So i arrived in Vegas on Saturday night after a nightmare flight from the UK. Nearly missed my connecting flight in NYC because of the massive lines at immigration.
I’ll be attending some sessions and playing in the poker tournament in Wednesday night, would love to meet more people so if you read my blog and want to say hello then feel free to come over and say hi, here is a picture of me 🙂
I doubt i will be posting much here this week so will go a bit quiet.
Short post because the ever brilliant cracked.com has most of this covered and they can present it in such a better way that i ever could.
Image from cracked.com's post
Basically they have done a post about 9 Innocent Google Searches That Get Porn On the First Page and even though i have had some very strange results from certain search terms, i never expected that some of these come back with porn.
Go check it out for a chuckle, then have a little search to see what you can come up with 🙂
Whilst i understand that a lot of people don’t trust Wikipedia all that much, i have to say that i can spend hours upon hours reading article after article. Whilst i can appreciate that not all articles are 100% accurate i think that Wikipedia is one of the best things to ever happen to the Internet. It allows you to quickly find out information on a subject that would require many hours of searching around the net and piecing things together.
So anyway since i adore Wikipedia i thought i would go an check out the latest Wikimedia annual report which can be found at http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Annual_Report
Everything you want to know can be found in there but basically Wikimedia cost about $5m to run, and made about $7m. This is quite amazing considering they have a little more than 20 full time staff and the rest of Wiki is run by you or I 🙂 The pdf also lists the total number of pages in the English version (over 2.6m) along with information about the financial breakdown.
So here’s to Wiki, may you live long and prosper.
Back in July (when the weather was a little sunny and not bitterly cold) i wrote a blog post about using your Facebook profile on Digg. Just to recap, it was regarding the rather great ability to use your Facebook profile to login to Digg without registering an entire new Digg account, on top of that it also allows Digg to post information back to your wall as a news feed to let all your friends know what you have been Digging.
Well after allowing websites like Digg, and Stumbleupon to use Facebook connect it seems that the big FB are set to allow any website to use Facebook Connect on November the 30th and you should be quickly scurrying to work out how you are going to incorporate it into your site. Here’s why and how…
Firstly. The Why?
There are really three major reasons why you should be using Facebook connect on your website, and i am sure that as the platform progresses, there will become many many more.
Stumble reviews posting back to Facebook
You can see a great example of how Facebook Connect is working on the Facebook Example Site
Secondly. The How?
The first thing to do is go and check out the Facebook Wiki on The Anatomy of a Facebook Connect Site then bring yourself back here, and we’ll go through a few steps incase your still unsure of how to implement it.
Back already? Gee you are a fast reader, ok now take a look at the image below to get an idea about how Facebook Connect works in the background…
So the image above explains how it all works, but how do you put it into your site?
Finally, just go and read everything on the developers wiki to get yourself up to speed with other features, and then you can start to look to implement the sections of code into your site. Start of by getting the login button working, then by getting some information back from FB about the user. Once you have mastered that you can then get onto the good stuff like writing back to users walls, and allowing them to invite friends to your site.
There is no doubt in my mind that Facebook connect will be a massive step forwarding in bringing around a centralised way of logging into websites and getting meaningful information about your users. From a search marketing perspective you can gain literally hundreds of new visitors a day to your site. If you have a login form then you should be looking at this now.
I would love to hear other people’s thoughts on Facebook Connect, and if you think you will be implementing it on your site.
…or so a (tsk) .net development blog would have you believe.
I have just read the above linked post on reddit which is from a .net development blog. At first i was very frustrated about how someone could be so ignorant about an industry that they obviously don’t understand, but then at the same time i started to think about how people do view the SEO/SEM industry in a negative light. I know it has been discussed to death about how some SEO’s come across as snake oil salesmen but i feel that this post deserves some attention, especially due to the negativity of some of the reddit comments that people have left. Before i even get started on my views though i will present you with the opening paragraph of the enlightened post…
Let’s face it: SEO is a joke, not a job.
Anybody today can achieve excellent search engine ranking for his own blog or website in his spare time, working on the strength of contents or services offered. A little bit of social bookmarking, a little bit of fuss on major social or professional networks, a little bit of impression exchange, a little bit of back-links here and there: it doesn’t seem to me as a big deal.
Pretty convincing stuff huh? Well not entirely. It seem like this guy has absolutely no idea what real SEO involves. In fact he seems to think that if you just develop a website to standards then you are going to automatically rank for your chosen terms. He even goes on to say that “getting noticed on the web is extremely easy, just with a little reading and even less intelligence.”
Now anyone who has tried to create a site and get it to rank for anything which is remotely competitive will certainly find that getting noticed on the web is far from easy. You obviously have to get the site architecture right, get your pages linking to each other correctly, make sure that you title tags and meta descriptions line up with the page content, ensure that there is no duplication of content, actually right decent content and get it up and indexed by the big G. Now that’s just the on page side of things, we all know how hard it can be to get free links hence why linkbait and creative viral is so effective, and usually not cheap. Lets not even get into link buying which can cost a lot of money for a small site to break into a competitive area.
So its quite obvious that SEO is a job, because if not it wouldnt be a multi million pound industry. However i do see why people look at us so bad. There are so many stories of companies ripping people off and saying how they will submit your site to a gazillion search engines, but it is so frustrating when uneducated fools make comments and posts like the one above. I know some people have bounced around the ideas of having academic standards in the world of SEO, and whilst i am against it, it could help solve some of the negativity that surrounds us all?
Oh, and don’t even get me started about the post author disabling the right click on his website! 1999 called, it wants its javascript back 🙂