InfoMusing

Matt Cutts Speaks on WordPress and Google

WordCamp San Francisco is a conference organized by the creators of WordPress for their user community. It was just held last weekend, May 30 and 31, in San Francisco.  Highlighting the real time nature of the blogosphere, some of the presentations have already made their way onto the net.  So those of us who could not make it out to the West Coast of North America can get some of the benefits of this great event.

Attendees have been blogging and tweeting that one of the best presentations was by Matt Cutts who is the head of the webspam team at Google where he specializes in search engine optimization (SEO) issues. With a title like “Straight from Google: What You Need to Know” it’s no surprise that his session was well attended.  Getting your blog well ranked by Google is certainly among the top goals for any blogger.

Read the full story at Blogging Tips.

Web 2.0 – Celebrating Failure

Any IT staff person knows the strain and stress that occurs whenever an application or server bites the dust, locks up or otherwise goes down.  User’s scream!  Customers kvetch!  And amidst all the rabble rousing, the IT staff has to get their job done and resolve the issue. However, in the world of Web 2.0, some companies have figured out how to market even the most dire of circumstances.

Check out the full blog at Tech Owl.

Rock beats scissors and a wave beats a bing!

Last Thursday saw two big technology announcements – one from Google and one from Microsoft. These announcements could not have been more different and truly highlighted the difference between these two technology behemoths. Microsoft announced the launch of a new search engine called Bing and Google announced the future launch of Google Wave.

Check out Tech Owl to read about which company, Google or Microsoft, gets innovation and Web 2.0?

How Twitter Missed the Point

So far this year, both Twitter Inc. and Facebook , the traffic Kings of Web 2.0 social media, made changes that upset their users, and for which, in the end, they apologized and backtracked. Both offered poor examples of how to lead a business.

To review: Earlier this month, Twitter implemented a feature change that removed the ability for Twitter users to view “@replies“ from people they were not following. Instantly, the Twitterstream was in an uproar with tweets and retweets of complaints. There were threats of protesting, petition-signing, and, in general, lots of bashing on Twitter.

Click here to read suggestions on how Twitter should have approached this event.

Contenture – The Anti-Ad Network

If you want to make money from a blog you have a limited number of options.  The most popular approach is to run ads – typically using an ad network like Google’s AdSense.  Many bloggers also join affiliate programs and post links and banners for those programs – but to the visitor it is just more ads.  You can also charge a subscription fee – but you will have to have some truly unique content to pull that off and also the systems to handle the ecommerce.  So your primary options are to run ads and annoy your visitors or collect money from and annoy your visitors.

Next week, Contenture is launching what they call the “anti-ad network.”  The basic idea is that you would add a subscription component to your blog/website.  You would offer some type of premium benefits to visitors who are signed up with Contenture….

Read the full article at Blogging Tips.