Open letter we received thinking that we are Google,

A Open Letter I received from our website User thinking that we are google LOL, It was horribly written probably this guy is not a English native

Hello,

I am not a computer expert ,I spent a year and a half learning how to and building my site ,I held the No #1 spot for my category, this was no accident , I spent another year and a half matching my setup to my site, now I am 50thwhen computer people play games with the internet it has REAL consequences to REAL people,what google has done is WRONG.We would have gladly paid them there F bribe money had we know what was a foot.

Dear Goggle

I can not begine to tell you how angry I am.a year and a half of back breaking work.$250,000 investment in building and equipment a year and a half building my site and bikes, and driving it to the top of the rateings. Just to have my hopes and dreams distroyed, by your damm algorium. if you think this will make you the kings of industy, on the backs of the citizens, WRONG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!further more , its people like me and websites like mine that let people like you live in your gilded palices and I am only one small TO YOU personSHAME AND DISHONOR TO YOU!!! in case you have the balls to respond to this email!Kim.southlakeenterprize.com

How much are websites worth – Tip of the day

Many always wondered what their hard designed and developed website is worth. Lots of sites provide ways to evaluate the value of a domain name. When it comes to search engine optimization and search engine marketing value of a domain name is based on

Backlinks: Links that are pointing to that website from external websites.

Quality backlinks: Backlinks mean one thing quality backlinks mean an other. A link from Yahoo homepage is a million times more valuable than a link from a Mom and pop site, Its important to research the quality of backlinks that are pointing to that site,

Dmoz listing: Dmoz is the world’s leading human edited directory a listing in Dmoz adds the value to a website since dmoz plays a very important role in search engine’s way of guaging the value of a website.

Links from high pagerank sites: If the site being sold has links from many high pagerank websites it will definitely boost the value of the domain

Pagerank of the site itself: Pagerank is google’s proprietary core algorithm of judging the value of websites. Even though pagerank doesn’t matter much anymore when it comes to selling sites a good pagerank website will go for a high price

Quality of information on website: A Spam directory is much less valuable than a site with quality pages and quality information, its important that the site has quality information.

Targeted industry: If its a quality site and targets industries like automobiles, real estate etc it is valued much higher.

Uniqueness of information : A site with lots of unique information is important duplicate sites are not gonna go for much money.

Existing traffic and projected traffic: This is last but not the least option when it comes to judging sites if a site is already getting 3000 uniques per day then it should be a very good site. Our site gets anywhere between an average of 2500 uniques to 4000 uniques per day. So you judge the price .

So judging by these points what’s your website worth care to share? Soon we are releasing a new SEO tool which will predict the price of a website based on the above criteria till that time you can use this tool. directory.sootle.com/website-worth

Promoting website for Social networking sites

I have got requests from clients to promote their sites in social networking sites like Myspace, Orkut, Facebook, Friendster etc. We stayed away from it because it looks like too much spam for me. Myspace , orkut, facebook are all sites for youngsters to meet their friends and relatives online. We cannot disturb them by promoting our material, Personally if I find someone trying to promote something to my myspace profile ill find all the best ways to get him banned from Myspace

If you really want to advertise for people in social networking sites go for the paid option myspace, orkut, facebook all have paid ads which will be shown to their visitors. I recommend going by that option

Personal blogs are the best one to promote in social networking sites. If you have friends in myspace you can add a link to your personal blog in your profile and this will definetely make your friends see your blog if they like your blog it will be bookmarked and they will visit your site regularly to read interesting information in it.

I recommend if you want to promote in myspace or facebook do for your blog .

Special Characters, Smileys in Meta Description – Helps or hurts

How many of you have seen sites which use special characters / smileys in their title and meta tags. I have personally come across a lot of sites doing it .

Having smiley’s in title and targeting a commercial audience IMO is not a great idea. when people are looking for professional company to do service for them its better we stay away from all those playful stuff in titles but if its a site servicing a crowd that likes stuff like that we can definitely do it.

