oh well, it seemed the print thing wasn’t going as well as planned. Not being content to be the world leader in online search, Google now wants to try its hand ( and what a hand it holds…) at radio ads.
See Clickz for the whole tune

well, it’s really only a screenshot of something that really imtrigued me today.

Every-one who is on Twitter is either  bragging about their number of followers, talking about others who have many followers, looking at their position on Twittergrader or even paying for people to follow them in order to tell them what they have to say.

To then come accross some-one with 948 followers, yet not a single update, really got me thinking about this tool….

A ruling has been reached among the president’s advisers – and the Secret Service – that will allow him to keep his e-mailing device. The decision is set to be explained this afternoon at the first White House briefing of the new administration.

Read the full story on NYTimes.com

by Catherine Parker

I do search engine optimization (SEO) for a large online tech reviews company in San Francisco, and representing such a credible website is a luxury for many parts of my job. One of the most basic tactics in getting your site to rank highly on search engines is ensuring you have good quality links pointing to your site. For small and medium businesses, this can be a long and arduous process, since you need to create linkbait, find credible sites to link to you, and then entice them with the content you’ve created.  Luckily, this isn’t so hard for us. Our entire business is the creation of fresh content, and our editors are well known in geeky online circles. This means that we get links without needing to ask, and usually they’re from high quality sites.
When we do ask for links, we see great success.  As an example, it took just one short email for me to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) conference organizers to add us on their official blogroll, since we were an exhibitor at their show. Not only did I get the exact link text that I wanted, but I was able to choose where exactly on their page I wanted it to be placed. This to me was a great example of the true power you can harness once you’ve built a good brand.

Today I’m very honoured to have a guest posting from Catherine Parker, a South African SEO expert with a tech company in San Francisco

Catching My Breath in San Francisco
It’s been a frenetic and exhausting last month or so in the Bay Area. I work for a website that reviews tech products, and the biggest days of the year in my company are over the Thanksgiving weekend in late November. During “Black Friday” and “Cyber Monday” of that weekend, Americans go mad with spending, both on and offline. Since the U.S. economy has taken a dive, reviews sites like ours are crucial in the sales cycle, as customers are being more careful than ever about where they spend their dollars on luxury goods.
The Thanksgiving rush is closely followed by the Christmas season, which these days is as big a deal for online retailers as it is for bricks and mortar sellers. More and more, people are abandoning the queues and stress of mall shopping and doing most, if not all, of their shopping online (me included!). It makes so much sense here – shipping costs are negligible, and you get your delivery within a couple of days, which means it’s a no mess, no fuss operation.
Most recently, the first part of January was taken up with two major tech conferences: Macworld in San Francisco, and the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. This year’s Macworld was fairly subdued due to the news of Apple pulling out next year and concerns over Steve Jobs’ health, and CES was also quiet due to fewer than usual exhibitors as a result of the reeling economy. Nevertheless, there were plenty of new tech launches during the show, specifically in the mobile space where companies like Research in Motion (producers of the Blackberry) and Palm are racing to steal market share from the iPhone.
After all that activity, it’s no wonder we’re all feeling a bit frazzled. Monday is a public holiday here, which is a very rare thing in these parts, so I’ll finally be taking a break. See you on the other side!

I’ve finally managed to work through the 1h39 podcast hosted by Joseph Jaffe on this topic.

He had a number of prominent podcasters online who all joined the conversation and had their say.

Worth a listen on that next flight or in the peak time traffic.

Guests who participated include:

• Adam Curry – Podfather – Daily Source Code – Mevio.
• Cliff Ravenscraft - GSPN.TV.
• Shel Holtz - For Immediate Release - The Hobson and Holtz Report.
• Mignon Fogarty - Grammar Girl.
• Terry Fallis - Inside PR.
• Lee Hopkins.
• Jay Berkowitz - Ten Golden Rules.
• Dave Guerra.
• Jay Moonah - Media Driving

Download it at Six Pixels of Separation or Jaffe Juice or of course iTunes.

This is what I get when trying to register for Liberty Life’s online service: BluePrintOnline.co.za

Supported Browsers
As a Liberty Life standard, this site is designed to operate on a Microsoft Internet Explorer Browser and is best viewed with Internet Explorer (IE) Version 5.5 or later. Other browsers are not currently supported however this is being investigated.

This ” being investigated” is just to keep me, their client that does not use IE, quiet. It’s “being investigated” for for as long as the service has been in existence.

I’ve not used IE for 4 years now, I think, so when will this huge ” investigation” finally be complete.

To make matters even worse, should I for some reason want to find a way to install IE, just for my one Liberty policy is this:

Availability

Access to this Servicing facility is available weekdays between 07h00 and 19h00 (GMT). The system may be available after these hours, but it cannot be guaranteed due to batch processing of information.

wow, that’s exactly not the time that I’d like to spend on my personal and private online matters!

Please, if Liberty is your client, HELP THEM!

japie swanepoel

Twitter suffers phishing expeditions:

Twitter, the micro-blogging service, is finding scammers can find a way of stealing identities even when they have only 140 characters or less to work with. On Saturday, the service put out a warning that users may receive direct messages from services with links to what is purported to be Twitter, which could encourage them to give away their login information.

Read the full story at: http://blogs.ft.com/techblog/2009/01/twitter-suffers-phishing-expeditions/