Healthy Blog Reviews

Maybe I missed the point of the whole China/Google kerfluffle , but I could have sworn the reason Google was pulling out of China was because they didn’t want to obey China’s rules on censorship anymore. Apparently China has decided to conveniently ignore that fact as they remind Google to continue to obey China’s Internet rules , even if Google does decide to leave the country. Riiight. According to Reuters: “On entering the Chinese market in 2007, it clearly stated that it would respect Chinese law,” the spokesman, Yao Jian, told reporters in answer to a question about Google. Google opened its Chinese search portal in 2006. “We hope that whether Google Inc continues operating in China or makes other choices, it will respect Chinese legal regulations,” Yao told a regular news conference. “Even if it pulls out, it should handle things according to the rules and appropriately handle remaining issues,” he said. Yes, of course Google should continue to obey the law for remaining “issues” within the country (possibly its other services, if Google decides to only pull its search engine). However, although I’m not in favor of China’s censorship, I don’t think Google should wage a direct Internet war against the country. China’s admonition seems a little like a parent expecting a child to keep the same curfew when they leave the house. Google is leaving precisely because they just can’t abide those rules anymore. They’re going to live their life the way they want to now. Or, for another analogy that might hit home a bit more with the Chinese government, maybe this is more akin to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton telling China to investigate the hack attacks (to which China said Clinton damaged the countries’ relations, and basically she should mind her own business). What do you think? Could China seriously expect to dictate to a company even if they won’t have any jurisdiction to do so?

Tags: China, china-or-makes, clinton, country, hack, internet, leave-the-house, legal, Search, secretary, state-hillary
Posted March 16, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Hang around any industry conference, forum or blog long enough and you’ll find someone lamenting our dependence on Google, or search engines altogether. It’s absolutely true that we as webmasters and marketers need to diversify our traffic strategies (you know what they say about eggs and baskets)—but are you willing to take the step to block all search engines from your site? Hacker News was—at least for a little while. At news.ycombinator.com recently, the robots.txt file was changed to disallow all crawling from search engines, as theNextWeb reports . However, Paul G. at Hacker News quickly explained : Don’t worry, it doesn’t mean anything. The software for ranking applications runs on the same server, and it is horribly inefficient (something 4 people use every 6 months doesn’t tend to get optimized much). This weekend all of us were reading applications at the same time, and the system was getting so slow that I banned crawlers for a bit to buy us some margin. (Traffic from crawlers is much more expensive for us than traffic from human users, because it interacts badly with lazy item loading.) We only finished reading applications an hour before I had to leave for SXSW, so I forgot to set robots.txt back to the normal one, but I just did now. There’s nothing wrong with that (though you’d hope you wouldn’t forget that kind of thing!). Rather than the User-agent: * Disallow: / theNextWeb spotted, Hacker News’s robots.txt now only disallows all user agents to five selected paths. Can you ban all search engines (on purpose and for the long term)? Sure—that’s what robots.txt is for (I’m looking at you, newspaper sites who claim Google’s stealing your bacon content). Some people do it just to keep search engines out; others do it to force themselves to develop other traffic streams. But if you do it, be sure to actually work on those other traffic streams, and to have a good on-site search capability. What do you think? Would you ever block all search engines, for any reason? Join the Marketing Pilgrim Facebook Community

Tags: absolutely-true, banned-crawlers, dependence, marketing, newspaper-sites, search-engines, take-the-step, traffic
Posted March 16, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

Twitter is not content to occupy those little moments you share together when the boss is not looking. It’s not willing to put up with being used merely as a channel to share what you ate for breakfast! Nope, Twitter wants to be @anywhere and @everywhere. OK, so officially it just wants to be @anywhere–the name of its new framework–but you’ll soon see Twitter’s real plans are to be everywhere on the web. According to co-founder Biz Stone you’ll be able to… …follow a New York Times journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a video without leaving YouTube, and discover new Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home page. Yay, more noise! Ahem, I mean, valuable content being distributed throughout the web. While @anywhere is not live yet, Twitter has an impressive line-up of sites that have agreed to participate, including Amazon, AdAge, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, The Huffington Post, Meebo, MSNBC.com, The New York Times, Salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and YouTube. How will @anywhere work? According to DigitalBeat , those annoying nifty hovercards that Twitter implemented on the web interface will be the carrier for the disease that will infect every web site in the world platform used for @anywhere. Your 2-cents? Go!

Tags: accounts-while, Amazon, citysearch, disease, little-moments, platform-used, salesforce-com, Social, Twitter, Yahoo
Posted March 16, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

I really thought this chart from Hitwise (via TechCrunch ) was going to be a bigger deal than it actually is. On the face of it, Facebook just overtook Google as the most visited site in the U.S: However, Google doesn’t get the benefit of traffic to YouTube; and Yahoo is a mere third, because Yahoo Mail or Flickr aren’t credited towards its total. Considering Facebook does video, images, messaging, it seems this chart has been carefully crafted to create headlines.

Tags: benefit, bigger-deal, chart, cloud-hosting, computing, flickr, rackspace, Yahoo
Posted March 16, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media