Whether it affects ROI or not is a question we never tested it if someone has tested please post your experiences here

Yahoo Open search to support Microformats

Yahoo’s Amit mar has mentioned in their official Yahoo search blog that Yahoo will be supporting Microformats in their opensearch

According to yahoo
“By supporting semantic web standards, Yahoo! Search and site owners can bring a far richer and more useful search experience to consumers. For example, by marking up its profile pages with microformats, LinkedIn can allow Yahoo! Search and others to understand the semantic content and the relationships of the many components of its site. With a richer understanding of LinkedIn’s structured data included in our index, we will be able to present users with more compelling and useful search results for their site. The benefit to LinkedIn is, of course, increased traffic quality and quantity from sites like Yahoo! Search that utilize its structured data. “

So what is Microformat According to wikipedia

A microformat (sometimes abbreviated μF or uF) is a web-based[1] data formatting approach that seeks to re-use existing content as metadata, using only XHTML and HTML classes[2] and attributes.[3] This approach is intended to allow information intended for end-users (such as contact information, geographic coordinates, calendar events, and the like) to also be automatically processed by software.
Although the content of web pages is technically already capable of “automated processing,” and has been since the inception of the web, there are certain limitations. This is because the traditional markup tags used to display information on the web do not describe what the information means.[4] Microformats are intended to bridge this gap by attaching semantics, and thereby obviate other, more complicated methods of automated processing, such as natural language processing or screen scraping. The use, adoption and processing of microformats enables data items to be indexed, searched for, saved or cross-referenced, so that information can be reused or combined.[4]
Current microformats allow the encoding and extraction of events, contact information, social relationships and so on. More are being developed. Version 3 of the Firefox browser,[5] as well as version 8 of Internet Explorer[6] are expected to include native support for microformats.

Several microformats have been developed to enable semantic markup of particular types of information.

hAtom – for marking up Atom feeds from within standard HTML
hCalendar – for events
hCard – for contact information; includes:
adr – for postal addresses
geo – for geographical coordinates (latitude, longitude)
hReview – for reviews
hResume – for resumes or CVs
rel-directory – for distributed directory creation and inclusion
rel-nofollow, an attempt to discourage 3rd party content spam (e.g. spam in blogs).
rel-tag – for decentralized tagging (Folksonomy)
xFolk – for tagged links
XHTML Friends Network (XFN) – for social relationships
XOXO – for lists and outlines

[edit] Proposed microformats
Among the many proposed microformats,[9] the following are undergoing active development:

citation – for citing references
currency – for amounts of money
geo extensions – for places on Mars, The Moon, and other such bodies; for altitude; and for collections of waypoints marking routes or boundaries
species – For the names of living things.
measurements – For physical quantities, structured data-values.

[edit] Uses of microformats
Using microformats within HTML code provides additional formatting and semantic data that can be used by applications. These could be applications that collect data about on-line resources, such as web crawlers, or desktop applications such as e-mail clients or scheduling software.

Several browser extensions, such as Operator, provide the ability to detect microformats within an HTML document and export them into formats compatible with contact management and calendar utilities, such as Microsoft Outlook.

Microsoft expressed a desire to incorporate Microformats into upcoming projects;[10] as have other software companies.

In Wikipedia – and more generally in MediaWiki – microformats are used as part of templates like {{coord}}.

[edit] Evaluation of microformats
Various commentators have offered review and discussion on the design principles and practical aspects of microformats. Additionally, microformats have been compared to other approaches that seek to serve the same or similar purpose.[11] From time to time, there is criticism of a single, or all, microformats.[11] Documented efforts to advocate both the spread and use of microformats are known to exist as well.[12] [13] Håkon Wium Lie has said we will see “a bunch of microformats being developed, and that’s how the semantic web will be built.” [14]

[edit] Design principles
Computer scientist and entrepreneur, Rohit Khare stated that reduce, reuse, and recycle is “shorthand for several design principles” that motivated the development and practices behind microformats.[8][15] These aspects can be summarized as follows:

Reduce: favor the simplest solutions and focus attention on specific problems;
Reuse: work from experience and favor examples of current practice;
Recycle: encourage modularity and the ability to embed, valid XHTML can be reused in blog posts, RSS feeds, and anywhere else you can access the web.[8]

[edit] Accessibility
Because some microformats make use of title attribute of HTML’s abbr element to conceal machine-readable data (particularly date-times and geographical coordinates) in the “abbr design pattern”, the plain text content of the element is inaccessible to those screenreaders that expand abbreviations.[16]

[edit] Intellectual property
As part of the open participation model of the microformats community to require that all contributions be placed into the public domain. This means that any page created, or any content added to microformats is placed into the public domain for maximum possible reuse.

