All platforms running Firefox: The latest revision of my very own homecooked Better Gmail Firefox extension, version 0.6, is now available for your downloading pleasure.

This release is leaner, meaner and snappier than ever as most of my effort went into resolving performance problems. If you disabled a previous version because of slow page loads, give this one a another whirl. Also, this rev includes a disk usage progress bar for keeping an eye on your ever-filling inbox (as pictured). Finally, I'm thrilled to announce that the fine testers at Mozilla Add-ons approved Better Gmail for public downloads. Huzzah!

Existing users can upgrade in Firefox's Add-ons dialog (hit the Find Updates button); new users can hit the link to download it. Better Gmail is a free download for Firefox. —Gina Trapani

Thank you Family Matters for your nice words about Information Trapping. And thank you to SWC for putting it in your library.

Citysearch is adding video .

The Google Books project gets beltsanded . And not in a nice way. Great comments. I’m thinking a lot of these problems could be solved if they had human review through massive Mechanical Turking.

Which news sites are using RSS best? interesting study.

New folks at Yahoo! Research.

Heh. New online database of aircraft values. Subscription-based of course.

Nice! New digital archive for South African books on the way.

Blah blah busy work home thyroid family blah.

Now that that’s out of the way, a few thoughts before I get back into writing up sites and services.

* WIKINOMICS — My husband and I had a long drive last weekend so I bought the audio book version of Wikinomics to listen to — I thought I could give a book report. We had in the past listened to The Long Tail and Freakonomics while driving and quite enjoyed them, so we figured Wikinomics would be a good fit (and I’m a Don Tapscott fan.) Unfortunately, after about 40 minutes my husband informed me soberly that if we didn’t listen to something else he would drive off the side of a mountain (we were on the Blue Ridge Parkway.) I’m going to try to read the book…

* CRAIGSLIST — I was at a party and watched a 20-minute conversation about what a great resource Craigslist is. I have even started hearing Craigslist as a verb. “I decided I didn’t have room for that desk anymore so I Craigslisted it.” If I were a classified ads manager at a newspaper, I would be spending every spare second mad-scientist-ing my department, trying to find new and better offerings. Flashier Web sites like MySpace and YouTube are getting all the attention, but Craigslist is going to knock over an industry.

* YAHOO GETTING ACQUIRED BY MICROSOFT — Oh, I hope not. I really, really hope not. Horrified might not be too strong a word. This whole “Live Search” thing has been a mess, and I’m afraid of Microsoft getting Yahoo and doing the same thing to it. Yahoo is doing some amazing things — Yahoo Pipes for just one — and I’d hate to see it get stifled. On the other hand, I would love for Yahoo to acquire IceRocket for the trending tools and blog search.

* SECOND LIFE — I’m still working on Second Life. In fact, I’m renting part of an island. Yes, an island is a bit more expensive. However, we have a lot more control over content and what we sit next to. I’m building a search engine information center, conference area, and bookstore. And of course there’s a beach for soaking up rays and listening to the seagulls. I’m thinking about setting up a mall-type area for just libraries and similar sites that want an SL presence but don’t want to pay rent. Anyway, stay tuned.

* NOSTALGIA — Remember when Ask was putting stickers on apples?

• Google is the most used search engine in my school, according to interviews.
  
  
• Google is a web interface to the world.
  
  
• Google represents a Faustian bargain between society and technology.
  
  
• Google is a big platform for distributed computing.
  
  
• Who needs the Internet? We've got Google cache!
  
  
• Google was a search engine. Google is more than the sum of its usable parts. It is an entity that many use to access personalized information and find both new and old ideas alike. It is now an essential part of the Internet.
  
  
• Google is the other half of my brain.
  
  
• Google is the command line, the start of an OS.
  
  
• Google is a gateway to millions of ideas.
  
  
• Google is the crossroad where life is transfered from desktops to the Internet.
  

Technorati Ranking Metric: Hot or Not?
Technorati recently made a few changes in functionality and features to their blog search engine/directory. One change is to their blog ranking metric.

Using SearchEngineJournal.com’s rank as an example, previously Technorati might have said “387 links from X blogs”. Now it says “387″. The total number of links from other blogs is still present, which in this case is 18,479, at the time of writing. However, my observation, at least on my own low-traffic websites is that X does not usually equal 18,479. If I recall correctly, X would be larger in most cases.

That means that the new metric is a downgrade, in my opinion, because it gives less information than before. As a data junkie, I like more information. What do you think?

10% Of Web Pages Are Malicious?
The BBC News site reports that one in ten web pages that Google looked at during their regular indexing process contained malicious code capable of “drive-by downloads”, which are amongst the nastiest of malware trends.

To Infinity and Beyond: Google Acquisitions
As I mentioned in Friday’s News Review, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt says that they’re open to more acquiring more businesses. Allen Stern at Center Networks points out that Schmidt also said, “Google buys a start-up once every few days, or around one a week.” If you’ll recall, Schmidt says that Google’s purchases are for filling holes in their portfolio. The question, then, is what is their intended portfolio? When you play in the online market, pretty much any business could be purchased and the spin doctors claim that it’s part of the portfolio. If Google intends to “index the world’s information”, then that portfolio will continue to grow to infinity and beyond.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Personal

* Use personal folders to back up important files that are only for you.
* Get to your files from any computer with Internet access by signing in with your Windows Live ID.

Shared

* Shared folders make it easy to collaborate with coworkers or classmates.
* You decide how much control each person has over each shared folder. Some can just read what's there: others can add and delete files.
* Everyone who is sharing uses their own Windows Live ID.

Public

* With public folders, anyone on the Internet can view your files, but they can't change them.
* Want to show your public files to others? Just send them a link! Each folder and file has its own web address.

Get a list of Lifehacker's weekly best posts on Friday evening by subscribing to our Highlights feed. Or, get a handful of daily best posts with our top stories feed.

