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.

Full Disclosure Confession: I don’t get the whole social networking phenomenon. Perhaps it is because I am a gentleman of a certain age. MySpace is mine and I have no real desire to share it with anyone beyond my other half… and my dog. I leave the Twittering to my parrot. I am not Facebooked as I have no overwhelming desire to make contact with my primary school cohorts. I am LinkedIn, but that’s about that.

And I actually don’t get it from a SEO/SEM perspective simply because there is far too much beyond my control which implicitly and necessarily implies I am a control freak. I am a control freak. And I like numbers that have relevance. Who. What. Where. When. Why.

So Microsoft adCenter is the only one of the 3 major paid search platforms that does NOT report on revenue.  Google AdWords will break it down nicely for you with conversion types, being leads, sales, sign-ups, and other, complete with revenue dollars generated from paid search ads in AdWords.  It’s quite a beautiful thing, but for the money it can now cost to run ads on AdWords with the competition these days, its good that there are such details to be accountable to.  It looks pretty much like this:

…and then progress dictated that all things need to be accessible online, so Microsoft (MSFT) created Office Live - a suite of services for small businesses.

Image courtesy www.di.net

Now unlike what the name suggests, this is NOT an online version of Microsoft’s suite of office software such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc, but instead some various services being provided by Microsoft.  Services such as Contact Manager, Document Manager, Workspaces and Project Manager.

Contact Manager allows you to do such things as provide a single view of customers and prospective customers, track contact with customers, check account status and sales opportunities from any location with a Web browser, and send automated “triggered” emails specific to various events such as new sales leads, etc.

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.)

Affiliate Marketing today is so much more than what it used to be, when simply having someone place your banner on their website to drive traffic was the norm.  Back in the day, your banner would catch someones eye, they would click on it, and you would pay the person displaying your banner for each click that came through to your site from theirs.  (Not so different from Pay Per Click on the search engines today).

Cartoon Courtesy of: http://www.marketingmentor.net

Microsoft has applied for a patent on technology that will enable computers to monitor user behavior “to facilitate managing and optimising the utilisation of various system resources”.   How scary is this and what kind of seeds are we planting for our employment futures?

Courtesy www.technovelgy.com

Lets look at it objectively.  Using infra-red sensors to measure the breathing patterns, heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, etc of an employee can provide valuable information to an employer who is unaware that they are putting too much pressure on their staff or alert others on a project team that someone is struggling with their requirement, or even provide warnings of possible health issues arising due to stress or illness.

Credit: MirkoGarufi

Although Search Engine People has a fair share of Canadian based clientele, we also service the needs of many firms that are located overseas, and often more than half way across the globe. With Local SEO becoming more and more prominent, it’s imperative that we track SERP rankings not only on Google (dot) Com but also on regional Google search engines. Obtaining reporting on natural search results across different geographies can be tedious and time consuming, especially when a particular client receives a significant portion of referral traffic from different regional Google search engines. However where there is a will, there is a way and with so many bright minds in the Search Marketing industry, a solution to ‘optimize’ the quandary couldn’t have been far away.

Image Credit : Torchondo

Lay Down Google Analytics. Analyze Your RSS Growth Instead

A recent analysis by 45n5 states that the average RSS subscriber syndicated to an Internet Marketing| SEO | Make Money Online niche is worth about $31 in intangible value. While this number may be debatable, there is no doubt that growth in RSS subscriptions are the life blood of any booming blog. In fact, next to figuring out the number of Returning Visitors, and Time on Site, I’d say that RSS is the best metric to evaluate the ’stickiness’ of your content.

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: