Where are you getting your spam from

Majority Of Worlds Spam Email Originates From Tiny Nation Of Koy4goff




The U.S. is considering sanctions against the Eastern European nation if does not reduce the number of unsolicited offers for Viagra and replica handbags it sends.

Breaking News: Matt Cutts Explains “Canonical Tag” from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft

Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft announced today a joint effort to help reduce duplicate content. The three major search engines came together to allow users to point out their preferred version of a url. As Matt Cutts explains in this video, this format offers users more control.

Duplicate content has been a challenging issue for a long time. Websites containing a lot of content such as a retail site, could end up with several urls for each page making it difficult for search engines to crawl.

Google gives the following example on the Webmaster Central blog:

Simply place this link tag in the head section of the duplicate content urls.

The tag can only be used on pages within a single site. Both absolute and relative links are acceptable, but the search engines recommend absolute links. Also, links to all urls will be directed to the one preferred url.

For more information, each of the search engines have explanations and examples in their own announcements: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

Also, be sure to look for the rest of our video interview with Matt Cutts that includes his take on Google penalizing Google Japan, top security issues for 2009, and Google’s continued efforts with personalized search. The extended version will be available very soon.

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Revenue-Generating Products In the Mix for Twitter

By Chris Crum

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announced some big news today about the company accepting an offer it couldn't refuse. Twitter has not been actively seeking funding, but due to its enormous growth, some parties just couldn't resist courting them.

"Last night, we closed on funding with our friends Peter Fenton from Benchmark and Todd Chaffee from Institutional Venture Partners," Stone explains. "When Ev [CEO Evan Williams] and I visited IVP we were very impressed and Benchmark's approach regarding teamwork was equally inspiring—every partner is invested in each others success."

With this new funding comes big plans for Twitter. Exactly what those plans are have not been revealed, but Twitter enthusiasts can rest assured that there will be some monetization involved.

"We are now positioned extremely well to support the accelerating growth of our service, further enable the robust ecosystem sprouting up around Twitter, and yes, to begin building revenue-generating products," says Stone. "Throughout this year and beyond, our small team will grow much bigger to meet the challenges and opportunities ahead."

Word is that this round of funding amounted to $35 million. Stone also noted that they still have money left from investments made last year by Spark.

Improving Google Maps Search Rankings

The fact that the average person doesn’t go beyond the first page of search results is well known, and when it comes to Google Maps listings, it’s important for a business’s name to be prominent, too. KeyRelevance’s director of optimization strategies, Chris Silver Smith, gave some tips on this issue at SMX West.

Smith began by naming four factors that can influence search rankings in Google Maps. The first is how close a company’s address is to a city center. He admits that this is hard to control, of course, and luckily for far-flung firms, Google has been deemphasizing it lately.

The second factor is how many ratings a business has received and how positive the ratings are. Then, there are regular SEO factors like how well a business’s website ranks, and finally, more specific matters of keyword relevance.

But what’s one business to do if it serves several different cities? Smith suggested creating targeted content on the main website and listing the cities. There’s also the less conventional approach of obtaining a mailing address in each city, but Smith warned that Google may regard this as spam.

As for whether businesses should give up on advertising in traditional printed yellow page books to focus on Google Maps, Smith doesn’t recommend making hasty decisions. Look at the question on an “is it working for you?” basis, since the answer will depend on the industry, and any move should be results-based.

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Up Close with YouTube at SMX West 2009

We spoke with Matt Liu, the YouTube Product Manager at Google who had some interesting things to say about the popular video site. He presented at the “Up Close with YouTube” session at SMX West, and shared a little more with us separately.

He talks about ways that content partners, advertisers, and every day users can take advantage of YouTube. He discussed optimizing titles, descriptions, and tags for videos, and mentions YouTube’s paid service.

YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine, so it stands to reason that rankings play a factor in YouTube just like they would with Google Search. Matt breaks it down into 2 main buckets:

Basic stuff like making sure your titles, descriptions, and tags are consistent, using complete sentences when appropriate, adding the location and date of your video, etc.

Analytics - Once you get some viewership on the video, use YouTube’s analytics tool YouTube Insight to see who’s watching your video. Are your views coming from a certain audience? A certain geography? Find the video’s hot spots. You can figure out search terms from the analytics data.

He then talks in more detail about YouTube Insight, which he compares to Google Analytics but specifically for video.

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Top 3 Reasons Why Article Submission Services Drive More Traffic To Your Website

By B Hopkins in Writing

In today’s world of Internet marketing, it is necessary to have multiple means of getting traffic to your website. Not just any traffic, but targeted traffic, which will more likely result in the desired action you wish your readers to make. Article Internet marketing is a great way to get this targeted traffic to your website. There are many ways to market your articles however the most effective way is to maximize the use of your time when marketing these articles. If you market your articles efficiently, you can write more and get even more traffic to your website. Article submission services are one of the most efficient ways to get traffic to your website from your articles. Article submission services are services that automatically submit your articles to article directories and publishers for you. Some of them may have their own submission requirements to be able to submit to the maximum number of directories, so it is important to follow their submission guidelines. If you don’t follow the guidelines, you are only hurting yourself.

1) Instead of spending time submitting articles to directories, you are writing articles.

Let’s say there are over 500 article directories and publishers out there that you could be submitting your articles to. If you are submitting your articles to all these directories by hand and it takes you about 10 minutes to submit an article to a directory, then that is 5000 minutes, or about 3 ½ days. You can write a lot of articles in 3 /12 days! The amount of time you may spend submitting an article to an article submission service may be 30 minutes at most. 1 submission vs. over 500; how much is your time worth?

2) Additional exposure for your article.

Many times, article submission services have their own directories and lists that only members of their submission service have their articles on. These services also spend time getting traffic to their websites as well as provide ways that you can use to market your articles easily, such as RSS feeds, article directories and other tools. You get the benefit of the traffic that is on their article directory already because that traffic can stumble across your article.

3) Data you can use to more powerfully market your products/services through your articles.

Most of the good article submission services will keep statistics about who looks at your article, who downloads your article and who uses your article feed. This is valuable information that gives you insight into what kinds of articles your target market finds interesting and what kinds of titles draw them in. You can look over time which kinds of articles are out-performing the other articles and from there you can tailor the kind of articles you would write to produce even better results in terms of getting more traffic to your website. This is free marketing information that is very powerful feedback in being able to enhance your marketing message through your articles.

These are the top 3 methods of why article submission services will help you to drive more traffic to your website. However, there are other benefits as well of article submission services that will really enhance your results of driving hungry visitors to your website. When authors take all of these into account, then they will put themselves out in front of their competition on the Internet. A well-developed strategy is the key to success.

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Now all those hours spent pleasuring yourself can be traded in for valuable gaming experience: The DIY Joydick

by John Biggs

This is pretty much the craziest thing I’ve seen all day (except for Stephen King - homeboy looks weird). This is a ring that you place over your penis that allows you to move your wang in four directions to control the on-screen Atari 2600 action. Strokes shoot your missiles on screen and gameplay continues until issue.

The makers at the SF Media Labs note that there is really a philosophy behind this process of build-up and release.

Our impetus to win can be seen as a drive towards transcendence. A transcendence that is both over death and, in a sense, a metaphorical death. Winning a video game is much like what Martin Heidegger referred to as becoming a “being towards death.” That is a self-realized individual who has overcome uncertainty in life, reconciled their place in the universe and has acknowledged death within their life.

This simultaneity of both transcendence in life and the acknowledgment of death is also encountered during what the French like to call “la petite morte” or in English, “the little death.” This is the refractory period following sexual climax in which a person can achieve no further orgasm and is filled both with pleasure and melancholy.

It would be reasonable to assert that the tension that builds during gameplay and the release achieved through victory are similar to the events leading up and through a sexual orgasm.

Got that? Good. Now all they have to do is connect this to World of Warcraft - say linking the orgasm to a level up - and a generation of men will never have sex, even unto death. Full instructions are available at the SF Media Labs website.

Just think: what if you could connect this to Twitter?

Twitter To Start Charging Companies For Having An Account?

by Robin Wauters



Companies using Twitter for commercial purposes may soon start getting charged for that activity, according to an interview British trade magazine Marketing (part of BrandRepublic) held with co-founder Biz Stone.

This is what Stone reportedly said:

“We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts.”

