Hot off last August’s announcement that R.H. Donnelley (No. 3 Yellow Pages publisher in the US) had begun selling ad placements in Yahoo! Local, comes today’s news that Canada’s Yellow Pages Group will begin reselling Google AdWords advertisements.

Its agreement with Google allows Yellow Pages approximately 425,000 advertisers to appear alongside Google search results. Previously, Google Local or ‘Maps’ would display only names and addresses of Yellow Pages’ businesses next to results from searches on local information.

Yellow Pages Group has been working with Google since 2004, when they struck an agreement granting the Internet giant access to its databases and, quietly I may add, began embedding Google AdWords on its websites earlier this year.

The best thing to come out of Google buying the social site Jaiku is that it has put Twitter on the attention map of many people again. Every second article, report or blog post about the Jaiku acquisition draws a comparison with the service offered by Twitter.

And that’s good. Because Twitter deserves a lot of attention: your attention.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a place where you can post short (140 characters max., a limit directly related to the 140 max. limit of SMS text messages) status updates on what you’re doing, thinking, eating, reading, etc.

It’s been forever since I’ve posted anything and it’s probably going to take me a while to come back up to speed, but in the meantime, I’ll start with the proverbial babysteps.

So, guess which magazine is making it’s long overdue comeback?

While it may be old news from CNET, I for one welcome the return of the Industry Standard.

Gosh, how I remember cutting my baby SEO teeth on the standard.

There was just some ineffable thing that made it completely accessible and crunched down to Internet time, making it the perfect in transit reading.

Establishing a strong Social Media Profile necessarily means establishing networks of (professional) friends/relationships online (aka online professional relationships … OPR) that can be called upon to help you when needed. In some cases, your goal will be to befriend individuals that are influencers in a given sphere; when needed you can count upon them to use their powerful sites and networks to drive traffic and/or business to your site. In yet other cases, your goal maybe to enlist your network to stumble or digg particlar articles. Your effectiveness at each of these efforts is a function of the strength of your OPRs … since many require different levels of trust given the potential risk to the OPR. And yes, risks do exist! Accordingly, the remainder of this post will discuss our SEP interpretation of the stages of online professional relationships, and what OPR efforts can be expected at different stages.

Of all the social media sites out there, StumbleUpon is by far my favorite.

From an SEO standpoint, I’ve used it to generate instant traffic and awareness of client websites and, from a personal standpoint, I’ve used it to discover hundreds more websites than I ever could through traditional search.

This week I’m taking a look StumbleUpon, by the numbers:

• StumbleUpon was created in 2001 by three friends who were still finishing off post-graduate studies in Calgary, Canada.

• Silicon Valley investor Brad O’Neill assisted with a move to San Francisco and the initial round of $1.2 million in fund-raising.

Social Media Chaos

The services included in the screenshot above constitute some of the A-list social media services we use today. Keeping up with so many different iterations of what is essentially the same concept of viral and user generated media is not only difficult, but nearly impossible while juggling the many hats of an internet marketer.

While submitting your stellar and ’social media worthy’ content has become increasingly easier using multi-submission tools such as SocialMarker and OnlyWire, it is significantly difficult to track the results of a social media marketing campaign. Hats off to uber social media plugins such as Social Media for Firefox for summing up the popularity/results of individual articles or posts, but what if you wanted to know your social media saturation in its entireity?

So here you stand, a virtual newby to the world of social media, and it appears that you have the monumental task before you of scaling this towering mountain called developing a professional network online … developing your social media profile. But where do you begin … “my god this mountain is high” you think to yourself. There are so many possible paths up the mountain.

Well, I don’t completely agree. Wysz from Google’s Search Quality team repeats that spam sites linking to you doesn’t hurt. (Hat tip: Barry Schwartz).

“I wouldn’t really worry about spam sites hurting your ranking by linking to you, as we understand that you can’t (for the most part) control who links to your sites.”

Uhuh. Of course. It would be way too easy otherwise to mess up Google’s ranking system big time.

Spam links count for zero. Nothing gets added, nothing gets subtracted. So just as spam links are not supposed to help, they can’t hurt either.

Imagine finally answering the question; is our collective social consciousness a better predictor of the actual outcome of future events than our own personal guesstimates? Well, imagine no more. Enter ZiiTrend - the Social Prediction Community, a site that endeavors to answer that question for us, and provide us with the collective social probabilities of the occurrence of certain events. Hat tip to Profy.com for bringing it to my attention via their blog.

The deeply amazing and impressive aspect of the search function Google added to Google Reader is that it is able to search back across every feed it has ever indexed — all the way back to the very first day Google Reader was launched: October 7, 2005.

That’s no small feat to pull off. Here’s why.

Of the millions of feeds Google indexes an ever increasing number is full feed: the feed contains not a snippet but the complete item. Feeds are often (read: usually) limited to around 10 entries. After that they “roll off” the feed, being replaced with newly posted articles.