A beginner’s guide to search engine optimization

Do-It-Yourself SEO Advice For SMBs, by David Mihm at Search Engine Land, provides some basic advice for small businesses on improving their search results, an integral part of online marketing and advertising. If you once paid $20,000 a year for Yellow Pages, you'll be glad to hear that Mihm says that the cost of taking control of your web presence is more like $30 - $200 per year. But be prepared for the labor costs in detangling the hype of the world of search engine optimization (SEO)!

Mihm has more advice on his blog and in his post Local Search Ranking Factors.

Future fiefdoms: psychological profiling on the Web

This really makes me... uhh?

CNET's Elinor Mills notes new research in Psychological profiling on the Web:

'Inspired by the site WeFeelFine.org... The dashboard looks at the stream for expressions of emotion in real time and uses colors to indicate different emotions. ...But our own comments about our mental state can also be very revealing, to friends and enemies alike, said Dhanjani. He foreshadowed his research on his blog last month and elaborated on it in several subsequent interviews with CNET News. ..."It's almost like it gives other people the power to play God and glean what's happening inside your head," Dhanjani said. "I can see implications for economics, business, and psychology."

And I thought behaviorally targeted ads were scary!'

See tags advertising and propaganda for more.

Obey Alien Orders

In Obey Alien Orders, John Dowdell builds on an O'Reilly blog post noting consequences of letting your web browser run scripts capriciously. With much of the world, awhile back I settled on the NoScript and Adblock add ons to Firefox to control which sites get to run scripts. It's easy but a bit annoying trying to figure out which scripts are need to run Yahoo and Google Analytics tracking and Blogspot smoothly. Better than letting scripts run wild.

Marketing knows this, so you still have to enable scripting to view many things. You can still do housecleaning by Clearing Private Data (except Saved Passwords), or more effectively by running Ad-Aware and Spybot Search & Destroy, and CCleaner on Windows.

Privatizing the Cookie Monster

As Ars Technica explores Ask.com to offer anonymous search with AskEraser, it's clear that privacy is the big issue, but there's more wishes for Google according to John Dowdell.

Update: John Dowdell clarifies that the real privacy issue is cross-site ad-tracking (and I'd add surveillance databases), and answers the search engine marketeer's kiddie porn threat if privacy has primacy:

It seems like that problem might be handled more simply and specifically by not indexing kiddie porn in the first place, and then not accepting searches on those terms... they wouldn't actually need to first satisfy those search requests and then log everybody else's search terms for accountability.

A Live TV Studio In Your Browser

Live Streaming that ‘Just Works’...from NewTeeVee:

'Veodia’s recently released streaming-video software is easy to use. Really easy. We’re talking plug-and-play easy. Plug your DV camera into your computer and put it in record mode. Log into Veodia.com and hit “new broadcast.” And you’re live. Instantly. And when you’re done, you hit stop and the video you’ve just streamed is available on demand through your favorite RSS feeder. Instantly. And it works.'

...read the rest at NewTeeVee.

Make Internet TV

NewTeeVee reports on Make Internet TV, "a newly released site from the Participatory Culture Foundation that also brought you the Miro, nee Democracy player, Broadcast Machine and other free, open-source alternatives to offerings from Microsoft, Apple and Google."

But wait, there's more -- like millions looking to get in on our game.

Favicons

Favicons, the little icons next to the URL location in your
web browser, can be exported from PS with a Mac/Win plug-in from
http://www.telegraphics.com.au/sw/.

The cleanest discusion of it I saw of was at
http://www.golivein24.com/tips/favicon/.