This week's best posts include:

• Top 10 Body Hacks
  "We geeks spend a lot of time tinkering with our PCs, but the greatest computer you'll ever use is your body."
• Stream your music with Orb
  "You don't need to spend a dime to stream your music library to another PC. All you need is Orb, a free service that turns your system into a killer MP3 server."
• Secure your laptop with the LaptopLock
  "Don't let the creep who stole your computer paw through your private files, passwords and personal information."
• Replace Windows Explorer with Xplorer2
  "Like Firefox is a must-have replacement for Internet Explorer, a file manager called Xplorer2 blows Windows Explorer out of the water for anyone who browses multiple folders, copies, pastes, moves and searches the PC filesystem frequently."
• It's what's on the walls that matters
  "Each of our entries for the day have a little something special going on with their walls, whether it's a well-chosen paint job or some snazzy artwork."
• Lifehacker Code: Invert web page colors with the Darken bookmarklet
  "A little Javascript can darken the background of any web page to heighten readability, reduce brightness and monitor energy consumption."
• Find an apartment with Google Maps/Craigslist mashup
  "MapsKrieg helps you find apartments, houses for rent, sublets and more by mashing Craigslist listings with Google Maps."

Google’s Chaos and Order
According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Google’s new focus [NY Times; subscription req’d] is search, ads and apps but that their “underlying mission has not changed.” Interesting. One might think otherwise. They’ve moved from just search to adding ads to buying up a whole slew of web applications - albeit good ones, many of which I use daily. But it’s starting to feel like the 1980s and 1990s again, when IBM and Microsoft, respectively, were into “everything”, acquiring businesses left and right. However, Schmidt says the recent big acquisitions are for building out their portfolio, not for competitive reasons. As such, they’re remaining open to buying more large businesses.

GMail Traffic Up
Google GMail has been openly available for a few months now., and since that time it’s US traffic has increased about 17%. And supposedly nearly 20% of overall GMail visits are from young, well-to-do people. Compare that to Yahoo Mail, who apparently have the lead for the under $30,000 group.

Now while I’ve integrated my Yahoo Mail account into my Google Mail account (because I can’t stand the new beta interface), I find myself going through spam more often these days. Even my Google address receives far more spam than prior to GMail leaving beta. Before then, I was inclined to say GMail’s filters were better than Yahoo’s. But now I’m not so sure. If I get this much spam now, what’ll happen when Google has as many users as Yahoo or Hotmail?

Technorati Receives a Million in Funding
Technorati, the blog search engine cum directory, just received an additional million in venture capital, this time from a Japanese firm, DG Incubation, who run Technorati Japan. Technorati is still looking for a new CEO.

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Lifehack.org posts 10 tips for organizing your feeds and optimizing your time spent with Google Reader.

We've actually covered a lot of these tips individually at one point or another, like aggregating and filtering feeds with Yahoo! Pipes, getting to know your Google Reader shortcuts, adding a custom Google Reader Search, and installing the Smart Google Reader subscribe button, but there are a few other good ideas in here worth checking out for the die-hard Google Reader user. — Adam Pash

The Simplehelp weblog has a quick Gmail tip that blew my mind this morning: you can select multiple emails in Gmail by clicking the first email in the series, then holding Shift and clicking the last of the series you'd like to select.

This behavior is akin to how you'd multi-select anything in most desktop applications, but who knew it existed in Gmail, too? And here I thought I knew everything about Gmail. — Adam Pash

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Santa Clara University law professor Eric Goldman, on his Technology and Marketing Law blog, has updates on several search-related laws or lawsuits this week.

1. Broad Matching Doesn't Violate Injunction – In the Rhino Sports v. Sport Court case in Arizona, the courts have gotten broad matching right for once, Goldman says. Rhino Sports agreed in 2002 to a permanent injunction from using "sport court" in commerce, and last year, Sport Court saw that Rhino Sports' ad was showing up in a search for "sport court." The judge correctly pointed out that Rhino Sports was using Google's Broad Match, and was not targeting the term "sport court," and so was not in contempt of the order.
2. Utah Trademark Protection Act Updates – It seems Utah's legislators will hold off on implementing the state's Keyword Protection Act "for at least a couple of months." That's probably the best plan, since the law is both unenforceable and would not achieve the desired results.
3. Another NY Court Says Keyword Triggering Isn't TM Use in Commerce – In the Site Pro-1 v. Better Metal case, a court has determined that keyword triggering and metatag usage isn't a trademark use in commerce, so it's ok for companies to bid on others' trademarked terms. The legal debate's not over, since other courts have ruled the other way, but this is one more vote on the side of sanity.
4. Social Networking Sites and the Law – In preparation for an undergrad event looking at laws that pertain to social networking, Goldman has put together a brief summary of the legal issues involved. Two of the biggest issues are people creating fake profiles of others, and sexual predators on social networking sites.

It's not always the full-blown software applications that make the biggest difference on your computer; often it's the small do-one-thing-well utilities that enhance our computing experience that much more.

Today's top 10 covers the system utilities that add a extra polish and convenience to your Mac's working environment. Most (but not all) of these little suckers are free, many live in your Mac's System Preferences pane and on the menubar, and all of them greatly enhance your overall Mac experience.

Top 10 Mac utilities

Honorable mentions include InstantShot, Nocturne, Google Desktop, Do Something When, smcFanControl, MacFUSE , and VirtueDesktops.

What would have been on your list? Let us know in the comments. —Gina Trapani

The old saying “Sex Sells” never gets old, even in the world of social media marketing and Digg.com.

Recently I’ve been noticing a trend on Digg that when a story is submitted, especially a tech story, with a little spin about sex, that story attracts much more Diggs than it usually would.

Take today’s most popular story on Digg for example, entitled Gmail Users are Younger, Richer, Good in Bed.

The genius behind the title of this story, by Pete Cashmore of Mashable.com, is that his blog post is simply the restating of facts from a Hitwise study on GMail usage and user behavior. When comparing GMail to Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, the study shows that users of GMail are younger and have higher incomes.

The study says absolutely nothing about sexual performance, which Cashmore addresses in his post; “As for performance in the bedroom - well, we kinda lied. In fact, the stats show that solitary Gmail users are far more likely to Google themselves.”

