Right, so now you can search the web and win ticket to Kevin Federline’s birthday party. Britney Spears’ ex-husband is apparently really desperate to hawk his album, something that won’t work out if the critics are to be believed. Usually they aren’t, but this might be something to break the norm.

The new site, available at http://searchwithkevin.prodege.com, promises to put Federline’s famed discerning judgment to work for ordinary Web users, with an added incentive: Searchers are automatically entered in a contest to celebrate Federline’s birthday(s) with him in Los Angeles, on March 21st, and Las Vegas, on March 24th–billed as “a once in a lifetime opportunity.”

Play with fire over at Search with Kevin. Ridiculous ploy or a genius scheme?

Originally posted on March 20, 2007 @ 3:14 pm

Top 25 Marketing Blogs

The Viral publishes a Top 25 Marketing Blogs list every week. A browse through the last few lists, or via Technorati, shows that Seth Godin’s blog has been at the top for some time. I’m not 100% sure but I think the positions are being based on Alexa ranking. Hugh Macleod’s wonderfully entertaining (potentially NSFW) Gaping Void blog/ cartoons is #4 on the list, which might be initially surprising for a cartoon. On the other hand, he is a marketing strategist and the cartoon’s blog widget has made him go viral (marketing-wise, that is).

Fired For Blogging

Some employers just don’t get new media. Which is fine. What’s not fine is when they fire someone for blogging on their own time, with nary a mention of the company. That’s what happened [via Micro Persuasion] to Drew Townson, an experienced audio engineer and producer working for a company called Mercenary Audio. Part of the problem is that after Townson posted a pic of his new baby son, employees passed around a copy, which the boss saw, causing him to fire Townson by voicemail.

Nice, very nice. If you’re a blogger and aren’t up to defending yourself in court, check with your employer. Especially in those states that have weak labor laws and where your employer can fire you without cause. (Georgia comes to mind.) And you bloggers for hire might just want to keep this company on your list of clients never to accept.

Control Your Company’s Conversations

It may not be easy to stop people from creating domain names with your trademark, especially negative names, but you can buy them up and shut them down. Tate & Lyle, the company that makes the sugar substitute Splenda (aka sucralose), bought [Sustainable is Good] hundreds of negative domain names with the word “splenda” in them. Johnson & Johnson, a co-developer of the product, also bought up a number of negative domains.

I tried some of the examples listed in the Sustainable is Good article and they produce no web page – no host parking page, no redirect. So the two companies have rendered the domain names useless.

Is this something other companies should consider? One could speculate that domain squatters might then create negative domain names with trademarks not for political reasons but purely in hopes of reselling, even if through a third party. I can’t answer that question, but if it’s something you want to do for your company/ clients, the Sustainable article lists two strategies: reactive domain purchasing and forecasting.

Originally posted on March 17, 2007 @ 2:15 pm

Unlike most other blog search engines, the Google version ranks the search results according to relevancy. A look at a patent gives more insight into how the results are ranked and how to improve your blog’s ranking. (I rounded the numbers out, actual pointers are more than 10).

5 Things That Improve Your Ranking

1. How many RSS subscriptions there are to the blog,
2. How often people click on a link to the post in search results,
3. How many blogrolls, and “high quality” blogrolls the blog is in,
4. If the blog offers visitors the chance to tag posts and whether people are tagging them,
5. References to the blog by sources other than blogs, (Pagerank, and; Others).

5 Things That Deteriorate Your Ranking

1. If new posts appear in short bursts or at predictable intervals, and whether posts are the same size, or roughly the same size,
2. If the content of the posts doesn’t match the content of feeds from the posts, or if the content includes a lot of spam related keywords,
3. If a lot of content is duplicated in multiple posts from a blog,
4. Link distribution of the blog,
5. If posts primarily link to one page or site, (and; Others).

From Search Engine Roundtable. [via Google Operating System]

Originally posted on March 19, 2007 @ 11:38 pm

Abobe’s much hyped Apollo, a cross operating system runtime that allows developers to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications (a sort of Sun Java for Web 2.0) is to be released to the public for Alpha testing, according to ZDNet.

Whilst the launch will cause much excitement amongst the Web 2.0 coding crowd, Apollo faces the same difficulties Sun faced in trying to make Java the cross operating system standard it wanted, essentially Microsoft and its suite of existing products. I’m far from an expert on how Apollo will work, but certainly you can hear the echos of Java circa 1999 in the Apollo hype now. One to watch.

Originally posted on March 18, 2007 @ 10:27 pm

Whether you think Twitter is good or bad, you’re bound to be amazed and/or a bit stunned by Twitterholic.com. It’s a top 100 list on the most followed Twitter users, with hotshots like Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel, Jason Calacanis and more.

At the moment, 15 of these 100 twits are actually from BBC, as in BBC News, BBC One, BBC Sports and various local stations. That makes me all warm and fuzzy, BBC is great at adopting new technology and this is putting Twitter to good use, right?

Our own David Krug is on Twitter of course. He tries to convince me to join. I will, when I’ve redesigned my own blog and actually gotten back to regular updating. In other words, not likely happening anytime soon.

Are you on Twitter?

Originally posted on March 19, 2007 @ 12:15 pm