Blog Ryan

Looks like Google is feeling the pressure of Yahoo Site Explorer.  Yesterday they announced they will have a new tab in the Webmaster Console that will allow you to see more (although not necessarily all) of the links that Google knows about that point to your site.  It was interesting to see how that applied to one of my sites, NBA Wire.  With just the link operator in Google I show 42 links.  Using the new backlink tool i show just shy of 3,000.  You can export this list, sort it, slice it, dice it…Just remember just because a link shows in the list, doesn’t mean it carries any weight.

More coverage at Search Engine Land, Search Trends, Search Banter, Webmaster World, and Wolf Howl.

• The big story that shouldn’t be overlooked is Google is ramping up personalized search. Google made the official announcement yesterday. This will surely spark the debate of whether or not SEO is dying or not. Make sure you read this post by Gord Hotchkiss and where he thinks this announcement us. Michael Gray has a couple of interesting posts on the topic as well.
• Want your site to a deeper crawl from Yahoo?  Use Search Builder.
• Yahoo Affiliate Program is removing performance incentives.
• National Pork Board gets called on the carpet by the blogging community and issues an apology after firing off a lawsuit threat to a blogger advocating breastfeeding.
• 100,000 Videos Removed from YouTube after threat of legal action from Viacom.  Can’t help but think this will be a regular occurance for Google and will keep a lot of employers busy for a long time.
• SEO Training Posts.  A great list of SEO posts that all should be read by all new comers and good information for some of us industry vets too.

We are at a very interesting time in our political evolution. The power was always supposed to be in the hands of the people. I believe there was a time when that as true. That time slowly disappeared as the power was transferred to mega labor unions and special interest groups. Politicians became beholden to a few massively powerful groups and forgot about the individuals that supported them. I believe that the power is starting to be transferred (granted not very quickly) back into the hands of the people. How is this happening? Social Media. Web 2.0. User generated content.

Whatever you want to call it, the power of individuals to shape an election is arguably greater than it ever has been. Don’t believe me? Just ask former Senator George Allen. His racially insenstive remarks were caught on camera and put up on YouTube and instantly became one of the most blogged about stories. That got immediate and significant attention and many believe was the turning point in the Virginia Senate race that cost Allen his political career. A one time presidential hopeful now finds him self sidelined.

Mitt Romney’s camp displayed its political savvy when faced with a potentially damaging YouTube video showing past campaign statements that contradict current stances was quick to release his own video response, quickly curbing the issue before it overwhelmed his campaign.

Here is a look at some of what some of the other candidates are doing:
Hilary Clinton is trying to harness the power of the masses by turning to Yahoo Answers to seek solutions to the nations health care. As of today she has received 37,570 answers–many of which are well thought out intelligent responses. Try getting that kind of response on a listening tour.

Nancy Pelosi is leveraging the power of the blogosphere to further the agenda of Democratic cause. She has singled out time to field questions from a few dozen bloggers on a conference call that is NOT available to the mainstream media. She has hired a full-time staffer to monitor the blogosphere. She is also organizing training sessions to educate politicians about blogs as well as starting to blog herself.

John Edwards has probably the most robust website of all the candidates so far with YouTube videos, blog, “web 2.0 design”, flickr, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube badges. and maintains his own blog on the website.

It has been quite a while since I’ve done a Ryan’s Radar. I was gone at Affiliate Summit for most of last week and have been trying to get caught up since I’ve been back. Affiliate Summit was excellent. You can read my recap at Super Affiliate Marketing. Like always there is a lot going on so I’ll try and captures a few highlights:

• How to measure ROI from Social Media: [Flashpoint] Ian Kennedy shows a graphic from a Forrester Research report that Steve Rubel discussed that shows how to measure Return on Investment from social media in general and blogging specifically…nothing groundbreaking here, but a good summary of how to measure the investment of blogging.
• Apple is ordered to pay $700,000 for bloggers legal fees. [Robert Scoble] Serves them right. Apple is ordered to pay for the legal fees of a blogger that they went after. The fact that the blogger racked up $700 grand in legal fees is the scary part to me. This underscores the importance of understanding the legal ramifications of blogging (which I don’t pretend to understand) and Scoble references the need to have some sort of legal group to help bloggers out. I’d pay a small fee to have access to that on the off hand chance some mega corporation came after me.
  Ask a Ninja signs big advertising deal with Federated Media. [Robert Scoble] Scoble points out that video blogging is starting to take off.
• Yahoo Adds Link Badge [Search Engine Land] Barry points out that Yahoo has added the ability to add a badge displaying the number of links that Yahoo show to a given page or site. Nice move by Yahoo. Makes them seem a little more friendly to the SEO world by offering an accurate count (**cough** Google?) of links and makes them feel more socially oriented, which I believe they are positioning themselves for anyway.
• SEMPO Institute is Live [Web Analytics World] SEMPO has officially opened the doors to training in SEO. There will initially be a high level course on SEO broken into 14 lessons. It will cost $499. Eventually there will be an advanced training offered. It will be interesting to monitor this to see the perceived value by those who have taken part.
• YouTube Offers Revenue Share from Ads [Tech Crunch] Many people are talking about the impact the YouTube announcement will have. Now that they will be sharing revenue with content producers the gap between them and their competition has widened significantly.
• Using YouTube to Drive Traffic [Web Log Hits] James Thomson and Muhammed Saleem seperately discuss using YouTube to Drive traffic to your website. Very interesting read regardless if you’ve used YouTube as a promotional tactic in the past.

