To understand the future of the Internet, definitely read this article at Wired on freeconomics.

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Talk about knowing your audience–this is definitely the best keyword buy ever:

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• Go to: Google
• Search: French Military Victories
• Click: I’m Feeling Lucky

Or just go here: French Military Victories (and click the first link)

Post by: Demerzel’s China and SEO Blog

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Here’s one of the areas where Baidu is actually behind in its own market comparative to Google (unlike my previous post on how Google is so far behind in understanding China and in localizing the Chinese market). The China SEO blog has the details on this:

Baidu has been rumored to preparing the launch it’s own IM software. As the leading search engine in China and considering the extensive online properties it owns, Baidu has the potential to establish itself very quickly as a player to count on in this very competitive market.

The most used IM service in China now is Tencent’s QQ. MSN messenger (or Live Messenger, as it is being branded now) ranked at the second spot and is used by more educated or affluent Internet users. Yahoo! messenger and Google Talk appear to be non-factors in the IM industry in China.

I have to admit my bias for any kind of IM client that allows me to interface across multiple services so I can chat with my friends without having to run multiple programs at once. That and what killed me from ever using AIM again were the absolutely annoying ads–pop-ups, video, sound, etc. That and the eventual downgrade of AIM to AIM Triton finally made me move to a client that I could customize–for free!

My point: unless Baidu focuses on those areas (of course usability plays a huge part) good luck breaking into the IM market.

Oh, and I have always enjoyed ICQ/QQ over AIM for whatever reason if it wasn’t for few people using it/my wife deleting it off my computer. :/

Post by: Demerzel’s China and SEO Blog

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This flashlight by wicked lasers just screams to me that they really should begin building a phaser. You know how many Trekkies would buy that?

Okay, so maybe not as much profit off Trekkies as a military contract, but still would be sweet.

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I ran across a hot topic on Sphinn titled “Google Showing Bias Towards .org TLDs” and thought to take a look at how other sites/people are trying to run tests on what matters to Google. I am always appreciative to see people trying to run tests that go beyond just pure guesses as I’ve stated before about statistical SEO. Below are some of the findings from The Google Cache on what TLDs matter:

Preliminary Results:

The results were quite shocking. The .org subdomains outranked all other extensions. As you can see, the .nets and .coms are intermixed, some not ranking at all, but the .orgs are stacked at the top. While these results must be taken with a grain of salt until they can be verified on a much larger scale, it does indicate that there may be some bias towards the .org top level domain. (many have suspected this) These results have shown true on appx 80% of datacenters we have tested.

[...]

Implications:

1. Further study is definitely needed. Virante will be expanding the number of test subjects greatly and testing with and without subdomains.
2. Considering the costs are quite similar, it may make sense to begin using .orgs, like our good friends at SEOMoz

I’ve gone through my share of econometric papers, so I usually quickly turn my eyes to what the set-ups were to test such an experiment. First, let’s look at the methodology:

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So, I wanted to be able to somehow convince my wife to make a music video with me of Love’s Angel (爱的天使) by Jolin as a romantic thing, but she’s rejected that idea before. Now, I came up with a great idea that she could buy an LV bag (that would be $1000) as long as she and I could make a music video similar to the one that Jolin has.

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 The main question is: At what point after crossing the rubicon into Grayhat SEO can you justifiably (or morally) limit yourself to various grayhat techniques and not go full swing into Blackhat SEO? Follow the background into how I came upon this before I go into the darker areas of SEO.

Background

I ran into one of my friend’s church friend the other day (or rather he recognized me) and we chatted for a little bit. I asked him what he was doing standing there by himself and he mentioned he was doing a survey. He invited me to try out what he was doing at the mall via asking questions and picking which pictures best represented the question (kind of a psychological test).

At the end of the questions, I asked what my results were and he said there were none, it was just to generate a conversation. I was disappointed as I have done surveys before and unconsciously called him out on his tactics by noting that he did not have a piece of paper or survey papers or anything to truly conduct a survey. Basically I implicitly called “BS” on his survey line and that his real goal was trying to convert people to his religion or to his church.

 The SEO Rubicon

As such, this got me into thinking about the similarity within SEO: At what point after crossing the rubicon into Grayhat SEO can you justifiably (or morally) limit yourself to various grayhat techniques and not go full swing into Blackhat SEO?

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I was reading Richard Brubaker’s post at All Roads Lead to China about how China’s infratstructure is currently maxed out:

With regard to the recent air capacity issues, this is a situation that was horrible 18 months ago. Planes were consistently 1-2 hours delayed, lines were long, and even getting a cab from the airport seemed to take a half day (unless you took the gypsy cabs). A large part of this was the number of airplanes available for commercial airliners, and the fact that any weather delays forced the system to a halt as new lanes could not be made available.

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Nobody likes anything delayed, and it definitely sucks that Star Trek XI will be delayed, but if that’s necessary for a better Star Trek film, so be it.  SyFy Portal has the details:

Although Paramount Pictures is saying “Star Trek XI” will hit theaters May 8, 2009, sources with the studio tell SyFy Portal that no actual premiere date is set in stone.

That’s nearly a half year delay from the Star Trek Under Construction trailer that I linked to previously that showed it would come out on December 25th.

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