The More Things Change, The More Microsoft Stays The Same by Trevor Bauknight

In the last few weeks, I’ve been watching a sleeping giant stir to life and wondering aloud (See A New Culture At Microsoft? Only Time Will Tell) what it would do when it awoke to find a dedicated army of the normal-sized working feverishly to lash it to the ground. Would Microsoft dedicate itself anew to genuine competition, relying on the merits of its products, or would it throw its considerable weïght around and ensure for another generation that “good enough” remains the standard? The answer is becoming clearer, and while Microsoft has been hinting at the former with a few recent announcements, it looks as if the software giant is ready to start grinding bones instead.

Google’s Personal Evolution by John Stith

Google took another step yesterday in their personal evolution by offering an easy-to-use personalized homepage called Fusion for its users. The new service marks the latest offering in Google’s ever-expanding catalog of products to help users find information quickly and easily.

The new offering, similar to other personalized portal pages from Yahoo, MSN and others, is the next logical step for Google in their development. They feature news, email, weather, stocks, etc. This allows Googlites to put all their features into one simple website.
In all honesty, it is a portal website but it’s something that works well for Google’s direction. Critics have different things to say, some good some not so good. They will comment that this is a weak form of My Yahoo! and My MSN and in some ways they may be correct.

Google To Feed You Ads by David Utter

Google’s AdSense for Feeds gives advertisers placement in popular web site feeds everywhere.

RSS and Atom feeds of web sites showed so much promise. No more going from site to site to see the content you want. Just fire up a compatible feed reader and there’s the content from as many sites as you like, aggregated in one place.
It took providers about a fraction of a nanosecond to include ads with those feeds.

But many think feeds are the wave of the future, where the desired demographics will go for their web content. Google, a very smart company, thinks this way now.

Transfer Your Web Hosting the Right Way by Derek Vaughan

You’ve heard the horror stories, and lived through your own: web hostïng providers that didn’t live up to your expectations. Reasons often stated for switching hostïng companies include - additional features not available, technical support not able to quickly solve problems, billing irregularities or over billing, and most importantly for the majority of web hostïng customers: poor email përformance.

Study: Search Engines Increase Coverage by John Stith

As we go through existence, we find there are great questions in life: What is life’s meaning? What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow? And finally, just how big is the Internet? A recent study attempted to put some of the Internet question into perspective and they discuss how much is covered by the big search engines.

A cloud is moving toward Europe. It carries with it the thunderous, electrical, (digitized?) calling card of storm-fronted majesty, raining in streams of zeros and ones, boisterous, anarchical, bellowing the dirges of Europe’s heyday, reeking of Yankee imposition, a new brand of manifest destiny wearing a name tag pregnant with the usual oddity of foreign names-a name that gurgles from it foghorn style as it moves across the sea-Gooooooo-gle!

Was that a tad dramatic? Judging from France and the EU, it may be an accurate description of how they feel about it.

Quick loading web pages - a must for website optimization and a good policy in search engine optimization.

Why Quick Loading Web Pages?

Unless you rely ONLY on users with high speed Internet connections, you must take into consideration the quick loading issue for your web pages. According to statistics, a first-time visitor will not “waste” more than 5 seconds until seeing the content of your web page or, at least, until he/she gets an idea about what the web page is about. This means that for an average transfer rate of 3 Kbytes per second your web page must take maximum 15 Kbytes of disk space.

With an aggressive pricing strategy and years of brand recognition, Napster and Real will be hard-pressed to face the Yahoo machine.

The company started as the brainchild of a couple of Stanford grads, who felt the nascent World Wide Web needed a little navigational organizing. They created Yahoo! and offered visitors two columns of web site categories where people could find sites of interest.

Website link popularity is used to indicate how many other web pages link to your web page. It is calculated by counting the number of web pages that contain your link, also known as inbound links.

Proper website linking strategies can help you gain inbound links which in turn can greatly improve your search engine ranking. For this reason, it’s wise to maintain link popularity strategies as part of your overall search engine optimization efforts.

There are several linking techniques and strategies used to obtain inbound links. Here are a few popular strategies that just may bring you the results you need:

Can a Search Engine be Biased? by Jason L. Miller

Is there a conspiracy deep in the belly of the Internet beast? Are corporate entities secretly driving the information available to you-subtly stroking toward a global political opinion matching their own agenda? Maybe they are. Maybe they’re not.
For the unwitting, it is largely assumed that this info-universe is under the tight, objective thumb of algorithms, a mathematical surety of neutrality.

But in the world outside, humans prove craftier than processors, and find ways to outsmart search engines. Add some advertising, and the pure waters of objectivity become a cloudy, bleach-white mess.