Admittedly, I’m not a Twitterer however during last weeks Pubcon in Las Vegas, virtually every Social Media session I attended mentioned the micro-blogging service which allows users to send instant updates to a network of friends. Their passion for Twitter was infectious. As such I decided to take a closer look.

This week I’ll review Twitter, by the numbers. Note to Twitterers, it’s not limited to 140 characters!

The Beginning:

So much fuss lately about our carbon footprints, but what about the digital footprints we leave. Think about this for a second … a great deal of what we do now appears online? I started thinking deeper about the implications of digital footprints earlier when I posted a piece from DailyBlogTips … titled “Put Honesty and Integrity Above Everything Else to Sphinn.

Suivant de près la sortie de l’article intitulé « Différencier ( Votre Avatar) ou Mourir » par Michael ( alias planetc1) sur le site Sphinn, et suivant aussi l’expérience unique vécue par une des dames ici à nos bureaux, On m’a chargé de créer une expérience avec un avatar et de le tester ensuite. Essentiellement, elle, ( ce membre féminin de notre équipe) a changé son avatar à StumbleUpon, et ce faisant, le nombre de ses amies/amis a augmenté de manière très rapide avec, à toutes fins, peu d’effort.

Maintenant, je suis sûr que beaucoup d’entre vous avez maintes théories sur le sujet, mais, celui-ci a incité plusieurs de nous ici `a SEP à bavarder et théoriser. Après de multiples débats, nous avons émis l’hypothèse suivante :

L’Hypothèse:

Un avatar de “jolie femme” résulterait en l’addition de plus d’amis, si l’on y met le même effort, qu’un avatar représentant une femme absolument splendide, parce qu’il apparaît plus probable que cette femme serait conforme à son image dans la réalité et l’avatar non pas créé pour attirer plus d’amis.

Nous avons aussi émis l’hypothèse que les deux avatars féminins engendreraient l’addition de plus d’amies/amis qu’un avatar représentant un gars.

Alors… nous avons pensé créer une expérience pour vérifier notre théorie.

L’image est une courtoisie de la 20^th Century Fox provenant du film « Deux filles et un gars »

L’Expérience:

1. Créer 3 profils séparés sur StumbleUpon avec 3 différents avatars, un pour chaque personnage :

Ah, weekend! Time to put up the Christmas tree, play with the kids or just hang back.

Thumbnailing Copyrighted Images = Fair Use

In the case of Perfect 10 Inc. vs. Google, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that showing thumbnails or copyrighted images can be fair use.

The justices ruled that a larger public interest in searching for information — or, in this case, images of partially clad women — amounted to a "transformative use" that trumped Perfect 10’s copyright claims.  […]

Today’s blog posting is of the best sort. Short, sweet and to the point.

Introducing the Search Engine People quote request form which can be found here.

It too is short, sweet and to the point.

Of course, some people will want to borrow from it’s simplicity and we of course say, feel free… our Internet world is about sharing.

We do however, caution that our credentials should remain our own so please don’t steal the Microsoft AdExcellence button, which we worked so hard to be the first company in Canada to get. And please don’t steal the Google Adwords Qualified Company button at which we laboured so diligently to be the first company in Canada (to the best of our knowledge) to get.

Quick recap;

Google created a problem for itself when it chose links to a web page as one of the corner stones for ranking web pages.

As the web of links form link patterns, manipulating links isn’t that easy. Unless you can manipulate the link pattern itself…

Manipulating Link Patterns

Anyone who has ever attempted 3-way linking is familiar with the idea of manipulating link patterns. Truth is, with a couple of sites in your farm, the setup remains transparent.

But using 50,000 sites you could do major damage to Google’s link based algorithm and convince it of your relevance for any query you desire.

Credit: Skizoidman

Google Reader Feed Recommendations

Google Reader is my weapon of choice for keeping up with the 1000 + feed stories I subscribe to everyday. As an RSS Feed Reader, Google Reader performs quite admirably in keeping up and sorting hundreds of feeds, and offers great features for sorting through feeds. While I simply thought of Google Reader as a productivity tool in the past, the Reader team has recently launched a nifty recommendations feature in the main dashboard.

RSS Feed Top Recommendations

Here’s the word from the mouth of Google: