’ address books would act as a social graph, essentially turning Yahoo Mail into the basis of a whole new social networking experience.

Obviously, the GMail Tasks announcement was very timely given the earlier reporting of the Yahoo plans. However, both plans point to something bigger. GMail now has contacts, chat, calendar and task integration. Yahoo has had contacts, chat, calendar and task integration for a while as well. Both Yahoo and Google are planning to ensure that you never have to leave your e-mail client. The key to both platforms is that they allow widgets for additional functionality. So, if there is some favorite application that you are missing, there is the possibility for getting application integration without using something like a GreaseMonkey script. However, third party integration is not the real goal of either platform. The real goal is for each provider to easily integration whatever functionality they want as easily as possible.

So, can you spend your entire digital life in your e-mail client? What are the required applications needed for your constant attention?

• E-mail (duh)
• Contact management and extended profiles
• Integrated Calendar and scheduling
• Multi-provider chat client
• Task and To Do list integration
• RSS Reading or a good configurable news interface
• Extensible platform for third party applications like social networks

Obviously, your entire digital life would never fit into one interface without getting cluttered and overwhelming. I did not include applications like FriendFeed, socialmedian or Twitter. Other social media applications like Digg, Mixx and Reddit also do not fit very well. But everything else mentioned is already integrated into either GMail or Yahoo Mail.

So thinking about best of breed tools, what would this all-in-one application look like? First, the GMail interface for e-mail, including the filters and tagging. Neither GMail or Yahoo have good contact management capabilities, so we should look to something like Microsoft Outlooks contacts. All of the calendar offerings are reasonable enough but there does need to be a reliable way to get alarm notifications. For multi-provider chat functionality, just look to Meebo which is the best online service available. For tasks and to do list integration, I prefer Remember The Milk, though many people mentioned they would prefer something more lightweight. RTM does have a GMail widget which probably fits the "lightweight" concerns. Given my technical roots, I would prefer an RSS reader like GReader, while other more normal people may prefer an interface like MyYahoo with selectable news sources in a simple readable interface. The selection of RSS reading or a news interface should be configurable. Lastly, we should not have to depend on GreaseMonkey for extensions to the interface. A simple plugin architecture similar to what MyYahoo or NetVibes have done would suffice.

The real question is, would you actually use something like this? Many companies have been targeting your "one digital home", but nothing has really dominated the space. Do you think Google or Yahoo can pull this together?

Read more by Rob Diana at RegularGeek.com.

15 Tips on Improving Search Engine Visibility

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)

I will first start by stating I am not an SEO expert.

Over the years, I have studied and tested various methods, guidelines and techniques for generating search engine traffic. Back in 1997, I took on paid clients and SEO became a full time career for a few years. AltaVista was the dominant leader in search in those days. Learning how to control and manipulate the engines to get front page search results became my main objective and an obsession. Today, things are a lot different, as there is basically one dominant leader in search, and the playing field is more level than it's ever been.

Most of these practices and techniques are still very much relevant today as they were then, so I thought I would touch upon a few of the key ones.

1) Start with your domain name.

You have heard it before a million times, register a .com domain name. The domain spelling should be as equivalent to someone typing that word in a search engine. It should be relatively short and easy to spell as well. Try to avoid hyphens and or any unnecessary or unusual character variations. Most search engines still to this day give a lot more weight to .com extensions, as opposed to other TLDs. Keeping the domain name easy to spell and avoiding hyphens is more for branding purposes, than SEO. Search visibility can still be achieved with a confusing, long character riddled domain that makes no sense at all, but will someone be able to find it, and most importantly remember it without the assistance of a search engine?

2) Establish quality inbound and outbound links.

Search engines, more specifically Google, ranks your site based on the amount of inbound links it has from other sites. Spend time and get authoritative sites linking back to you. Inbound links from these sites are worth their weight in gold. Links from an authoritative site also influence ranking. More weight is given to these inbound links because these sites are considered a trusted and or leading source as they are considered the most influential on a particular subject matter, e.g. Wikipedia.org

3) Understand PageRank.

Websites that Google believes are important and influential receive higher PageRank. A Higher PageRank can influence better search results and rankings. Authoritative sites, for example, usually have a high PageRank. PageRank is worth taking note of, but should not be your main focal point. You can check a site's PageRank by going here, or by installing the Google Toolbar.

4) Put relevant keywords on all of your Web addresses.

Make sure any content you publish on the web has the keywords of the subject or story headline formatted in the permalink/web URL. If your are writing a post, for example, about how FriendFeed was just acquired by Google, you would format the URL similar to this, http://www.yoursite.com/friendfeed/google-acquires-friendfeed.html, or http://www.yoursite.com/google-acquires-friendfeed.html. Notice the sub-directory in bold has the keyword of the story subject. Take advantage of whatever you can to give as much URL mention of the target keyword as possible.

5) Headlines and page titles should always contain the target keywords.

In combination with having the relevant keywords in your URL, the same emphasis, if not more, needs to be placed on placement of keywords in your headlines and page titles. If you do no optimization at all, at the very least always practice these three guidelines. It's also a good idea to put the relevant keywords of focus first in the headline and page title, and if possible somewhere in the start of your story content. Failure to practice these guidelines will leave your site buried pages deep in the search results, rendering it almost nonexistent, at least to the search engines.

6) Start a Blog.

Blogs are a major source and very relevant source of information for millions of people daily. Blogs are also influencing consumer's decisions to buy products. Think about the last time you searched for something on Google. There is a high probability that you found your information on, or were referred from a blog. Search engines, specifically Google love blogs for the rapid amount of fresh and timely content they produce. Setting up a blog is very easy, and if tweaked correctly can be a powerful tool for search engine traffic generation. Configure your permalink structure immediately after installing your blog. Spend five minutes tweaking the basic admin settings. I would also recommend installing and using plugins such as the "All in One SEO Pack" available for WordPress. Now you can focus on producing the quality content that will get your site linked to and noticed. Give and get as much "link love" as possible. Become an expert in your field and let your content reflect that. Use the power of RSS to convert that search engine click into a return visitor.

7) Use keywords as anchor text when linking.

Anchor text is weighted highly in search engine algorithms and subsequent search results. Anchor text gives the user and search engines descriptive information about the content of a hyperlinks destination. Use Anchor text keywords, especially as often as possible when linking to pages. Avoid using "click here" at all costs, this will do nothing to increase or improve visibility.

8) Install Web Analytics software.

Flying blind is foolish. You need to first measure, and understand your traffic patterns and behaviors before you can seek to improve it. Installing Google Analytics should be your starting point.

9) Utilize Sitemaps.

Sitemaps, are basically a list of all the pages pertaining to a particular site. This protocol allows you to notify Google about URLs on your website that are available for crawling and indexing, that may otherwise have not been discoverable by Google's normal crawling process. They also should help with getting your site crawled in a more timely fashion.

10) Use Google Webmaster Tools.

Google's Webmaster Tools, allows you to see your website the way Googlebot sees it. The tools provide data on finding out which sites link to yours, finding search queries that list your site as a result and finding which of your site's pages are indexed, and also showing you any errors Google encountered while crawling your site. Those are the core features, but there is more under the hood. The goal is to make your site as Google friendly as possible. The more data you are armed with and utilize, the better your chances are for higher visibility in search results.

11) Produce and publish quality content with some frequency.

Write quality content and publish on a regular basis. Sites that publish more frequently are seen as more reliable than sites that seldom do. This also helps for you to increase the amount of content on your site, which in turn yields more indexed pages, which then yields more visibility, increasing the quantity of search clicks to your pages.

12) Use Headline tags.

Headline tags (h1, h2, etc.) are a great place to use your targeted keywords, phrases and secondary keywords. Search engines recognize that headline tags are more important than the surrounding text, therefore they assign greater value to keywords found within them.

13) Don't forget about the other engines.

Google, the gorilla, produces the biggest quantity of search traffic for the majority, but don't forget about Yahoo & MSN. It's at least worth the effort to stay current on both of their publishing guidelines. Yahoo has a resource for web publishers, as does Microsoft to help you better optimize your pages for their engines.

14) Consistency is the name of the game.

Focus on what works and run with it. There is not one single magic bullet for achieving better search results. It's a combination of these practices and understanding what criteria the search engines look for when indexing your pages. Search is all about optimizing for the relevant keywords or phrase, master this practice and it will pay off. Don't expect results instantly. It takes time to build up your content, establish inbound links, tweak and re-tweak.

15) It gets better by using social media.

Guess what? If you are active in social media, you are probably already ahead of the game. Social networking profiles such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter all get favorably indexed, and always rank on the top of the search results. This is especially great if your goal is for personal branding. Being active and maintaining consistency, should easily allow you to own your name in Google. Social media is probably the most invaluable tool you could use for traffic generation, if executed correctly. User generated content and the applications that power them such as, blogs, wikis,video, social networking sites, bookmarking, microblogging, etc are the leading mechanisms for search engine traffic, and will only increase as time goes on.

Image courtesy of Silent under Creative Commons license.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

30 Different Uses for RSS

By Mike Fruchter of MichaelFruchter.com (Twitter/FriendFeed)


I'm making an effort to become less reliant on visiting websites for the data I need. Spending a majority of my time in Google Reader, I decided RSS could help me accomplish this task. I no longer have to visit Yahoo to read my horoscopes or sports scores. I now track my Ebay auctions from Google Reader. These are some of the ways I started to recently use and rediscover RSS.

This post touches on 30 different ways RSS can be used.

1) Tabbloid is a "hatchling" project that comes to us from Hewlett-Packard. It's a very simple and useful utility that turns your RSS feeds into a personal magazine via PDF format. You can generate your PDF files on the website, or have them emailed to you.

2) Track deals for hotel and airline fares at Expedia,Travelocity,Orbitz and Kayak.

3) iTunes music store RSS generator allows you to set up notifications based on your genre for new releases, top songs, top albums, featured albums and exclusives.

4) Track your favorite sports team news and game scores at Yahoo Sports. Basketball | Baseball | NFL | Hockey

5) Simpletracking.com lets you view the latest tracking information from all the major US shipping carriers. No need to go directly to the carrier's website anymore. Get notified when your package tracking information has changed directly from your feed reader.

6) Create customized news feeds and track specific keywords. You can get a feed for any search you do on Google News. First do any search on Google News, then simply use the Atom or RSS link on the left-hand side of your search results page to generate the feed. Here is what my FriendFeed Google news feed looks like.

7) Track your favorite online comics strips. Tapestry Comics maintains an RSS directory of comic strip feeds. Dilbert, xkcd and several hundred more feeds can be found here.

8) Create customized Ebay auction search feeds. Keep track of Ebay auctions with ease.

9) Set up custom feeds for job searches using the Indeed job search engine. As with Google News, the process is the same. RSS job feeds are automatically generated on the search results pages.

10) Get real time reports about current traffic incidents in your area. Traffic.com delivers RSS feeds of traffic information for most major U.S. cities.

11) Be notified of severe weather warnings and advisories for the United States, issued by the National Weather Service.

12) Get notified of the latest movie and dvd releases courtesy of Movies.com.

13) Get notified of current airport delay courtesy of Flightstats.com.

14) Listen to the President of the United States radio addresses.

15) Get the latest NASA news articles and press releases.

16) Read your Daily Horoscopes.

17) Send RSS feeds to Twitter using TwitterFeed.TwitterFeed is a simple utility that will check an RSS feed for updates and send them to Twitter accordingly.

18) Get notified of RSS feed updates via SMS messages sent to your phone.

19) Convert RSS feeds to audio recordings. You can also subscribe to them as podcasts via iTunes, and download your recordings as an mp3 file.

20) View the latest public pictures being uploaded to Flickr. You can also generate custom RSS feeds based on a multitude of parameters detailed here.

21) Generate custom Picasa RSS feeds for your family pictures. You can also generate feeds from public pictures. All search result pages will generate an RSS feed for that keyword. Here is one I set up for "Dogs."

22) View the real time public Twitter time line. You can also get your Twitter account time line by going to your Twitter profile page. Scroll to the bottom right of your profile page and you will see an RSS link located there.

23) Keep track of your recently played Last.fm tracks. Replace mfruchter with your Last.fm user name. ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/mfruchter/recenttracks.rss

24) Keep track of what you and your friends are bookmarking. If you wanted to find out what Louis Gray has bookmarked recently, you could go to his FriendFeed or Delicious url. Better yet you could check your Google Reader. To find yours or a specific Delicious user's RSS feed, simply goto their Delicious profile page and scroll to the bottom right of the page where you will see an RSS icon. You can also generate custom RSS for specific keywords/tags. All tag search result pages will have a corresponding RSS feed option. Here is one I set up to track of all recent public bookmarks tagged "twitter."

25) Watch the most viewed YouTube videos of the day. You can also customize this to your liking based on this criteria.

26) Keep track of new products on Amazon.com. Never miss when new items become available. You can generate an RSS feed for just about any product category Amazon has to offer.

27) Try an RSS feed matching service to find new feeds based on your interests. One that comes to mind is Toluu. Toluu allows you to upload your existing OPML file to their service, they in-turn will match you to new feeds and members who share similar preferences in feeds.

28) View all of your publicly shared RSS items on one web page. This is a great built in feature of Google Reader. Any item you star or share is automatically saved on a public html page that Google generates for you. Here is what my shared page looks like. To see the public page containing your shared items, click the "Shared items" link in your Google Reader. You'll see a list of everything you've chosen to share, along with a link to the page where they are displayed.

29) Use Google Reader as a new tool for microblogging. With the ability to “share” or “share with note" option in Google Reader, you can leave comments and invite conversation on posts you publicly share. Aggregate Google Shared items into a site like FriendFriend, so others can voice their thoughts as well.

30) Get the best of FriendFeed without ever going to the actual site. FriendFeed generates RSS feeds for almost every user function of the site. You can view your mainfeed as well as your, comments and like feeds in Google Reader. Have you created any topical lists? You can get RSS feeds for your lists too. I have found this function particularly useful as I can now track my "social media whales" list in RSS. Often I spend more time in Google Reader then I do on FriendFeed. RSS gives me a backup and safety net, so nothing goes under the radar.

Read more by Mike Fruchter at MichaelFruchter.com.

Web Service Logos from AOL to Zuula Get Spooky for Halloween

Google is the best-known Web company that gives its logo a frequent revamp for holidays and other occasions, Halloween being no exception. But the search engine giant is far from alone in their creativity. Last year, I highlighted YouTube, Technorati, Yahoo! and FriendFeed as companies who went the extra mile to add pumpkins and other Halloween gear to their logo, and in 2008, many are back at the drawing board.


