Hot off the heals of the MyBlogLog API debut, MyBlogLog just released a shiny new widget for displaying recent visitors. In addition to its shininess, you can hover your cursor over a MyBlogLog member to learn more about them. Hovering over Web 2.0 Guru — a recent visitor to the Raven blog — revealed some identifying details and also listed all of the blogs that he authors. There are also options to add a member to My Contacts and to view their profile.
The widget is available from your Blog/Community page on MyBlogLog. Look for the message and link at the top of the page that says, "Check out our shiny new Recent Reader widget."
While Facebook and LinkedIn duke it out to be your main profile on the Internet, a new player, bigsight.org, is creeping into their space with a completely different approach. Unlike the closed off nature of Facebook and LinkedIn, bigsight.org keeps all user information completely public and does it with style. All profiles use an attractive minimalist design that keeps your focus on what's important, the user's data.
Having a good design is nice, but what's really important is how the bigsight.org profiles perform on search engines. The last few months have shown a giant leap in search engine performance for bigsight.org. In many cases, bigsight.org profiles are surpassing almost every other social network in the SERPs, including LinkedIn profiles. So, while Facebook may be the closed off service that let's you control your identity in the social network world, bigsight.org is quickly becoming the service to control your identity on Google.
A case in point is my own vanity search. Doing a Google Search for Jon Henshaw (as of this writing) will return my personal website first, my company's website second and then bigsight.org — bigsight.org surpassed both MyBlogLog and LinkedIn. I highly recommend that everyone stop by bigsight.org to setup their profile. If you're busy (or lazy) like me, then you'll be pleasantly surprised to know that they have a Facebook Profile Importer that will do all of the heavy lifting for you!
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We wanted to thank everyone who has been following our blog. The blog will be a bit sparse this week, because we're putting the final touches on our Raven SEO Tools — implementing help and tutorials, squashing bugs and doing overall cleanup. Raven will officially launch next Monday and will be officially "out of beta!"
We'll continue to publish the SEO Daily Reading and might be able to even squeeze out an in depth review of Market Motive, but other than that we'll be hard at work polishing up Raven.
Stay tuned for more information about our official launch. We think you'll be pleasantly surprised when we release our introductory pricing and also officially announce our new Raven Firefox toolbar (it's rad!).
There's an update to this story at the end of the article
If you go to Network Solutions (I can't even bring myself to provide a link to their site anymore) and look up the availability of a domain, and if it's available, they will register it! This is unbelievable and incredibly unethical. I first read about it on Bill Hartzer's blog (via Marketing Pilgrim) and had to find out for myself. So I went to Network Solution's website and looked up networksolutionscanbiteme.com. As you can see below, the domain name was available.
Then, within seconds of submitting that request, they had already registered it. How do I know that? All I had to do was go to the domain I had just queried and this is what I got.
I smell a class action lawsuit coming on. My advice to you, stay very far away from Network Solutions. Chris Dohman has more details about it on this Sphinn comment.
My biggest problem with this practice has to do with imposing this so-called customer protection service on users that aren't customers yet. For example, what if I stumbled upon Network Solutions and wanted to look up the availability of a domain name. Then, after finding a domain name I liked, I saw their fees and wanted to look elsewhere for registering my domain. Well, I couldn't (for the time being) and I would be held hostage by Network Solutions. I don't like the service for other reasons too, but that's my main beef. Fortunately, there's already some concessions that are being made. Shashi Bellamkonda who works with Network Solutions has posted the following changes that they plan to make within the next week or two.
- We have changed the current webpage to which reserved domain names resolve to a general under construction page. Additionally, all new reserved names after tonight will not resolve to any page at all.
- This week, we will be making enhancements that will address the concerns related to disclosure of zone file and DNS server information of the reserved names. This should address some of the concerns recently raised.
- Very soon we will remove our customer protection measure from our WHOIS search page, so that no domains searched on this page will be reserved. We will continue to reserve, however, domains searched from our homepage.
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Many people tend to give a negative stigma to anything that Microsoft works on. Because of Microsoft's PC dominance and business practices, just about everything that comes out of Redmond is reviewed with a fine tooth comb and equally criticized. In fact, the general consensus seems to be that anything Microsoft creates — especially products and services for the Internet — have an uphill battle to fight. Live Search is no exception.
The overall perception among the SEO community has been that Microsoft hasn't taken their search engine strategy seriously enough and that it's traditionally been a search engine that's easily influenced by search engine optimizers. However, that sentiment appears to be changing. It appears that Microsoft is taking a much more serious and agile approach towards Live Search.
I had the privilege of hanging out with Derrick Wheeler while waiting in line to get my conference badge at PubCon Las Vegas 2007. Derrick was recently hired on by Microsoft as their Senior SEO Architect for their Central Marketing Group. He's been tasked with standardizing and optimizing all of Microsoft's Web properties — no easy task mind you. I also met Jeremiah Andrick at the Live Search vendor booth. Jeremiah is a Program Manager that works closely with the Live Search team. In my brief conversation with him, he described the Live Search team as a semi-autonomous small group of intelligent engineers. Of particular interest was his description of the team being somewhat cut-off from the rest of Redmond, allowing them to be more innovative, reactionary and agile.
I have no reason to doubt Jeremiah, especially after we saw how quickly they were able to respond to the Google AdSense bug we first reported on. Nathan Buggia, the Lead Program Manager for the Live Search Webmaster Center, quickly jumped on the problem and fixed it very quickly. He also did a good job of transparently communicating about the problem and what they did about it.
With all of that being said, I think Live Search deserves more attention than it's previously received — especially attention towards the innovations that they're currently developing right now. A few weeks ago, buried in the comments of an SEOmoz blog entry, Nathan highlighted four of his favorite new features of Live Search that I think are worth taking a closer look at.
Traffic Info, Directions, Maps, Gas Prices, Movie times and Local Search. Access Live's local search and mapping features from a native app on your smartphone. And if you have excess cash, you can connect it to a GPS receiver and it just works. They also added voice recognition and while it isn't perfect yet, it has saved Nathan from crashing his car while trying to look up directions. He's only tried this on his WM Dash, but there's also has a native client for the blackberry.
This technology scans videos and automatically builds a "highlights" reel for the video. Hovering over the video in the results plays the highlights, and then you can click on it to see the full video. They crawl YouTube and thousands of other sites.
If you host an event and want to include general directions for everyone, you can grab one of these maps which provide auto-gens directions to your location from major arterial routes north, south, east and west.
If traffic is no good where you live, then you may also find this useful. (Notice that the map is interactive)
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