Groupthink is fairly common in the board room but more and more I’m starting to see it in social media too.

Groupthink is defined as “a type of thought exhibited by group members who try to minimize conflict and reach consensus without critically testing, analyzing, and evaluating ideas.”

Basically what this means is that people will avoid putting forth opinions or viewpoints that are not likely to be popular with the group.

Groupthink has been thought to be the cause of such major disasters such as the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster and the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

Last week Google opened iGoogle’s themes up to be customized by … you.

They’re prepared a themes directory for you.

Creative coders have since already released two easy to use iGoogle theme editors  - for you.

Google has assigned a 50×100 pixels attribution area in the top right corner of the footer of a custom theme for you to brand yourself or your client.

There’re 19 themes so far — all made by Google.

What are you waiting for?

After my recent posts on SEO, social media, and goal setting, I thought it’d be nice to break away from my addiction to search marketing and focus on something more light hearted. Inspired by our SEO funnies contest a couple of months ago, here’s my rendition of a ‘ballad to social media’

To the tune of “these are some of our favourite things” from the Sound of Music:

Matt Cutts on Paid Links and Google quite Smitten
Webmasters scared and PageRank thats Bitten
Inbound Links and Authority Pages
These are some of our favorite things

It’s that time of year again when everyone is talking about football. I don’t know about you but at one point in my life, the lead up to the big game had me focused on nothing but. While life’s priorities have lessened my interest in football, I still find myself watching the big game and it appears I’m not the only fair weather fan.

Last year, CBS aired the game before an astonishing 93.2 million viewers. Thirty-second spots cost as much as $2.6 million. Fox has the game this year and is asking everyone, except godaddy.com, for upwards of $3 million for a thirty second spot.

How do you benchmark the quality of your own blog postings?

This is a question that each blogger should be able to answer without hesitation … yet few of us can. After all, how do we know if the quality of our posts is improving or getting worse over time. Are we continually improving our post quality, or are bad habits creeping into our writing and causing us to loose valuable readers? Its well understood and even intuitive, that the better the quality of blog posts, the more likely we can achieve virtually any objectives.

Courtesy: SmallFuel.com/Blog

This post is part of an ongoing series: How Search Really Works.
Last week: Meta Keywords.

A web page can only have a limited number of words — but can receive an unlimited number of links.

It’s not rare for web pages to have more words about them than on them.

Because links are formulated by people whom generally don’t benefit from lying about your web page, search engines put an awful lot of trust and faith in them.

Keywords in links trump keywords in content.

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.

source: pcweenies.com

Credit: Joey Ganoza

As a follow-up to my previous post about the Just Do It Philosophy in Search Marketing, I will devote today’s article on how I go about planning and executing on my SEO goals. By following a theory of GOPST, or Goals, Objectives, Plans, Strategies, and Tactics, I am able to have a clear path in my mind towards achieving my short term and long term goals. Let’s begin my an overall look at this methodology:

Goals

I came across Michael Martines blog this week. In it, he says that he managed to increase his blog’s subscriber count by nearly 200%, to 900 subscribers in just two short weeks, by offering a free eBook for subscribing to his blog.

eBook readers have always sounded like a great idea to me, but until this past holiday season, they’ve fallen short of expectations. Sony and Amazon have taken advantage of new technology to release eBook readers that they’re hoping will take off.

source: digital-lifestyles.info