This Year's Entrants to the Halloween Logo Ball
As of midnight Pacific time on Halloween, Google has once again carved out a jack-o-lantern, replacing its two O's with the pumpkin and a seed scoop. The L in google? A candle dripping with wax.

In an attempt to seem similarly hip, AOL turned their O into a pumpkin and their logo is infested with bats. Yahoo! is displaying a Flash-based Halloween scene with pumpkins aplenty. Ask.com, an also-ran in the search rankings, tries to win out by making their entire page Halloween friendly, showing trick-or-treaters on a Fall day.

FriendFeed is back at it, with more attention to detail, as a youth in ghost costume springs up as the "n", arms aloft as one shoelace dangles untied. The two "e"s are jack-o-lantern ies, with toothpicks keeping the letter intact. Meanwhile, their real-time search engine has its unfair share of cobwebs.

Zuula brings up the rear of the alphabet, but doesn't lag in design with its own silhouetted pumpkin and Halloween scene.

Unlike last year, YouTube and Technorati are not yet in the Halloween spirit, nor are other brands, including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, or the long-forgotten portals of Excite and Lycos, which deserve their own cobwebs, if you ask me. Also not participating - Digg, Reddit and SocialMedian.

Added via the comments:


PopURLs: http://popurls.com/

Find any good Halloween logos this year? Let me know in the comments. And have a Happy Halloween!

Yahoo! Co-Founders Quietly Come Out Against Prop 8

Last week, Apple and Google made headlines for announcing their opposition to California's Proposition 8, which aims to restrict marriage to couples of different genders. At the time, following Apple's announcement, some, including Valleywag, asked why Yahoo!, still a thought leader in the Valley despite their many troubles, was remaining quiet on the issue. The company's Pride page features a "Vote No on Prop 8" link, but the company's leadership hasn't made the same headlines as Apple and Google have with their visible opposition.


Yang and Filo Both Donated $15k Against Prop 8
Without drawing attention, Yahoo! co-founders Jerry Yang and David Filo have both donated $15,000 apiece, opposing proposition 8, according to public contribution records. (See: San Francisco Chronicle) In fact, the $15,000 donations make each of them the highest level donations in the city of Sunnyvale, almost double the third highest entry, which provides $8,000 in favor of the initiative passing.


The Pair's Contributions Lead Sunnyvale Donors
The controversial initiative is seeing money flow into the campaign for both sides, and recent polls have the initiative running with an even chance of passing, despite Silicon Valley's vocal opposition.

While Yang and Filo have made personal contributions against Prop 8, Yahoo!, aside from their Pride page, has made no official statement. My previous discussion on Prop 8 can be found here. And while I have heard some small buzz in the "Yes on 8" circles that they will boycott companies that oppose the initiative, at the rate it's going, they might not be able to search the Web or even use an iPod, so maybe they should at least rethink that strategy...

The full database of donations for and against Proposition 8 can be found at the San Francisco Chronicle's special page: http://www.sfgate.com/webdb/prop8/

Twitter - the Portal of Web 2.0?

By Jesse Stay of Stay N' Alive (Twitter/FriendFeed)

A lot of discussion is going on around the blogosphere right now about whether Twitter may not be around much longer, because they have not yet implemented a business plan and have no immediate plan for enabling access to the "firehose" of data. It's a valid concern - yet at the same time, it's beginning to go "mainstream", with the adoption of sites like CNN.com and by pop figures like Britney Spears, people and businesses are really beginning to rely on this service. Will it have been in vain?

I asked on Twitter, "How many of you use Twitter as your sole update source? (e.g. you don't update Facebook with it, you're not on FriendFeed)". Surprisingly, of the responses I received, not one of them used Twitter as their sole update service. Here are the responses I received:

@bethevans: Not me. On FriendFeed.

@Bwoolley: Primarily Twitter, some Friendfeed

@shylie: I only update through twitter. I have it linked to Facebook and I have Pownce, FriendFeed, etc. accts but I rarely use them.

@jojeda: I use all, but most with effort and reluctance; only Twitter feels easy and fun.

@kenburbary: On FB, on FF, but use Twitter to update them for me. Twitter is the dashboard

@AgentJon: I use twitter to update my facebook, that is all...also when i send a twitpic i also send to facebook as well...

@erikmagraken: I use Twitter along with LinkedIn

@tatango: I have facebook also

@mclaughj: I'm on FriendFeed but the only thing I update is Twitter, not sure how that fits in...

As you can see, every single person responding was using Twitter as a gateway into some other service that they use. Some were using it to update their Facebook. Others FriendFeed. Others use Twitter, but at the same time they use a service such as LinkedIn, which has its own status feed. Not a single person was using Twitter as their sole source for networking and updating friends. No one seems to be completely reliant on Twitter, but they all seem to think they are.

