Its interesting to see the types of Keywords and websites that the Great Firewall of China censor’s Online.  Information is Beautiful gives us an awesome idea of what China blocks and as you look through the visualized data its hard not to imagine that the filter that Senator Conroy proposes wouldn’t eventually block the same types of KW’s and websites.

If the thought of internet filtering gets your blood boiling then head on over to No Clean Feed and find out who you can contact and what you can do to help in the fight against blind government censorship.

In the game of marketing, this ever-shifting technology is our greatest friend and our worst enemy. We look like visionary heroes to our clients when we create an embedded Twitter feed that auto-substitutes a series of handwriting fonts for their micro-site. But the next day they are frustrated beyond words when we tell them that they can’t put that simple video into their Powerpoint presentation.

So what to do? Should we shield our clients from the icky inner workings so we appear to be all-knowing technology magicians who work miracles—only to on occasion disappoint completely when our wand turns out to be incompatible with the archaic legacy platform their inventory database is built on? Or should we pull our clients into the technology swamp with us so they can can empathize with the slogging, sloppy mess that it can so often be?

The latter approach might mean technology loses some of its romance, but at least 12:30 AM tech support phone calls might become just that much more pleasant.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/science/09tier.html via http://www.WantToKnow.info/

I learned that intuition is as important as statistics when it comes to making Internet Marketing decisions.  We have to remember that even though we are working on computers we are still working with people. You can advise affiliates all day long about their navigation, metrics and demos but if you don’t have a human connection with your affiliates and merchants then all the technology and number crunching in the world isn’t going to inspire them to promote your products, drive traffic to your website or help to make your campaign work.

The same goes for website design, email marketing and search engine marketing.  When it comes to finding out why people are online and what they are looking for, ask yourself why you are online and what you are looking for.  Stand outside the statistics and ask yourself how you feel about your campaigns / website and you might eb surprised by the creativity that results.

Hi,

My name is Mike and I’m a freelance digital consultant.  A client of mine is looking to by link space from high ranking websites.

I ran a keyword search and your website came up and  I was wondering if you would be interested in selling a text link or banner space on your website where my client could advertise?

If you’re interested please feel free to email, phone or skype me and I can let you know who the client is, we can go from there.

Kind Regards

MIKE

Oxford University Press USA, in a blog post, said “unfriend”, a verb, had beaten netbook, sexting, paywall, birther and death panel for the honour.

“Unfriend has real lex-appeal,” said Christine Lindberg, senior lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program.

“It has both currency and potential longevity,” she said. “In the online social networking context, its meaning is understood, so its adoption as a modern verb form makes this an interesting choice for word of the year.”

Previous words of the year include carbon neutral, locavore and hypermiling.

Locavores are people who eat locally grown food while hypermilers modify their cars and driving techniques to maximise petrol mileage.

“McAfee began to warn of the global cyber arms race more than two years ago, but now we’re seeing increasing evidence that it’s become real,” said Dave DeWalt, president and chief executive of McAfee on Tuesday.

“Several nations around the world are actively engaged in cyber-war-like preparations and attacks,” he said. “Today, the weapons are not nuclear, but virtual, and everyone must adapt to these threats.”

The Santa Clara, California-based McAfee, in its fifth annual Virtual Criminology Report, said China, France, Israel, Russia and the United States were countries that have developed “advanced offensive cyber capabilities.”

McAfee said cyber attacks were on the rise and “cyber warfare is a reality.”

SOURCE: SMH.com.au

This is exciting and interesting and it confirms that SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and Social Media are partners in your success.  You shouldn’t neglect either!

The search engines favour web pages with history, quality and volumes of information, much the same as the way they treat Social Media posts.  This means having an account with Facebook and Twitter is a must if you want to ride this wave.

Get as much history in as you can and remember that accounts that have been around longer with more tweet history may fare better.

Tweet often but keep it natural - and tweet quality.  Tweet when you have something to ask, share or teach.

Use keywords – but don’t stuff your posts full of keywords.  If the tweets are about your industry, you should be using keywords naturally anyway.

Use links in your tweets back to your site (to relevant content on your site) and share the link love – link to other quality sites out there.

Make sure you use your keyword in your bio and if you are just setting up your username, maybe in your username too?  This may or not help.  Again, I must say – do not stuff keywords anywhere – not in tweets, not in your bio, not in your username.

This is a good thing, but if people abuse it and bring the overall quality of Twitter down, we will all be sorry.

If you have a feed that sends your tweets to Facebook, or your Facebook status to Twitter, you may want to consider turning it off.  If you have the same message in both places you are missing an opportunity for Bing to pick up both.  If they are unique, you have 2 chances to get in there!

When Murdoch and other senior News Corp lieutenants have criticised aggregators such as Google for taking a free ride on its content, commentators have questioned why the company doesn’t simply make its content invisible to search engines.

Using the robots.txt protocol on a site indicates to automated web spiders such as Google’s not to index that particular page or to serve up links to it in users’ search results.

Murdoch claimed that readers who randomly reach a  page via search have little value to advertisers. Asked by Sky News political editor David Speers why News hasn’t therefore made its sites invisible to Google, Murdoch replied: “I think we will.”

Although he has previously talked at length about the role of aggregators, it is one of the first times Murdoch has discussed actually removing content from the search engines.

Murdoch’s interview was one of a string of conversations he had with the various News Corp-affiliated media outlets.

Murdoch told The Australian’s media editor Geoff Elliott that the company might be join the auction of digital spectrum.

And Murdoch confirmed to The Daily Telegraph that he’d like to buy Telstra’s stake in Foxtel.