(Version francaise) MonAvis.ca is a 2 months young French site by Quebecers for Quebecers. Its purpose is simple: to share your recommendations and opinions on shops, bars, hotels, etc. etc.

On the submission form the province of Quebec is hard-coded but a little note suggests that it is “for now”. Eyes on the future?

Entry is easy. You simply start to give your advice. It is only at the end of a four step process that MonAvis will prompt you to either sign in or sign up.

Our resident PPC dude, Sasha was wondering hither and yon over Google today and came up with this little nugget on a search for “business cards Toronto”.

This is everything that appears above the fold and if you look very, very carefully, very, very carefully and you’ll see it waaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyy at the bottom.

Why it couldn’t be, could it? An organic listing. A single organic listing.

There’s been a lot of chat regarding whether this is a good Google or a bad Google thing.

The buzz around the productivity sphere is the recent Associated Press poll which shows 1 in 5 bringing their laptop along on vacation.

Besides using that laptop to offload digital photos from the camera or watch a DVD or two, we do quite a bit of communicating on that vacation laptop.

Put on your site

1 in 5 of those who bring their laptop stay connected to work somehow. They check email, check work messages, work. And a whole bunch of course check our personal messages.

Kartoo is a visual meta search engine. The interesting thing about is the visual component that not only shows the circle of influence, but also shows the nature of that influence.

A search of our SEO lyrics contest, (Where by the winning, the winning lyrics could net a cool $1,000) delineates the influencers in the space.

Very cool.

And very informative if you take a moment to understand it’s relational value.

Have a good one.

~The (SEP) Guy

I’ve always had a soft spot for Ask.

I like the simplicity of their results and in particular the visual nature of their results.

The new design is again, terribly simple and good.

But Ask has a long way to go.

The luxury of being an also-ran is the propensity to try that much harder, and to take more risks.

Ask did that a couple of years ago when they fired Jeeves and introduced their first major makeover. They’ve done it again, reinventing the search page results. At first glance it appears that they may have left a lot of money on the table by giving up the paid revenue channel that typically runs down the far right side of the page.

It’s coming, Search Engine Strategies - Toronto - 2007.

For the 2nd year in a row, Search Engine People is sponsoring the conference. Not only because we’re good corporate citizens. Not only because a couple of us will be speaking.

But because it’s an opportunity to become more entrenched in what we do every day. And because it’s an opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with some of the familiar faces in our business. And because it’s an opportunity to meet some of the new faces in the business.