Google-News or blogging : Natural Search Blog

Google Pushes Reading Lists of Politicians & Pundits

Google announced today that they’re introducing reading lists from major politicians like Barack Obama and John McClain along with reading lists from political commentators like Ariana Huffington and Mark Halperin. Google promoted the new service today on their homepage by touting the ability to read what Obama and McCain are reading, with a link line just below the search form:

Google provides Obama & McClain's reading lists
(click to enlarge)

The Google Reader blog states that you’ll now be able to “read what they read” and here their commentary as they share and discuss news.

(more…)

Popularity: 2% [?]

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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 08/18/2008 | Permalink | Email | Print

Trackback | Comments (0) | Comments RSS | Filed under: Blog Optimization, Google blogging, Google Reader, politics, rss readers

Corporate Blogging: Too Legally Dicey To Allow?

This article at CNET, “Corporate employee blogs: Lawsuits waiting to happen?“, caught my eye. Large corporations definitely feel nervous about allowing all their employees to have a public voice, but I think it’s now something that must be allowed, and good common-sense management can be used to help avoid some of the risk of lawsuits such as the one mentioned in the article involving Cisco.

Some companies’ legal departments think that blogging is just too risky to allow, and that it’s not worth the time and administrative headache to try to manage. The problem that I see with this is that it causes a company to be stuck in a Business 1.0 world of the past, disallowing the grass-roots-level public relations that employees can provide — blogging allows a big corporation to have a human face and can help explain and communicate what the company is up to. (more…)

Popularity: 5% [?]

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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 03/26/2008 | Permalink | Email | Print

Trackback | Comments (0) | Comments RSS | Filed under: Best Practices, General, News blogging, corporate blogging, employee blogs

Google News comments likely to be panned by major corporations

Google today introduced a new experimental feature in their News - they’ve added story participant comments into their listings of stories.

Google News

I think it’s a cool idea, since it invites more community participation in story threads - sort of an evolutionary step on the old threaded format of the old Usenet layout paradigm. If you’ve ever had a story written about you in news media, and were disappointed to see that the reporter made a mistake or neglected to mention something that you felt was important, this would be a convenient route to mitigating it.

But, from what I’ve seen commonly happening in the contemporary business community, I’d bet that most of the major, publicly-traded companies will not engage in commenting on stories about themselves. Read on and I’ll describe… (more…)

Popularity: 3% [?]

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Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 08/08/2007 | Permalink | Email | Print

Trackback | Comments (0) | Comments RSS | Filed under: Google, News blogging, Google-News, user-generated-content

New WordPress Plugin for SEO

I’ve just released “SEO Title Tag”, a plugin for WordPress. As the name implies, it allows you to optimize your WordPress site’s title tags in ways not supported by the default WordPress installation. For example:

If you define a custom field (called “title_tag”) when writing or editing a post (or static page), that custom field will then be displayed as the title tag.
The post title and blog name are reversed for better keyword prominence within the title tag.
You can shorten or eliminate the blog name altogether from your title tags.
You can define a custom title tag for your home page through the Options page.
It will use the categoryâ€™s description as the title on category pages (when defined).
If you’re using the UltimateTagWarrior plugin, it will put the tag name in the titles on tag pages.
It will also cook you dinner and all sorts of other amazing, useful stuff (not really).

Get the plugin now: SEO Title Tag WordPress Plugin

I’d love your feedback, as this is my first WordPress plugin.

Enjoy!

Popularity: 12% [?]

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Posted by Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts on 07/14/2006 | Permalink | Email | Print

Trackback | Comments (5) | Comments RSS | Filed under: HTML Optimization, Tools Blog Optimization, blogging, page-titles, plugin, plugins, SEO, title-tags, WordPress

Latest Google happenings

Google’s estimated numbers of search results per query aren’t to be trusted? Hmm… kinda looks that way. Certainly Yahoo’s numbers appear to more believable from this little study.
Google releases an API for Google AdWords - an Application Programming Interface for manipulating your AdWords account programatically without having to do screen scraping. Way cool!
Google unveils new “nofollow” link tag. Yahoo and MSN follow suit. I’m dubious that this is going to do anything to squelch comment spamming, but I thank Google (and Yahoo! and MSN) for giving us website owners better control when we link to sites that we don’t want to share the “search engine juice” with.
Google more than triples its word limit on search queries to 32 words. Good work Google! The 10 word limit was one of my pet peeves. Now I can finally run queries that have a pile of site: operators all separated by ORs. Now please Google will you let me further refine link: queries with additional operators? (Yahoo! and MSN support the use of other operators with link:)
Google launches Google Referral program, an affiliate program that pays $20 per referred AdWords customer. Sounds kinda cool, but I can’t imagine I’ll make nearly the cash I make as an AdSense publisher…
Source code released into the public domain for getting the PageRank of a page automatically in PHP. Not that the Toolbar Server can really be trusted anymore to serve up anything resembling the actual PageRank score used by Google’s ranking algorithm…
Google loses another trademark lawsuit in France relating to selling AdWords ads against trademarked terms. Ouch, that smarts!
Google earnings for 4th Quarter 2004 top $1 billion. Makes me sorry I don’t own Google stock…
How To Destroy Google With $100 Million? - a flawed idea, but it does make one think…