With all the other social networks out there is there room for one more? With the social networking being all the rage due largely to the success and celebrity of high profile sites like Myspace and Friendster one is left to wonder where we go from here.  So, if you are indeed one and you are in fact wondering, try this on for size.

There is yet another social networking site online now called MingleNow. What’s the purpose of this site, you ask? Why, linking patrons with local bars and restaurants.  If ever a nobler mission existed, I simply can’t imagine it.  You can chat online with people who may frequent a local establishment and make plans to meet at the local watering hole?  To coin a phrase: Brilliant!

While Myspace has some where around 120 million users it will be interesting to see if MingleNow will be able to capture a meaningful percentage of those users or any others.  Perhaps since MingleNow does offer both online and offline networking focused on the party crowd it could work. The question becomes will this be enough to set the site apart from the more established social networking sites?

How well MingleNow will do remains to be seen. Their niche certainly has potential for the young crowd. A sort of Myspace for the party people.  With their online and offline socializing and the promise of free drinks for inviting others to join maybe that is a cocktail for success or maybe they will be drowning in their own sorrows.

The larger question in my mind would be; is this the proverbial shape of things to come?  Is the next logical step for today’s sprawling, undirected social networking sites going to be a move towards specialization and niche markets?

There are many things you can learn about search engine marketing from infamous rich girl Paris Hilton, who some have called The Queen of Links. Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz puts it another way - “This falls under my ‘Paris Hilton Law of Visibility,’ which states that even the least attractive content can be the most visible with the right media attention.” As you can see, Hilton’s affect on the marketing world has been noticed.

But how can you take the Paris Hilton marketing lessons and apply it to link building? Before we get into that, I should probably provide a little context. Fishkin’s latest post compares link building against creating valuable content and he contends that in today’s search environment, well-linked sites with poor content will, in all likelihood, rank better than sites with excellent content and little-to-no links pointing to them. While it’s probably true well-written content is a very attractive option for inbounds, having such content in no way guarantees good rankings, unless you are producing this content for a non-competitive keyphrase area of the web.

This is where Ms. Hilton comes into play and like Paris has demonstrated, the key to a successful media presence depends on the amount of people paying attention to you. This theory can easily be applied to search engine marketing: your site, unless it’s in an non-competitive area, will not be considered “popular” unless there are a number of unique links pointing to it.

What Fishkin recommends is to develop good content, which will make you more attractive to social networks (Digg, Del.icio.us). Once these sites take notice, the amount of inbound links should improve. However, there is a caveat:

Great content is merely a means to an end, not a ranking strategy by itself. In fact, I have little doubt that much (possibly most) of the very best content on the web today ranks nowhere in Google because it hasn’t been well-marketed.

This means even though Google, et al, are opposed to link farms and the buying of links (and they’ve adjusted their algos accordingly), the amount of links pointing to your site will usually trump the quality of the on-page content.

Chris Richardson
Staff Writer | WebProNews Blog

Robert David Steele a former clandestine services case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency says Google and the CIA are “in bed” with one another. He made the remarks on the nationally syndicated Alex Jones radio show.

Steele stated “I think that Google has made a very important strategic mistake in dealing with the secret elements of the U.S. government - that is a huge mistake and I’m hoping they’ll work their way out of it and basically cut that relationship off “.  Steele says he has confirmed this information with his contacts within the agency. The question this raises is who is controlling information that may be seen as controversial?  Is censorship-taking place and how would one go about proving that censorship has taken place?

One possible example of censorship taking place could be the manipulation of the online film Terror Storm .  The number of viewings the film had on Google were kept artificially low. Speculation  this was done so the film would not enter the top 100. Google says the problem was a glitch and issued this statement; “The temporary statistical change in public view was a result of system issues”. Ok. Fair enough.  I just hope the first amendment is not in jeopardy because of what someone at the CIA may want to censor on Google or anywhere else for that matter.

Michael Hampton who writes for  www.homelandstupidity.us  wrote “Even while Google presents a public image of vigorously protecting its users’ privacy, it has quietly provided assistance to several U.S. intelligence agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency, as the U.S. prosecutes its war on terrorism.” As for Steele he stated, “If Google is indeed starting to do harm then I think it’s important that be documented and publicized”.

We’ve heard these kinds of claims before, so we’ll leave it up to you.  Is this a case of where there’s smoke there’s fire?  Or is it time for tin-foil helmets all around?

A new social network called VOX launched today, and before you can say, “Oh no. Not another MySpace.” Listen up first.

Six Apart, owner of Live Journal, Typepad, and MoveableType also own VOX and while they may offer some MySpace-like features (what social network service doesn’t?), they do have a unique approach to a couple of areas that’s bound to please users - their method of displaying advertising and their attention to privacy issues.

TechCrunch has more:

Vox includes extensive privacy controls, a tag cloud for blog posts and a beautiful WYSWIG composition page. Privacy levels are a big part of the company’s strategy…

One of the things that users are going to love about Vox is that the advertising is incredibly unobtrusive. The business model here looks really smart. There are large sidebar ads only on the admin pages, search results and a few others, it’s great. You can view profile pages and explore the site without looking at big ads! There are a few very small ads in public user pages and users are encouraged to post about their favorite books and movies.

It was also mentioned VOX conducted a beta test to foster their community (which boasts over 85,000 members) before they launched to the general public. VOX also issued a welcome post if you’d like to read more about their rationale for launching another social network service.

Chris Richardson
Staff Writer | WebProNews Blog

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

The online video age, with the eye-popping Google/YouTube acquisition serving as an initial punctuation, is not going away. The popularity of this growing industry is only going to increase, especially once the movie industry picks up their feet and catches up with the vloggers. Case in point, there have been a few ccurrences in the last couple of days that illustrate this point nicely:

First off, the founder of MySpace has decided he’d to try his luck in the online video arena. That’s right, Brad Greenspan has acquired a majority stake in Flurl.com, a video search engine with an impressive page view count of over 100 million a month, according to Comscore. Don’t let anyone say that Greenspan isn’t trying to strike when the iron is hot. Perhaps if Flurl is sold to a Google or Yahoo, he’ll be able to benefit more than he did from the Fox/MySpace purchase. Read more about Greenspan/Flurl partnership here.

Flurl.com isn’t the only video site making news. PureVideo Networks, which two video sites catering to specific video tastes as well as a meta video search, announced the relaunch of StupidVideos.com, a humor video site with a well-stocked index. StupidVideos.com was redesigned to feature a new look; a larger video player; content channels; and improved search and browsing capabilities. The developers made a point to explain their improved browse function, indicating it was the one of the key improvements:

Users can explore deep within the site’s library by selecting videos that are New, Top Rated, and Most Popular and filter by Last 7 Days, Last 30 Days, and All Time, as well as by categories such as Stunts, Sports, Animals, Just Plain Stupid and others. With three browse filters and improved search algorithms, users have a number of ways to access the video they want.

These changes will make StupidVideos very user-friendly, something their 5+ million unique viewers are bound to appreciate.

Finally, WebProNews’ Jason Lee Miller reported an online video story of a different variety - a honest-to-goodness vlogger spat. Ze Frank, host of a video “blog” called The Show doesn’t believe rival vlog Rocketboom’s numbers are what Andrew Baron says they are and Frank was not afraid to let his feelings be known. Frank feels Baron’s reports are inflated and that Rocketboom seems to owe their success to this number/letter combination - 38DD…

Baron did not ignore Frank’s “attack” and responded in kind with Alexa research to back up his claims. Whether Alexa is accurate or not isn’t the issue. The fact that Baron even felt the need to offer a retort is surprising however. Just continue to ride the wave started by Cogdon (which has been sustained and masterly maneuvered by Colan) and let critics like Ze Frank think what they want. Especially if you are pulling in the ad revenue you said you were at the VON Conference.

Chris Richardson
Staff Writer | WebProNews Blog

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

As expected, to accompany their recently redesigned Panama ad platform, Yahoo! has launched a blog focusing on their search marketing endeavors. Called the Yahoo Search Marketing Blog, Yahoo is expected to use this spot to provide Y!SM members and non-members alike timely SEM information, while relating it to the Y!SM environment.

The blog’s introductory post is along the lines of a mission statement, informing users what they can expect:

During the first few months, we’ll use the blog primarily to inform and educate you about the many features and benefits of our new platform, and the important administrative details that you’ll need to know before your upgrade date. We encourage you to bookmark this page, or better yet, subscribe to the blog via RSS, so you can have all the info you need to hit the ground running.

As we move past the upgrade, we will begin to take a broader look at online marketing and the challenges you face. We’ll examine how 21st Century media such as Tivo, satellite radio and the Internet are contributing to the challenges faced by traditional marketing channels like TV, radio and newspapers. Audiences are fragmenting, and advertisers both large and small are looking for understanding and insight into alternate solutions that will provide the connections they need to their target markets.

I would expect the Y!SM blog to function much like Google’s AdWords blog, which is a great resource for AdWords members. Following that rationale and the quality exhibited from other Yahoo blogs (the Buzz blog is my favorite), it stands to reason their newest member will keep the tradition of quality posting alive.

Chris Richardson
Staff Writer | WebProNews Blog

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl

When it comes to big-ticket items like plasma televisions and other electronic toys, who actually shops for these items using the web? Answer - the affluent. According to an eMarketer report, households with incomes over $100,000 are more inclined to do their research and purchases of electronic goods on the web. The numbers breakdown goes like this:

- 93% of the affluent research these purchases
- 62% used both websites and search engines to conduct this research
- 27.5% used email newsletters as part of the research process
- More than half of the affluent buy their computers and peripherals online (59.2% for laptops, 61.1% for desktops, and 57.2% for printers online)

This research and buying trend goes hand-in-hand with the amount of online advertising done by the computing industry, which is the second highest user this style of marketing.

Information like this is golden to web business owners and search marketers alike, especially if you own a site that features electronic goods and products. Knowing whom your audience is, what they are looking for and their propensity to buy is knowledge you usually have to pay for.

Armed with this information, you should be able to alter your marketing campaign and optimization efforts in order to attract these potential customers. Remember, they like to use search engines. Adjust accordingly.

Chris Richardson
Staff Writer | WebProNews Blog

A post at the WebmasterWorld discussion forum brought up the subject of search optimization tips for Microsoft’s search engine, Live.com. The information is fairly standard across the board, but it is good to see this information made public. The question becomes, does anyone care enough about Live.com to implement these attributes (although, if you’ve optimized for Google and Yahoo, you’ve pretty much accomplished the same for MSN)?

During the thread, RichTC, a poster who was also pointed out by Barry, goes over each initial point with a sharp, critical eye. RichTC’s post certainly helps clear up and confusion those of you may have about MSN Search SEO. Some of his nuggets of wisdom include:

*Discussing the Content is King theory - If content was currently king a) the search bot would read all pages on a site rather than skim them b) authority sites rich in content would be ranking left right and centre yet they are not and c)i wouldnt be able to get junk 5-10 page sites ranking well in msn

*Discussing the fresh content theory - I think this was a dream that the marketing people at msn had and the search team think they are on the money with. Fact is i can get sites with no fresh content outranking sites with fresh content. A site with no new content or additions slowly moves up to the number one position of the serps based on just a few choice backlinks.

As you can see, RichTC seems slightly discouraged about MSN Search, or at least the ability to outrank quality sites with other, less qualified sites. It seems to me that if you focus your SEO efforts on the big 2, MSN’s rankings will take care of themselves.

Chris Richardson
Staff Writer | WebProNews Blog

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

For those of you lucky enough to make into the DMOZ directory but don’t want their descriptions or titles popping up in Yahoo search results, we have good news. According to their blog, Yahoo Search now supports the NOODP tag, which instructs Yahoo’s algorithm to ignore the ODP (which stands for Open Directory Project, another name for DMOZ) description and title in favor of your own.

If you’d like to avoid the DMOZ description, place the following attribute(s) in your page’s header:

META NAME=”ROBOTS” CONTENT=”NOODP”

or

META NAME=”Slurp” CONTENT=”NOODP”

If you are unsure of what I’m talking about, I’ll explain a little further. When sites appear in search results, they show up with a description and title. For instance, this is WebProNews’ description in Yahoo:

WebProNews - Breaking eBusiness News
Breaking eBusiness news. Your source for investigative ebusiness reporting and breaking news.

…which is taken from our meta description. If Yahoo was using the DMOZ description, WPN’s would read differently.

If you are happy with the way ODP describes your site, then including the NOODP attribute is unnecessary. But, if you’ve spent a great deal of time crafting your site’s description and don’t want to run the risk of another one being used, then by all means, implement NOODP.

Chris Richardson
Staff Writer | WebProNews Blog

Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl

Saw a site today called dontclick.it, I tried it out and I think maybe I could live without the click. 

It is kind of strange at first, you essentially just mouse over things like you would if you were clicking them but you don’t have to click.  It’s like somebody accidentally used mouseover attributes on all the links in a CSS somewhere and figured out that it actually worked pretty well…

Stop clicking here.  I mean, click that to stop clicking..  So do actually click that one - you know.

Wonder if Google would want to buy those guys too.  After all, if you have no clicking, there can’t be click fraud anymore.  Right?