If you have a billion users, and a mere 0.1% of them have an issue that requires support on a given day (an average of one support issue per person every three years), and each issue takes 10 minutes on average for a human to personally resolve, then you’d spend 19 person-years handling support issues every day.

If each support person works an eight-hour shift each day then you’d need 20,833 support people on permanent staff just to keep up.

That, folks, is internet scale.

We are often asked in our Live Support Chat ‘Do you guys ever sleep?‘ or ‘How can you afford to offer 24×7-365 live support, as a start up?‘. The answer is simple really, and it all comes down to the foundation of this very business.

To put it bluntly, the SEO industry for the most part totally sucks when it comes to client service and accountability. Agencies and ‘celebrity’ (spew) SEO consultants that work the speaking circuit tend to spend more time promoting their capabilities, their new book or their personal brand, than they do focused on delivering value to their customers. Which is where LC is a little different.

In short, we are well aware that this business is nothing without our customers. Evidently so, as we named the company LOVEclients. So how do we keep up with the demands of 24×7-365 live support, scale the business, and still deliver a quality service that our customers have become accustomed to?

It is a mix of the following:

Technology (The HUB)

Every LoveClients campaign is managed within a custom built application that acts as a central communication tool for everyone working on the campaign.

The hub, which is what we call it internally, is a place where clients can login to track progress, provide their input, approve process elements, and communicate directly with the team 24×7-365. It keeps everyone accountable, and campaigns on track.

All reporting, communication, trackable metrics and and site analytics are conveniently located in one place, so as to make daily decision making an informed, and simple process.

Multiple TimeZones

When LoveClients first started trading, we opened a 24×7 production facility based out of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. We thought we would take advantage of the low production and operation costs, and access to great talent. It didn’t work however, here’s why:

In under 12 months, we came to realize that the type of people that were willing to work the ‘late shift’, really were not suited to the level of fanatical support that we have for our clients, and their respective campaigns. To add, due to the timezone difference our best team members were working the day shift; while our clients were sleeping. When clients awoke, they were then dealing with the team on nightshift.

We are still paying for that mistake, but it taught us many, many valuable lessons. We adapted quickly by opening offices within the TimeZones our clients trade in, and scaled KL down.

Now we operate separate offices and production facilities in Vancouver, London, Riga and Melbourne, taking advantage of the differences in timezone to offer a true 24×7-365 service offering. Each office now has an overlap, of a few hours, so as the team in London is coming toward the end of their day, the crew in Vancouver takes over, and as Vancouver is calling it quits, Melbourne is fresh and ready to be of service.

So.. No, our clients are not serviced by half-asleep crew in stale offices that stay open 24×7-365 – but instead by opening strategically placed global offices, and a custom built central communication tool (The hub), we are able to offer 24×7-365 live client service & support, by mother tongue, english speaking professionals who keep normal hours!

Mother Tongue client service

When I called to query a charge on my AMEX bill last month, I was routed from Vancouver (Canada) to Bangalore, India. The representative that took my call was helpful enough, and for a task as simple as checking a transaction on my statement, I completely understood why AMEX would use a facility in India to cut down their customer service costs.

Though when it comes to providing high-level, often culturally sensitive, marketing advice; the timezone and cultural differences between say Birmingham, Boston and Bangalore can play a massive role in the quality of advice you receive from your SEO Agency. Even though the human resource costs are high in cities like Vancouver & London, we have found that keeping customer service, strategy planning and research on-shore has played a massive role in the overall experience for our customers.

There are many great SEO companies that operate throughout places like India and the Philippines, though there is a notable difference between simply delivering a shopping-list of tasks for a customer, and actually getting involved in a clients business, understanding their objectives, the cultural sensitivities and their specific audience requirements.

Don’t try to be Everything to Everyone

Love the clients you have, and service them well, but don’t try and tackle tasks that are way out of scope of your offering. If you were to walk in to a McDonalds Restaurant, and order a plate of Spaghetti Bolognese, they are not going to hop out the back and do their best to whip up the sauce, to keep their customer happy. On the contrary, they stick to what they know best & deliver what they know works.