Cashmore is instead using the old trick of writing sexy headlines to gather more reader interest. Mashable’s ‘internal’ readers are used to this approach, as Peter routinely talks about sex in his headlines, which draws more interest and comments from his RSS subscribers.

But the after effect is the Digg popularity. Digg is a breeding ground of young horny geeks and in the same fashion that Marvel Comics uses in making Jean Grey or Mary Jane sexier and bustier from year to year, Cashmore does the same in his Mashable titles.

Examples:

• Revealed: The Social Network Most Likely to Get You Laid
• MySpace: No Gays for a Day

Furthermore, Mashable.com has a positive reputation amongst Digg users, which lets Cashmore get away with the posting of these misleading titles, without getting buried or comment bombed by Diggers (although Pete does not submit these stories himself).

So, if you’re going to try to use Sex to sell your site, get you on Digg.com or attract more links; be careful, be original, be thoughtful and most importantly, be sexy.

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Google held its annual shareholder meeting yesterday at the Googleplex, and Andy Beal has done a great job in breaking down what happened there, in four easy pieces:

• Google Press Meeting Part 1 - Acquisitions – Google CEO Eric Schmidt says Google is now more comfortable thinking about buying big businesses, but will not get into the content business.
• Google Press Meeting Part 2 - Software – a new corporate mantra: “Search, Ads and Apps”
• Google Press Meeting Part 3 - Stock Split – No plans for a stock split.
• Google Press Meeting Part 4 - Censorship – stockholders voted to allow Google to censor its results in order to continue operating in China.

Designing your website for screen resolutions of 1024×768 or higher can achieve a richer user experience and dramatically increase performance and usability. As users upgrade to larger monitors, websites can take advantage of new layout options like never before with increased content, additional graphics and larger fonts. Your wider website will give a user more options to navigate your website without having to scroll, which often leads to higher conversion rates.

Keeping 800×600 Users in Mind

While it has been noted that most of today’s computer and Internet users utilize a screen resolution of 1024×768 or above, there are still some who will visit your website in the 800×600 resolution, and many in the web design industry believe that sites should still built with these users in mind. Submitawebsite customers are typically more sophisticated computer users who would benefit from the larger screen resolution, but in order to make sure that we aren’t alienating a significant amount of potential customers, we’ll use tracking software to discover what screen resolutions users view our site with.

Using Google Analytics to Track Screen Resolutions

In this example we’ll be using Google Analytics, the most popular free tool on the market today. We’ll use information from our website, Submitawebsite.com, paying specific attention to our web stats from January 1, 2007 through May 1, 2007. These statistics will allow us to see how our users navigate to our site, as well their physical location and what type of resolution they have their screens set to.

In order to get the best results for your own site, you’ll want a good range of web stats with which to work. I would recommend looking at a minimum of 6 months, although 90 days should provide an adequate amount of statistics for you to look at.

Once we reach the main screen of Google Analytics for Submitawebsite, we’ll navigate to the Content Optimization section and select the Web Design Parameters. Within that section we’ll click on Screen Resolutions which will take us to a page showing the different resolutions people have on their computers when they come to our website.

I would say that you want at least 95% of your users to be able to view your site properly according to their resolution settings, keeping in mind that designers generally create websites around the size of the lowest common denominator. Looking at these statistics, we find that 10.42% of Submitawebsite viewers utilize the 800×600 screen resolution, which is a bit more than we would want before we redesign the site for 1024×768 users. Though the remaining 89.58% utilize a 1024×768 or higher resolution, it would seem that we have a significant enough number to cause us to refrain from upping our site’s resolution.

Let’s use Google Analytics take a closer look at these numbers. Clicking on the double arrow to the left of the 800×600 row in the table, we can access the Cross Segment Performance of this statistic and see our where the users at that particular resolution are coming from, broken down by region.

Looking at the top 100 results, which will give the most accurate representation of user location, we can see that the top two regions for 800×600 users on our site are Delhi and Uttar Pradesh. Both of these locations are in India, which is a region we’re not too worried about at this time. As you go down the line you can see that while there are a significant amount of people in the United States, the vast majority of the referrers are from parts of the world we aren’t particularly interested in targeting, especially the top three which are in India or labeled as “no data”.

What this tells me is that the top 96-97% of people that I want to target visit Submitawebsite with a 1024×768 or higher screen resolution, and because I know that my customer base is slightly more sophisticated than the average user, this exercise proves to me now that I can and should move over to a 1024×768 website. Again, the increased real estate on the user’s screen will allow for bigger images, larger font and a richer experience with more information, which has been proven statistically to increase conversion rates on my website and gives us more presence.

Joe Griffin is a Vice President at Website Pros, and is the current acting President of Submitawebsite.com, a company he co-founded in 1997.

Yahoo Search Marketing’s Yahoo! Ultimate Connection Contest is being held to help small business owners connect with new customers through online advertising, and with some of the world’s leading marketers.

How Can You Enter?

• Submit a 500-word essay (deadline: May 25, 2007) that focuses on what their businesses need to be successful, and how the “Ultimate Connection” contest can help them achieve that success.
• Once all submissions are in, Yahoo! will select five finalists from the entries and the Yahoo! community will be invited to vote for their favorites beginning on June 11.

The prize package includes:

• An “Ultimate Connection” power lunch in New York City with the up-and-coming entrepreneur winners and top-ranking marketing stars 
• A $25,000 budget from Yahoo! Search Marketing to use toward a keyword ad campaign
• Mentoring from a legendary marketing expert throughout the year
• Access to a Yahoo! Search Marketing expert throughout the year
• A website makeover, courtesy of Yahoo! Small Business and Web site development firm FastPivot.

The power lunch in New York with recognized marketing ‘stars’ such as Shira D. Goodman, executive vice president of marketing, Staples; Raymond Joabar, GM CC Marketing & Strategic Partnerships, AMEX OPEN; and Yahoo!’s own chief marketing officer Cammie Dunaway.

Four king-bashing clips removed from YouTube

Google has agreed to pull four videos from YouTube which Thailand claims insult the country's revered King Bhumibol Adulyadej, Reuters reports.…

Yesterday three US federal judges upheld a decision which said that a federal employee’s reputation was not harmed by a search on Google for his name, and that employers can use Google to search for backgroud information on their employees.

