Archive for October, 2009

Social Networking – Facebook

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

“According to research from database firm Drake Direct, Facebook now accounts for 25 percent of Internet page views in the United States.” I stumbled on this reference and it certainly caught my attention! I know my two teenagers spend a ton of time on Facebook and stay in touch with friends and family. I have looked over their shoulders and seen the general drift of it, but I never logged in myself and I don’t have a page. I am thus officially a dinosaur.

Our company, EBS, does have an embryonic Facebook page and inspired by the page view statistic I decided to log in and check it all out. I am doing that as I write.   If you are also a dinosaur you find someone’s profile and you see their “wall” – a public listing of comments, feedback, messages. I am looking at the Facebook profile for Amazon.com for example – the comments on their wall are bashing them for carrying a Halloween costume that seems to be inappropriate.  One message: “Pull this costume off your website for good!!! Needless to say, I will NEVER again use my Amazon account and will no longer support such an idiotic corporation.”

Ok, for my first toe in the water that is a little unnerving -as a business person!  Ok let’s try Starbucks, we find:“ ooooh, mocha…yummy :) ”  and “starbucks is the best!! im going their tomorrow.”  Well that is more encouraging.

Our EBS profile is just our logo and a little information about the company so far. We have made a few Houston business links. I am going to push that we build the profile up some –get more content and links and I will report on what happens we go along. How can the social networking phenomena be utilized for marketing?  That is the business question we will discuss some more.

Posted in Social Networking, Web 2.0, Web Promotion SEO, Web and Browsers | No Comments »

Microsoft’s Bing Makes Waves for Google

Monday, October 12th, 2009

After years of Microsoft trying to keep up with Google, they finally made some headway with the release of Bing, Microsoft’s new “decision engine”. Since the release of Bing, Google has released a pre-beta stage of a new Google engine named “Caffeine” .  Coincidence? I think not.

It is not Google’s norm to announce an upgrade release; they tend to keep the magic behind the curtains, so why the big announcement this time? Some would say it was to keep the spotlight on Google.  Now that Microsoft has come out with a “faster, better Search engine” Google wants to make sure they don’t lose their audience. Google claims not,  “Nope. I love competition in search and want lots of it, but this change has been in the works for months. I think the best way for Google to do well in search is to continue what we’ve done for the last decade or so: focus relentlessly on pushing our search quality forward. Nobody cares more about search than Google, and I don’t think we’ll ever stop trying to improve.” [1].

The new version of Google is to be better and faster, we all know Google is fast, how much faster can they make it? Well just about twice as fast! Speed is great and all, but what we all want to know is how is the new Google going to affect our search engine optimization efforts? What ranking, crawling & indexing changes will we see?

The new Google is to include more comprehensive ways of crawling the web and determining PageRank. The main goal is to return more relevant results – faster. According to Google’s Matt Cut the change is “primarily under the hood” [1] Google will still look the same but the bots will be working differently. When the new updated is released the most important words in SEO will “reputable and relevant”!

Google is working hard to get the users what they are looking for faster which means SEO’s will need to work  harder to keep up with the race.

A push in favor of reputable can only help our EBS SEO work  -we take the high road by helping our clients create rich content that should always be favored by the search engines.

To check out the Caffeine preview yourself you can go to:http://www2.sandbox.google.com/

[1]http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/type/googleseo/page/4/)

Posted in Web Promotion SEO, Web and Browsers | 2 Comments »

Getting Your Blog Listed By Technorati

Monday, October 12th, 2009

They will  ask you to post a code in your blog – to confirm you do in fact control the blog you claim. Like this:

nm5kjswudz

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Internet Connection Reliability

Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

Is your business basically down when you lose your internet connection?  Our connection was out for a short time this afternon and our work started to grind to a halt. Crucially, our phones are out as well when the connection is down. We quickly forwarded our phones to cell phone lines, but it was still a painful reminder of our dependence on “the connection”.

Barracuda, among others, has a device to ease the pain and provide solid reliability.  Their “Link Balancer” device lets you plug in several internet connections and automatically distributes the load among them. Then, in the event of a failure on one connection the device switches your load to another live connection.  So if say your primary T-1 line goes down you can run on a DSL or cable connection until the T-1 is restored.  You may well have slow connection speeds and may have to curtail some activity, but you will not be dead in the water. You could also have redundant T-1 lines from separate vendors. However, if they run over the same AT&T or other common local carrier you could lose both at the same time – do a little research. It is likely that while one service is down, other types of service will still be functional.

When you have an  Internet link failure, the Barracuda Link Balancer will automatically route your  traffic to another available Internet connection without administrator intervention. The  Link Balancer will then check the offline connection so that you get fast reconnection when Internet service is restored. “By automatically detecting link health and failure, the Barracuda Link Balancer assists administrators by providing a worry-free redundant connectivity to the Internet. ” per Barracuda.

Barracuda has 2,3 and 6 connection devices available.

Seems like one way to have more business peace of mind – for  a price of course!

Posted in Business Continuity / Disaster Recovery | 3 Comments »