Coolest Google Rumour

Late January, Michael Eisenberg, partner at Benchmark Capital – (and he should know, Benchmark Capital are one of the investors in Second Life) mentioned this on his blog:

 “Google is working on turning Google Earth into a virtual world a la SecondLife”

Google Earth ( a 3d mockup of the planet generated from satellite photo’s) is terrific, but Google want you to do more than just zoom through it, it wants you to add to it too.

Google recently released version 6 of its popular 3d modeling program (free) sketchup. 

Late January 2007 Google put out a competition for college students to model their campuses in sketchup.

They even provide the 3D warehouse – a website where you can demonstrate what you’ve build in sketchup

The Metaverse entrance? 

Jerry Paffendorf, research director of the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a futurist organization says “I would expect to see someone using Google Earth as a virtual social space by the end of the year.  He is working on the “Metaverse Roadmap Summit” – a gathering of programmers of virtual worlds

How to Link Bait

The idea of generating traffic to your website seems daunting for many; people often use not too clever ideas, sometimes learning about the Google death penalty as a result.

You don’t want that.  If people can’t find your site, they won’t come to your site; if they don’t come to your site – no surprise – your product or service can not sell.

Q: So how do you generate traffic to your site?

A: You encourage new links!  Think Link Bait!

Eric Ward sums it up neatly and accurately:

“Link Bait has been around longer than I have.  It’s what we used to call ‘content’.”

Google’s Matt Cutts describes it as “Anything interesting enough to catch people’s attention.”

Although it has an unfortunate name, the ideas are tried and true; just ask any journalist, PR or marketing person – you need to ‘hook’ the reader.  Read more about what is linkbait at blogwell.

4 Cool Free Tools for Webmasters

domaintools.com

whois record, domain name, registrar and contact, indexed data, Wikipedia info, SEO

Validator.w3.org

Browsers accept Web pages and try to display them even if they’re not legal HTML. Usually this means that the browser will try to make educated guesses about what you probably meant. The problem is that different browsers (or even different versions of the same browser) will make different guesses about the same illegal construct; worse, if your HTML is really pathological, the browser could get hopelessly confused and produce a mangled mess, or even crash.

This free validation service is available at world wide web consortium (W3C) that checks web documents in formats like html and xhtml for conformance to W3c recommendations and other standards.  It also tells you how to fix it. 

They also include a validator for css.
websiteoptimization.com

This is a web page analyzer – you enter your URL to calculate page size, composition, and download time.

The script calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component.

Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve page load time. The script incorporates best practices from HCI research and web site optimization techniques into its recommendations.

www.siteadvisor.com

mcafee siteadvisor – go to bottom of the page and enter your url for a safety test links – see whether anyone has reported you as spam out there.
 

The Art of the Blog

A recent study by MRI research and CBS chief research officer David Poltrack, only 8% of Americans read blogs.  This figure is based on a survey of 20,000 people.

Yet here I am telling you to blog.  Huh?

Eight percent of people read blogs on a regular basis. 

Search Engines READ blogs; better, search engines LOVE blogs.

Blogs update a lot; they are remarkably free of stupid, confusing code.

If your customers are looking for products that you make, or services that you provide, you want to be the first thing to show up in the search results.  If you want search engines to consider your site to be the most relevant result to your industry – blogging is the way to go.

WHY?: Technorati currently tracks 66 million blogs…

In January 2006, over 70,000 blogs were added every day, now over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) make a debut every day – think about the numbers.

At the beginning of last year, research showed that only about 5% of FORTUNE 500 companies had blogs. A new survey that began in October 2006 has to date looked at 64 Fortune 500 companies and found 43 with at least one public-facing corporate blog.  The Fortune 500 Blog Project is an independent volunteer effort to study public-facing corporate blogs by Fortune 500 companies.  They are reviewing on average about 10 companies a month.  You can help by registering as a researcher; choosing a fortune 500 company and helping them complete their list.

I had a chat with Adam Lasnik (Google Search Evangalist) in December, who said:

“We DO love blogs – because they have frequently updated material and many links – I don’t see us looking down at blogs anytime soon” And that’s the clue:  Frequent updates and many links.

Anthony Hicks began a database of Australian blogs in 2000, but stopped in 2005.  He says the site began with only a couple of hundred bloggers, but ended at 8,500 in 2005. 

An Age article says that as of June 2006, there were 750,000 Aussie blogs

It is an exercise in frustration if you try to get numbers for blogs; so much so that comScore last week announced they are going to join forces with Federated Media and start taking a closer look at the blogosphere.  All everyone knows is that the blogosphere is growing, and growing fast.

What to blog about?

Decide what you want to blog about.  Generally you either write in a news format, reporting what is happening in the world in a particular field, or you write a personal piece, something for friends and family to stay connected with what you are doing, or your opinion on a topic.

So where do you start?

First you need someone to host your blog.  This is easy, and inexpensive.  For the most part, many sites that are dedicated to blogging offer their basic package for free as long as you are happy to have a site name like www.techtalkradio.wordpress.com.

When you sign up, you will have to fill in basic fields like the name of your blog, a brief description.  Then it’s off to determine the basic layout of the page, usually called a template, skin or theme.

That’s pretty much it.  Now you need to add content by adding a posting.  The html is done for you; usually you just click on a button that lets you ‘post’.  Once done, save it and put it out there for the world to see.

Seoblackhat has a great tip:  “In blogging, the tightest grasp is with an open fist”