There’s an interesting story in today’s Globe & Mail regarding Canada’s green initiative.

It seems the federal government has in essence, hijacked the name of an existing non-profit, environmental organization in British Columbia. The government program, Canada EcoTrust tramples all over EcoTrust Canada.

In fact, type CanadaEcotrust.com in your browser and it redirects to Ecotrust Canada. Search for Canada Ecotrust in almost every available search engine and the first or first and second result tends to be Ecotrust Canada.

Ultimately, this is a story about due diligence. A simple search of any search engine would have raised flags.

Two very interesting online posts today around Matt Cutts’ comments regarding search results of search results showing up in Google. One from SEORoundTable and the other from Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land.

In his example, Danny used “dvd players”. Curious, I scratched around the longtail terms, searching dvd players by brand names like “Sony DVD players” or “Panasonic DVD players” and I’m even more intrigued by the prospects. Not only will sites like Amazon.com and Bizrate be affected, but so will a couple of other lightweights like, oh, say MSN Shopping and Yahoo! Shopping who also show up in Google results.

There are myriad free tools abounding on the Internet, some more useful than others.

Deserving of a mention, in my estimation, are Yahoo! Search Suggestion Tool (formerly Overture) and the recently unleashed KeywordDiscovery.com Tool.

But there are other equally interesting and informative tools that can provide hours of fun for the whole family. Okay, well maybe not for the whole family. But the hours of fun part, that’s true. Hours. Seriously.

Today, Google Trends, which is one of those tools that should be mentioned a lot but seems to be woefully underused. And it’s free!

The question of analytics has popped up more and more these days, both from an organic and a paid perspective.

There are several analytics packages on the market today ranging from the very cheap to the not so very cheap; and from the very good to the not so very good as these things are wont to be.

Transitioning from one analytics package to another can be a jarring experience as numbers may fluctuate wildly between any two given packages.

By now, we’re all aware of Google Alerts and their use as competitive intelligence tools.

Signing up for a Google Alert is relatively straightforward, and can be done here. However, in choosing your subject of choice, try for an exact match, “in quotes” or you may become the unwitting victim of information overload.

Googling potential job candidates has become, by now, commonplace. And it can be enlightening, not just for the frat party pictures, but in providing additional insight into your potential choice of candidates by revealing specific interests, skillsets or attitudes that can affect that choice, one way or the other. (Bear in mind we’ve all been to a toga party or seven and even Clinton admitted to smoking and Obama, more than that.)

The (SEP) Guy is writing this blog posting from home awaiting someone to come help get his car started.

Winter officially wins. Though it’s been relatively short, it’s been brutally brutal. So far, in five short weeks, The (SEP) Guy has slipped and hurt himself falling on ice; had his card snowplowed under; been forced to sleep on an airport floor after spending 4 hours snowed in on a runway. And now the car.

No amount of searching for warmer locales or warmer clothes from Mountain Equipment Co-op will help. Reports of the warmest January on record. Phhfffft.

Maybe it’s the time of year but no less than Yahoo! and Business 2.0 each have articles on less than saintly bosses today.

I’ve had the privilege of leading a team, and it really is a privilege. And I have the privilege of being partnered with someone who leads a national team and whom I consider nothing short of a mentor. I watch him work countless hours and I watch his team respond to email requests late into the night on weekends. It takes a lot of work to make it seem so effortless but in watching, I’ve learned that they readily engage because they know he is actively engaged… Yes, even late into the night on the weekends.

It gives me great pleasure to announce that we have officially launched our blogroll as of this posting.

And it gives me great please to announce Dave Forde and Perfectio as our first blogroll mention.

Why? Simple stuff that.

A blog with the intention of Bringing together Canada’s connected community is a very good blog indeed. While by no means a nationalist (So no, this doesn’t really qualify as a Patriot Missive.) I personally don’t feel that we do enough as Canadians, and as Canadians in technology, we don’t do enough to put ourselves front and center centre.

If not the first in Canada, one of the first. Take a bow, guys!!!

It’s a two blog day!!

Under the auspices of striking while the iron is hot, Search Engine People is beyond thrilled to announce that we are among the first, if not the first Canadian company to become Google Adwords Qualified.

Not only has Search Engine People met the minimum standard requirements for qualification, we have surpassed them. (Google requires two Google Adwords Qualified Professionals, Search Engine People has no fewer than four.)

And, ripped from the press release, in the words of my boss: