It was my intention to blog on something else today until I chanced upon this article from SearchEngineWatch.com: 48 Practical Questions to Qualify Prospective Search Marketing Vendors by Marty Weintraub.

The 48 questions in question are both enlightening and informative.

And frankly, they should be information volunteered, not solicited. Run the questions around your agency/office and everyone from the receptionist to the CEO should be able to answer any one of them.

Short and sweet.

Start talking about file sizes, page load time, ease of navigation and in the shortest time possible you’ve just qualified yourself as a goodie-two-shoes geek with admirable yet naive views on making money on the web.

And that, my friend, is your fault.

Instead of using Urkel speak  and freaking geeking everybody out, use words that make sense in business.

"Is the site consumer friendly? Is the site ready to do transactions at any time, on any platform? How easy is it for a prospect to become a customer? How fast can a customer pay?"

Credit: Big Golf

Change…

New adventures are always hard to begin when you’re having so much fun to begin with. My soujourn at Search Engine People has been exactly that - a fun, exciting and enriching experience that I will always cherish. That said, I’m moving on to the next big adventure in my life, where I’m sure there will loads more to learn and share alike.

I’ll be working at a mid-sized foreign exchange trading firm as their lead internet marketing strategist, with a great deal of seo and social media thrown in for good measure. Despite being fairly young, I’m ready for the challenge and new experiences that await.

So how many of you are familiar with Enterprise tools such as Google Search Appliance? Google Mini Search Appliance for example, starts at $2,990 for searching up to 50,000 documents with a 300,000 max document capacity. Google Search Appliance starts at $30,000 for searching up to 500,000 documents with a 30 million max document capacity. (By the way, these are tools used for internal development of infrastructure and intranet and to enable maximum efficiencies between the internal world of information and the internet, among other things, for those of you wondering.)

Wow! What a beating Google took on the heels of the comScore data showing Google’s paid search ads were down 12% in January from October, and flat from a year prior.

“Has Google Peaked?”

Google’s shares drop as surfers cease clicking, another wails.

Dear Goth, has there been more fraught chest-thumping, more moaning, since last Celine performed that song at the 69th Annual Academy Awards®?

Google will go on. And oddly enough, if surfers have stopped clicking and are now only treading water like Leonardo’s Jack Dawson just before succumbing in that movie where Celine performed that song then why haven’t Yahoo and MSN been just as negatively affected?

So I was snooping aroiund YouTube to see what information I could find about Windows 7, when I came across this video of Construction Mike managing his day to day with a myriad of various informational and communication devices, all apparently loaded up with Windows 7.

 While I found most of the devices to be soooooo cool and I want them, I have difficulty actually imagining people from most industries, let alone the construction industry, investing in the number of gadgets per employee that Mike had the good fortune to use in his daily routine.

Oh, I love this. The deluge of "news" articles about Google’s re-release of JotSpot as Google Sites has only just begun and already everyone and their mother has an opinion that needs to be shared.

Which is great — I’m not one to lobby for blogging to then slam it. In fact, as soon as I heard about the release (Twitter, anyone?) I wanted to write about it all SEO expert style, you know? How Google Sites will increase the number of sites on the web (duh!). Or how down the line Google could include automated optimization reports for Google Sites the way they’re toying around for AdSense.

Last week I lost a bet to my friend Paul Steven over at North South Media. While I was a fan of their blog, it wasn’t until I ran into Paul on StumbleUpon that I got to know more about him and his company. Among a common passion for SEO, I discovered that we both share more than a passing interest in the worlds “beautiful game” - soccer or Football as it’s known across the pond.

News.com.au reported that for a few days last week Yahoo7 Australia did not return any direct links to bittorrent tracker The Pirate Bay.

It’s an incident like that that rekindles my worries.

You see, when it comes to policing, shifting responsibilities has been found a very effective tool.

When in the 1980’s pirate television flooded Europe’s cable networks, authorities had a difficult time stamping it out. Until someone came with the bright idea to make the cable network responsible. They would be fined for every illegal movie broadcast over through their network. They would be responsible for coming up with means to secure and seal off their network.

Einstein’s definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Look or sound familiar?

For example, having the same dialogue with the same client and expecting different results. Or having the same conversations with a peer or associate and expecting different results.

Words get tossed around in such dialogues and conversations; words like stubborn, non-responsiveness or negativity more often than not with fingers as pointed as the barbed dialogue behind them. At first blush, bad words all but in reality, not so much bad as emotionally charged, which may in fact be good because they intimate an emotional investment in projects, clients or responsibilities. Whether good or bad, they tend to be taken to heart, and taken personally.