As a small business providing a professional service offering you can’t be everything to everyone. Know your limits and deliver a brilliant customer experience to those customers that suit your service or product offering, trying to deliver something that is way out of scope or simply not part of our core competency will only end in tears.

Manage Client Expectations

For starters, don’t even begin to promise #1 rankings as a reputable SEO Agency. A sure fire way to lose a client is to promise deliverables that are out of your 100% complete-control within a timeframe that is totally unrealistic.

Not only will you not keep your customers happy, you will lose them for good. Prior to building LoveClients the founders of this company worked in the web design & advertising space so we are all very well aware of how the promise of a deadline that is not met, can ruin a working relationship in less time that it took for you to read this blog post.

As a service provider, if you provide realistic expectations from the outset and explain your channels of communication, then life will be a great deal easier for all parties concerned.

In our instance, we have three very specific forms of communication. Live Chat, The Hub & a 24×7-365 Live Call Back service. No power-point presentations, no long-winded lunches & no, we will not write you a proposal. As outlined on our Contact Us page, we simply don’t do meetings.

Although DeWitt Clinton makes a valid and interesting point about the true human cost of scaling client support, it is still arguably possible to manage at scale if expectations are managed correctly, the technology is in place to communicate efficiently & of course if the company has hired the right people (in the correct timezone) that are dedicated to client satisfaction, & not just client service.

There are two fundamental things that make this important for SEO Agencies. But before I tell you what those are, just a warning: this doesn’t apply to every SEO company out there. This only works for the ones that do good web design as well. The ones that know online marketing inside and out. Who do research, who read. Who don’t sit back, who never coast (I happily include Loveclients in this category, of course).

Here’s why:

iAd Will Be the Biggest Competitor to Google’s AdWords & AdSense

There are about 85 million iPhone/iPod touch devices out there. By the time iAd launches, you can expect that number (add in iPad numbers too) to be quite a bit higher. None of these devices display Google’s ads properly. AdMob, the company Google is still in the process of purchasing, displays ads in tons of free applications, but these generally remove you from the application and take you into a web browser.

Apple realized a competitive advantage here. Since it controls the iPhone OS, it can create a better opportunity for in-app advertising, and that’s exactly what they’ve done. If it takes off, that’s 40% profits for Apple on every ad buy across the iPhone/iPod/iPad platform.

There is no other competitor to Google operating on this scale — Apple just announced a brand new platform, with new rules and new, as-of-yet-unseen tracking methods, that will eventually (this summer) compete on a major level with Google, albeit entirely in the mobile space.

What does this mean for SEO agencies? Well…

The Good SEO Agencies Will Leverage Their AdWords Skill for Compelling iAds

Advertising is advertising. Apple and Google know this, even though Google changed pretty much the entire game with their platform, and use it to drive nearly all of their earnings.

If your SEO Agency continuously educates itself on AdWords success, takes advantage of the inherent characteristics of the platform (for example, by knowing through experience what ads convert the best), and works hard to do PPC Management right, there’s no reason they won’t do the same with the iAd platform.

But it gets better…

SEO Agencies Who Build Standards-Compliant Websites Are Uniquely Positioned

First, agencies who don’t use flash are already at an advantage — we already work with standards because that’s what gets SEO results. It also happens to make good, accessible, future-proof, properly-degrading websites, too. Everyone wins.

But here’s the new development: Apple’s iAd platform is entirely HTML5-based. It is built on these standards. If your development team already knows how to build on these same standards, they already know how to make an iAd. OK, but hang on — anyone can make an HTML5 document these days. What makes a good SEO Agency any different? Well:

Combine that skill with advertising acumen. Now you’ve got the ultimate machine:

• an SEO/PPC Management company who knows online advertising.
• a company that can also build standards-based sites.
• an agency that knows how to learn an evolving ad platform.
• a company that knows how to market online.