Seems that a Mr. David M. Mullins felt that after using Google to perform searches, his former employer, the U.S. Commerce Department, was influenced by his past work behavior and fired Mr. Mullins because of his background history where he was fired from other jobs.

Mullins was fired for misuse of a government vehicle & government credit card along with falsifying travel documents.

Mullins appealed his dismissal to an administrative law judge, saying that his “right to fundamental fairness” was violated when Capell allegedly used Google to do a search on his name.

Specifically, he argued that his rights were violated when Capell “came across…my alleged prior removal from federal service by the Air Force.” He also was fired by the Smithsonian Institution. Mullins claimed that she perjured herself when saying that she was not influenced by his two prior job losses.

The appeals court, however, disagreed. It ruled that the Google searches were not prejudicial and affirmed Mullins’ dismissal as a civil servant.

Instead of trying to appeal and win his job back after being fired for wasting government property, perhaps Mr. Mullins should sink his energy into first, not getting fired from his job for doing dumb stuff and secondly, search reputation management.

More from the News.com Police Blotter.

This week’s in-house spotlight is on Tanya Vaughan, the Global in-house SEO with Hewlett-Packard. HP has a few in-house SEOs within various divisions, one is a full-time SEO, but most do SEO as portion of their role, and Tanya is HP’s central SEO hub. Tanya is the dream find for an in-house position; she had been working with HP for several years and knew about SEO, but more importantly was passionate about its integral role in the company’s web presence. Having already been with the company, she was ahead of the game when it came to what I call “the human side of SEO” – she already knew how to navigate through the personalities and corporate politics to get things done at HP. Tanya started dabbling in SEO as a content manager for HP.com, knowing that she wanted her content to be found. She’s a self-taught SEO that successfully works with all the HP divisions across the globe.

Tanya’s advice on working with many divisions: She does an SEO Catch-up Call every 4-6 weeks, where HP in-house SEOs discuss what they’re doing and things they’ve learned along the way. This is a call with the core people doing SEO within the various business units of HP.

The biggest take-away: If your company has a corporate style guide, get an SEO section added. To put it into perspective, HP’s style guide contains 20+ pages of information specific to SEO, that’s a lot of guidance and means SEO has a priority within company standards and guidelines.

On to the Q&A….

Jessica: When starting as HP’s SEO, you were already working at HP, and SEO was something you did when writing content for HP.com. How did you first learn SEO and once you landed the full-time SEO position, what did you do to bring yourself up to speed quickly?

Tanya: I was a web marketing content manager for Printing and Imaging products in our SMB segment. Since I was already doing paid search to drive traffic to the pages for which I was developing content, I decided I needed to also focus on natural search given how paid and natural complement each other. To learn SEO, I read books, articles, and blogs, attended conferences and took any opportunity I could to start up a conversation with the more seasoned SEO professionals. As I started the new role with HP, I engaged, not one but, two vendors to get the program up and running. I now have just one vendor but having two to collaborate with about topics helped me make more well-rounded decisions about HP’s SEO strategy.

Jessica: We always talk about the challenges of getting SEO changes implemented, and to do that you need to focus on building relationships. You have a unique challenge: You do everything virtually, working with teams across the globe. What do you do to build and nurture the relationships needed to successfully get SEO changes implemented?

Tanya: Part of my success has been due to the team I sit on and my manager and her span of influence. She manages the HP.com Customer Experience and Design Team which owns the site’s experience as well as the web design standards. My manager has been extremely supportive and helps me make contacts with resources as I need them so leveraging her relationships as well as the relationships of the people on her team has been a big driver of the success we’ve had to date. And since I’ve been at HP for almost 7 years, I have a lot of relationships of my own that have enabled me to get some traction.

Jessica: One of the things you have done is set up an internal website for people throughout the company to get SEO answers, access tools and much more. Can you expand on what it is available and who uses it? If an in-house search marketer wants to create their own SEO Intranet website, what should it entail?

Tanya: I have four key areas within the site that anyone inside the HP Firewall can access: Strategy, Training, Research and Resources. The strategy section outlines how HP envisions SEO and how we approach it ethically and always with the customer in mind. I also post a monthly dashboard to show how we’re doing in natural search and where we still have opportunities. The training section includes access to an on-demand recorded version of our SEO training - developed specifically for HP - as well as alternatives to acquire live training. We’ll provide the training to any team in any region at their convenience and we also set up regular quarterly training sessions that we make available to anyone at HP via web conference. In the research section I post research we’ve purchased or acquired that I think would be of value for SEO. Most of the people doing SEO aren’t doing it full time so they aren’t typically acquiring search research or getting emails targeted at the topic. It’s a way for them to quickly access some of the content I’ve reviewed and felt was of value. Finally, the resources section has links to free tools I use or recommend. There are so many out there that people can choose from but this way I can group them together by what value they offer and even provide some sort of summary as to what the tool does so it’s easy for the user to select which they want to use in which instances. I also post the quick reference tools we’ve developed in house for users to download.

Jessica: You do a lot of training for anyone and everyone who wants to learn SEO - all done virtually. How is that done and what are a few lessons learned that you could recommend for someone who needs to do SEO training remotely for multiple divisions in their company.

Tanya: Training remotely is challenging because it’s more difficult to get the audience to engage and not multitask. However, SEO seems to be a pretty interesting topic to most as we get a lot of questions and comments throughout. We also use survey questions to try and reinforce the main points covered in previous sections and I think that review provides a lot of value even if the learner wasn’t engaged at the time we covered that particular topic.

Jessica: To help people who have gone through training, you’ve created quick reference sheets that other in-house SEOs could also create. What topics do they cover and who do they target?

Tanya: Topics of the quick reference guides are broken out to cover keyword research and selection, content optimization (on page) and link building. The first two are step by step check boxes to help walk people through an SEO exercise the first few times. Link building is more a list of ideas and suggestions and guidance on how to approach it in a manner consistent with HP’s values.

