Under the auspices of better late than never, and after phone calls, emails, protestations and enquires, not the least of which may well have been a phone call from Andrew Wahl of Canadian Business Magazine, Google has reversed its policy, now allowing Canadian companies to become Google Adwords qualified and as such, a Google Adwords Qualified Company.

Becoming a Google Adwords Qualified Company requires:

Well, first of all, it requires being listed in the Google country participants which Canada is, here.

Sometimes the coolest things are the simplest.

One of those things is inserting your company logo as an icon at the beginning of your browser string or URL.

And it’s surprisingly easy to do.

Well, according to our multi-talented technical search guy, (Shout out to Wisam) it’s really easy.

In fact it can be done in four, count ‘em, four easy steps.

1. Get a copy of your company logo in Gif or JPEG format
2. Use a tool like http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/ to generate the favicon.ico
3. Upload favicon.ico to the root directory of your site
4. Insert the following

I do.

I’m relatively new at this company and I have those moments where I feel pretty clueless. It’s the little things. Remembering to set the alarm but forgetting to turn out the lights. (The last thing I was told was and don’t forget to set the alarm.) Right. Got it. Set the alarm. Set the alarm. New guy moment. Singular focus out of that need to get it right.

We all want to make our mark, especially when we’re new. And we try desperately hard not to step on toes. Doesn’t always work.

Content may rule, but there are a few rules for content that need to be considered.

From a search engine perspective, there was absolutely a time when they (they being machines) did not care. In essence, blah, blah, blah, keyword. Yada, yada, yada, keyword. Da da da keyword. And there you have a winning strategy. Seriously.

But times have changed and the search engines are trying to change with it. But, and this is a big but, the search engines are trying to create a logical automated process to a fundamentally human experience.

Every morning I get asked by two associates what I’m going to blog about today. It’s fun and fulfilling even if it is only two people. And every morning I tell them I don’t know. Mostly because I don’t. I like to write either first thing in the morning or early afternoon. If the morning, I’ve had an opportunity to think about things. If in the afternoon it’s because something has happened in the process of the day that intrigues me.

It’s 2:36 PM now.

Today it’s .pdf files. To me, pdf files are the Internet equivalent of Michigan J Frog from the Bugs Bunny cartoon. You know the one.

Certainly, the biggest thing to come out of the Internet of late, capturing media, analysts and users like is Web 2.0 or user generated content.

In fact, Business Week, in their article Retailers Take A Tip From MySpace, detailed how ecommerce sites are letting customers post comments, reviews and photos with regard to products, and the benefits it’s having on online commerce. And some of them are intriguing.

After being snowed in (Or was it plowed under?) and enduring windchill that makes it feel like -30 out there, I’ve decided I could either whine or wish.

I wish it were warmer, I whined.

Ensuing conversation… blah, blah, blah, warmer. Blah, blah, blah, Florida. Blah, blah, blah, passport. Blah, blah, blah, lazy.

And then the voice of God my boss intoned: Well, if we’d annexed Turks & Caicos you wouldn’t have that problem. You could go somewhere warmer and still be in Canada.

Don’t toy with me, I said suggested with a look. It’s cold out and I haven’t finished my coffee yet.

By now, it’s facile to think that we’re not being watched whilst we’re on the web. But the degree to which can at times be a little disconcerting. In fact, a lot disconcerting.

An article crossed my desk regarding clickprinting, a theory and research out of The Wharton School by Professors Balaji Padmanabhan and Yinghui Yang. In short, it states:

We address the question of whether humans have unique signatures - or clickprints - when they browse the Web. The importance of being able to answer this can be significant given applications to electronic commerce in general and in particular online fraud detection, a major problem in electronic commerce costing the economy billions of dollars annually.

Corporate blogging is a little like getting a new puppy. At first mention, ears perk up, eyes light up and tails start wagging — in the case of blogging, it’s tongues and fingers that wag. Actually, corporate blogging is a lot like getting a new puppy particularly when you find out it requires a little more time and attention that you may have first anticipated. The first couple of times you trot the corporate blog out, it’s, well, kinda fun. And people notice. And some may even comment on it.

Or, why can’t we all just get along?

Is it just me or is there a big disconnect in the advertising world of late? I’m speaking of both online and offline advertising.

Take, for instance, Google. Isn’t it a little odd that the world’s foremost brand, the company challenging not only advertising revenues but the very model of advertising has yet to drop a dime on advertising? And they’re hardly alone. Ebay, Napster, Yahoo in their early and supernova days spent nothing on advertising.

No wonder Madison Avenue has issues with Silicon Valley. That’s a lot to have to swallow.