Back in the late 1990's, when I was working tech support for my Uncle's Freeservers.com, at the time a fledgling startup in the back room of an old skating rink trying to compete with the likes of Geocities, it seemed that the topic of portals would come up regularly. Back in the day, before the "first bust", everyone predicted the future would be full of "portals", where people would come to one or two sites to get all the information they needed. Everyone wanted to be that site, and advertising was going to power it all. Unfortunately many of those portals did not succeed, and we saw sites like AOL.com and Netscape.com quickly fail as users wanted content from the source, through means such as search and RSS.

What this study on Twitter has made evident to me is that, whether that vision of portals ever really came true or not, Twitter itself has become one of those portals in regards to community. While each individual has their own community on Twitter, it would appear, were there a way to organize that community into groups, each individual on Twitter's network is nothing but a set of fragmented communities from other sites. Twitter has built a portal around the combined communities. No other community considered "mainstream" out there is so fragmented such as this.

It's an interesting concept, but as technology evolves around this concept will better ways of managing those communities come about? I'm worried that Twitter is in a fragile state that, while it disguises the whole community as its own, seems to really have no unified community in reality that can truly say they only care about Twitter. Having each user on Twitter belong to a subset of multiple other communities seems like a fragile state to be in.

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Read more by Jesse Stay at Stay N' Alive.

Hackr WatrCoolr: Tech News Aggregation With No Mouse Required

A couple weeks ago, in an article about Microspaces, I said that Web entrepreneurs are finding new ways for you to navigate their sites, and many are now incorporating keyboard input, to jump to new comments or pages. Though I mentioned it in a quick tweet on September 25th, I thought it was worth highlighting the Hacker WatrCoolr, a site that displays headlines from many popular tech news sites, and lets you quickly flick through them using only your keyboard - no mouse required.


A Headline from ReadBurner on WatrCoolr Tonight
WatrCoolr shows the latest headlines from Digg, Hacker News, Del.icio.us, Techmeme, Reddit, RSSmeme, Slashdot, Yahoo! News and ReadBurner. Each headline shows its recency, and the destination URL (e.g. nytimes.com or makeuseof.com).


Scoble's Post Hits Techmeme and Makes it to WatrCoolr
But unlike many other news aggregation sites, the Hacker WatrCoolr doesn't shoe-horn them into one busy page, like AllTop. Instead, it displays one headline at a time. To scroll through older items from the same source, you just need to hit the down arrow key. To see a new source, hit the right or left arrow. And to read the article, you just have to press the "r" key, or press "n" to have it open in a new window or tab.

While Hackr WatrCoolr is not looking to replace your RSS reader, some of the functionality is very similar to that of applications like Google Reader, and it's a very easy way to get all the top stories from each of these sites in one place. It may be a little experiment, but it hints at one way the Web could go to make the process of our news gathering even that much more easy. I hope to find more Web developers who are thinking different about how we navigate today's often-formulaic and static Web sites.

DISCLOSURE: I am an advisor to ReadBurner, and hold a small equity position.

Top Resources to Help Stay Informed In a Crazy World

By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)

I completely suck at numbers. I could give a crap about the stock market. I tune out politics since I'm sick and tired of the same old rhetoric. And if you're like me, you most likely skip over all the panicked headlines about how the $700 billion bailout got kicked from Congress.

I mean really - why would all this junk be relevant to regular people like us? The headlines are too damn depressing and most importantly - we don't have power, money or stature for any of this to really matter anyway - right? Wrong.

Listen to me, you guys: Now is not the time to tune things out.

Why is this important for people like us? Because well... I kinda sorta wanna know if I should close all my bank accounts and hide the cash under my mattress - don't you? It's also ... uhhh... election year, too. And as much as I want to turn the other way, this time, I can't. All the signs are pointing to: our country is in deep s--t.

I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the rest of America doesn't seem like they know what's going on either. Just ask someone to explain the stipulations of the 110-page bailout and how/what we (Americans) need to do to protect ourselves moving forward. Or the presidential candidates' action plans to rectify this economical disaster. I guarantee not everyone can - regardless of who they are or what their pedigrees are.

So you see, now is the time - moreso than ever, that we the regular people, need to come together. And if enough of us get together, our voices WILL matter. How do we do that? It's all about information.

Yes, I know reading the headlines is depressing, but educating ourselves so we're aware of the current happenings is a must; so we can get involved to make differences. How do we get involved? Well that's up to you - the reader to decide.

But what I CAN do for you, is provide resources to keep and stay informed. Hubs, if you will, so you don't have to dig through and search to stay involved. Please remember, to take account all sides, know your options, and if and when action is called - don't hesitate and go for it. Whether it be by voting, informing people around you, or just informing yourself, knowing and keeping up with the current situation means you have power to decide what to do with the knowledge.

