A little video company, much like Joost or YouTube went public, surging almost 40% in its debut. That company is Blinkx.

And that user experience is quite compelling.

Better than YouTube. And better than Joost. (Frankly any live video company is better than Joost right now, being well, live and not having to wait behind the Internet equivalent of the red velvet rope…”Be the first to know when we go live…”)

From the moment of entry it’s not afraid to be what it is. And it’s very, very dynamic intimating that you might be in for, oh, I don’t know, a visual experience?

Attention: All creative types; talentless hacks; singers of shower diddies.

Search Engine People is pleased to announce the first annual ever SEO lyric contest.

It’s simple. Submit a song worth sixpence $1,000. That’s right. You heard it here first, unless this puppy’s already gone viral.

Submit a search-relate lyric to your favorite song and it could be worth $1,000. There are, of course, official rules… and they can be found here.

What else do you need to know? Oh, yeah, the $1,000 is U.S.

Today’s blog comes courtesy of Geri Rockstein of Writeforthenet.com. With that kind of domain, you have to know Geri is a web content writer. In fact, an esteemed content writer who knows of what she speaks. And on that happy note, over to Geri…

“Content Is King”

“Content is king” seems to be a buzz word in the industry. But what does that really mean? And does anyone really care?

(version fran栩se)

You can’t spend more than a day in the world or search engine optimization without being exposed to the social media mantra: you have to get your site exposed on Digg, Slashdot, Fark, Netscape, etc.

Have to.

And why again? To gain fame or customers? No. To get links. Links, links, links. Tons of them.

With reciprocal linking schemes out of the door, playing the social media card has become the way to build links for a site.

(English version)

Personne ne peut passer plus d’une journ裠dans le monde de l’optimisation de moteur de recherche sans 鳲e expos矡u mantra des sites sociaux : vous vous devez d’avoir votre site bien en vue sur Digg, Slashdot, Fark, Netscape, etc.

Condition sine qua non!

Mais au fait, pourquoi encore? Pour la gloire ou attirer les clients? Non. Pour obtenir des liens. Oui, des liens, des liens et encore des liens! Une tonne de ceux-ci!

Les plans 袨afaud豠pour 袨anger des liens r袩proques balanc豠par la fen鳲e, jouer la carte des sites sociaux est devenu la fa殮 de se cr褲 une liste de liens pour un site donn笠

Quand nous partageons une histoire, une image, un vid譬 un outil d赥lopp窠ou n’importe, nous esp豯ns, d販rons et souhaitons vivement et ce, de mani籥 intentionnelle, que cela attirera et cr褲a des liens : nous appelons ce contenu la p風e aux liens (traduction de linkbait), i.e., cr褲 des liens dirigeant les pas vers son site. L’expression reste encore �赥lopper en fran栩s et nous ne donnons ici que notre traduction la plus 袬air裠sur le sujet. Lorsque que l’on s’attarde �ette expression du c󵧠anglophone, la connotation semble n覡tive, empreinte de mauvaises intentions. Mais il n’en est souvent rien et l’on ne saurait pr鳥r de mauvaises intentions �es gens qui, somme toute, ne d販rent que nous attirer vers leur site. Certains semblent trouver dans cette technique une recette cent fois utilis裠mais combien efficace! Ses marques ne sont plus �aire et la p風e aux liens devient vite un sport virtuel ayant des milliers d’adeptes!

Peu importe comment on l’appelle ou ce que vous en pensez : 柠marche et c’est tout ce qui compte!

Pourquoi cibler le march矦rancophone qu裩cois

Si votre bureau ou vos affaires transigent de mani籥 ou d’une autre au Canada, vous vous adressez donc �n march硠 l’int豩eur duquel se trouve un autre march窠celui-ci unique et diff豥nt par sa culture et sa langue : les canadiens fran栩s, la plupart r販dents de la province de Qu补c. Plus de cinq millions d’abonn豮 Parmi les utilisateurs d’internet les plus actifs avec un des taux de d赥loppement les plus 諥v豬 toutes locations incluses (maison ou bureau). Tr籠grande utilisation de l’acc籠internet haute vitesse–L’acc籠�nternet haute vitesse 賡nt ici la cl矰uisque ses usagers ach糥nt en ligne plus souvent que les gens utilisant toutes autres formes d’acc籠�nternet.

En d’autres mots, un march矩mmense pour qui l’on ne s’adresse pas encore tr籠souvent dans sa propre langue!

Et bien s�out comme l’anglais est utilis矡u Canada et au Royaume-Uni , pour ne nommer que ceux-l�le fran栩s est utilis短ondialement. Pas uniquement en France (comme certain seraient tent豠de penser), une superpuissance internet de ses propres droits, mais aussi dans bon nombre d’autres pays donc la Belgique, plusieurs parties de l’Afrique et par plus de deux millions d’habitants..des ȴats-Unis!

Cibler le march矣anadien fran栩s revient 覡lement �ibler une communaut矦rancophone mondiale.

Digg le Fuzz de Nuouz!?

