Archive for June, 2010

The mix of power sources in New England

Natural Gas and Nuclear make up almost 75% of power generation sources available in New England.
(Source: DPUC Disclosure Label-Supplier)

Can Small Businesses Find an Affordable Niche in Google’s Paywall Service?

Discussion started over at SEW…

Google always gives prominence first to paying customers (PPC above natural results) and second to what it deems are the most relevant results.

Let’s say that now when we produce valuable content on a client’s website, we have the opportunity to collect a fee. If a customer of Google’s paywall clicks and “accepts the charges”, supposedly we as the publisher of valuable information gain a dominant share of the fee.

This shows a great potential for businesses to invest more greatly in researching and publishing quality content. Of course it could also mean that writing a great headline could earn you the same fees rather than focus on the content behind the paywall…

Let’s look at it another way. I publish great content and offer it via RSS feed to other websites to increase my traffic. Will the paywall only be enacted if the visitor enters by Google referral?

Many questions certainly but I truly hope that Google succeeds in developing a working model for paid content. The dumbing down of literature and culture badly needs a buttress against the hammering of small opinions writ large.

Our earlier post on the verio hosting outage got ranked in Google in about 10 minutes

This behavior indicates 2 things:

1. Google is paying attention to our RSS feed, which is likely a function of how we distribute in on our primary websites (3PRIME & SpiderGourmet)
2. Google is doing a good job of deciding which content is relevant for temporary trends

Caffeine’s launch could be relevant to this as well.

One of our clients websites went down this afternoon, and one thing that really irks me is when a hosting client’s site goes down, but the hosting company’s website is still running fine.

So I go to check and see, and Verio.com was down (1:09EST). So at least they’re all down.

I thought I’d see if they posted on a twitter page and news, and discovered that Verio also hosts Twitter!

Now, the twitter status page was working, but the main twitter website was not.

We’ll be keeping an eye on this, on behalf of FloorMall.com, the online flooring store!

Update (1:22PMEST)
Floormall and Twitter are back up.

Mohandas Ghandi, in a list of 7 of the Worlds Greatest Blunders he made for his grandson, included among the list the following maxim as one of the great blunders of our world:

Commerce without Morality

Warren Buffet, IMHO, is a living example to the world what it means to exercise morality with commerce:

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-06-16/buffett-says-wildly-capricious-economy-inspires-his-charity.html

-C

I mainly use Google alerts for Link alerts, to see when Google “publicly” acknowledges that they have discovered a link to a specific domain or URL. I also use web alerts to find instances of content mentioned certain phrases.

Google has now announced that they are re-naming these. So now web alerts will be everything alerts, and most likely we won’t experience any significant change in our usage and benefits from this free service.

I do think it is notable that this follows the changes to their SERPs, the pages on which valuable keyword placed results are displayed to potential customers. As SERPs become more varied, displaying “everything” results (video, blog comments, items from gmail connected users) this has got expose in greater detail the way that they connect all this recorded content together around it’s keywords, and fence off what is “of interest” for you, as the creater of the everything alert.

Stumble(d)Upon a Great article from Anderson Cooper Chris Guillebeau of AC360° titled 28 things I wish I’d known before I started traveling.

It has some great points to consider if you are ever travelling abroad.

In that vein – I’m surprised he didn’t advise where Not to poke around a broad…

Correction: Article originally by Chris Guillebeau, an AC360° Contributor.

-C

And what really kills me is they were boneheaded enough to publish all of our email addresses in the CC field. That’s just plain rude.

So I apologize but I took advantage and responded to everyone offering our services. As business owners, exploiting opportunity must be our top priority.

Here’s my response:

Spam marketing probably means spammy practices.

Since they thought kindly to include me in the mailing, I thought I’d let you all know that if you’d like a free 10 minute consultation regarding valuable keywords you may be unaware of, feel free to contact me.

Other examples of service are

* Regular blogging, news-related, industry specific
* Link-bait articles, promoted via social media
* Highly relevant reciprocal link building
* Article writing and submission (ezinearticles, etc.)
* PRNewsWire paid press release distribution
* Local newspaper submissions in CT
* Onsite architectural optimization (URLs, filenames, internal link profile)
* Onpage keyword optimization

We are located in North Haven, CT and hope to hear from you!