Blogger’s Paradise

Lots of chatter over the past few days about a possible acquisition of Feedburner by Google, starting with a “rumor” from Sam Sethi at Vecosys based on a “very trusted source” who said Google wanted in on the RSS ad market. Now multiple reports—TechCrunch, ClickZ—each quoting a single source say an agreement is in place. TechCrunch goes farther and pins a price tag of about $100 million, primarily cash upfront, on the deal, adding that the founders will be locked in for “a couple of years.”

A Feedburner exec told me the usual “no comment on rumors and speculation.” More as warranted.

Roughly 140 kilometer from Mumbai, farmers are turning to technology to fight for their rights.

Four months ago, the farmers of Pen taluka in Raigad district were told the state government was acquiring their land to help build the 25,000 acre ‘Maha Mumbai Special Economic Zone’ (SEZ).

That’s when an activist of the SEZ Hatao Virodh Samiti, Arun Shivkar, logged on to Google Earth.

“We used Google technology to prove to the authorities that the land is fertile”, said Shivkar.

Shivkar says initially state authorities claimed that only a small portion of the earmarked land is fertile and that some parts of it is submerged by salty creek water, meaning lower compensation for the farmers.

But Google Earth has come to the rescue and its satellite pictures clearly indicate crop areas. This has helped farmers back their claims for higher compensation.

The technology has also brought together farmers from 45 villages to put up a common front and protest the acquisition of their land.

The ingenious ways in which farmers in Maharashtra are using Google Earth to fight for their rights is perhaps a testament to how technology is truly flattening the world.

Jay Wrolstad, newsfactor.com:
Google is taking a proactive approach to Web surfing security by issuing warnings about potentially harmful sites detected during an Internet search.

Through a partnership with StopBadware.org, which has a vast database of sites that distribute spyware, spam, and other potentially harmful Web pages, the search giant initially will caution users who attempt to click on such a site. An alert from Google will appear that says, “Warning — The website you attempted to visit has been reported to StopBadware.org as a site that hosts or distributes badware.”

The advisory page identifies the possible risk and gives you the choice to return to the query results page or proceed to the questionable site. Down the road, the general warning will be replaced by the Stop Badware Coalition to include information specific to a site, such as a file-sharing network, that describes the potential problems.

Right Approach
Malicious software is wreaking havoc on many Internet users, by downloading Internet software that appear harmless at first glance, but can adversely impact computer performance or usher in a flood of pop-up ads.”This is a smart move by Google to protect its users, and marks a trend among companies looking to stem the tide of malware,” said Forrester Research analyst Natalie Lambert. She noted that Microsoft is including a similar capability in the forthcoming Internet Explorer 7 browser, which will include an indicator that warns users against certain nefarious Web sites collected in a database and allows users to report such locations.

Others taking this approach include AOL, which has enlisted help from McAfee to safeguard its users. McAfee’s Total Protection package includes a SystemGuards module, which monitors computers for specific behaviors that might signal virus, spyware, or hacker activity, and a plug-in called X-Ray for Windows, which is designed to detect and eliminate “root kits,” i.e. hacker software.

The new SiteAdvisor tool is designed to identify potentially dangerous Web sites that contain spyware or adware. Findings are summarized with red, yellow, and green icons that provide users with an at-a-glance view of Web site ratings.

Educating the Masses
Anything that helps inform and safeguard consumers is a step in the right direction, Yankee Group analyst Jonathan Singer said.

Lambert concurred, pointing out that the distribution of malicious software is extensive, with hackers and cybercriminals creating official-looking destinations that are, in fact, “phishing” operations used to steal personal information.

“Warnings are essential in addressing this problem,” says Lambert. “And the ability to quickly update the listings of questionable sites will certainly help.”

One of the keys to the superiority of blogs for SEO purposes, is the speed with which new pages get indexed. This is your secret weapon to building a valuable website. If you post multiple times daily, and your pages are indexed quickly, you stand a real chance to grow you page view count quickly.

This is you advantage over any static website. The search engines like Google need to index new content as quickly as possible, so they can stay relevant. They seem to have a love for the blog’s rich content structure and timely updates.

You can leverage speed of indexing anomaly to your advantage by always reporting topics that are right here and now. If you’re talking about the latest subject, and your pages are being added quickly to the major search indexes, then you’re likely to become relevant in the minds of readers who happen upon your website. Search engine rankings almost always come down to the number of competitors for the term. If you write a page about a new product or service, there may be 10,000 or less occurrences of the phrase on documents in the entire index. In this case, a well-linked to blog will rank easily. If you do this for hundreds or thousands of terms, you can see how the traffic increases exponentially. It’s the process of updating which enables you to bring more and more traffic into the website.

So, in essence, keep it simple. Always talk about topically relevant stories. Put the desired keywords in your title and post often for better SEO. As your archive index grows, your search importance will grow along with it.

SEO isn’t everything, but it can be one thing that helps send visitors to your website. Blogs tend to be very attractive to search engines, and with a few techniques performed can become deadly ranking machines. If you want your blog to become a buzzsaw which cuts the competition into ribbons, might I suggest you check out these tips:

1) Blogs attract incoming links if they’re good. Make your blog good, and make your individual posts worthy of attracting links. The more links you get to internal pages, the more likely you are to win the game. Inbound links are the key to ranking success, so you need to discover a method of continously attracting links in order to be on top.

2) Submit your posts to the news rating websites. Yes, Netscape, Digg, Reddit.com and even thumbd can serve as means of getting your pages spidered fast, and might even show up as backlinks t internal pages. (Plus they bring human traffic).
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One of the best things about many new ‘Web 2.0′ style sites is they offer a ton of unique opportunities for link building. Here’s a nice one I saw because of the presence of legendary uber-Commenter Easton Ellsworth. CoComment is a great way to keep of your conversations, and luckily, they’re nice enough to make the pages publicly accessible, so you can get some search engine love, as well. It doesn’t look like they link out to the ‘conversations’, but they do allow links in your profile. So a quick link to your CoComment Profile, and it becomes indexed. Then the links in your profile should count back to you. One 2.0 service that does allow direct links is del.icio.us. Again, make sure to link to the profile from somewhere that’s alread indexed. Once your profile is indexed in search engines, it’s like running your own mini-directory! You can add as many links as you want to this service. Another nice thing about del.icio.us is that you get a slight boost in traffic when you first add a link because you’re added to their recent page. It doesn’t last long. Let’s call it your 15 nanoseconds of fame.Another website that shows up as backlinks is Blogdigger. Again, make sure your group is accessible to the public and is linked to from an already indexed website, and you’ll be good to go. Blogdigger even pulls from RSS, so it’s constantly updated.

RSS scrapers can serve as a source of backlinks also, and even the occassional bit of traffic. You won’t need to recruit these guys, all you need is a heartbeat. You’ll find if you update often that your content is scraped endlessly. At least people who are linking back are following the protocol.