So without further ado, I present to you:
"Mona's Top 5 Resources to Stay "Smart" - the Lazy Way"

1. NPR's Planet Money:
   NPR tags all articles pertaining to the financial crisis. It's just one click, and it pulls up all recent articles. The layout is easy on the eyes and there's no hunting or pecking through a mountain of pages to stay up to date.
   
   
2. Google News: Top Stories:
   I prefer Google News over Yahoo News because it's
   • Customizable
   • I can personalize it
   • Easy on the eyes
   All the top headline news from various sources are aggregated there. Pretty neat.
   
   
3. Harvard Business Online's Guide to the Downturn:
   A bunch of articles from really super smart people that are free. Plus the layout is nice, easy on the eyes, and surprisingly, the information is relevant to normal people, too. Don't be fooled, go check it out. Even if you think it's irrelevant, you can namedrop like I do. "OH YEAH? Bet you don't know what HARVARD professors are saying!" - or something close to that. ha!
   
   
4. Google Power Readers:
   Explore news sites read by McCain, Obama and political journalists, and see articles the campaigns and political pundits are sharing with Google Reader. What's better than knowing what they're reading and sharing!
   
   
5. Aggregation Sites like FriendFeed
   Since signing up for FriendFeed, I've been exposed to a lot of new blogs, different views, from so many different sources. The best part is, you can see what others are sharing, and choose if you want to read it or not. If you see the same headline shared by numerous people, it's a sign telling you: "READ IT, STAT!"

That about wraps it up. I hope this can help you, as much as it's helped me.

And remember, this is an election year. Our economical and country's future is dependent on us - We the people.

Update: Head on over to Scripting News. Dave Winer has a great write-up: "The US Economy After Katrina".

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits.

Google at 10 - a Decade of Innovation - But Challenges Ahead

By Charlie Anzman of SEO and Tech Daily (FriendFeed/Twitter)

Yesterday, Google posted a fascinating timeline of the past ten years.

For those of us that have been around since the days when Yahoo! dominated search (and Google wasn't 'here' yet), the timeline brings back a lot of memories, and also causes some pondering about the future.

Google's juice has always been their corporate culture. I've written about it before. A few weeks ago, Eric Schmidt, Google's CEO, commented that they try not to buy a lot of companies because it's easier to innovate from within, rather than to try and change the way a company does things. (Paraphrased).

Others are complaining about Google's stock price. A careful look at insider trading over two years showed many (current) employees cashing out in the 300's per share. Was 700+ in 2008 ever really in the cards? Did Wall Street expect a little too much?

Now we see Google literally firing on all cylinders. A new Web browser (Chrome), a significant upgrade to Picasa (and Picasaweb), and lots of other upgrades, APIs, additions and announcements made over the past two months.

There's little disputing the fact that Google (and the Internet) have literally created and/or eliminated exisiting business models (or significantly changed them). Not just Internet models but brick and mortar businesses as well. They've also created opportunity for those who continued to read, learn and took advantage of it.

Now, people don't Yahoo-it, or MSN-it (even though they do), the vernacular is Google-it ... and that alone is HUGE.

Interestingly, for you advertising buffs, Google has no tag line. There is no 'what we are' or 'what we do'. Obviously, someone recognized very early on, that the Internet (and the world) was changing so fast, it was difficult to predict exactly where Google's strengths would emerge. That continues to be the case.

I find I now have the same reaction to Google's success that I did to Microsoft's many years ago. Both serve as an example of how just a few people can create something BIG in just a few short years and set an example for those thinking about doing just that.

Like Microsoft, and many others, Google is a role model of sorts for entrepreneurs everywhere.

As they grow and mature, it will be difficult for Google to maintain their corporate culture, but not impossible. The perks of working at the Googleplex make complete and total sense. Help people forget about their mundane day-to-day worries so they can think, be creative, and work.

So …. Happy Birthday Google! One can only imagine (or better yet vision) what the next ten years will bring.

Read more by Charlie Anzman at SEO and Tech Daily.

Google Says Apple Owns the Letter "i", and Craigslist the "s"

Search engines work best when they have specific phrases to search for, or better yet, when they have parameters for when the Web page was posted. But if you get more abstract, going to single words or even letters, they typically don't know where to start in terms of finding what you want. Taking a look at Google's first answers for the letters of the Roman alphabet, it's interesting to see what the search index is guessing as the best answers. Google gives its own Gmail the letter "g", cedes Apple the letter "i", and Craigslist the "s", while kindly passing on the "Y" to Yahoo!, effectively dividing the alphabet as cleanly as the many nations who have laid claim to a slice of Antarctica.

For those not given to tech companies, the results weigh heavily with Wikipedia, as might be expected, with explanations of the letters, and periodic table elements. Also interesting, there are a pair of movies from IMDB that take the #1 spot, a pair of obscure scientific journals from the American Physical Society, and what looks like some great SEO by the Massachusetts Boston Transit Authority and Cirque du Soleil. The full list is below. All results were done with my own Google account signed out, so my Web history would not influence the rankings.