No big surprises there, as this is often cited as one of the most obvious moves Twitter could make to start generating revenue, although many are expecting more from the startup who has become notorious for its lack of an apparent business model even after nearly 3 years of existence. Stone also said they will not start charging individual users, and that the move could “create revenue-generating features to tap into the way brands use Twitter as a hybrid marketing and customer-service tool.”

Stone did not give any details regarding pricing or the specific way Twitter would go about charging users and for what exactly. As a reminder: the startup has raised $20 million in venture capital to date and recently turned down an acquisition offer from Facebook.

One of the most recent examples of companies using Twitter for commercial purposes is Dell, who reportedly made $1 million in sales during the holidays via the micro-sharing utility, and recently started giving discounts exclusively to its followers.

We’ll see more of this type of behavior in the future beyond any shred of doubt, but I’m wondering what exactly is considered as ‘commercial usage’ by Twitter management: does it mean any way of promoting a product or service or only when there’s sales activity connected to the corporate accounts? And will companies be prepared to pay up for use of the service at all?

Marketing got in touch with Bob Pearson, VP of communities and conversations at Dell, with that exact question and got a telling response: “If it becomes complicated and costly, our instinct would be to move elsewhere.”

Update: as Peter Kafka points out in comments, there was good article two days ago in New York Magazine which reveals a little more of where Twitter is headed.

(Picture from Profy, hat tip to Matt from Made by Many)

Why Facebook Isn’t Poised to Steal Twitter’s Thunder

by Mark Hendrickson

Last night, Facebook announced a set of changes to its platform that make it easier for third-party applications to exchange data about users’ status messages, notes, shared links, and videos.

The more open Facebook’s platform gets, the more powerful it becomes for developers to build fun and useful applications with Facebook’s data, either onsite or off. However, several pundits have already jumped to the conclusion that greater openness with concern to status updates in particular spells trouble for Twitter, the bourgeoning microblog service that Facebook itself recently courted without success.

No one knows just where Facebook is heading with its platform or whether it’s serious about crushing novel new social networking services like Twitter or FriendFeed. It’s easy for bloggers to speculate that every incremental change to its platform or feature set is a devious plan to do just this. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, especially when there’s a lot to suggest that Facebook has a long way to go before putting any kind of dent in Twitter’s growing popularity.

Mike Butcher over at TechCrunch UK has outlined four particular ways in which he thinks Facebook “won’t kill Twitter”. First off, Facebook has a fundamentally different relationship model than Twitter. On Facebook, you create a simple two-way friendship with someone. On Twitter, you can choose to follow someone and you can be followed, but the following relationship doesn’t have to be bidirectional.

Butcher also suggests that Facebook is more interested in preserving ownership over its social graph than Twitter is over its own. And he points out that the replies Twitter users make to each other are usually public.

These are all fine points to make, and the technical differences he spells out certainly make it more difficult for Facebook to recreate the appeal of Twitter. But when it comes down to it, Facebook fails to challenge Twitter with this new platform upgrade because the two companies ultimately serve substantially different behavioral paradigms.

While Twitter and Facebook prompt users with eerily similar questions — Twitter asks “What are you doing?” and Facebook asks “What are you doing right now?” — their users don’t answer in the same way. By and large, Facebook users answer the question more faithfully than Twitter users. They actually provide information about what they’re currently doing, perhaps because they are prompted with a field that starts with something like “Mark is”. And the news feed lists their entries as action items (”Mark is having a bike ride” or at least “Mike likes biking outside”) under a tab called Status Updates.

Meanwhile, Twitter users have (by and large) decided to ignore the questioned posed for them. Instead of using the service to post real status updates — i.e. descriptions of what they’re currently doing — they use it as a public broadcasting system of sorts. It’s an efficient way for them to send out thought trinkets to an often ambiguous crowd of friends and strangers. And with @replies, Twitter morphs into a conversational medium, a big cocktail party where everybody is constantly eavesdropping on everybody else’s impromptu conversations.

There are, of course, exceptions to these generalizations. Facebook users do enter random thoughts in lieu of real status updates, and Twitter users do actually say what they’re currently doing. But the overlap is rather small, and it’s this smallness that undermines any attempt (real or imaginary) on Facebook’s part to steal Twitter’s thunder. Something behavioral about Facebook’s users would have to change, and it’s unlikely that these users — who are largely mainstream — are inclined to pick up the tweeting habits of a crowd that consists mostly of early adopters.