Jessica: Being an in-house SEO you have to walk through many political minefields, one of which is SEO vs. PPC, who aren’t always on the same team. After talking to countless in-house search marketers, one common challenge is that the SEO may be perceived as saying that SEO is better than PPC - when we all know that a solid search strategy contains both. What advice do you have for in-house SEOs to avoid people getting the perception that you are saying SEO is better than PPC?

Tanya: That’s a tough one and I wish I had some no-fail advice. I’ve definitely been misinterpreted as having said SEO was better even though I’ve never believed that. The challenge is selling SEO because it takes a lot of coordination and buy-in from a lot of people just to optimize one page, let alone a whole site. So when you’re trying to get someone excited about the potential of SEO you usually end up comparing it to something related that people already understand, and that’s typically PPC. Unfortunately, any time you come out with a mention of the Google Triangle or how many clicks happen in the organic versus natural space or potentially higher conversion rates from natural, it comes across as SEO is better. And, when you’re focused on one versus the other you’re always going to be seen as biased. I am a firm believer that the two complement each other just like all other marketing activities are meant to be complements so my advice is simply to reiterate that as much as possible.

Jessica: I always tell in-house search marketers that you need outside council, just like a corporate attorney has outside council to discuss issues and an accountant has an auditor that ensures everything is accurate. HP is a company that has an in-house SEO, and still engages an SEO firm for both outside council and to do SEO work. What do you use the SEO firm for and how do you decide which tasks go to the SEO firm vs. doing yourself.

Tanya: I rely on my SEO firm to answer or find the answer to any questions I can’t. They also have some more technical resources that can consult on code development to our developers when they’re trying to make certain sites more search engine friendly. They also get on calls with me to IT when I need a little more backing. I also rely on them for bandwidth. They’re my extended team so a lot of what I need done gets done by them because I know I can tell them what I need and they’ll deliver. There are some things I prefer to do myself. One is to consult with other teams that are just getting up to speed on SEO. Then once they get excited and ready to do some serious SEO projects, I hook them up with our SEO vendor. But if they’re only going to optimize a page or two and have a really short turn-around, I walk them through some of the basics and provide guidance or specific recommendations myself. I also do some of the ad-hoc reporting myself (regular reporting I leave to the agency) and I manage the intranet SEO Program site and all communications regarding SEO (not to mention the standard company stuff you get to participate in as an employee!)

Jessica: You are basically an in-house agency, a resource that the various HP business units can request services from. What have you done that has been extremely successful getting other business units to reach out to you for SEO training and input in projects?

Tanya: Communication. I try to get as much visibility around the program as possible. First, I’ve launched an HP SEO blog where I talk about SEO challenges and successes at HP. I take every opportunity I can to get into internal company newsletters with provide relevant stats and successes we’ve seen with SEO to get them interested enough to call or email me. I’ve submitted the program for a marketing program award which the program is a finalist among 450 entries (we’ll find out next week if it wins). I’ve also crashed many staff and manager meetings to present the benefits of SEO. And some of it comes naturally as others learn about SEO and want to find out more they go searching our intranet and find our optimized SEO Program site and resources. I just got a call today from a colleague in Honk Kong who had heard about the program and wants to leverage the training for a project he is working on so the word is getting out there!

Jessica Bowman is the Director of SEO for Business.com and an independent consultant. Most known for being an in-house search marketer, Jessica relishes in the human side of SEO - the art of getting things done within an organization, a challenge for most search marketers.

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Web Stickies Mod is a new iGoogle gadget that lets you paste virtual sticky notes on your homepage.

Just click Add to create a new note, then drag it anywhere on your page (including the gadget itself, where you can "dock" stickies if you don't want them in the way). You can choose from a variety of opacity, font, font-size and other settings for your notes. What you can't do is move notes to other iGoogle tabs; they're stuck wherever you installed the gadget (though you can certainly install it on multiple tabs). Nice little add-on for those who like stickies but don't like them cluttering up the real world. Thanks, BB! —Rick Broida

Google has been testing new layouts for the past couple of years. Each layout seems to build upon what Google has tried in the past. This timeline reflects just some of the layouts seen from 2005 through today.

December 2005

The first test layout showing the different search option links displayed on the left hand side of the screen rather than their original horizontal location above the search box.

March 2006

The second layout, spotted in the wild, has the left hand side search option links like we’ve seen before but now they have green bars next to them. It was unknown what the green bars truly represented.

March 2007

The search option links have now been moved to the top left hand corner of the screen. Nothing else has changed in the layout of the page though.

April 2007

This new layout has related searches at the top of the search results as well as links to other search options that your query can be performed in. For example, doing a search for C++ will generate links to Code Search, Books, & Groups. The search option links only display if your query has results for that search type. The usual search option links ’Web, Images, Video, etc are still visible in the top left hand side of the screen.

May 2007

This layout has the same top left search option links that we’ve seen in the past. It also displays related searches on the left hand side of the search results. If your query does not have related searches, you might also see a list of different search options that you can perform with the same query string. The list of search options now includes more options like Blogs, Books, Products, Groups, Patents & Scholar.

Two more layouts have been seen recently. Both layouts have the standard search option links above the search box. Also, both layouts have the gradient bar above the search results. Neither of these new layouts has related searches though.

There are several things that Google seems to be focusing on with these latest tests: Placement of the different search option links like Images, News, Video, etc., placement of related search links, and finding new ways to get users to try their queries in other search verticals (Books, Products, Scholar, etc).

Given all the layouts you’ve seen Google test over the years, which do you prefer and why? Do you have any suggestions for improvements you’d like to see Google make to their results pages?

[By Colin Colehour | Original post | Comments]

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

But can't quite remember why

A Harvard professor has published a paper in which he suggests that revolutions in data storage, search, and other information technologies are creating a "panoptic society", in which everything is being watched and, worse, everything which is recorded is preserved and accessible forever.…

I came across a very interesting online tool while I did some research for the post about proper title capitalization. The tool is about the use of the English language in real life and called WordCount™.

WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonness. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

WordCount™ data currently comes from the British National Corpus®, a 100 million words collection of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent an accurate cross-section of current English usage. WordCount includes all words that occur at least twice in the BNC®. In the future, WordCount™ will be modified to track word usage within any desired text, website, and eventually the entire Internet.

Here is a nice shot of how the results look like.

To the look and purpose of the tool did the create state the following.

WordCount™ was designed with a minimalist aesthetic, to let the information speak for itself. The interface is clean, basic and intuitive. The goal is for the user to feel embedded in the language, sifting through words like an archaeologist through sand, awaiting the unexpected find. Observing closely ranked words tells us a great deal about our culture. For instance, “God” is one word from “began”, two words from “start”, and six words from “war”. Another sequence is “america ensure oil opportunity”. Conspiracists unite! As ever, the more one explores, the more is revealed.

WordCount Conspiracy.
The author published a number of WordCount sequences that were discovered by people in the fast amount of data rankings and emailed to him. The results are quite funny and show that some people have certainly too much free time on their hand. Look for yourself. Conspiracists unite!

I like even more the spin off tool of WordCount titled QueryCount.

QueryCount shows the top words queried for at WordCount by users of the site. It is something like a mini-Google Zeitgeist, only a lot smaller, but certainly not censored like its big brother from Google :)

The results shown by QueryCount seem to be about right and more or less represent what I would expect as the top words used in queries on the major search engines as well.

I was checking out the results for 2006 at Google Zeitgeist and my little modified picture below expresses what my thoughts were when I looked at them.

The number one term “bebo” did really have many searches. Bebo is like another MySpace, Xanga or Yahoo! 360. Michael Birch and his wife founded bebo.com in 2005. It saw a huge increase in popularity and number of memberships last year. The site did break into the Alexa Top 100 already.

I have not checked it out myself yet, but I am intrigued.

The Soccer World Cup in Germany was big of course. Metacafe.com is another social network for video sharing. Radioblog is the music search engine “radio.blog.club” at radioblogclub.com. Radio.blog is the web music player powered by Adobe Flash and PHP used by the site.

I took the number two word “myspace” and the number six word “Wikipedia” of the top 10 list and hopped over to Google Trends to compare the search trends of the two words with the trends of the top two words of QueryCount.

The number one QueryCount word clearly beats the number two word of Google Zeitgeist.

It should have been the number Two in Google Zeitgeist instead. The number One actually, because “bebo” did also not have as much searches to beat the real #1.

I can to some degree understand why Google censors words like p**n in something like Google Zeitgeist, but the word Sex? C’mon. Show the world that Americans are not as prude as people say about them. There is nothing wrong with sex. Nobody would be around to talk about it without it.

It is interesting to see how uncensored tools like QueryCount show the real human US. We are what we are and there is no reason to be ashamed to be human. Make love and peace…

Cheers!

Carsten Cumbrowski
Owner of the uncensored Internet Marketing Resources Portal at Cumbrowski.com

Titles of blog posts and web pages are very important. Having important keywords in the title is the most important ranking factor for search engine optimization. It is also  important to make the title appealing and interesting at the same time, because it is usually the first thing people notice when they see your post or web page in the search results of search engines, feed readers (blogs) and news aggregators. Anybody who tries to attract the Digg.com crowds knows that the title tag can make the difference between having a winner and going unnoticed into oblivion.

Interesting about titles in the English language is also the fact that they follow different capitalization rules for the words used in the title compared to the capitalization rules of regular content.

English is my second language and we do not have different rules for this in the German language. It was always a mystery to me, which words have to be capitalized and which words do not. A simplified but wrong rule is to capitalize every single word in the title. It does look awkward in most cases, independent of the fact that it is just wrong to do it that way.

I used my gut feelings most of the times, but decided to get to the base of it and figure out if there are any specific rules that state which word needs to be capitalized and which word does not. Most people probably know about these rules, but I am sure that I am not the only one who did not learn this in school or college. The people who had it in school can consider this information a “refresher”.

In titles of songs or albums and band names, blog posts or articles, the standard rule in the English language is to capitalize words that:

1. Are the first or the last word in the title
2. Are not conjunctions (”and”, “but”, “or”, “nor”), adpositions (”to”, “over”), articles (”an”, “a”, “the”), or the “to” in infinitives.

Conjunctions
Correlative conjunctions are pairs of conjunctions which work together to coordinate two items. English examples include for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so, both … and, either … or, neither … nor, and not (only) … but (… also).

Subordinating conjunctions, also called subordinators, are conjunctions that introduce a dependent clause; English examples include after, although, if, unless, and because. Another way for remembering is the mnemonic “BISAWAWE”: “because“, “if“, “so that“, “after“, “when“, “although“, “while“, and “even though“.  

Adposition
An  adposition is an element that combines syntactically with a phrase and indicates how that phrase should be interpreted in the surrounding context.  “Adposition” is a general term that includes the more specific labels preposition, postposition, and circumposition, which indicate the position of the adposition with respect to its complement phrase. Adpositions are among the most frequently occurring words in languages that have them. Examples: of, to, in, for, on, with, as, by, at, from  

Articles:
The words: the, a and an

Infinitives
The infinitive of a verb is its basic form with or without the particle to. Therefore, do and to do, be and to be, and so on are infinitives.

I found most of the information on Wikipedia and used some of its content directly or in altered form in this post. I also used a few other online resources for complimentary information.

There are always border line cases so I would not worry about it too much, but it helps with the decision if or if not a word in the title should be capitalized if your guts took time of right at the time when you are finalizing a great post for your blog or website.

Cheers!

Carsten Cumbrowski
Resources for internet marketers at Cumbrowski.com, for example keyword research tips and guides for SEO and SEM.

John Hanke, Director Google Earth & Maps, announces the new blog:

As web mapping (dare I say “the geoweb”?) matures, we’re finding that we have a lot more to communicate about new developments in Earth, Maps, Local, and our APIs. The tools are becoming more powerful, more accessible, and more interrelated — not only to each other, but also to the web at large and to things like search.

This should be an interesting blog to follow, perhaps a bit developer focused, but very interesting to non-technical people as we witness the increasing geo-tagging and localization of the Internet.

