An interesting post over at SearchEngineLand, where Eric Ward discusses the answer to a seemingly simple question of how far you should go with link building in terms of speed and number of links at once. Obviously you want to be below the radar, so to speak, but it’s not quite that simple.

While a question like this may seem well documented on the web, it seems that many people still implement all the wrong strategies for obtaining links towards their sites. I won’t go into too much detail here, because Eric wrote quite an informative post and pretty much explained it all.

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Has anyone tried to get a decent paid listing on a shopping review or lifestyle niche lately? When you visit these sites, they are very eager to show you they are #1 according to [insert favorite internet rating site] or that they rank #3 for some nice keywords. This in turn should guarantee that, after being charged sometimes for very high amounts of money, you will get niche-focused traffic from them, after all they have categories with niche content and lots of visitors. When you see these listings don’t really work, you ask for a direct link because sometimes these pages actually rank well for an interesting search phrase (why not?, let’s get at least some value for the money). Sure, you’ll get the direct link if you upgrade to a premium listing which of course means even more money on top of what you already payed. When you get down to it, if a paid listing is on a page that ranks well, is it worth that much extra money to get a direct link? Should we tolerate this kind of rip off tactics?

It will take a personal recommendation from a fellow online marketer I actually know to get me to pay for these listings anymore. Fortunately, there are alternatives to getting ripped off by greedy webmasters…

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Social networks have become a bit of a problem for companies haven’t they? It seems that many companies employing a large number of people have had combat a growing problem of their employees spending a lot of time online doing things that are not productive for their company. Latest study to go into this has been done in Australia. According to a Reuters article, an internet security company called SurfControl delved into this problem and found that Facebook users cost their employers about $5 billion a year (1 USD = 1.3 AUD) !

People love being there and telling people what they are doing right now, what their thoughts are right at this second…

It’s so interactive that people just get addicted to watching their Facebook groups all the time.

The study was based on a typical Facebook user, earning average wage, and spending on average an hour online per day. They then calculated the costs of one person in each company spending an hour online every day, instead of working.

SurfControl’s Chairman, Richard Cullen, said banning employees from using Facebook, or being online in general, would probably not be the best way to resolve this problem. Social networks are all about forming relationships, communications and participating in focused groups. This in turn makes people happier and relaxed, and willing to work longer hours.

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A couple of days ago I was domain shopping for a couple of projects I’ve been planning for a while now. Lucky me, I found two great domains available for a normal registration price (about 10$). They were not only great for what I needed but also as domain names by themselves. I tried to purchase them right away using my credit card. The card didn’t work (turns out the issuing bank had technical difficulties for days); my cable connection died (severe thunder storm, damaged infrastructure city-wide); DSL connection died a couple of hours later (same problem as cable); dial-up was simply unusable (dead slow). Finally, two days later, everything started working, I went back, and what do you know? Both domains have been purchased the day before. Bummer! It’s like the cyber gods have all turned against me on this one. Now I have to start looking for new domain names that will do the job, but that won’t be easy, the two I missed were perfect.

My point… when a good domain name comes up have a contingency plan in place - borrow, travel, beg, do whatever it takes to grab it right away. Also, if your idea hangs on something as simple and as unsure as a domain name, then you should probably rethink the whole thing. If the meaning and significance goes only as deep as the domain name, you will probably be in trouble. Grabbing the perfect domain name is just a start, what follows is the real thing. If your idea has substance, the domain name itself may not be all that significant in the end.

Well, back to the drawing board. Gotta go research keywords and come up with a couple of good domain name choices.

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Yep, another people search site. Wink is the place “where people find people”. I tried a search on myself, and was surprised the search actually returned a couple of results from the web with my information. Unlike PeekYou, which didn’t find information about me , Wink actually returned a couple of sources I expected to see. So, I guess that was good.

Visually, there is room for improvement. There is a developer API, which pretty much comes down to enabling people search on your site, with results in form of member thumbnails and nicks. Wink says the API is new and the feature set is largely determined by its customers. They welcome suggestions and developer involvement in shaping future API functionality.

