Google’s long awaited social network project, Google+, has been recently released to lucky few, while the rest of the world willing to try the “not Facebook but like Facebook” new kid on the social front are bound to wait. While in most cases restricting your beta release to a restricted group might be a bad idea, in Google’s case it seems to be working great.

Browsing my Google Reader today (yes, my online life is completely dependant on Google), I saw a quite a lot of stories on how to get invites faster, news roundups including the Google announcement, reviews, good or bad, and everything in between. While some proclaim Google+ another failure at getting the social concepts right from the search giant, others are already focusing on the features and how to leverage this new networking channel. Bottom line, the Google+ project keeps getting lots of coverage.  Continue reading

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A while ago, I tried to access a website I like to read, home of the odd and unusual, offbeat news, with plenty of gorgeous pictures to support the content, and flawless copywriting. To my surprise, Google had blocked the site in my browser, because it contained malware. This happened because of a flaw in MediaTemple’s security patches for sites built on WordPress, that allowed hackers to insert a malicious script. It had to be there, unobserved, for quite a while, if Google decided to block the site.

To my knowledge, many MT customers who host there blogs, have to pay enormous sums, sometimes ridiculously high, for hosting, bandwidth, etc. A popular site like Life in the Fast Lane has seen, no doubt, bank-breaking bills. The price would be well worth it, if the site owner had peace of mind. But if it happened once, who says that it will never happen again. Continue reading

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I love reading SEOBook and from the SEO perspective, I think Aaron Wall is quite the guru. I also think he’s got very cool marketing and business development insights to share. But it seems Twitter is where our opinions start to differ. According to his post about Twitter, this microblogging platform is a big page rank waster, mostly because of the no follow links. True. He also seems to think there’s little to gain from using Twitter. Aaron also quotes Seth Godin on the fact that, just like the phone, Twitter is only a connecting medium, not a marketing medium.

My question to you is: if you could (legally ) listen to people’s conversations on the phone, hear them when they mention your product or service, if you could start your own conversation with them, wouldn’t you be all over the phone? I know I would!

Twitter might be nothing more than a connection between many dots, but it’s an extremely transparent one. You can literally watch thoughts spread through word of mouth. Tweets and retweets and the circle keeps growing. Continue reading

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It’s today! And while not all languages have a dedicated pirate vocabulary, we’re all fascinated by these seamen. It’s a fun day and everyone seems to be talking about it. I first found out of it from John Cass of PR Communications. Through his post, I found out everything about this day.

What then caught my eye was Barbara Rozgonyi’s article on how the buzz around this day evolved in the last two years. I wonder how it will all evolve now that Google is joining in and Facebook is teaching us how to talk “pirate”. I’m sure Barbara’s search results will double in a few days!

Now, if you’re like me and can’t talk like a pirate with your friends, here are some other ideas to celebrate: invite your friends over and have a pirate themed party (this will require great event planning efforts ), watch some pirate themed movies or read something pirate related. Have fun!

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