Pedro Sttau

Massive infrastructure near the The Dalles. Pictures are a courtesy of Information Week.

Check out the Full gallery.

That’s right guys. I want to make this a tradition in my blog. During the last weekend of every month I will be giving away two domains. (Friday and Saturday)

The only cache is that you will be required to post an interesting/useful comment in context with the month’s topic. The most interesting/useful answer/resource will win the domain.

Only the first 15 answers will be considered.

Domain: http://www.fwapr.com (Page Rank 1)
Registrar: http://www.namecheap.com/
Expires: Mon 01/14/2008

Topic: SAN Jose SES Conference. Resource: Interesting/useful/fun video. (Please don’t forget to post the source and author of the content)

Looked like real fun, although some of those Googler’s clearly need to get out more often.

Google Dance 2007 - Channel: piutus

Google Dance 2007 - Karaoke Channel: courtrye Proceed at your own rish!

AuctionAds users are reporting severe downtime as well as a drastic drop in revenue.

My client’s to whome I have referenced Actionads are also reporting the same problems. It’s too early to have this sort of problems, if the application wasn’t scalable, why not just postpone the activation of the accounts like a sensible company would? (Ex. Google & analytics accounts)

For those of us who couldn’t be there, I decided to do a coverage of all the video content that I can find from the San Jose Search Engine Strategies conference. Since the content is not mine, I will naturally give all of the credit to the content owners who went through the trouble of documenting the conference and post it on their respective youtube channels.

In case you have any footage you would like to share with me, please feel free to contact me, all the material you send me will be credited to you.

Lets begin with a fantastic footage of the exposition itself, it’s a bit long but worth it. I don’t know the exact date that the video was recorded, so if anyone has any info feel free to post it.

SES San Jose 2007 Exposition - Youtube Channel: ackmnmn

Google is watching your every move, don’t you think you can fool the eyes of the Bot! So buying your way to the top, are we? It’s just a matter of time before you get caught. Riiiiiiiiiiight.

A little word of advice to the big G, Begin by sorting out your first page results, and then worry about what Webmasters are up to.

Search for Web Marketing at Google.pt: (The Red arrow is pointing to my companies website whilst the blue arrow is pointing to the site that is “clustering” the results page).

http://www.google.pt/search?hl=pt-PT&rlz=1T4GGLJ_enPT232PT232&q=web+marketing&meta=

Is a simple condition statement too complex for the algorithm to handle?

IF RESULTS page 1 already contains Page A should I display Page A twice? What about three times? Heck, why not go all the way and cluster my own search results page with a single website?? that should be fun!

I don’t have a lot to complain about since my company is leading the SERPS with a single results. But for the love of God, this is becoming ridiculous, to the point where I’m having trouble explaining to my clients that Google is a good reliable system to invest in.

Maybe the Adwords Learning Center could add a new Sales pitch tutorial on how to lead with questions like: “why is that site occupying three slots in the first page? Why should I invest in PPC when I can get 30% of the top page slots with my website?

Please note that I have nothing against the website’s webmaster, I personally know the owner of the company in question and kudos for him for the fantastic results, but it’s impossible to stay quiet when you see one of your top business search queries being handled by Goolgle the way it is. Sort it out!

Now here is a creative way of kicking the crap out of your competition.

So Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick published some notes about how Google is going to develop a system that will aggregate the data from all of the most prominent Social Network sites. Note that we are not talking about an end-user product, meaning that the purpose of this system is to provide a tool that will generate graph data from all of the network sites without having to login seperatly to each account. Sounds a bit confusing right?

That’s the idea! Of course that there is a hidden agenda here, and doesn’t take a rocket scientist to uncover it.

Imagine not having to re-invite your friends every time you register on a new Social Networking platform since this centralized system will aggregate all of this data for you! and what about only needing to login to your Google account to have all of this data at your mercy? Ah the joy of Google contr…I mean simplicty.

Supposedly, Google is negotiating with Facebook and they have shown a lot of enthusiasm.

