Reprise Media Xmas Reading List
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Written By Kate Zimmermann | December 25, 2006 | Share This
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For everyone who needs a break from wrapping paper and holiday cookies, here’s a recap of search news over the holiday:
Wikiasari
It’s not just a dyslexic’s spelling nightmare, Wikiasari is a future search engine that threatens to upset the search market dominance of Google, Yahoo and MSN. The Times announced on Saturday that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales will soon launch a search engine that exclusively crawls community-generated wiki content. Search Marketing Gurus has a good roundup of what bloggers have since reported about the new engine, separating the facts from blogger speculation, “Here are the facts: Widiapedia founder James Wales is planning on launching a new search engine first quarter 2007; Amazon nor A9 is not involved with the project; It will be a “people-powered” search engine; It will be built as open-sourced; Wikiasari is the software name, not the Search Engine name.”
Diggtatorship
Lee Odden’s Online Marketing Blog is among a growing list of SEO blogs and forums that are permenantly banned from Digg. After a recent “witchhunt” of SEO sites, a lot of reputable bloggers are angrily calling for a more transparent - or at the very least, reversible - banning procedure. This is yet another example of how digg is mismanaged and perhaps not ready for a mainstream audience. Techipedia says it all in their breakdown of diggcharacters, “With the continued feeling of inadequacy, I personally say that we need to find a new service to replace Digg.”
More Visible Quality Score
Search Engine Roundtable posted a screen shot of Quality Score ratings that are now showing up in their Adwords reports (We saw these on a few of our clients’ accounts last month). Though the ratings don’t offer much more than qualifying words (”good”, “poor” etc) and a minimum bid price, they give advertisers a way to at least differentiate what works and what doesnt. This will hopefully clear up some of the confusion surrounding Quality Score.
PayPal v. Identity Theft
PayPal has a new Virtual Debit Card for online transactions. Like Disposable Email Addresses, the Virtual Debit Card will generate a temporary mastercard account number that users can enter instead of their real credit card information. Thus, if an e-commerce site gets hacked, the user’s credit card information stays safe. The Virtual Debit Card will help combat the growing threat of online account information theft. Though a WebmasterWorld thread praises the feature, I ran a Mom Test for potential consumer adoption:
Kate: “Mom, paypal has a new way for you to shop online without revealing your real credit card numbers.”
Mom: “I don’t use Paypal because I get so many emails from PayPal spammers, it’s impossible to tell what’s real and what’s not. It’s PayPal, not the online shopping sites, that I’m worried about getting hacked.”
She has a good point.
Vanishing Act
This is not exactly search related, but (via Slashdot): “Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.” Wow.
Topics: Search: News |
Global warming may or may not be happening. Science is by no means sure whether or not current warming constitutes either a trend or a trend outside historical, geological timescale norms.
Likewise, as any archaeologist will tell you, there are thousands of archaeological sites that are currently under water but which thousands of years ago were above water. Were cavemen or Minoans guilty of driving SUV’s each & all? Hardly.
Everywhere I see global warming blindly accepted as though it were a religion (it is, actually, but that’s another story…), I try to stomp it out, but like any good religion it’s taken on a life of its own.
Abcs Of Credit Card Finance
The financial backing fuels the program's push to demystify finance