It’s an all-in-one solution. If you’re looking for an internet marketing company that’s going to keep you on the cutting edge of the online ad market but makes sure you have a strong, solid foundation, that’s the kind of SEO Agency you need to find. (ahem)

This Will Change Our Industry

This is the “a-ha” moment for mobile ads. Apple controls the OS and a huge share of the smartphone market. Google controls another big chunk, and will no doubt transform AdMob into a competing platform with full AdWords integration across their devices.

Good agencies will be ready for all of this, because we’ve been getting ready for it from day 1, by following best practices and doing things right. Apple’s new platform and its standards-based foundation is a great validation for the way companies like Loveclients do business.

Recently, there’s been a whole lot of debate about how Flash is becoming out-of-date, how the web is going to move beyond Flash and towards something more open — mainly HTML5 standards that include embedded video.

Apple vs. Adobe

One of the main reasons — and main communities of discussion — this conversation has heated up is the often-vocal Apple community online. Since the iPad was announced in January, and Steve Jobs’ demo included visiting sites featuring flash (and thus featuring the same blue lego you see on the iPhone browser), a lot of great writing has been published regarding the potential ‘end of flash’ on the internet.

First, you have John Gruber talking about Apple, Adobe, and Flash:

Flash is the only de facto web standard based on a proprietary technology. There are numerous proprietary web content plugins — including Apple’s QuickTime — but Flash is the only one that’s so ubiquitous that it’s a de facto standard. Flash is the way video is delivered over the web, and Adobe completely controls Flash. No other aspect of the web works like this. HTML, CSS, and JavaScript are all open standards, with numerous implementations, including several that are open source … it is harmful to the web as a whole to have something as important as video be in the hands of a single company, and the only way that’s going to change is if an open alternative becomes a compelling target for web publishers.

Could Flash Go Open-Source?

There was also some talk about Flash becoming an open standard, that Adobe might release the source code in order to allow Apple to re-engineer it to run properly on their iPhone, iPad, and, to an extent, their computers — as both Adobe and Apple insist that they’re not given full access to each others’ low-level computing tasks in order to get flash working as best it can on Apple platforms.

But this is unlikely, and, as Gruber pointed out, the flash source code might be a “huge steaming pile of convoluted C++ horsesh*t”.

There’s also this revealing infographic from LifeHacker which shows how the number of users visiting the popular site with non-flash-enabled browsers has increased in recent years.

Adobe’s Response

Adobe has responded, both here and here, but it’s notable that the most stringest defenses of Flash online have so far come from the very company who sells it, not from Flash-using developers.

Why Loveclients Doesn’t Over-Rely on Flash

A final word should probably be given to Jeffrey Zeldman, who wrote a post entitled Flash, iPad, Standards:

As the percentage of web users on non-Flash-capable platforms grows, developers who currently create Flash experiences with no fallbacks will have to rethink their strategy and start with the basics before adding a Flash layer. They will need to ensure that content and experience are delivered with or without Flash.

This is essentially why we don’t automatically mandate flash in our designs (even though you see it on our homepage, as a video) — content and experience, which can only be well-delivered with a good, open structure, are the essential building blocks of SEO, and we don’t want to design sites on something that can’t deliver.

The consensus is that it’s time for a new kind of search, one that finally brings the internet in-line with the sort of ‘breaking news’ we might see on TV, or that ubiquitous, useless ticker at the most of most 24-hour news channels.

Writing in Seattle’s The Stranger, Paul Constant recently explained why real-time is important:

The thing most people will probably, eventually use Twitter for is its clean and efficient search engine.

The search function on Twitter is an amazing thing: It’s a focused laser beam into what people are thinking about right now.

And it’s permanently set to “now”: It doesn’t have anything to do with the past or with archiving. That is an innovation in and of itself.

An inordinate amount of the internet is devoted to archiving and filing all the world that existed before the internet.

Twitter is reflexive, instinct driven, present. It doesn’t care about the past. It’s hard to find a post older than a week old. It’s work.

Twitter’s own search has been covered to death online, and the consensus is that it needs competition and improvement. As a result, an almost comical number of competitors have stepped up to sort and catalogue what’s happening in real-time on the internet right now.

