Found an handy list on Yahoo Buzz - it’s the top 20 How To’s that people want to know how to do.

The dissipointing thing is one you click on a link (ie: How to Draw ) it’s just a pre-fabricated Yahoo Search Query.   That’s fine, but hardly more than I could do myself.

There’s a disease where you hear phantom cell phone rings called "ringxiety"; it got written up recently in the New York Times.

…"of falsely believing you hear your mobile phone ringing or vibrating - is so widespread it has an official name: "ringxiety" and it’s really the subconscious calculating how popular we are.

David Laramie, from California’s School of Professional Psychology, who coined the termed ringxiety and says he himself is a sufferer.

More on phanthom vibrations and phanthom rings in Ringtonia.

 

Wondering if this "ringxiety" is a part of a larger illness or is it just something that happened because we have so many cell phones.  Not sure.

Just reading Mike Grehan’s blog entry on his trip to Hong Kong and the opening of a new office there.   I love reading Mike Grehan’s blog for the pictures and local descriptions of the cities he visits.

Suddenly I recoginize a familar face, Shri!  I ow him an email as I was going to write some blog posts for him - but got so bogged down with other work that I did not yet respond.   Guess it’s time to do that now.

Here I am with Eddie and another buddy, Shri, who runs a niche ex pat business in Hong Kong and is also a moderator at Webmaster World.

I did not know Shri also runs a board at Webmasterworld.  Small world.   Hi Shri!

Shri told me that Hong Kong is much easier to live in than, say, most cities in the United States - we spoke at last Webmasterworld Pubcon in Boston in Mid April.

So an Artist sells numbers as paintings on the web and Seth Godin bought number 552.  For me the concept of this kind of offering is more interesting than the actual product - it’s just a bunch of signs with the numbers 1-1000 on them.   I guess they will never be assembled as one image since they’re sold off.

So what’s the statement?  Usually art has some kind of statement behind it - a belief - something.

Microsoft’s purchase of DeepMetrix, reported here acouple of weeks ago, is rumored to be part of a much larger web analytics offering that will effectively compete with Google Analytics, or surpass it.

According to Ben Charny in eWeek:

"Theories abound as to what’s to be unveiled. Perhaps Microsoft is augmenting many of its online features with Web analytics gizmos from DeepMetrix, a 15-year Internet intelligence firm.

Microsoft said two weeks ago, after confirming the DeepMetrix purchase, that it intended to soon incorporate DeepMetrix’s Web analytics features into AdCenter and other popular MSN features.

Another theory is Microsoft’s to create a line-up of computing hardware that enterprises buy to trick out their intranets’ search capabilities, or to add a hot new search engine to a Web site.

Either of these supposed moves would push Microsoft into direct competition with Google. Consider that there’s Google Analytics, Google’s free Web analytics facet. Meanwhile, Google’s been selling a low-cost enterprise search device, the "Mini," for years now.

There’s more about the newfound Microsoft/Google enterprise competition here to consider.

"Microsoft is clearly entering the lower end of the market to combat Google; it will be interesting to see how this all plays out," said Andrew McKay, vice president of product marketing for leading enterprise search company Fast Search & Transfer.

"The real innovation in search, however, is happening at the high end of the market, where a new generation of search technologies is changing the way companies conduct business."

I’m glad Microsoft will have a robust analytics package to go with AdCenter- they certainly needed one.   I’ve worked extensively with DeepMetrix for the last 18 months on my architect clients, who all have LiveStats.NET now.

One of my favorite Titian Paintings - redone as SuperHero Mashup care of Boing Boing

Oh! This site is Great!   Here’s a couple of Superhero Renaissance art Mashups:

Super Cool Delacroix Superhero Mashup!  Always thought of Liberty Leading the People as Wonder Woman! 

And who can resist the mystery of Mona Zena (Mona Xenas)

Or Jesus as Superman

Or Edward Hopper’s painting of Superman in the Coffee Shoppe!

SeoBook has a good post about quick indications of low quality search spam and this is becoming more and more important in determining how a client’s website is going to rank.  Earlier this month Matt Cutt’s announced that Google was deciding not to index certain types of sites where it detected high amount of Spam Sites in the sites backlinks.  Google also looks at what a site is linking out to.

Here’s a quick list of SPAM you can cut out of your site immediately, care of SeoBook.

• URL name - does it have 12 dashes in it? Is it a subdomain off something totally unrelated? SPAM!
• folder names - are the exceedingly long and/or redundant? SPAM!
• file names - are they redundant with the file paths and long? SPAM!
• page titles, headers and content - are they so keyword rich that it is illegible? SPAM!
• design - does it look like a 4 year old put it together? does the design not match the site? are the colors just ugly? SPAM!
• graphics - do you use the a similar graphic to what most spammers in your industry use? SPAM!
• ad placement - is the ad block floated left inline with the content area? SPAM!
• outbound links - does it only link to crap off topic sites that link back? Is there a huge irrelevant link exchange area? SPAM!

One of the other things I noticed is excessively commercial content categorization can be an inhibitor of ranking in the top non-commercial results.   MSN has a good categorizer for this:  Detecting Online Commercial Intention tool.   Generally speaking, the very top search queries for "free" search results, or "organic" need to be information and transactional in nature as categorized by the search engines.  

Why? because the results are "free" vs. Paid (which are on the right and top) - if you want to rank high for Paid, you pay for it.  If you want to rank high for organic results - you have to provide the best information and have the highest quality backlinks.  That’s the deal and search engines are more and more making that distinction.

So the top organic result for "office furniture" in Google is:  http://www.officefurniture.com/

Result: Commercial-Informational (Page)

Probabilities for Each OCI Type:
Commercial-Informational    Prob.: 0.56323
NonCommercial                    Prob.: 0.29864
Commercial-Transactional    Prob.: 0.13813

What about the top organic result for "house plans" in Google:

http://www.coolhouseplans.com/

Result: Commercial (Page)

Probabilities for Each OCI Type:
NonCommercial                    Prob.: 0.48197
Commercial-Informational    Prob.: 0.40292
Commercial-Transactional    Prob.: 0.11511

Look at my top house plans client who is on the second page of results.

Result: Commercial-Transactional (Page)

Probabilities for Each OCI Type:
Commercial-Transactional    Prob.: 0.39236
Commercial-Informational    Prob.: 0.32321
NonCommercial                    Prob.: 0.28443

Certainly, if the category "house plans" is considered by Search Engines to be a commerical category - then your page is going to need to be considered to be "commerical". However, since free results depend on quality of information, your page must also be "informational" or "non commerical" to rank at the very top for organic results - backlinks notwithstanding.

See how much SEO is changing.  People want to twiddle with keywords - but now it’s also what you actually put on the page.  My client has a couple of ads for Lamps Plus on their page- guess what that cost them?  A first page listing and hundreds and hundreds of visitors a day that don’t come to their site because the search engines think the site is about doing a commerical transaction rather than providing information.

Think hard about what you put on your pages if you want Organic traffic.

You can copy every part of what you understand is the idea, of something, like an airplane strip, but unless you understand all of it, copying what you understand might now work to bring results.  That’s what I got out of Seth Godin’s post on Richard Feynman on marketing.

Happy to say that my posts Idling in America on Webmetricsguru.com got picked up by the Top 40 on About.com

Weekly Pop Music Blog Roundup: The Return of Clay Aiken

It has been 4 days, but the online world still seems to be buzzing about Clay Aiken’s return to primetime television on Wednesday night’s American Idol Finale. A few selected posts:

 

• Idling in America - Fascinating analysis of the Aiken phenomenon based on what people are searching for online.
• Crop Circles, Clay Aiken, and Evolution
• Most of us have heard comparisons of the new ‘do with Pee Wee Herman, but how about Clay or kd?
• Clay Aiken Sings With Fans - Some great live footage.
• When Clay Aiken’s Hair Stole the Show
• Clay Aiken: Shock and Awe

 

B.L. Ochman has an article in NY Metro soon about Business Blogs needing a sense of humor (I’m not sure when it actually is going to be published- but I do read NY Metro on my way to work often).   Here’s her blog post (below)

Paul Berger interviews me today about corporate blogging (page 4) in Metro New York, the free paper given out all over the city. It’s also the biggest newspaper in the world, Berger says, with 61 daily Metro editions in 88 major cities in 19 countries in 18 languages across Europe, North & South America and Asia.

What’s the idea behind Ethics Crisis?

Ethics Crisis was created to promote SRF Global Translations, which specializes in translating ethics compliance and marketing materials for multinational corporations. …we decided to focus on global buisness ethics issues in the blog, providing news, information and resources about translations and ethics compliance. I also added a weird, fun features allowing anonymous confessions of the worst thing people have evver done in business and letting readers rate and comment on the confessions. Bingo!

"Any advice for business owners about blogging?"

Everyone and her dog already has a blog. Make sure you have a good reason to start and sustain a blog. And make it fun. Make your customers smile. Laugh even. … Hardly any bloggers have any sense of humor.