“It was Benjamin Franklin who said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” - strangely close to the day to day practice of seo.

for distributing freely content that AFP in france likes to sell, and for featuring National Vanguard - a US right wing mouthpiece.

shame they couldn’t work on increasing global coverage (still little in the uk, although that could be partly down to the fact that the press here is rubbish at its online coverage).

msn has started eating into google’s market share according to neilsen/net ratings. note that these figures are for the states and we haven’t seen this for the uk (ie hitwise uk).

does the world really need another social network? yahoo seems to think so with the lauch of yahoo 360.

sometimes get the feeling technology doesn’t really understand ’social’. it’s like building a pub on the outskirts of town and calling it ‘the corporate social’ on the basis that putting the word ’social’ in the title means people will come. the yahoo offering in particular looks more like the kind of brochures you would get from the bank.

i didn’t quite see the point of friendster, signed up for LinkedIn at the request of an associate and never used the service again, and last visited friends reunited about 2 years ago.

i do visit quite a few blogs and enjoy quirky sites such as globulos..

just not so into the whole gated community thing, and don’t think it has a strong future on the web. not as strong as those technologies that hide beneath the service - with people only vaguely knowing that they are there. isn’t that part of the beauty of the blog - an open technology that allows you to use it in whatever way you see fit (in this case more or less a collection of notes that i don’t trust my mind to hold).

btw, google has been remarkably quiet about its ‘orkut’ offering.

try the following:

PR Newswire
Business Wire
Market Wire
PR Web

Google estimates that one-third of all queries conducted on its network are in a European language.

There are approximately 200 million internet users in the US, and 225 million in Europe.

Successfully reaching out to Europe is more complicated than translating keywords, page titles, and META tags. The experts agree that to succeed, you must be willing to devote the resources necessary to develop a truly localized ad strategy that understands the market you are moving into.

Traditionally, a search engine returned a set of documents containing your exact query words, with little attempt made to find related pages. So a search for ‘car insurance’ wouldn’t return pages containing the words ‘motor insurance’.

Enter – Latent Semantic Indexing. LSI attempts to map a relationship between every word or phrase in the collection of documents, based on their statistical proximity to each other and interconnectivity. In our ‘car insurance’ and ‘motor insurance’ example, LSI would know that both these phrases often appear on the same page, or pages about ‘car insurance’ are often linked to ‘motor insurance’ and visa-versa. It also knows that ‘car’ and ‘insurance’ occur together. So it’s fairly straightforward for LSI to find pages that are talking about the same subject, but using different languages.

LSI is an extremely powerful method when applied to the Web, because, unlike other techniques where relationships between words and phrases are mapped according to their dictionary definitions, LSI simply maps relationships based on how they appear in the collection of document in the index.

To the user –
It means your query language can be more generic, making it easier to find a wider set of documents matching your query – more choice.

It also means, as far as a search engine using LSI is concerned, the relationship between words are no longer defined by their dictionary meaning, but by their common usage on the web. Some believe this is a better way to derive meaning as language should be dynamic.

.. well, unless all the hype around click fraud continues. seems like click fraud is akin to the perception of crime - a great story for the media so the amount folk worry about it is disproportionate to the degree to which it occurs.

but this article is more about who will continue bidding as the price of ppc continues to rise. kevin lee predicts it will be the sophisticates. that is those who go beyond just monitoring conversions - and actually use the data to tweak on-site factors and drive up return.