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Recently, as I’ve hit 40 and somehow my body has just realized this , I’ve been out of the running a little bit as my body seems to be falling slightly apart. As a mental case good SEO everything relates to SEO for me. And thus while giving my body the rest it needed I was thinking “this is why you need some kind of perpetuum mobile of SEO”. I might have mumbled it instead of thinking it as I distinctly remember a person of the medical profession going “come again?” but face it, that’s besides the point.
This week I watched "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" and couldn’t help but realize how far I’ve come. No, not necessarily career-wise but …well… in pure years.
Glancing at my handsome avatar you might easily be deceived and even attempt to argue; "But no way, Ruud, you look like a young grasshopper — and anyway, age is all in the mind, the mind man!"
OK… Well then let me tell you this.
You know you’re old(er) when you know "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" is a sequel, the fourth (count ‘m: four) movie.
Last week I wrote about how the SEO industry is growing up. Tremendous growth and low barriers to entry are / will attract many new entrants to the market.
But with formal SEO training not yet available on mass (i.e. taught in colleges), this growth is going to leave us with a talent shortage.
Essentially, large companies who want to get into this business are going to be forced to buy their way in.
In order to prepare your shop to possibly benefit from this increased M&A activity, it is helpful to have a sense of what factors will make you attractive to a perspective purchaser.

Image - CasualChatters.com
Retail therapy helps us to feel so much better when things don’t go our way, and it would seem that the same is true for large corporations with lots and lots and lots of big bucks!

Image Courtesy - lemetrosexuel.com
Since Microsoft’s offer to purchase Yahoo! didn’t seem to turn out, they have found themselves with all this money for acquisition available and a designer outfit that appears to be unavailable at this time. Like any savvy fashionista, they’ve decided it was time to head to the mall for some serious retail therapy to make themselves feel better about not getting what they’ve been holding all that lovely money for. LO AND BEHOLD! Like spying the first Abercrombie & Fitch store L.A. (and a demographic to match), Microsoft has decided to head on over to� facebook and see what fits.

Image Courtesy - ab initio ad infinitum
So it would seem that everyone is in a race to become as transparent as possible.� It has become (clearly) evident that there is more revenue potential out there by opening up everything and making it available than there is by keeping it all horded and secret and hidden in the dark.
Cell phone technology is a brilliant example of transparency becoming extremely key.� It’s helping mobile carriers and equipment providers to quickly and easily design, develop, and deploy in tandem.� It’s also giving software development platforms such as Google and Microsoft the opportunity to build out their handset web technologies.
At the brink of an economic recession which will forever change the way we live, how secure is your job?
OK, you know this one:

It’s a familiar graph.
But for most of us that extreme upward trend has never applied to these:
Corn

Soy

Wheat

The price of food is rising at an incredible rate.

The managing director of the Asian Development Bank puts it like this;
"We just have to accept the era of cheap food is over."
So I don’t know if you recall in the past when I mentioned that I believed Live to be the branding where Microsoft planned on competing with Google. (See Virtual Reality - Microsoft Office Live). Well, we should look at some of the things that they are doing from the User perspective.
Nice and clean, free of advertising, and links to other Microsoft places of possible usefulness. It’s very familiar, don’t you think? Ever seen anything like it before from any other extremely successful search engines?
Image courtesy of rapidsharecinema.blogspot.com
According to the ComScore figures, growth in paid-search clicks happens to be slowing down. Is it because of the economy? Is it because of the “R” word that is being used in the United States? Don’t know, but there was still growth in Google. Certainly it may not have been huge growth like the numbers we are used to being reported, but still almost 3% growth year over year is substantial compared to the losses evidenced by the competitors Yahoo and MSN. Yahoo paid clicks went down by about 3% year over year and MSN went even further in the wrong direction by a note-worthy 12%. It all really does make that 3% growth in Google clicks stand out that much more, and lends that much more credibility to their reputation.
Andrew Goodman, of Traffick.com and Page Zero Media, and I are if not friends, well, at least peers with a mutual and healthy respect for each other both knowing exactly how long the other has been at this Search (whether paid or otherwise) stuff in this country. Over the years we’ve lunched, coffee’d and conferenced together.
And always, one theme has come up. When and why did Canada miss the boat when it comes to search and the Internet?
Coincidentally, Andrews post of today “When Registering Domains, Think Big”, he states:
Personally, I have a real problem with the .ca.
With the flurry of news stories running rampant over the past 24-48 hours, poor Scarlett Yahoo must be exhausted. Who indeed to take to the cotillion? There’s that awful Rhett MSN or that nice Ashley Wilkes Google.
Frankly, I’m reminded of the opening scene with Scarlett on the veranda cloying with prospective suitors and the saga is all a little exhausting. Makes me want for a nice Mint Julip and a nap until this whole silly thing blows over
Afterall, tomorrow is just another trading day.