You can try the beta here!

http://maps.bings.com/maps/explore/

Doesn’t play well with Google Chrome.

Good one, MicroSoft.

~ I realize its because it uses silverlight and chrome is a rounding error for Msft.

~ I think the best use of Google Chrome OS would be in use like the Insta Boot Laptop feature that is becoming ever more popular.

* If they could offer it free to any manufacturer / its another niche` platform ala Android (which isn’t so niche).

If every laptop started to have this feature they could get 60% of the number of windows installs within 10 years

Google OS = Google Login = Google Customer

Google is smart.

- It basically says from November 2 thru December 29th they are raising the CPC (Cost per click) rate by 25% due to seasonal buying patterns.

Below is the email in full highlighted are the parts I think are shit.
Important Notification: Product Submit Seasonal Rate Adjustments

From November 2, 2009, until December 29, 2009, Yahoo! will be making a seasonal rate adjustment by increasing the cost per click (CPC) by 25% in all categories. This means that during this period your actual billed CPC will be 25% higher. This adjustment reflects the increased consumer buying activity during the holiday shopping season, which is typified by increased leads, better conversion to sale, and increased revenue for our merchant partners. The 25% adjustment to your billed CPC will be reflected on your Click Report and in your invoice.

Please Note: You will not need to make changes to your account before or after this period.

Terms & Conditions

Please review the Master Terms & Conditions and Program Terms, as your continued use of Yahoo! Product Submit constitutes acceptance of the Master Terms & Conditions and Program Terms.

Please contact Customer Care if you have any questions.

- The Yahoo Product Submit team

————————————————————

How do they know that my sales will increase or that buying activity is higher?

*sending me more leads doesn’t necessarily mean your sending me more sales; perhaps my ads were already at saturation point.

- I agree they probably generate a higher amount of leads for our ads, but as long as its cost per click shouldn’t the model even itself out? Especially if they had a auction model; if they aren’t using one it’s probably one of the reasons for Yahoo’s demise.

- Of course this is Yahoo and we are talking about Yahoo Product Submit (the precursor to Yahoo panama); so this could just be a by-product of a old ass product that fell by the way-side.

* I think the best lesson learned is that of having a business model that will to some degree adjust itself to the market, taking into account competition and value of what your advertising. (I.e. Google)

Yahoo chaps my ass.

So what is this special place I’m talking about? It’s the place where you have plenty of money, plenty of momentum and a great idea. So whats missing?

A business model.

Twitter hasn’t been able to monetize the service yet, although 2mm people use the service everyday. The good news is Google was in this exact situation having raised 25mm and built their mountain view offices having very little revenue. The other good news is that Twitter is growing substantially and have a lot of eyeballs to sell adverts to.
My 2 Cents

I think Twitter will wait 1-2 years from now; when the economy is picking back up or just starting to, once they have say 10x the users they have now (probably 2-3 years away). After they have the amount of users they should offer a way for each user to agree to receive ’1 tweet txt ad’ a day – This should be after you have had only so many followers; that way it isn’t the only tweet newbs are getting.

*open up to VERY select group of advertisers, MSFT, GOOG, VERIZON etc.. then charge them either per message delievered or per a click sent to their site (managed by a 3rd party analytics program)

I can see a company paying $10k to reach 30,000 people that have mentioned their product before, and when they open it up to everyone (via adwords type ads) your mom and pop bakery can hit you up when you mention your in the mood for that muffin.

So I think Twitter becomes “A adwords for real time, connecting brick and motar stores around you to your thought stream”

.rb

The # in the picture above - is the culprit

Google just started bucket testing a feature that is breaking many analytics programs. The culprit seems to be the ‘#’ in the url after a search is made, they used this symbol in order to use AJAX to display the search results.

The problem is anything after the ‘#’ in the url isn’t kept by the browser, so many analytics programs that use the url string to determine the referrer to a website is now showing blanks where keywords used to be.

- This brings into question the company’s motto “Don’t be evil.” I think it really shows that google might be motivated to do some things it normally wouldn’t do, in the interest of its share holders, or because of this economical climate.

- Another question is “Who owns the data?” Google? The User? or The Website they visit? I know there are millions of dollars invested in companies that google just shot in the foo.  I wouldn’t put it past any of them from bringing suit and/or pushing for a antitrust suit.

- I am waiting a repsonse from any credible source; I will update the post when this happens.

Update:

The saga continues, I guess I caught wind a little late as this test has been going for the last 4-5 days. The test has to be a pretty small bucket test as most of my sites are showing less than 5 blank referrers.

It is not our intention to disrupt referrer tracking, and we are continuing to iterate on this project. For more information on the experiments that we run on Google search

That is the best news so far, that when they do roll it out – it won’t be the exact implementation of what is happening now, the bad news is we don’t know for sure if they will f ix the referrer issue. The statement references this post

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/04/this-is-test-this-is-only-test.html

That post has no reference to this specific test; and just says they do bucket testing. Google is still being unusually quiet about this one; No post yet by Matt Cutts or nothing

ideas are easy execution is hard

At least once a month I end up talking to a potential client about SEO (Search Engine Optimization); usually these talks end up with me offering free advice to the client and them walking out probably feeling over whelmed.

I say this to try to communicate my lack of business skills; although I still think my age is holding me back. At 24 years of age its hard to get 50+ year old business men to listen to you. MAny times these business men are coming to me becuase they just woke up and realized their %30 drop in year over year sales isn’t solely based on this slow economy but is also based on their lack of internet sales or having an outdated business model.

Many times after talking with these clients who come to me when they haven’t a penny extra to spend due to low sales; I ask myself why “If you are good enough to work for other peoples business’s why can’t you work for yourself?” I then wake up and realize that yeah if I had a $10,000 dollar runway of cash and 3 months to work I could probably build a site that made $1,5000 a month. That means it would take 6.6 months to re-coop the money; also the amount of monthly maintenence isn’t known.

I am heading this route, it offers many advantages over working for other companies. When you do SEO work for other companies you are doing a kind of work for that company that really can’t be measured as well as per se “manufacturing tools or cold calling direct sales etc…” SEO is a kind of art, but really the art is in the fact that there isn’t a course for it in a college or even vocational school. The only way your employer would know that you weren’t doing it right was if they actually knew what was right, the other measurement is results. Which as stated earlier isn’t really measurable.

Since I am taking this route I better get a plan at least layed out in my mind. First off what kind of business should I do on the internet? That’s the magic question. If you don’t know what I mean by what “kinds” of business’s I mean am I going to try to do (click arbitrage, affiliate page, information page with advertising?) or other more physical business’s (selling shirts, gadgets, books etc..) I think SEO more directly relates when I try to connect it in my mind to the selling of information, and non shipping of real items.

Lets start by comparing the different kinds of information businesses…

• Click arbitrage – Buying and selling clicks from users and search engines to other users and or search engines: You purchase clicks from yahoo for $.10 a click and it lands on a page paying $.26 cents from google
• Selling information – Compiling data at a hurt point where a need is underserved, then collecting that data – displaying it in a better format than any other sites and placing ads on that site
• Selling services – Selling services on the internet or subscriptions for access to information or a application usually hosted on the web.

I will do some thinking on the above and add to this post later.. to be continued.

• This is the first post for my new blog…
• “Whos is ‘my’ – you may ask..

I’m not telling; this blog is an experiment in my writing skill, a personal journal and will mostly likely turn into nothing of interest or vaule to anyone other than myself. I will try to work on my writing style for different articles, write – edit re-do and submit to different sources for peer review. I will file this post in my about me page also…