Below, we look at 5 of the most interesting ones and let you know how they work, what they do for you, and whether you’ll want to use them every day.

Friendfeed

Friendfeed was the first search I tried. To me, it ended up looking more like a blog search—most of the stories were people posting major newspaper articles pulled by Google News, or from the New York Times directly, or from other major international sources like Spain’s El Mundo. I saw a few results pulled from delicious.com and also some posts by the New York Times’ own friendfeed stream as well. The real-time updating was nicely done, but for the subject I chose, there simply isn’t enough at-the-moment information coming out to make a search like this worthwhile.

After about 30 seconds of waiting for someone else to make a comment, tweet, or social-bookmark another article, I moved on. As it stands, I could get a nice idea of how a story is developing through conversation online, but a quick Google News search would get me more relevant information a whole lot faster, considering almost everything in the feed is just links to old-fashioned journalism anyway. Perhaps with a still-rapidly-developing story things might be different, but again, a huge amount of conversation (even about ultra-fresh breaking news) comes through as links to newspaper websites.

The Verdict:

A nice but very simple interface that pulls from a wide range of sources (tumblr, twitter, delicious, digg, facebook, youtube) to get its information. Whether that information is any good is another story. If you use it just to search your own friends’ streams (and have a lot of friends online) it might be great—otherwise it’s search away and hope for the best.

Scoopler

I liked Scoopler’s approach, as it shows real-time results updating in the center column, while displaying various ‘popular’ results (sorted into videos, links, and images) on the right. I tried following a few other ‘hot topics’ as suggested on the left, and most of the twitter results that showed up were near-unreadale, full of 6 or 7 #hashtags each and several links to spam sites.

The spam isn’t surprising—any new communication format online gets abused by spam, but usually we’re able to block it out, either by not following spammers on twitter, or relying on Google’s algorithms to block it for us. Scoopler, although I’m sure they’re trying valiantly to do so, hasn’t done it yet, although they are a brand new search engine.

The Verdict:

An OK mix of the real-time flow and a filtered, more popular resulsts list, but ultimately not very satisfying in helping me find anything. If you like studying the online zeitgeist, this is better than Google Trends, in most respects.

Topsy

Topsy is actually quite fantastic. Want to see how many people are talking about a particular article or several articles on a specific subject? Topsy does it beautifully, because it ranks the results using some specific algorithms. Certain tweeters get an ‘influential’ rating, based on a series of criteria that surely includes the number of followers, the amount of re-tweets they garner, and so on. So as something new and trending pops up online, you can get an immediate sense of ‘authoritative’ search that some of the other real-time engines lack. I’d like to know more about how Topsy evaluates its ‘influential’ criteria, but they’ve definitely hit on a good idea.

The other thing I’m enjoying about their site is the following: it gives me the satisfaction of google’s indexed, archived, older searches, only applied to Twitter. I can go through Topsy and immediately find my own profile, and then get a sense of how many other people tweeted the same links I did. Authors can also use this to find articles and blog posts of theirs that other people have been talking about—while Twitter’s main search lets you do this too, Topsy makes it more elegant and far better organized.

In the end, when it came to my breaking news search (Xinjiang), Topsy was much like the others, giving me general links to big newspaper stories with lots of authority, and little else. Perhaps I picked one that didn’t have much original content outside of news agencies—it was coming from China, after all, where there’s still plenty of censorship. Breaking stories elsewhere have a much different feel to them—faster links to amateur video on youtube, and so on.

The Verdict:

Out of all of these, Topsy is the one search engine I can see myself going back to, and using it to supplement a google search. I’ve already used it about five times today, which is the only thing that matters, in the end.

Collecta

Collecta is another startup (all of these are startups, of course) searching twitter, this time with an interface that lets you put into larger focus individual tweets, and lets you run several searches concurrently.

I liked both of those features, and the fact that it pulls comments from blogs, as well as blog posts and flickr photos. There was no smooth interface action where the newest tweets cause the old ones to elegantly slide down (something that FriendFeed does, which gives it a more ‘real time’ feeling, at least aesthetically), and there was still, as is inevitable, a ton of spam when it came to any ‘hot topic’.