[edit] Alternative approaches
Microformats are not the only solution for providing “more intelligent data” on the web. Alternative approaches exist and are under development as well. For example, the use of XML markup and standards of the semantic web are cited as alternative approaches. [8] Some contrast these with microformats in that they do not necessarily coincide with the design principles of “reduce, reuse, and recycle”, at least not to the same extent.[8]

One advocate of microformats, Tantek Çelik, characterized a problem with alternative approaches:

“ Here’s a new language we want you to learn, and now you need to output these additional files on your server. It’s a hassle. (Microformats) lower the barrier to entry.[4] ”

For some applications the use of other approaches may be valid. If one wishes to use microformat-style embedding but the type of data one wishes to embed does not map to an existing microformat, one can use RDFa to embed arbitrary vocabularies into HTML. An example of this would be embedding domain-specific scientific data on the Web like zoological or chemical data, where no microformat for such data exists. Furthermore, standards such as W3C’s GRDDL allow microformats to be converted into data compatible with the Semantic Web.[17]

Another advocate of microformats, Ryan King, put the compatibility of microformats with other approaches this way:

“ Microformats provide an easy way for many people to contribute semantic data to the web. With GRDDL all of that data is made available for RDF Semantic Web tools. Microformats and GRDDL can work together to build a better web. [17]

Microsoft offers more for yahoo – 34$

According to Citigroup Microsoft has offered a share price of 34$ a increase of 3$ per share. Previous offer of Microsoft was 31$ which yahoo and its share holders denied. It seems soon it will be YahSoft or you can say MicroHoo

Facebook more attractive than google – :-) ***8

Google looses another senior employee to social networking start up facebook. Is facebook going to a be a powerful social networking place in future. Facebook is only next to Myspace I feel it has a long long way to beat myspace but definitely seeing the effort taken by facebook people it seems to going in the right direction

“Facebook on Tuesday confirmed that Ethan Beard, the former director of social media at Google, will join the privately held company as director of business development. Mr. Beard is the second high-profile executive this month to leave Google, a company that was widely considered one of the best places to work in Silicon Valley.
“

Though google is rated by fortune the No.1 company to work recent drop in its stock value might be an other reason its employees are panicking. From over 700$ google’s share value has dropped below 500$. If it continues this way they might end up with a share price of 300$ which is not good for a company like them,

About Facebook:

Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.

Anyone can join Facebook
All that’s needed to join Facebook is a valid email address. To connect with coworkers or classmates, use your school or work email address to register. Once you register, join a regional network to connect with the people in your area.

Discover the people around you
Facebook is made up of many networks, each based around a company, region, or school. Join the networks that reflect your real-life communities to learn more about the people who work, live, or study around you.

Do more
Facebook’s Platform enables anyone, anywhere, to build complete applications that you can choose to use. The possibilities are endless. Define your experience on Facebook by choosing applications that are useful and relevant to your world.

what is the future market share of Google in US?

Many predict google will have in excess of 80% , Even after US going on recession google has started investing heavily on various products. Recently they acquired Doubleclick a leading paid advertising company. They are now doing better in wireless market possibly stealing a share from Verizon in future. Back in the early 20th century many said Ford would be the dominant car manufacturer forever too. However, I think today GMC and Toyota would have something to say about that. Now, considering that Internet technology moves at light-speed compared to automotive technology… it should be a fair assessment that while Google is dominant now, 90% is pretty far fetch.

milliondollarhomepage.com still going strong

milliondollarhomepage.com one of the greatest inventions on Modern .com era is still going strong after 5 years. Alex the founder of million dollar homepage has promised publishers of hosting the ads for upto 2010. Its going strong and should be long enough

Yahoo now supports google’s effort on Open social networking

Yahoo we announced today that it has joined forces with Google and MySpace to create the OpenSocial Foundation, and will also begin supporting the OpenSocial standard. Industry consortiums such as this often start slowly and evolve over time. So far, OpenSocial is rapidly growing and adapting, but still in the early stages.

According to yahoo press release

“OpenSocial addresses an emerging problem for developers who are eagerly building applications people can enjoy with their friends: before OpenSocial, if a developer built a “favorite photos” application to work on one social network, it would have to be built all over again to work on another site. OpenSocial tackles this problem at its technology roots, providing common “plumbing” that lets social applications run on many different websites without requiring duplicate work from either developers or the websites.
The result is a vast distribution platform for social applications, whether they are for sharing photos or playing games or arranging real-world meetings or any number of other activities – everything is more fun, interesting, and useful when users can involve their friends and contacts.”

This video gives a better understanding on how opensocial works and to find more resources

Self expression and communication are often fun and entertaining alone, but OpenSocial is also a platform that can be leveraged to solve real world tasks where the social graph assists us in making decisions. For example, while some might be prone to grab a book at random off the shelf, there are many who appreciate a good recommendation from a friend. With a variety of possibilities in entertainment and interests, it can be useful to facilitate meetings, purchases, recommendations, information management and learning to create a richer, more lasting experience across your application.