OzWebMasters

Over at TechCrunch, Paul Carr has written a piece entitled: Thnks Fr Th Mmrs: The Rise Of Microblogging, The Death Of Posterity.

I have always been convinced that Twitter has no future. For the following reasons:

• Being text and link only is too restrictive
• Easily replicated by any other mass communication service (ie Facebook updates)
• It’s a fad - few people actually enjoy reading the minutiae of the lives of others, especially people they don’t actually know
• Most tweets are incomprehensible
• Will never be profitable

It has some uses, like people reporting from a conference. Facebook Places will do a better job of that.

Micro-blogging is basically tweets not worthy of a real blog post. If you can’t bother writing a proper paragraph and using a spell check, I don’t care to read it.If you do write a blog post, there are tools that enable me to be instantly notified. Twitter is superfluous and lacking usefulness.

I have at times been very impressed with the efforts some Microsoft departments have made to be hip & cool. But in so many ways they are stil idiots!

Hotmail - bulk delete of spam, no “are you sure”
Microsoft Partner Program UK - unable to enrol using FireFox. No respect for the possibility that FireFox is the best browser, but SilverLight rules as well.
IE7 - hit the close button, no “are you sure, close ALL tabs”

These are simple things. Being cool won’t cost them. But there seems to be some evil little accountant overlord misguidedly pulling the strings. Fire the prick!

(oh yeah, and Vista - some aspects of it are so bad it should never have been released. A disclosure as to why would be cool)

eBay has asked for special permission to have PayPal as the only means of paying for items on their site. A good discussion as to why this should not be allowed is at IT Wire.

Not happy with having a tidy little monopoly on aspects of the domain name business, they’ve now begun a very sneeky, dirty tactic. Basically, if you use NS for hosting, and someone visits a page on your site that doesn’t exist, they serve ads and keep the profits. Not only is this unethical, it can damage the reputation of your site.

Yes, they mention it in their T&C (amongst 59,000 other words), and yes it is possible to turn it off, but the default is on.

Read more here, and if you are a Network Solutions customer, consider voting with your feet.

A subscription flyer dated 8 Feb 2008 lists numerous reasons why I should subscribe. One of those is the opening sentence, which says:

“…but for less than $5 a week, BRW really is your best investment.”

At the bottom of the page the price for a 50 issue subscription is $199, incl. GST.

$199 divided by 50 is…. $3.98.

• perhaps they decided that less than $5 sounds more appealing than less than $4
• perhaps they can’t count
• perhaps they didn’t update the whole flier when they reduced the price

I’ve emailed them to ask. Their marketing email address (as listed on their site) doesn’t work! So I tried one of the others…

Late last year was this announcement:

auDA, the .au Domain Administrator, today announced the 1 millionth .au domain name had been registered.

‘We are pleased to announce that the 1 millionth .au domain registration is elite-finance.com.au’ said Chris Disspain, auDA’s CEO. ‘We congratulate the Registrant of elite-finance.com.au for being part of this momentous occasion.’

And it is “under construction”. I’d be interested to know how manyare actually being used. I know I have more in the “to do” pile than what I am actually using.

How’s that for a feel good news item:

 Almost one in three web users in the Oceania region – 31 per cent – were using Firefox, compared to 28 per cent in Europe and 21 per cent in the US, XiTi said.

 And I’m guessing many people are like me, still use IE occasionally for when I am forced to. Add that into the equation, and the real figure might be higher still.

Knowing how addictive it could be, I have been putting off adding Scrabulous to my FaceBook. Good thing as well, because like many folk I had just assumed that they had the rights to make it. Turns out the 2 lads from India didn’t, and they’ve been making money from Hasbro’s product.

It has been claimed that the brothers are receiving $US25,000 ($A27,853) per month in advertising revenue from Facebook.

From 500,000 users per day, that is 1/6th of a cent per user, per day.

Obviously Hasbro could have sent their cease and desist a long time ago - my guess is they were waiting until their own FaceBook app is ready to roll, and they will instantly get a massive userbase.

Yet another site has lost its lofty PageRank, and for good reason. phpBB is great (I use it), but the obligatory link from any installation of their forum is not a vote for their site. Yes, using their software could be seen as a vote for the quality and usefulness of the product - but that’s the product, not the site.

The question remains - was this adjustment done manually, or is it part of a new and improved algorithm for spotting links that are part’n'parcel of installing free software?

SEM expert Andy Beal provides this list of tips:

1. Only buy links from sites that are highly relevant to your web site content.
2. If the site you are buying links from already has more than 5 paid links on the page, walk away.
3. If the site labels the links as “sponsored” or “paid links” or anything like that, walk away.
4. Be selective in your targeting. Don’t buy footer or sidebar links if you can help it. Buy a single link from a relevant page.
5. Vary your anchor text. Try to make your anchor text look natural. If you buy links on 100 pages, and they all use the same text, you’re asking for trouble.
6. Avoid any paid link where the seller is also an affiliate for the broker.
7. Check that the page ranks well for its targeted keywords. If it doesn’t rank well for its own keywords, it will likely not help you.
8. Point the links at different pages. Don’t buy lots of links for your homepage.
9. Try to get the links in a contextual format. A link that is part of a highly relevant paragraph will be more valuable.
10. I guess I should round this out to ten. Don’t worry about PageRank. A brand new page may be highly relevant to your industry and rank well, yet the PR shows 0/10. Ignore that, PR takes forever to catch up.

And I agree with every one of them!

I can add:

11. Check back a few weeks later and make sure they haven’t added a “nofollow” to your link
12. Use the keyword suggestion tool at Google Adwords to find related keywords for the keyword you wish to found for - and use a related keyword in your link text