Trouble at the ODP By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.

The Open Directory Project is the largest human edited directory of web sites and documents existing online at this time. While many search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN maintain largë² databases of electronically spidered sites, the volunteer editors at the ODP read, sort and classify all submitted content before it is added to their search-database. Started in 1998 in reaction to difficulties webmasters had getting their content into Yahoo’s then human edited directory, the Open Directory Project was a simple and effective idea.

A Business Model For Podcasting By Neville Hobson

Software veteran Dan Bricklin (remember VisiCalc?) started podcasting last week…

I’ve finally started my own podcast, “Dan Bricklin’s Software Licensing Podcast“. It will be a series of interviews and perhaps other material that should be of interest to people who care about the legal and managerial aspects of software licensing in general, Open Source licenses in particular, and who knows what else.

As I’m doing more frequently these days, I find and listen to new podcasts as part of learning what others are doing and how they’re doing it. I listened to Dan’s second podcast, a phone conversation with Joel Spolsky, author, blogger, Windows developer and co-founder of Fog Creek Software, recorded last Thursday.

Get Better Search Engine Rankings with RSS by Satyajeet Hattangadi

RSS is the latest craze in online publishing. But what exactly is RSS?

RSS or Rich Site Syndication is a file format similar to XML, and is used by publishers to make their content available to others in a format that can be universally understood.
RSS allows publishers to “syndicate” their content through the distribution of lists of hyperlinks.
It has actually been around for a while, but with the advent of spam filters and online blogging, it is fast becoming the choice of ezine publishers who want to get their message across to their subscribers.
However, not much attention has been given to the advantages RSS provides for search engine optimization.

With its new personalised home pages and its email service, the Internet firm is clearly moving away from search, but it’s anyone’s guess where it’s going

In plotting its future, is Google following its rivals too closely?

The last several months have been marked by the addition of several new features as the search-engine leader attempts to realise its widening ambitions. The latest, introduced last Thursday, is a feature that lets people set up personalised home pages a direct answer to Yahoo’s My Yahoo portal. But in doing so, Google’s online face to the world increasingly resembles those of its Web portal rivals.

Screwed: Is This An Inevitability Of The Search Engine World? by Courtney Heard

By about 2pm everyday, each of my team members has spoken to a good handful of clients and potential clients who have been speaking with other SEO firms. This an absolutely wonderful thing to see, as in the past in our industry, not enough of our consumers were questioning what they were purchasing. It is a sign that accountability will come and the bad guys will be weeded out.
While this is a good sign, it’s the cause of my having to answer the same questïons over and over. The consumers in the SEO world are being fed out and out lies by some of the people who call themselves experts in the area of Search Engine Optimization. They hear these lies and while comparing prices, contact us at Abalone Designs. They then proceed to tell me everything that all of these other companies promised them and I am utterly astonished. Below are some of the most asinine claims I hear through the grapevine.

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.