… or at least their respective “answers” services do.

Today I saw that the very first product of Google Labs (launched back before “beta” was in Vogue) Google Answers is finally shutting down. This stands in stark contrast to Yahoo Answers, which launched just months ago and has enjoyed pretty impressive growth and adoption. It’s not really fair to compare them side by side since they’re significantly different products, but I will do so anyway.

» Continue reading “Can you drink water from an Air Conditioner? Google says no, Yahoo says yes”

This “pingomatic down” post is (hopefully) one third informative, one third predictive, and one third inquisitive. Pingomatic is the default pinging service used by Wordpress and many other blogging platforms to let the world (various aggregators and search engines) know when a new post has been written. A few months ago, at the Future of Web Apps conference, Matt Mullenweg (the creator of Wordpress) told us that pingomatic will eventually be shut down.

» Continue reading “What to do when Pingomatic goes down”

It looks like Google may be “profiling” website owners using the whois data of their registered domains. At Pubcon last week during one of the sessions, Matt Cutts was reviewing an attendee’s website and using his laptop (which was tunneled into Google’s brain I assume), looked up all the domains this person owned and called him out on it, suggesting that a number of other websites he owned looked spammy.

» Continue reading “Is Google profiling website owners?”

Duane and I just got back from Pubcon 2006 in Las Vegas. Had a REALLY good time, met a ton of really cool people - very glad we went. I threw together some business cards (see below) specifically for Pubcon. But Kinko’s couldn’t print them in time so they sort of went to waste. (Everytime I go to Kinko’s, aka PopCopy, it annoys me to hell) Oh well.

We met Rand Fishkin (Seomoz), Matt Cutts (Google), Adam Lasnick (Google), Jeremy (Shoemoney), David (Dillsmack), Rae (Sugarrae), Jen (Jensense), Dax, Adam (Shadyking), Todd (Oilman), Michael Gray (Graywolf), Marcus Tandler (Crazy German guy), Bill Slawski (SEO by the SEA), Andy Hagans, Todd Malicoat (Stuntdubl), Aaron Wall (SEObook), Chantelle and Erin (Azoogle). Got a cool Shoemoney shirt.

Much of what was covered in the day sessions was pretty basic SEO/SEM/marketing stuff, but there were a number of really helpful points and tips in between. There was a lot of talk about how to avoid duplicate content issues and penalties, coverage of viral marketing tactics, what’s new with search engines, etc. I also picked up some golden nuggets from Shoemoney, Dillsmack, Rae, etc. Looking forward to launching some new projects and testing out the results in the coming months.

This was the biggest PubCon to date (and our first). I highly recommend going if you’ve never been.

Just got into Las Vegas for Pubcon 2006. This is my first year going. I’m looking forward to meeting some cool people here this week.

I’ve never much of a conference kind of person but this year I’ve made the effort to attend two: Future of Web Apps, San Francisco and PubCon, Vegas.
Here is (an incomplete) list of who I want to meet and/or buy a drink for this week:

• Rand Fishkin and the rest of the SEOmoz crew
• Jeremy “Shoemoney” Schoemaker
• Matt Cutts
• Jeremy Zawodny
• GrayWolf
• Aaron Wall
• Adam Lasnik
• Danny Sullivan
• Oilman
• DaveN
• Rae Hoffman
  
• Greg Boser
• Andy Hagans
• Bill Slawski
• Todd Malicoat
• Nathaniel Broughton

I didn’t have time to link out to all of them since I’m really tired and have to get up early in the morning. If you’re at Pubcon, come say hi.