There are three types of people in the world: Those who think anyone can do PPC. Those who think it takes a very special kind of idiot-savant. And those who understand that the truth lies somewhere between the two.

Image: Corbis

I spend my typical PPC day pulling bunnies from hats.

The prestige — the unexpected and surprising conclusion of the illusion — lies in knowing exactly which hat I’ll be wearing that day. Oh, and in having a brilliant assistant.

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.

Great news this a.m. from the land of hockey … Yahoo has finally acknowledged that yes, we Canadians live in Canada. What you ask?

In essence, this means that Yahoo is finally automatically redirecting Canadians searching via Yahoo Search (ie. Yahoo.com) to Yahoo.ca, presumably based on IP. The result is more Canadian sites will be found in the search results (and fewer U.S. based sites) since the vast majority of searchers assumed this was happening automatically.

Try it for yourself if you live in Canada … type in Yahoo.com and see if you are redirected to http://ca.yahoo.com.

When a blog becomes a community destination it is more than writers writing and readers commenting. Readers get to know the names and avatars of blog authors, and check to see what they are thinking and reading. Readers who have questions may feel that the blog’s collective expertise is available to them, and use it as a great place to refer others - a smart jump start for a business with aspirations of establishing authority.

Grow a team, grow a blog, grow a community? Of course it’s not that simple. These steps may help.

Ever wonder why some Digg submissions go hot at 25, while others don’t at 270+? Same with Stumbleupon … why do some posts do exceptionally well while others with similar numbers of thumbs ups get substantially less traffic?

One word … TRUST!

Trust plays a huge role in organic search algorithms, so why wouldn’t it in social media algorithms. After all, it makes perfect sense intuitively. Social media sites rightfully want the best content to rise to the top, so at the end of the day there are really only 2 considerations for a piece of social news/bookmarking content:

Its true! Matt McGee and I have had a long time bet who would be the last to join Twitter. Following Michael Gray’s session at SMX Social, we both saw the light and mutually agreed to join Twitter. Though in true fashion, we’ve still got to settle our bet, so we decided to each wager $250 … and merely change the terms of the contest.

Despite all the benefits of Twitter, its still a little bittersweet for me. I liken twitter to The Collective aspect of the Borg in Star Trek. A person can be easily overwhelmed with incoming information. That said … I’ve seen the light … I am now Borg. Resistance was futile!

I’m a stats junkie. I just love surveys, research papers and opinion polls, so its no accident that I enjoy sharing my finds with the our readers. I look for ways to use the information in order to assist our clients by incorporating relevant trends into our their online marketing initiatives. This is why I loved this new Burst Media Survey on consumer recall of advertising with a green message.

Essentially, the survey shows consumer recall of advertising with “green” messaging is high, with 37.1% saying they frequently recall green messaging, however they remain very skeptical about claims� made.

When you say “Local Market Strategy”, most people think of local as at the city level. In search that means Google Local, using Geographic delimiters in keywords, Local Directories, etc.

But for large enterprise sized clients, a local strategy is one for a particular country. Multi nationals typically are faced with the decision:

Are they going to have one overriding strategy for all markets

or

Are they going to have a local strategy (including different products, pricing, etc) for each market (country) that they play in.

and how this question is answered has a HUGE impact on your Search Strategy (at least it should).

At the brink of an economic recession which will forever change the way we live, how secure is your job?

OK, you know this one:

It’s a familiar graph.

But for most of us that extreme upward trend has never applied to these:

Corn

Soy

Wheat

The price of food is rising at an incredible rate.

The managing director of the Asian Development Bank puts it like this;

"We just have to accept the era of cheap food is over."

I came across Martin Hardee’s post on Sun’s Customer Experience Blog, where he’s posted a collection of Web 2.0 logos.

Here’s my list of the Top 5.