As of September 21, 2008:

a = Links in HTML documents from www.w3.org.
b = Physical Review B from aps.org.
c = C (programming language from wikipedia.org.
d = Physical Review D from aps.org.
e = E! Entertainment Online
f = Ford Motor Company Stock from Yahoo! Finance.
g = Gmail from Google.
h = Hydrogen from wikipedia.org.
i = Apple: iPod + iTunes from apple.com.
j = The Letter J from wikipedia.org.
k = The Letter K from wikipedia.org.
l = The LaTeX project from latex-project.org.
m = M (1931) from imdb.com.
n = Nitrogen from wikipedia.org.
o = Cirque du Soleil - O - Las Vegas from cirquedusoleil.com.
p = Phosphorus from wikipedia.org.
q = The Letter Q from wikipedia.org.
r = The R Project for Statistical Computing from r-project.org.
s = Craigslist.com.
t = Massachussetts Boston Transit Authority from mbta.com.
u = The Letter U from wikipedia.org.
v = V Magazine from vmagazine.com.
w = W. (2008) from imdb.com.
x = X.Org Wiki from x.org.
y = Yahoo.com.
z = The Letter Z from wikipedia.org.

In addition to these results, Google offers up stock quotes for Ford (F) and Qwest (Q) atop the other search results, and provides scientific details like the speed of lightfor "c", "e" as a mathematical constant and Planck's constant for "h".

While Google's search engine is ubiquitous, by some measure around 90% of all searching, it's clearly still got an extreme bent toward academia and science. Apple's capturing the letter "i" is a great feat of marketing, as is Yahoo!'s "y", but should Craigslist get the "s" and Gmail the "g"? Those are more curious.

Where You Get Your Tech News Shapes Your Tech Views

By Rob Diana of Regular Geek (Twitter/FriendFeed)

FriendFeed seems to be the source of most of my interesting conversations these days. Sometimes the benefit of FriendFeed is not even the conversation itself, but finding a link to a blog post that I normally would not read. This happened this week when Jesse Stay shared a post to a story on newspapergrl.com. I read a lot of what Jesse shares, but this site is one I had never read. I found the post interesting because it was about tech news and how slow things are:

I just got off the phone with my friend Chris and we talked about how we hardly blog anymore. Also about how nothing seems that exciting in tech lately. It's mostly about Google and the iPhone over and over. Are we just cynical or have things quieted down considerably?

I had no idea that this is what people thought. This was not written during the iPhone hype, this was written a few days ago. So, I decided to look and see what news was posted on Thursday, July 31st.

First, let us look at what TechCrunch had to offer.


Click to Enlarge Image
Out of 16 stories in our selection, 4 were tech financial news, 3 streaming video stories and the remainder (9) were about various sites and their features. For a technology news site, that seems very reasonable.

ReadWriteWeb tends to have more opinion and review posts than TechCrunch and their stories reflect that.


Click to Enlarge Image

You can not tell from all of the headlines, but of the 16 posts, 6 were opinions and reviews. 4 of the posts were about video, image or mobile devices. The remainder were about various sites and their features. Again this is a reasonable breadth of information.

The last "heavy" technical news site I want to look at is Mashable. They tend to be not as news-heavy as TechCrunch, and have more of a social application focus. So, what did they post?


Click to Enlarge Image
Out of Mashable's 16 posts, 5 were about video, audio or images and 10 were opinions or reviews of various sites. Lastly, there was 1 self-promotion post. Given the specific content focus, this is also reasonable. So, we have looked at the 3 popular tech sites that many early adopters read. In order to contrast what a mainstream user might read, I took a look at what stories Yahoo Tech News listed for the day.


Click to Enlarge Image
For Yahoo, we again sampled 16 stories. Of these stories, 5 were financially related, 2 were about cell phones, specifically controlling kids use and cancer risks. 3 of the stories were about server products (VMware, Microsoft "Midori", and SharePoint). 3 more stories were about video games, 2 of which were about WordScraper/Scrabulous. The last 3 stories were the Chinese internet censorship, a Blu-ray player for Netflix, and 6 Ways to Save on Groceries. A simple breakdown does not really show the difference, except for the groceries story. The 3 stories on server products were mostly business related. VMWare giving something away, another product trying to replace SharePoint, and what "Midori" could do for Microsoft.

Most of the stories on Yahoo contain little or no technical detail. You do not see anything about social networks or other social applications. There was no announcement for the SocialMedian release or the redesign of Delicious. So, why is this important? It is important because most people are not reading about the same things that an early adopter is reading. Obviously, there will always be some overlap, but the mainstream users care about very different things. Given the various discussions about passionate users, early adopters and mainstream users, maybe we need to take a step back and think about how we bridge that gap. If you do not agree, then find your most non-technical friend and explain why they need to use Twitter and FriendFeed. Do not be surprised if they ask whether they could find more than 6 ways to save on their groceries.

Seeing The Web's Racist Underbelly Is Saddening and Shocking

This afternoon, I caught a video broadcast with Wayne Sutton and Corvida Raven of SheGeeks.net, where Corvida had the opportunity to share her story of asking Verizon to drop their relationship with Loren Feldman of 1938 Media, in light of his controversial video parodying African American bloggers. While both carried on a strong conversation around the issues of race, bigotry and getting ahead through hard work, their efforts were dwarfed by some of the most hateful, shameful, racist speech I've been exposed to in a very long time.

It's common knowledge that anonymous commenters often fall to the lowest common denominator. The wider the audience, the less respectable the discussion, with YouTube being a perfect example.

Most of the time, the places I engage in social media (and real life) are civil. But as Corvida and Wayne talked about her family's efforts with Verizon, and how black tech bloggers are often stereotyped, with Feldman's video as an example, the Yahoo! Live chat screen filled with filth, with racist words, references to Kentucky Fried Chicken and watermelon, comments on Obama, and discussion of penis sizes.

Essentially, you name the negative stereotypes and hatred that could be spewed against the African American bloggers, and they were there.

I don't want to spread the filth that was said during the chat, but it's worth exposing these purveyors of hatred, to illustrate the nonsense. If only there were a way to break through their anonymity...

There's no question the work was done by a few anonymous malcontents, but it was eye opening to unfortunately be reminded those people are out there, and are willing to share their nonsense in an attempt to intimidate both Wayne and Corvida, in hopes of persuading them to stop. But it didn't work. As Wayne said the issue of Loren Feldman was "a wake-up call for African Americans", today's nonsense was an unfortunate wake-up call for me.

I'm glad both Wayne and Corvida maintained their professional integrity in the face of ridiculous nonsense that could have brought weaker people to tears, but there was absolutely no reason they should have had to put up with that horrible behavior, which, as it was undoubtedly intended to do, made me quite angry.

Forty years after the assassination of Martin Luther King, and with all the advancements we think we've made in Civil Rights, we still have to see this horrible, ridiculous, ignorant junk. I was appalled at what Corvida and Wayne had to suffer through, and I wish I never had to see it again. These people do exist, but they don't deserve a platform, and in this case, there should have been ways to either increase filters, block by IP address or reveal the real names of the trolls.

I am very sorry Corvida and Wayne had to suffer through that in what was otherwise a very engaging disucssion, and I hope this filth doesn't slow any person of any background down for a second.

Mint's Latest Additions Make It My One Stop Financial Hub

For years, I've manually edited a custom portfolio in Yahoo! Finance in an attempt to track all my financial details in a single place. That meant copying and pasting trade details from eTrade and checking in with Fidelity every two weeks to get an update from my 401k. But even then, it wouldn't have bank data from Wells Fargo, or credit card debts, so I haven't had a perfect picture on a single page - until now. With the addition of investment tracking capabilities at the end of April, Mint has now morphed from a simple curiosity to becoming my long sought after single point for financial details.

Mint came to my attention last year, like it did for many people, when it won the best presenting company award at the inaugural TechCrunch40 event.

While some have said storing financial login data on a 3rd party site makes them nervous, I've always erred on the side of trusting the Web, and I registered right away. But site slowness, and Mint's initially not offering support for my investment accounts at eTrade and Fidelity meant it wasn't all that useful for me. I wasn't interested in following their little tips on how to save a few bucks here and there by switching my bank or credit cards, so I largely left my account dormant.

But now, Mint shows me everything in one place. After synchronizing my Checking and Savings accounts, my investments and my credit cards, I now get a perfect picture of available funds. And Mint, having more than 200 days history of my activity since I first signed up, also has some educated guesses on where I spend my money most frequently, trends on whether I'm spending more than others in my geographic area, and even records of which vendors.

Now, according to Mint, I can see I've spent $155 on iTunes since October 1st of last year, in 16 different purchases, I've spent $798 at Safeway in 9 tracked purchases, and $332 at Chevron in the same number of visits. Of course, with more than 1/3 of my spending being marked as "No Category", I have some work to do to get the data even better, and there are some amusing bugs, like the one showing I've spent $6,891 at "Louis Shoe Shop", in four transactions. My guess is that's supposed to be where I've made credit card payments, and I have no idea why it's called "Louis Shoe Shop". Are they confusing me with Imelda Marcos?


One month's financial tracking within Mint.
Regardless of those rare oddities, the simple fact that Mint shows me all my activity in one place means that I don't have to go to each of the individual financial sites to get my data. On occasion in the past, I've gotten hit with late fees on my credit card just because I had forgotten to log in before the bills were due. Now, if I can just log in to Mint instead, I can not only see when money comes in, but when money needs to go out. And I'm done messing around with Yahoo! Finance, manually entering owned shares data and estimated per share costs. Now, Mint does all the hard work for me. It's the way Web finance tracking was supposed to be.