The goal is not to replace Facebook. In fact, most people I’ve talked to love Facebook, just want a bit more of their already-public data to be more easily accessible, and want to mitigate site owners’ fears about any single data/platform lock-in. Early talks with Facebook about participating in this project have been incredibly promising.

If you have a centralized system that aggregates all of the data in one platform, the natural progression will be that the traffic will divert from the independent data feeders to the centralized system.

For the life of me I cannot understand how any of the Social Networks can find this exciting or promising in any way, unless of course there is plenty going on that we don’t know about.

This year me and my partner decided not to close the office in August, since there seemed to be a lot of action going on, Lot’s of deals being negotiated, internal developments, and other stuff as well.

I can safely tell you that this is the last year we are doing this. Most of the deals didn’t close simply because the prospect decision makers were on vacation.

Everywhere we turned people were off work, every time we tried to get things done we would get he same answer “come back september”.

People looked at us like there was something seriously wrong with us. “… but…it’s August!!”

For God’s sake, I know it’s August, so ****** what?!?

As some of you know, I completely changed the URL structure of this blog. I only got away with it because the this is a relatively recent blog and I don’t have that many inbound to specific posts yet.

For those of you who have well established Blogs/websites, and don’t have a lot of technical knowledge, or are not familiar with the Apache Mod_rewrite this might come in handy.

Principle nº 1: Don’t move posts unless it’s absolutely necessary.

If you have you have no choice, I suggest you go for a simple Mod_rewrite redirect that will do a clean redirect to the new location of the old post.

Simple .HTACCESS redirect:

1. Obtain all of the old Urls
2. Open your notepad and add the following line of code
Redirect 301 /old.php http://www.yoursite.com/newurl.php
3. Save the file and name it: .htaccess
4. Upload it to your server.

Redirection Rewriting a Rule

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^old\.php$ newurl.php

Very cool presentation my Googler Mark Lesser. He talks about how one should take a step back and try and enjoy the “art of doing nothing” at least once a year.

Something I should deffinately consider doing in the near future.

Was just checking out David Naylor’s Aftervote and I must say it’s very impressive.

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, Aftervote formerly know as Younanimous, is a Search Engine that bases it’s Search results on a voting system similar to the ones we see on most of the Social Networks.

However, the interesting bit is that rather then attempting to fetch it’s own search results (and trying to compete with Google, Yahoo and MSN) it’s using the Search results from these engines and then proceeds to sort them out through a social voting system.

The Ajax back-end makes it really east to get where you want, and the overall design is absolutely impeccable.

I have serious doubts about the scalability of this, but nevertheless it’s a great idea.

A deffinate thumbs up!

According to a poll conducted by the University of Michigan, for the first time Google has been left behind in a Costumer Satisfaction survey. Although the margin is very Small, an interesting pattern seems to be emerging, as Google is belonging to show signs of discontent, specially among IT professionals.

It is also very interesting to see this happen in a crucial turning point for Yahoo, as the new CEO Jerry Yang is about to unfold the companies strategy for the next years.

Note: Big thanks to Rui for bringing this to my attention.

Just to tell you that I am aware that the blog is having a lot of issues at the moment, one of them being that the blog posts are outputing a “404 page not found” error.

Me nad my programmer are adressing this and hopefully we will have it all sorted in a couple of hours.

Update: This issue has now been resolved.

Seems that Google is taking down the paid video rentals and downloads in a couple of days. This of course means that all of the rented videos will no longer be playable.

An email was sent to the Google Video purchasers informing them that they would be credited a fantastic sum of $2 in their Google Checkout accounts, that’s right bonus and gals, not $0.50, not $1, but a total sum of $2 for your troubles!

For god’s sake, why doesn’t this multi million dollar company just reimburse the money people spent with the videos they rented and were expecting to have access too?

I just noticed that Problogger has a new design, and dear oh dear…

Is “overall ugliness” some sort of a trend right now? In the early nighties that rugged unclean look was “the look”, so I’m guessing this is cyclic.

What’s up with this Technorati look? Is it just me or that font is just hard to read and in all fairnness, ugly as hell?

By the way thank you David Naylor for starting the trend with the splendrous redesign of your Blog.