12/14/2006

UTube’s new business modell

Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation made the headlines earlier this year when they complained about too much traffic they got to their domain utube.com by confused internet users who actually wanted to go to YouTube. They even considered legal action against YouTube. Now it seems they found a new business model:
At the top of the UTube Site is a search box which displays sponsored search results, along with links to high paying keywords such as poker or ringtones. According to their news section, they have some 80,000 unique visitors per day. Guess it’s a clever way to profit from that traffic.

12/13/2006

Google patenting search result pages

As New Google Blog writes, Google seems to have filed a patent for its search result pages. Here is a picture of the filing. To me it’s a good example of the insanity of software patents. I guess Philipp Lenssen is right when he points out companies just have to patent such technology today, just to counter similarly trivial patents by other companies. It’s a weird new world.

4/13/2006

谷歌

Yes, this is my first ever post with a chinese title. Google China got itself a new name, as announced by CEO Eric Schmidt on a conference in Bejing. The name 谷歌 is pronounced Guge, and said to mean ‘Valley’s Song’ literally.

Finally, the Google Calendar

So today Google finally released the beta to their long awaited calendar application. My first trial was less than expected, as I only got a server error. The site seems to work stable now though, and I am rather pleased. Unfortunately, features like natural language input or automatic event parsing are only useful to native English speakers, and since there still isn’t a decent Google Maps for Europe I don’t bet on a localized calendar to appear anytime soon. Anyway, I like the interface a lot and will give it a try for managing my appointments with Google Calendar in the next few days.

4/10/2006

Google buys new search algorithm

According to Haaretz Google has just acquired a new search algorithm that has been developed by Israeli student Ori Alon. The algorithm, named Orion, seems to recognize the topic of a search query and generates a list of keywords relevant to that query. A webpage will only appear in the search results, if the page contains enough of the relevant keywords. The algorithm also considers the quality of the website for the ranking, although it is not yet clear how Orion determines quality. Alon reportedly works at Google’s offices now. I wonder if Google is actually going to implement this for their web search, or if they only acquired Orion to keep Yahoo and MSN from getting their hands onto it.

4/8/2006

Earning money with MySpace

PRWeb has an Article suggesting there is a lot of money to be made with MySpace related websites. Of course MySpace is a traffic phenomenon, with a huge mindshare among teenage users. Obviously there is a big demand for support sites that offer help in creating appealing profiles, and some of these sites are reported to earn millions of dollars with advertising. While I do believe this market exists, I have a hard time believing these numbers. I wonder if there is a similar market for Facebook?

3/30/2006

Did Martin Luther predict the blogger movement?

»The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing; every one must be an author; some out of vanity, to acquire celebrity and raise up a name, others for the sake of mere gain.« (Martin Luther, German Reformation leader, Table Talk, 1530s)

If found this quote in the entertaining list of bad predictions. This almost reads as if Martin predicted blogging in 1530: People write for the sake of vanity, to make a name for themselves or, being pro bloggers, for profit. Now, what’s so evil about this?

3/28/2006

Increasing your search engine traffic by making your site findable

If you’ve been in the website game for a little time you know that the majority of traffic for most sites comes from search engines. But there are other means to drive serious traffic to your website, as everyone who has been Slashdotted or been on the Digg frontpage can confirm. These sites drive huge numbers of people to the websites they feature, often resulting in server overload of these sites. Other ways of getting visitors are the bookmark services like del.icio.us, Spurl, BlinkList and many similar services. Tagging seems to be the in vogue way of organizing information, so a good and appropriate tagged site on Technorati or Flickr can receive nice traffic from these too.
Allthough search engines still seem to rely on linkage to determine a sites placement, there are valid reasons to believe that they also measure real traffic to a site and take this into account when calculating rankings. Why do you think Google is giving away Analytics for free? So if you can increase your traffic by getting a lot of visitors from non search engine sites, this might in turn improve your search engine rankings, creating some kind of traffic perpetuum mobile. There is also a good probability that some of these visitors have websites or blogs of their own, and if they do enjoy your content, they might link to you, providing even more Google juice. So how do you tap into this traffic power? You have to make your site as findable as possible. Here are a few ideas:

• Make your site easy to bookmark
  Many people use social bookmarking sites, but they often forget about adding a page to their bookmarks. Help them! At least provide a link to add a page to del.icio.us, which I consider the most important bookmark site, at the bottom of your pages. The code would go like this:
  <a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=http://your_url&title=your__title">Add to del.icio.us</a>
  If you have a word press blog, you can do as I did and use the Scociable plugin, which adds icons for adding a post to almost any bookmark service at the end of the post.
• Tag like crazy
  If you have a blog, use Technorati tags a lot. Having a recent post with a popular tag can bring heaps of visitors. Be honest though and don’t use tags that don’t fit your writings. This damages your credibility, and people won’t be happy to link to you or bookmark your content. If you use wordpress, I highly recommend the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin.
• Flickr your images
  This is a great tipp I read about at Performancing: If you use pictures on your website (who doesn’t), host them on Flickr and provide good tags for them. Provide a link to your site at each of these pictures.

I suggest you try these tactics and see if they work for you. It is very likely you will see a good increase in traffic. Even if it doesn’t boost your search engine rankings (I would be surprised) it is allways good to have more happy visitors.

1/18/2006

The bubble about to burst?

Allthough Yahoo managed to increase their profits by 80 percent, they were unable to meet analysts expectations and promptly suffered a 13 percent drop in their stock value. Couple this with the demise of Searchfox and the blogosphere is abuzz with speculations on the crash of the Web2.0 [via Micro Persuation].
While there is no doubt that the whole 2.0 thing is overhyped, there has been a tremendous amount of innovation last year, which produced a lot of lasting values. I hope nervous investors will understand some day too.

1/8/2006

Blogs are dangerous for those not in the know

For the last week the German blogger scene was busy with two rather similar incidents: Renate Holst, an employee of the federal court »Sozialgericht Bremen« threatened to sue Shopblogger, a very popular blogger here, because he used the term »Sozialgericht Bremen« in the title on one of his posts that then appeared on the first result page in Google for this term. Almost the same time, Günther Klum, the father of supermodel Heidi Klum, threatened to sue another popular blogger, because he used Heidi’s name in one of his posts titles.
Both Klum and Holst seem to have made a serious impact - but not in the way they expected. The threatened bloggers posted about the incidents and immediately got a lot of coverage from other blogs. Through worldwide inter blog connections the stories made it to well read US blogs and even made the digg front page. Then mainstream media kicked in: The popular German magazine Focus did an interview with Renate Holst, where she managed to even make matters worse by explaining, she just wanted the blog article in question to disappear. Some call this censorship. Meanwhile Klum managed to piss of the well respected Handelsblatt newspaper.
So what’s the punchline? By 2006, Weblogs have established extremely powerful networks. Anyone with an interest in public relations should be very careful about attacking well networked bloggers. Some people say, there is no such thing as »Bad Publicity«, as it is always good to be in the spotlight. I believe Holst and Klum have done a lot of damage to their brands’ reputation though, and neither of them expected this to happen. They simply underestimated the power of the word of mouth.