Also, leaving the site gave me a message about disconnection, and going back to the site left me with a big wait before all my searches started again.

The Verdict:

Again, a nice interface, but nothing I’d use on a daily basis. I’m starting to notice a trend here—slight variations on the main twitter search engine—and I think a large part of this is because all of these search engines are just so damn new.

Almost.at

Here we’ve got a site that isn’t really a search engine, as much as a way to follow a series of ongoing events through real-time chatter online. You can choose major events from the left toolbar, and you get a series of twitter updates, flickr photos and youtube videos, and various links displayed.

What’s nice is that the timing is broken down minute-by-minute, so you get a nice clean view of the traffic for a specific event. You can also head back in the timeline to see what the chatter was at a previous time. Once I did this, though, I found it tough to get back to the ‘present moment’ and started forgetting today’s date.

The timestamping for the youtube and flick results also seemed to be non-existent.

The Verdict:

A cool idea for following live events, and the actual event choices (at least during the beta) are moderated, so the selection is small and relevant. The execution isn’t anywhere close to perfect, but the concept is one of the most interesting. Following protests using only #hashtags or twitter’s main search can become a spam-fest or a messy confusion, and almost.at’s concept of choosing specific ‘events’ and following just those is a nice way of organizing the information.

To Sum Up….

Pretty much all of these services are in beta, and they all show it. In the rush to capitalize on the new flood of twitter data that’s out there, it’s inevitable there are going to be a ton of real-time search engines popping up this year, and if the rumours are any guide, Google will surely launch their own effort soon enough.

Lots of chatter about real-time search tends to paint Google as an old-fashioned search engine relying on caches and ‘yesterday’s internet’. Be weary about such claims—determining relevance when it comes to search results takes time, and for now, the best algorithms are ones that can’t get the job done instantaneously.

And What About Google?

Another cliche in the chatter surrouding these sites is Google’s lack of a real-time offering as of yet, and the fact that they’ve admitted they’re somewhat ‘behind’ on the issue. While it is surprising that so many competitors have moved into the field while Google has released nothing so far (but goes ahead and announces stuff like the Chrome OS months and months in advance, without any previews or substantial details), it’s all just a matter of tracking and indexing data, something we all know Google is very good at.

And most of the data being analyzed is simply coming from Twitter streams, combined with reading the timestamp of various other postings. None of this is exceedingly difficult when it comes to search, so what’s really going to matter is getting relevant real-time results, blocking spam, and creating an interface that’s easy to use but robust underneath.

So far, a site like that doesn’t exist (although I’d vote for topsy as the best one so far). Might Google jump into the market with the best implementation of real-time search yet seen? Although the field seems insanely crowded already, even just a cursory glance like we’ve done here shows that there’s massive room for improvement. Real-time search is still in its ‘alpha’ phase, and needs a big player to pull it out. One is probably going to arrive any day now.

Of course this isn’t web or blog content, but rather just business or personal emails we send back and forth. But can we ever use any of it as content for our sites?

Indeed we can.

The Value of Author’s Letters.

I’ve been reading Norman Mailer’s letters recently, and it occured to me that he made dozens of great points, observations, and arguments while writing to friends and editors. This is normal–we often say great stuff in our emails, too (probably not as great as his, but hey).

But it’s not really publishable, per se—it’s generally only great authors who get that privledge, and thank god, because reading through people’s random emails would be an atrocious task.

But what about the few times we do write something truly memorable in an email? An anecdote, a product review, a recounted experience—we send a lot of these things to each other. I tell various stories in a ton of different contexts: flickr captions, google reader shared item comments, my photoblog, and in emails, too.

Many of the best things I’ve ever written are likely buried somewhere inside emails. If I were running a business, surely I’d have sent many good thoughts and observations on my business out to various friends and associates. Keep that part in mind while I tell you a story.

My Friend and his Duplicate Emails (He’s Proud of Them).

I’ve got a friend who admitted to a strange practice: when he tells an anecdote that takes more than a few lines in an email, he’ll often copy and paste the whole thing into other emails when someone asks about it.