Vous d販rez cibler la communaut矦rancophone du Canada? Allez �a p風e aux liens sur Digg, Reddit, Netscape—Tout le Saint-frusquin! Ou comme le disent les qu裩cois, tout le barda! Surpris? Nous esp豯ns que non. Les francophones ne sont pas des isolationnistes par nature ; Eux aussi utilisent les sites anglophones chauds de l’heure!

Wow…

Microsoft buys Aquantive for $6B. Google buys Doubleclick for $3.1B. Yahoo buys right media for $680 Mil. And WPP buys 24/7 for $649 Mil.

The most interesting of those deals is, in my mind, WPP. The multinational advertising conglomerate is not sitting on the sidelines watch thing parade go by.

The other interesting thing is that while all are functionally advertising networks, it’s the server technology the is the crux of each. Eyeballs.

Online advertising is about to change to become that much more visual a medium. I’ve said it before and I’m standing by it.

Seems like there are others who agree that Universal Search may witness a reversal of fortune for Google. Take for instance Donna Bogatin and “Why Google Search Will NOT Rule The Universe“.

What I find conspicuously absent from the Google dialogue is Froogle Google Products.

Is this a failure to monetize? Or is it a conversation to come? Methinks the latter.

Clothing afterall, has just usurped computers in terms of purchases made online.

A new era in ecommerce is about to begin. And yet, nothing from the company that launched Froogle and Google Checkout.

And under the category of not news, Google announced today that is unveiling Universal Search but for the sake of convenience, let’s just call it AGATT. (ALL GOOGLE ALL THE TIME.)

Work with me here. Do a search for red roses on Google, not google images. Theses are the results and my, aren’t those just about the prettiest durn red posies you ever seen? Click on those results and you go to another Google property, not to the web site from which the flowers image orginated.

Do a search for car crash and there it is, as it’s been for months now, a YouTube result and now with pictures!!!

Given the barrage of new link development techniques and spammy approaches that Google et al have had to contend with over the past year, it appears obvious to me that Google needs some divine insight (he says jokingly assuming that their myriad of PhDs haven’t already considered this possibility) in their efforts to define and value inbounds links in the ranking algorithm. People are always trying to game the system, and understandably so when the value of high rankings is soooooo outstanding.

That said, how do the search engines really know if a link is a vote or not, or if it should be counted towards rankings? Its quite obvious that current link valuation techniques have their share of problems, and consequently Dave Naylor’s posting today that Paid Links are being devalued on mass. So we know that Google is trying to solve this problem of link manipulation, but how else can they work to solve it?

Lets look at this from a different perspective. What if the search engines were able to create a ‘checks and balances’ mechanism that provided a second opinion about the value of a link? To some extent they’re already doing this by filtering based on content relevance. So now, lets add a powerful checks and balances mechanism which we’ll call ‘the click test’. In its most simple variation, the click test is just, if a link from site “A” to site “B” is not ‘clicked’ on over a prespecified time period, then Google would set the value of the link to “0″. If it was clicked on, then perhaps Google gives the link a value of “1″. The click test value could then be multipled by the previous value yielding a score of either “0″ or the previous score. Voila … link values are validated on an ongoing basis, and only quality links are scored. Those scoring a “0″ value are completely discounted.

This of course begs a number of other questions, namely:
a) wouldn’t the search engines need to make sure the links aren’t being gamed? The answer is yes … but the search engines can use simple technologies to ensure that the same person doesn’t click on the same links each month. This would be relatively easy to do for a Google, very similar to the algorithms used by Digg and other social media.

b) what if the value of a link was a multiple of the number of clicks it receives, so that the value is not merely as simple as assigning it a “1″? What if sites with links that did not receive clicks received negative points? Certainly possible, but far beyond the scope of this posting. Our main contention here is that, gaming the system should not be your goal, as the effort is doomed to fail long term. Google can use a number of relatively straight forward approaches to validate link worthiness.

c) could they gather these statistics? Absolutely, given all the tracking information Google has (see Why Does Google Remember Information About Searches and Yesterday’s “the SEP guy” posting on SEP You Have the Right to Remain Silent. It wouldn’t even require a whole lot more computing power to be frank.

So where does this leave us? Apparently, its going to leave me with an experiment to perform. That said, stay tuned, as I’ll set-up and report on the experiment. In fact, special offer; subscribe to our feed through Feedburner, and we’ll make the research findings available only through the feed. Regular blog readers going direct, will not see these results.

Stay tuned!

My boss and I had an interesting conversation yesterday around — I’m sure this will come as a surprise to everyone — Google.

Specifically around the amount of information Google gathers. I’ve been down this road before, I think it’s too much.

Andrew Goodman had an interesting article at SearchEngineLand.com: Your Paid Search Performance Is Relative detailing metrics and conversions all relative to paid search. Of course performance is measured all along the way.

All of this finessing should see a better spend, but the hope is a better spend will lend itself to a bigger budget, not only for you, but for your competitor as well. And up and up rates go.