Going to be pretty quiet around here for a couple of days.  I’m down at Affiliate Summit with Williams doing some networking and attending some classes.  Had  late night at the Share A Sale sing along.  Pretty funny to watch Shawn Collins sing a Toby Keith song. If you’re looking for any coverage of Affiliate Summit check out our Super Affiliate Marketing blog.

Flew in last night and am getting ready for Affiliate Summit. I am particularily interested in meeting up with people in the financial services space - especially those looking to run the Cash Central payday loan offer. I will be attending the meet and greet and the ice-breakers meetings this afteroon & evening.

• New Google AdSense Policies: [JenSense] This has got some people up in arms and is being discussed here, here, and here among other places. Google is playing the role of the playground bully. Basically Google is saying if you use AdSense you can’t display contextual ads from any of our competitors. Other updates put scraper sites on watch.
• 302 or 301?: [Multiple Sources] Always a popular debate. SEO Rountable revisits an article by Scottie Clairborne suggesting that a temporary redirect was the way to go until the new site starts to achiever rankings. SEO Rountable brings in some good articles and opinions to suggest that might not be the best thing to do today. I would do a 301 instead of a 302 personally, but Jill Whalen at High Rankings would disagree with me.
• More Adwords Quality Score Stupidity [Michael Gray] Michael uses the example of having to bid a minimum of $0.20 for his own name as yet another example of how random the Quality Score is for AdWords. I’ve come across the same problem in multiple campaigns of my own.
• Google checkout dwarfed by PayPal [JP Morgan]. Duh. Did we expect anything less? What I find amazing is Google checkout already has 6% of the market compared to 42% for PayPal. That is pretty remarkable considering the length of time in that particular niche. I think Google checkout stands to give them some real competition over time.
• The Tipping Point for OpenID [Jeremy Zawodny] Jeremy talks about this being the year to see if OpenID will thrive or dive.
• New SEO Blog [Search Trends] Dave Bascom introduces an SEO blog of one of his newest employees.

I got an e-mail from a new company this morning called Grand Central.  They offer a free phone number that will forward to any phone you choose.  What’s so cool about this? Well they claim that they will always offer unlimited free incoming calls and voicemail storage.  What I really like is I can create groups that will behave differently.  For example, I can have a group called “clients” that will ring only to my office line.  I can create a group called “friends” that will ring to my cell phone, or I can create a group called “priority” that will automagically forward to all my phones to make sure I don’t miss the call.  So say one of my partners call.  The service will forward my call to my office phone and will say “Ryan Williams is calling” I can then decide to take the call, send it to voicemail, accept the call and record it, or listen in as he leaves a voicemail.  Not convinced yet?  How about this, at any time during the call I can hit the * key and it will ring all my phones I have listed and I can switch from my cell to my office line seamlessly, and you the caller won’t be any the wiser.  Cool feature, it can save your precious cell minutes, or let you get out of the office onto your cell when you are in a hurry.

**In the spirit of full disclosure, this review was UNSOLICITED, and UNPAID.  Just thought it was a cool service and you might want to try it.

I decided to profile the works of some great social entrepreneurs.

Kailash Satyarthi has saved tens of thousands of lives. At the age of 26 he gave up a promising career as an electrical engineer and dedicated his life to helping the millions of children in India who are forced into slavery by powerful and corrupt business- and land-owners. His original idea was daring and dangerous. He decided to mount raids on factories — factories frequently manned by armed guards — where children and often entire families were held captive as bonded workers.

After successfully freeing and rehabilitating thousands of children, he went on to build up a global movement against child labor. Today Kailash heads up the Global March Against Child Labor, a conglomeration of 2000 social-purpose organizations and trade unions in 140 countries.

Yet even as he has become a globally recognized figure, Kailash continues the gritty work of leading raids to free slaves. Kailash believes that he must focus on a range of activities — from the most grassroots to the most visionary — in order to win the fight.

The above quoted from:

http://www.pbs.org/opb/thenewheroes/meet/satyarthi.html

Social entrepreneurs are not content just to give a fish or teach how to fish. They will not rest until they have revolutionized the fishing industry.

- Bill Drayton

We are still in the planning stages of our new project, Maya Jade, but I have to admit I can’t recall being more excited about a project. The basic idea behind the project is to take humanitarian expeditions down to Guatemala (other countries to follow) and allow the volunteers to participate on a wide range of service projects ranging from health and education to gardening and micro-enterprise. We have a million ideas flowing through our heads about how we want to tackle this new project. I am particularily excited about the potential use of the internet and social networking to grow support for our cause. The production of a top class website for Maya Jade is going to be crucial to our success. I envision expedition participants logging onto the website prior to the expedition and sending out customizable greeting cards to their friends and families inviting them to join or sponsor the expedition. Likewise after the expeditions I can envision them uploading their own photos and again sending out greeting cards - this time telling about their experience and once again encouraging them to get involved. I would hope past participants would be excited to promote the foundation via adding their trip photos to flickr, creating myspace and squidoo pages about their trip and even youtube videos. Of course, we would also have past participants have blogs on the website chronicling their trips. The website will also need to be very user friendly for donations and spell out customized monthly sponsorhip opportunities.

As I just read on Ashoka: “All ideas must be user-friendly, understandable, ethical and capable of engaging wide spread support.” I’m thinking that a cms (content management system) will be best for Maya Jade - not sure if wordpress or mod x is the right choice. Anyway, I’m just anxious to get moving with this new project and would love to hear people’s ideas for social entrepreneurship and how to leverage social networking to grow a cause.