I was just browsing my Google Analytics data today when I noticed the map of Florida looked really weird. Growing up in Florida I knew this was obviously incorrect so I took a screenshot.
And here is what Florida is supposed to look like.
Take a look at the bottom past Miami near the Keys. The Google map has no land there at all and the shape is all wrong. It looks like someone took a big bite out of south Florida. Maybe they’re just predicting water levels to rise soon and just saving themselves the extra effort of redoing their map after that happens. A bit of proactive thinking perhaps or completely obvious blunder.
I’ve been writing a lot about how great Bing is and made the switch to use Bing regularly but here I am in day 1 with using Bing full time and have run into problems. I am working on a Rails project doing some http requests and screen scraping. Basically, I’m extending the contacts gem to include AOL support. I wanted to see a quick reference to refresh my memory on the get / post syntax in Rails. I search Bing for “rails get http” and the first result is a link to rubyonrails.org. How useless. I search the entire first page and find absolutely nothing related to what I’m looking for. I’m beginning to second guess my previous whole-hearted support of Bing. Its good for general searches but it seems program related searches are crap with Bing. I do the same search in Google and the first result is what I wanted. Just a quick reference of someone using the Ruby get method. I tried a few other searches like ‘rails contacts gem’ and Bing doesn’t really give me much to work with in the results. I did have to dig down to the 8th result with Google but the Rails contacts gem project page is at least on the first page of the search results. Google wins when it comes to programming related searches in my opinion. Time for me to switch back to Google for the time being.
I have numerous SEO clients and one thing that I’ve noticed in the past few months is a drastic improvement in Microsoft’s Bing search engine’s quickness to respond to on-site content changes. All my clients are performing extremely well on Microsoft’s Bing search engine first and then the others follow. Yahoo and Google seem on par with each other as far as quickness to update and in rankings in general. Yahoo does seem to occasionally throw in huge random ups and downs but on the most part its in sync with Google’s rankings for most of my clients. Bing’s results however all outperform the other search engines in terms of quickness to respond to content updates as well as its ability to maintain high rankings for new content over time.
I’m not sure what Microsoft did to their search engine when they rebranded it as Bing but it does appear to behave differently as far as rankings for my clients. Despite the low amount of traffic it sends it is positive news either way. Now if only they offered some quality free tools like Google’s Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics it might start making some converts.
What I would personally like to see is for a top search engine to publish a detailed description for how to get them to view your site positively. They all keep it behind a black box and let the magic behind SEO consultants do the research but why? Why not just come out and explicitly say here is how to get your site ranked well. Here is what we don’t like. Here is what we do like. Then provide useful tools for optimizing your site to make it better. Offer a free set of SEO tools direct from the search engine. Then have a paid version that goes a lot deeper. I’m sure I’d have all my clients on the paid version in no time. Its not paying for rankings, its paying for the tools to get the site ranked better.
Its a whole new twist on SEO that who ever takes advantage of first might just become the next king of search.
Note: Microsoft didn’t pay me to write this but they should. They need all the positive publicity they can get.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting on the FTC’s recent decision to fine bloggers for not explicitly stating any compensation received for writing a blog. The FTC will now supposedly fine bloggers for writing reviews of products or services without specifying that they’ve been compensated for it. While the FTC has much bigger problems they should be dealing with like metered cell phone usage, misleading multi-year cell contracts, and software patents in general they are now focused in a direction they have absolutely no jurisdiction over. Will we now have federal blog readers employed with US tax dollars to just read blogs all day and make sure no one is writing reviews without specifying compensation for the review?
The whole logistics of enforcement of such fines is laughable in my opinion. First, what if I host my site in another country? Will these fines still apply? Second, a lot of blog sites have multiple authors with no realistic way for a site owner to ensure every writer is following the rules. Who will be responsible if a writer blogs against the rules? Finally, what will the FTC do if my site in another country and I am marketing specifically for US customer? Are they planning a great US firewall like China so they can excerpt more control over our online commerce and enforce penalties like blocking overseas sites?
Why the FTC even care? Marketing companies have been hiring bloggers to write reviews for years on sites like Pay per Post. My guess is the FTC is really less interested in protecting consumers and instead focused on brainstorming ways to help potentially generate more revenue for the US government and themselves. Its a laughable waste of tax dollars in my opinion.
NOTICE ON COMPENSATION: I received no compensation from the Wall Street Journal or the FTC for writing this blog.
Here is Micah Friedline with another screencast. This time it’s about The World’s Oyster, a self-updating address book. Stay in touch with friends, business contacts, and more with the easy to use address book that keeps itself updated as you move.
Here is a screencast our account manager, Micah Friedlin, made introducing you to Webster’s Classroom. Webster’s Classroom enables teachers to create free classroom webpages. We just recently upgraded the site to include some new features including password protection, classroom archiving, file dropbox, and more. There were numerous bug fixes and security enhancements made as well.
Its been a long year and I’ve had very little time to keep things updated around this site but here’s a preview of something we’ve been working on with a client. Its a self updating address book so you never lose track of your contacts when their information changes. Signup, try it out, and let us know if you have any ideas for improving it.
It’s been a long time coming but we’ve finally published our redesign of the Webster’s Classroom site. Webster’s Classroom helps teachers make classroom websites. We’ve also incorporated a new school site feature which will allow schools to take advantage of the features offered with Webster’s Classroom and get their entire school online. Its a service site offering school website design through my web development company, Onomojo. Check it out and tell your teacher friends about this great free tool.
This isn’t really the proper forum to be blogging about political preference, however, I stumbled upon a key difference in the three presidential candidates Obama, Hillary, and McCain with regards to the language they chose to program their campaign websites with. A quick browse through the links on the McCain site shows that they use ASP as you can see from this link:
Based solely on programming language choice for their web development which candidate would you choose? Given that I’m a Rails and PHP developer (albeit I once programmed in ASP for a paycheck) I think I’m going to have to go with the better language choice. It says something about where your head is.
Its been a long time coming but we’ve finally got our new site design finished for Onomojo. We’ve also expanded our services to include graphics design, logo design, web design, and a whole slew of other graphics related services. That’s in addition to the services we already provided which were primarily programming, seo, and marketing related. Here’s a screenshot of the new design.