After a few seconds of personalization, that second (or third, or fourth) recipient gets the great anecdote too.

Why not just make it into a blog, you might ask? Well, a blog changes things: it’s automatically more public, and it has a frontend that requires more work than just firing off an email. This is changing, of course, but updating a blog still isn’t really as easy—for most of us—as sending an email.

How to Keep Track of Your Finest Email Moments.

So let’s say we want to keep track of our greatest e-mails, those moments of prosodic excellence where we’ve written something truly great and might want to see it again in the future, or perhaps even use it. Is there a way we can keep track of this stuff, and quickly and easily turn it into published content?

Tracking isn’t much of an issue with something like GMail: just create a tag called “content” or whatever you’d like, and any time you notice you’ve written something that might be useful elsewhere, give it that tag. Every once in a while, go through your ‘content’ tag and see what you can find.

Getting All That Good Writing Online, Somehow.

So how do we get it online? Obviously we could just copy and paste it to our blog, but there’s a new service that makes this even better: it’s called Posterous. It’s been catching on recently among a few high-profile bloggers, and its mission statement is simple: blogging through e-mail.

It’s microblogging, much like tumblr offers (they too offer e-mail postings), but with a real focus on posting from your inbox as the primary way of getting content online.

A Practical Way to Make This Work for You.

Let’s pretend you’re running a blog and company website that promotes your independent printing shop.

Every once in a while, you write a great email to a friend, extolling the glories of letterpress, or talking about a new printer you just brought in, or talking about what a pleasure it was to finish a particular job.

As you know, getting interesting content (you don’t send deadly-boring emails, do you?) like that online is invaluable for several reasons:

• it keeps potential customers on your site,
• makes your business far easier to optimize for search engines,
• and increases the chances that other people around the web might enjoy something you write and link to it, thereby greatly increasing your traffic—and potential sales.

So try this out: setup a quick blog on Posterous. They’ve just taken the extra step of not requiring even a sign-up in order to create an account—you can just email their post@posterous.com address directly and within a few seconds you’ll have a subdomain and an account.

Then, every time you write something good in an email, take a few extra seconds to forward that to the posterous email address. You’ll already be in your e-mail client, so there won’t be much of a time commitment to speak of.

Then, just feed the posterous RSS into your main blog (you can do this through posterous or—likely—through your blogging platform too), and you’ve instantly got another way to add content to your site directly from your inbox.

If this Posterous Idea Makes Things Too Complicated, Not to Worry.

I didn’t want this article to sound like an ad for Posterous—we’re not affiliated in any way. But I like the site.

And I was just using it as an example of how simplified blogging tools are getting. What’s really important to take away from this article is this: if you are at all a writer, if your emails occasionally contain great bits of information about your business, life, or anything that might serve you well if published online, take advantage of it! Don’t just let that content be for one person—edit it a bit and put it to work for you.

Famous link-aggregration and voting site digg.com recently launched a new feature, called the diggbar. It’s a type of frame that appears above the browser window when you follow a digg.com link, and serves to keep the web user “inside the digg universe” instead of immediately leaving it.

It also functions as a URL shortener. In fact, if you enter any website URL after digg.com (for example: http://digg.com/www.loveclients.com) you’ll get that page, with the DiggBar displayed on top.

What’s the Point of It?

How does Digg describe the new feature? According to their site’s blurb, it allows you to do the following:

The DiggBar enables you to Digg, read comments, find related content, and share stuff from any page on the Web. And it’s presented in a short URL format, making it easy to share in emails, on Twitter, and via other services. In addition to finding it on all outbound links from Digg, you can generate the DiggBar using any of the following solutions.

What this really means is the bar above your page works like those popular browser toolbars that google, yahoo, stumbleupon and countless others want you to install. Functioning as a filter, helper, and advertising assistant all at once, they deal with your browsing and, depending on whose bar you’ve installed, respond to it in various ways.

