http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen

http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen

Quite… sad.

Here’s some links, and I’ll probably post more about it once I’ve looked at it further

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/07/2022244
http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060807-105252
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/08/06/aol-proudly-releases-massive-amounts-of-user-search-data/

The data itself:

http://www.gregsadetsky.com/aol-data/
http://www.aolsearchdatabase.com/
http://oy-oy.eu/temp/aol/

Among other things, Ammon mentions how many people – clients and SEOs alike – lose focus and end up concentrating only on “one link of the chain”: “They would forget that the idea of ranking high in a search was to draw more visitors, and that the purpose in drawing more visitors was to make more conversions, and that the sole point of making more conversions was to increase total sales. … They would aim for nothing but high rankings and would lose the mission – wasting time on getting a top rank for a phrase that didn’t drive any conversions.”

Ammon talks about the SMART objective he applies to any job he performs, as well as SEO’s part in Marketing – not just IT.

The interview is a good opportunity for any SEO – newbie or experienced – to learn from, as Rand says and I agree, “one of the best SEOs in the world”.

You can read it here.

Certainly a quick and easy way to become famous! He’ll probably really get hired now.

The current top few results for “tom vendetta” (with quotes) on Google are things from Digital Paintball forums. Check it again in a few days/weeks and there’ll be hundreds of results all about him.

Turns out he wants to visit Australia, too. Well, where the bloody hell are you?

Notes accidentally made public on Google’s website said “With infinite storage, we can house all user files, including emails, web history, pictures, bookmarks, etc and make it accessible from anywhere (any device, any platform, etc)”.

Google’s CEO also commented that one of their goals is to “store 100 percent” of consumer’s information.

This is probably going to get an even bigger backlash than what Gmail got, regarding privacy concerns. It’s even making me wonder now as well – whereas with the Gmail complaints I was just thinking “oh, get over it!”. Maybe it’s time I watch what I save in my Gmail account, you know, just in case?

(From Yahoo Finance via Slashdot)

I almost forgot it was April Fools Day today. If I remembered, I would have set my parents’ clocks forward an hour. It would have been fun seeing them (or getting their phone calls) when they got to work an hour early .

But I didn’t remember until I was on my way to work. Hungry Jacks/Burger King’s new burger was on the radio. They created the Left Hand Whopper – it has all the same ingredients as a normal whopper, they’re just rotated 180 degrees to make eating easier for the lefties among us. Hmmm….

That wasn’t all though. I got to work and was told that one of my friends was in hospital, and then realised it was a joke so I joined in on it with another friend. We ended up freaking someone out by saying he was dead….woops!

Then I visited my home forums – Cre8asite Forums. I had forgotten what we’d organised a few days beforehand, and as I visited, things were just starting to come into place. We flipped our avatars upside down for a bit of fun, but the best part was the announcement of our decision to sell the forums. Administrator Bill Slawski wrote up a press release explaining the changes we were making, to ensure that the forums were “a more attractive takeover target for some Venture capitalists and suitors from some of the larger online publishers”. Some of our changes included renaming the Website Hospital forum to Design Eye for the Ecommerce Guy, and stirring up controversy in the Usability forum with the new title, Usability Must Die. We also announced our intentions to change all the text to orange, adopt military style ranks for posters, create an eBay style reputation system, an add even more smilies to our currently very extensive collection.

People believed us, too. In our newly renamed Forum Issues That We’ll Ignore forum, Elizabeth and Donna both mentioned how we got them until the “Usability Must Die” part, whereas Paul got all the way through our new forum name suggestions!

Honorary Member Tam also told us about what she did on her forum, which is an idea for us to keep in mind for next year.

It wasn’t just us having fun either. On their blog, SearchEngineWatch made a rundown of pranks pulled within the search industry, including Google’s new underwear store and Gulp drinks, Ask Jeeves’ search robot, and the MSN friend-pranker search results. Don’t ask me how this one works though.

So all in all it was a good day, and it was fun to share it with the search engine community. I know we at Cre8asite already have plans for next year….

It’s SEOpen, and although I haven’t really tested it much yet, it looks like it’ll be useful. It ads a new context menu submenu, with links to services like Google and Yahoo backlinks, whois, robots.txt viewer, and others. All the stuff I normally have to visit manually. It’ll save a bit of time . There’s more features planned as well, so this will definitely be an extension I’ll be keeping my eyes on.

Barry Welford pointed it out on Cre8asite this morning.

The presentation covers the creation of the Internet in 1989 till when the New York Times is taken offline in 2014. It covers the creation of the Google Grid in 2006, and Google and Amazon’s merging in 2008 – creating the challenge to Microsoft, Googlezon.

Microsoft will fade away into history, and Larry and Sergey will be the world’s richest businessmen. Everything will be done online, and every person will have instantaneous access to the Internet wherever and whenever they want. The New York Times will “become a print only newsletter for the elite and elderly.”

On a related note, all this change brings us more towards the paradox of our time in history. As “we build more computers to hold more information to produce more copies than ever, but have less communication…”

And, as a sidenote, Googlezon domains have already been registered in most spaces – damn, I was beaten to it .