Here’s my post from last year about Google Earth as a “geobrowser.” The discussion in the post is consistent with some of the remarks about emerging 3-D environments and virtual worlds that Bill Gates made in his keynote yesterday.

According to Hitwise, Google accounted for 65% of all U.S. search in April. The trailing search leader Yahoo accounted for 20.73%, MSN 8.46%, and Ask 3.69%.

Google is the only engine which has consistently increased its search volume up 11% from last year at this point.

Many in the search marketing industry preach about moving on to other 2nd tier engines with Google’s high cost per keyword (in competitive industries) and strict quality score regulations.

Moving on to these 2nd tier engines would be a great idea, only if…PEOPLE ACTUALLY USED THEM. The traffic just isn’t there. Hitwise reported out of the remaining 47 search engines, they all accounted for a total of 1.86% of US search.

Social Bookmarking sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, and others can generate more traffic for you than advertising on Miva, Kanoodle, etc.

Planning my game plan of moving on to other engines as I have in the past but always tempted to continue, I asked about 40-50 people where they search. Most said Google, some said Yahoo.

Search engines are and will be primarily the way search is conducted online at least for the next couple of years to come. If you want maximum exposure, Google is where it’s at.

Pablo Palatnik is Managing Partner of eTrend Media Group, which specializes in Pay-Per-Click Managagement & Social Media Optimization.

Advertisement: Text Link Ads Smart Link Marketing

He's off the Russia

Google UK is threatening to sue Dutch cybersquatter who has used the name Google cunningly in several domains, including Googledatingsite.nl, Googleonlineshop.com, Googlecommunity.nl and Googlestore.nl. Marcel van der Werf ran these sites from the UK.…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Along the lines of yesterday's featured Mac download, Nocturne, a little Javascript can darken the background of any web page. With the help of reader Yusri, I've put together a bookmarklet and Greasemonkey user script to do just that called Darken.

Drag and drop the Darken link to your bookmarks toolbar and click it to activate a dark background with grey type. The bookmarklet works in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera.

To blacken certain sites permanently without having to click a button, after the jump, grab the Darken user script, which works with Firefox and the Greasemonkey extension.

[Install the Darken Greasemonkey user script]

If there are only certain sites you want to blacken, in Greasemonkey's preferences pane, set the list of sites Darken should apply to, as shown:

Now any web page background can be as black as your soul, no clicking required. Give it a spin and let us know how it goes. This code was a modification of Jesse Ruderman's zap colors bookmarklet. Thanks, Yusri! —Gina Trapani

Sergey Brin is telling employees to stop making old products and start improving new ones. "For example, said Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, Google plans to combine its spreadsheet, calendar and word-processing programs into one suite of Web-based applications."

Mac OS X only: Freeware program Address Book to CSV Exporter streamlines the process of importing all of your Address Book contacts directly into Gmail.

If you've been won over by the flood of Gmail tips here at Lifehacker and you want to take the plunge—but you don't want to spend your time importing all of your contacts—this tool is really handy. Just export the file, click the Gmail button, and it'll take you straight to the page in Gmail you need to upload the contacts. Thanks Jason! — Adam Pash

Some recent housecleaning at Google News has resulted in the removal of some controversial foreign news sources that appeared to be gaming the Google News algorithm to drive traffic to their AdSense-heavy site.

One Romanian site, Playfuls.com, had been highly prominent in Google News search results, to the point where as many as ten stories from the publication made the front page, as illustrated by WebProNews in March.

As pointed out by news aggregator Texyt, Playfuls has been recently been removed from the Google News index.

Less than a year ago, Google Adwords launched its Click-to-play, video ads format which offered advertisers a new avenue for promoting their products and services through Google ads. And with the growing popularity of online videos, advertising through this medium has also been found effective in terms of consumer clicks and action beneficial to the ads.

Now, to make video advertising a breeze for current advertiser clients and potential customers, Google Adwords is introducing the Google Ad Creation Marketplace. This online resource which is available right through the advertisers’ Adwords account provides an easy way of creating video ads even for those who have no background in advertising.

From Inside Adwords:

In the Marketplace, you can find video production professionals to create high-quality video ads at a budget you set. These professionals are not Google employees but industry specialists who provide a full suite of services including concept, script-writing, voice-over, editing, and production.

The Google Ad Creation Marketplace is currently seeking out US advertisers who will test the marketplace. If you have an Adwords account, why not give it a try and see for yourself whether video advertising is effective for your products and services.

Advertisement: Text Link Brokers Sell or Buy Text Links

Nathan Weinberg reports on the InsideGoogle blog that Google Maps for Mobile UK was announced at a London press briefing today.

Personally, I’ve been using the US version of Google Maps on my mobile in the UK for around the last four months and it’s been useful on several occasions.

One of the things I’ve never understand about Google is why they take so long to release services and applications for the UK market – especially when the actual content doesn’t appear to have been localized. When selecting the “Find Location” option, the interface displays this US example:

<<Move the map to:
(e.g. 90210, dallas, 10 main st boston ma)>>

I guess it’s easy to forget to localize UI strings like that but there’s no excuse for asking me to select a favorite rather than favourite. Even the online demo gets that right! In fact, one of the few localized features I could find in the UK version of the application was that it centered the map on London after installation. And I don’t live anywhere near there!

Come on, Google. If you’re going to take months to release localized versions of your applications, at least localize them properly for us Brits!

[By Tony Ruscoe | Original post | Comments]

Want to learn the in’s and out’s of the AOL owned social news sharing site Netscape, which seems to be growing in popularity and also loved for its authority status by Yahoo Search?

Well then click on over to PronetAdvertising and read Netscape Navigator Muhammad Saleem’s Beginner’s Guide to Netscape.

Normally I like Nick Carr a lot, but the headline on his most recent article (”Google preparing to police web”) didn’t strike me as accurate. If Nick needs some background on how Google handles urls that potentially spread malware, maybe other people would benefit as well. I dropped a comment on Nick’s post that I’ll echo here, with minor edits and more hyperlinks:

(Disclosure: I’m a software engineer at Google.)

