I am glad my business isn’t dependent on Google Places or their local business listing product for search referrals.
If it was, I would have already starved to death.
My Google Local Business Listing has been in a state of purgatory for at least a year.
Today I found the following note in my account regarding the status of my listing.
“This listing needs to reviewed further before appearing on Google. Please allow several weeks.”
Google Places Not Timely
GoDaddy has a domain auction marketplace with 2,901,383 domains presently available.
GoDaddy Domain Auctions
I am thinking about listing some of my domains for auction to give their service a try.
Have you ever used the GoDaddy Auction service?
What was your experience like?
From Microsoft:
Bing Is One
Bing is one year old – Join the celebration
Thanks to the support of Microsoft® adCenter advertisers like you, it’s been an amazing inaugural year for Bing. To celebrate, we invite you to explore some of the milestones we’ve achieved together.
• Bing advertisers are reaching a motivated audience; Bing searchers spend 42 percent more than the average search user in the U.S.—21 percent more than Google users and 25 percent more than Yahoo! users.¹
• Plus, people who land on sites from organic search results via Bing are 78 percent more likely to click an ad, compared with arriving on the site from Google.²
• Bing advertisers had a lower average cost-per-click than those on Google, and they had more impressions than both Google and Yahoo! advertisers.3
The pros and cons have long been debated in SEO circles as to whether or not domains are impacted by hyphens or spaces in between keywords in the domain’s address.
The same debate held true for social networking sites and its users addresses.
I initially thought Google’s algorithm would be able to parse Twitter user name addresses in the search results but to date, I have been proven wrong.
A Google search for my name in Google Updates produces a list of people who posted links with my name spelled and spaced correctly – Tim Cohn.
However, the same search doesn’t produce my own Twitter account: Twitter.com/TimCohn
Google Twitter Search
To get a list of my most recent Tweets in Google search, I have to search for my Twitter account name – TimCohn.
Google TwitterSearch
Surely Google can figure out which Twitter accounts are real users names and which Twitter accounts aren’t.
I attended the Pawnee Bill Wild West Show in Pawnee, Oklahoma and had a great time.
I took pictures with my iPhone not realizing trying to capture horses at high speed would be more than my iPhone camera could handle.
Here are a couple of the better pictures without blurry horses:
The Pawnee Bill Wild West Show arena before the show:
Pawnee Bill's Wild West Show
A stage coach on fire:
Stage Coach
Or should I say, the power of asking questions with a browser and then having users provide their own answers (content).
From TechCrunch:
WordPress developer Automattic has acquired Plinky from Thing Labs, the creators of social media application Brizzly. Plinky essentially aims to inspire content creators. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Plinky’s technology prompts you with an intriguing question or challenge and (like a question, or a challenge) and you have to answer. Depending on the prompt, your answer could contain photos, maps, playlists and more. You can then share your Plinky answers on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and others. For example, a sample question prompted from Plinky is “What’s your favorite summer memory?”
WordPress has already added Plinky as a feature of its blogging platform to help writers get their creative juices flowing.
Thing Labs, which was founded by a former Googler who worked on WordPress rival Blogger, actually started as “Plinky” and then changed its name last summer after shifting focus to developing Brizzly.
The Power of Questions
What other forms of online content could be generated by the Question and Answer format employed by Plinky?
From comScore’s May 2010 U.S. Online Video Rankings
YouTube.com achieved record levels of viewing activity in May with an all-time high of 14.6 billion videos viewed and surpassing the threshold of 100 videos per viewer for the first time.
YouTube All Time Video Views High
Over the years I have opted into many a marketer’s email list.
Within the last several months, I have been inundated with offers seemingly everyday.
Unfortunately for each of these marketing list owners, all of their emails are beginning to look and sound a like.
Their formula?
That’s the problem.
They all follow the same formula.
What are the all doing that is the same?
Each email begins first by trying to suspend the receiver’s disbelief.
Marketing List Marketing
Now either all of these offers are too good to be true or they all work wonderfully and the audience as a whole is just too skeptical.
Take your pick.
From the Inside Adwords blog:
The Report Center is full of helpful data, but effective campaign management needs to combine insights and control. That’s why we’ve moved a number of reports from the Report Center directly into the Campaigns tab.
Now you can use AdWords to see the search terms and automatic placements where your ads appeared, segment your data by things like keyword match type and day of week, and email and schedule downloads of the data you want to share. You can do it all on the same pages where you manage your campaigns, making finding key performance drivers (and acting on your discoveries) faster and easier.
With so much useful data available within the Campaigns tab, the AdWords Report Center is no longer the best place to find new reports. So, in order to build the most useful reporting tools possible, we plan to gradually move the existing reports from the Report Center into the Campaigns tab, then retire the Report Center entirely.
I was searching for Summer Solstice today in Google and saw a Tweet in their real time search results from “Bing Social”.
Having never heard of Bing Social, I thought I would investigate further.
Bing Social
Sure enough, clicking through took me to the Bing Social Beta site.
Bing Social Beta
The Bing Social site is where Microsoft collects and posts the “Hottest Social Topics” from both Twitter and Facebook.
While the topics featured in Bing Social may be hot, Microsoft is most likely using the social media streams to flesh out its fledgling search index.
Whether the hot social topics Bing or any other search engine for that matter feature have any shelf life beyond the moment remains to be seen.
Tim Cohn Flickr Feed
@TimCohn | Author Tim Cohn's Blog 