Visit Wink .

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Online Publishers Association released results on August 13, 2007, from a study comparing online behavior in 2003 and in 2007. To sum it up, visitors now tend to spend more time viewing content and less time searching. If you want the numbers, see the Online Publishers Association press release. The OPA also sites a number of factors that have contributed to these changes.

What was interesting also is that there’s a small (5%) decrease in commerce activity. It seems people are taking some of the shopping back offline. It’s not surprising since there had been analysis results in the past months suggesting consumers use the Internet mostly for research and comparison before doing actual shopping offline. This may not present that much of a problem for business that have a majority of offline sales, but for those doing retail mainly online, this decrease, however small, may present an introduction to a far more serious problem in the future. Online retail will have to come up with new ideas on how to convince consumers to buy online, with special focus on the social side of the web today.

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Just in case you couldn’t find that someone you were looking for on Facebook, MySpace, Pownce or maybe Plaxo, here is another social network called PeekYou. They say they are the new kind of white pages. The idea is to create a profile that consolidates all your profiles on the web on whatever other network you may be storing your information, or another type of website such as a personal site or blog. You can also create profiles for other people - friends and family - and thus make sure they can be found online. BTW, peekyou = people seek you. At the top of the page it says “50,397,199 Profiles Online”, they probably meant to show the number of profiles online in total for all the networks on the Web. PeekYou seems to want to bring all the sources together in one place. A very tough task, but the idea is ok though.

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Facebook has released a special part of their site devoted to iPhone users. As of yesterday iPhone users can access Facebook on a new address ( iphone.facebook.com ). NetVibes has already launched their iPhone site allowing iPhone users to access NetVibes tailored to their device.

TechCrunch has published pictures of what the two social networks look like on the iPhone, so go and see Facebook on iPhone here, and NetVibes on iPhone here.

The iPhone has spawned a whole wave of changes online. Facebook and NetVibes followed, which is logical considering their sites cater to exactly the kind of audience that may be the majority of iPhone users.

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M:Metrics, a Seattle (US) based company specialized in mobile content and application consumption benchmarking, released a press release about a study measuring mobile social networking in the US and Europe. The results are interesting, and show a growing trend in mobile social networking in these areas. MySpace leads in the US and EU market, whereas MSN was the number one choice for Web 2.0 content. Bottom line is 3.5% mobile users access social networks through their mobiles in the US, whereas 2.5% (largest part) users in the UK user mobiles to access social networks. Here is a screenshot of the data from the press release:

Nearly every online social networking site has added the ability to connect to these communities with a mobile phone, allowing people to access profiles and share content while they’re on the go. With the mobile phone playing a central role in people’s social lives, it’s only natural that social networking sites are working to bridge the gap between the online and mobile worlds.

MySpace and Facebook seem to be the social networks of choice for mobile users. With the significant rise in Facebook subscribers in the past months (well, years really), I wouldn’t be surprised to see Facebook come on top, especially since Facebook has made a special interface for iPhone users.

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IT security firm Sophos conducted a small test to see how Facebook users treat other people on the network. Sophos created a bogus profile called Freddi Staur to contact other Facebook users. To sum it up, out of 200 random users contacted, 87 added Freddi to friends, and 82 shared personal information with “him”. You can read in more detail on C|NET News.

These days it seems it’s up to the individual to decide whom they consider a friend. Are your friends only people you actually met or know from the “real” world (or meatworld, a term I came across)? How about someone you’ve had hundreds of chats with, or exchanged hundreds of emails with? Are they friends? In my experience, people I’ve communicated with online for longer periods, usually for work purposes, I usually meet in person at some point, so I guess it’s a small evolution process from being an online friend to being a “real” world friend. Then again, the whole idea of social networking on the web, with its very early beginnings in chat rooms, was to communicate with people around the world, even though you may never end up meeting these people in person. Some very strong friendships developed this way, later to be extended into the real world. It’s the basics from the real world that should be applied - do you meet a stranger in real life and tell them all your personal information? Of course not. I wish getting that girl’s phone number was that easy

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