Nick, I normally love your posts, but your headline (”Google preparing to police web”) isn’t very accurate, because we’ve been tackling malware for quite a while. Here’s some historical context.

Almost exactly a year ago, Google and other search engines were raked over the coals for exactly the opposite reason: allowing users to get infected with malware from search engine results. See
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/siteadvisor-study/
for more background. At the time, we were already anticipating the issue and had added “Don’t create pages that install viruses, trojans, or other badware.” to our webmaster guidelines.

Google’s response when we believed malware was present was to warn the user via an interstitial when they clicked on a search result that might infect their computer. See
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/info-about-malware-warnings-and-how-to-appeal-them/
for an example post about this process and how to appeal it if you have removed the malware or believe there was an error.

Users liked the malware protection a lot, so we added some annotation to listings for sites that could potentially infect a machine. See
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/02/google-flags-pages-that-install.html
for more info.

Of course, it’s important to help regular webmasters who might have been hacked and not even know that they were infecting their users. To that effect, we added sample urls with suspected malware to our webmaster console. See
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/got-malware-google-will-help-you-find-it/
for more details.

I’ve highlighted Niels Provos‘ fantastic work on my blog before, but Provos also provides free tools at http://www.spybye.org/ to help webmasters scan their own sites for malware.

All in all, I think Google does a pretty good job of protecting users from getting infected, while at the same time providing tools that assist webmasters in detecting and correcting hacked urls that could spread malware. Certainly compared to other search engines I think we provide more notice to users about potential malware urls, and we provide more info to webmasters about potentially hacked urls. So I think Google’s response to this issue balances the needs of users and webmasters pretty well.

I hope that helps give a little more context and historical background. Certainly I’ve seen emails from both sides of this issue, but I think Google strikes a pretty good balance.

Update: I forgot to mention that once you have all this historical background, then you’ll enjoy reading the USENIX paper “Ghost in the Browser” by Niels Provos and several other Googlers. It’s got a lot of useful information for people interested in malware.

Google states:

<<[Google] Blog Search indexes blogs by their site feeds>>

So when I recently started to receive Google Blog Search alerts for Digg articles that didn’t contain any of my search terms, I figured I’d found a bug, posted about it in the forum and emailed the Google Alert and Google Blog Search teams. After receiving more of these alerts on a daily basis, and having heard nothing from Google, I decided to investigate if there was a reason for this.

The search phrase in question was my name in double quotes, so it was quite obvious to me that this phrase didn’t appear in any of the feed items being returned. After carrying out a few searches, I discovered a blog* that was automatically aggregating RSS feeds from Digg and Google Blogoscoped (amongst others). However, due to a bug in their code, my name was occasionally being used as the link text for various Digg articles whenever I was incorrectly identified as the post’s author.

Since this was the only way my name could have been linked to the Digg articles being returned in the search results, it’s pretty obvious that Google Blog Search doesn’t just index blogs based on their feeds; it also quite clearly uses link text from other feeds (or perhaps just other web pages) probably in a similar way to their web search.

Although this produced irrelevant results for me in this instance, the theory is good. Presuming link text is relevant, this should improve Google Blog Search results. However, I think this raises some interesting questions:

• Is Google Blog Search just using link text from indexed feeds or is it being integrated with Google’s standard web index?
• Would it be possible to create a Googlebomb for Google Blog Search using this knowledge?
• Does PageRank count when it comes to blogs and feeds?
• Is Googlebot crawling links found only in feeds and does it obey the rel="nofollow” attribute?
• Will Google Blog Search try to ignore paid links?

What does this mean for SEO? Will webmasters now start to focus their efforts on getting inbound links from third-party feeds?

* Rather than being one of those annoying blogs that “borrows” RSS content in order to generate revenue, the owner of this blog states, “i am not scraping content for money reasons, just because i am lazy to visit the blogs every day.”

[By Tony Ruscoe | Original post | Comments]

(Also marking this one as a Google post so people don’t wonder where I went.)

Technically my vacation started a few days ago (I’ve already been in Kentucky for a while catching up with family), but I wanted to let folks know that I’ll be posting less for a few weeks. Last year I didn’t blog at all for a month; this time I intend to blog 2-3 times if something sounds like fun to discuss.

If you want a Matt fix, there’s a few choices:

- While I was in London a few months ago, I sat down at the London Googleplex (Londonplex?) for an interview with Mark Buckingham for .net Magazine. The issue just came out, and there’s a lot of Google goodness in there:

There’s an interview with Chris DiBona, he of the Summer of Code and other open-source goodness. And Thai Tran about Google Maps. And Vanessa Fox about Webmaster Central. Plus I’ve read the interview/article about SEO, and I think it’s quite good:

It’s a very solid 5-6 page introduction to SEO. I believe the magazine is sold in the U.S. as Practical Web Design.
- You might have missed this one, but I did an SEO interview with Zac, a Chinese SEO/search blogger. The most fun part of this was that I did this interview jointly with Jianfei Zhu, a member of my team and a top engineer on Chinese webspam. By the way, Jianfei will be speaking at SES China later in May.
- I’ll be attending SMX in Seattle on June 4-5th, including a “You&A” session that is nothing but questions and answers:

What’s a You&A? That’s where you, the audience, put your questions directly to the head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts. As an engineer in search quality, Matt’s been dealing with webmaster issues for Google since 2000 and is well known to many advanced search marketers from his blog and public speaking.

I may be a little out-of-touch after not reading feeds for a few weeks, but I’ll try to answer the questions as best I can. I think the conference will be fun (I’ve never been to Seattle! Bad Matt!), but if you can’t make it, I’m sure it’ll get live-blogged.

That’s all I can think of for now, but if something else comes to me, I’ll add it here.

Update: One more Matt fix if you care. I’m getting on a plane, so I haven’t read the article yet.

Zuula, which I covered back in January , has expanded its blog search engine from four blog search engines to nine. The new search engines now available include Sphere, Blogdigger, and Bloglines (yay!)

And in case you forgot, Zuula also has Web, image, news, and job meta-search. It’s still in beta but it’s a nice little search engine.