The google toolbar might find relevant sites depending on what sites you’re visiting, allow you to search google quickly (largely redundant with most browsers’ built-in search boxes now), while the yahoo toolbar contains a mail widget and various other yahoo-related connections.

Web-based Toolbars are Different Than Browser Addons

Where Digg’s new offering difffers is that, like stumbleupon.com, there’s no software to install. This means that the diggbar is essentially just a frame running at the top of your webbrowser, continuously connected to digg and pulling information from the browsing you’re doing below.

Offering comments from digg.com, the ability to share page content, and offers of related ‘dugg’ sites, the Diggbar is somewhat like an advanced bookmarklet (the little pieces of javascript you can drag to your browser toolbar and then use to share content on a variety of sites: see Google Reader’s or Tumblr’s for an example).

From some perspectives, this might sound OK, except that the Diggbar is generating a fair share of controversy. As URL shorteners are already becoming slightly problematic (their prevalence on Twitter means that if any of the sites, such as bit.ly, ping.ws, or tinyURL ever disappear, all tweets using those services will suddenly be full of broken links).

And now digg has jumped on the bandwagon, offering its own bar as a way to shorten URLs for use on twitter.

Everyone’s Doing It: Why Digg Wants to Keep You on Their Site

The controversy comes because, unlike the traditional shorteners, the diggbar takes you to a version of the website presented through digg’s bar feature, which means you aren’t seeing the website in its original form, but intsead in a framed edition.

The web-development site daringfireball talks about how framing a website harkens back to the mid-1990s, when netscape introduced its ‘frameset’ tag and temporarily made the web a very difficult place to navigate. Frame-based sites were everywhere, and made browsing terribly annoying for nearly everybody:

It did not take long for a broad consensus to develop that framing someone else’s site was wrong. URLs are the building block of the Web. They tell the user where they are. They give you something to bookmark to go back or to share with others. The DiggBar breaks that, and I’ve seen no argument that makes it any more sense to support this than it does to support 1996-style site embedding.

According to this argument, the diggbar is the exact same concept, only dressed up to look like something else. Instead of being a special ‘helper’ at the top of the site, it’s just an old-fashioned frame that keeps you on a site and confuses your sense of where you actually reside on the web.

Engadget is Having None of This

One of the biggest sites on the internet, Engadget, has blocked the diggbar entirely. In a statement, they explained why they have a fundamental problem with the way digg is implementing this new feature:

Ultimately, this is both a technical and philosophical decision. We believe that the work of content creators should be protected and treated as the unique product that it is, and that an end-user’s experience shouldn’t be tainted with a “catch-all” tool which diminishes context.

It’s all about context in the end, and the DiggBar simply removes too much of it. It’s great for Digg and its advertisers, but as an new method of keeping users “within the Digg ecosystem,” it’s not so great for the web at large. Engadget continues:

In Digg’s efforts to keep you swimming in their stream, they completely obscure the original URL you’re supposed to be looking at. And no, not just the URL you follow from a particular Digg on their site — all the URLs you visit (via clicks) until you kill the bar. Additionally, if you’re browsing around a site under the bar itself and you kill it, it transports you back to the original URL you landed on, thus completely breaking continuity and making it almost impossible to know where you’ve actually browsed to.

Other Reactions Haven’t Been So Kind, Either

Other not-so-happy reactions came from 3dogmedia, WebMonkey, and SearchEngineLand, none of which were very complimentary. Digg’s Kevin Rose has explained that they are looking into changing the way the diggbar functions to make it less intrusive and cumbersome, and to address some of these fundamental complaints.

Whether they can do that without changing the business plan that is surely behind the new bar’s introduction is going to be an interesting question in the future.

Digg is one of the web’s biggest sites, and their further attempts to monetize and become a profit-generating business mean that some of the best aspects of the social web will inevitably suffer, or at least undergo some serious changes. It’s something we’re all going to watch very closely.

And that’s all it has been doing—nothing has changed or become particularly more robust. You can add a feed of your flickr photos, links to all your blogs, and there are a few cursory implementations of various Google APIs (a non-dynamic maps image that shows where you’ve lived) to fill out the page.

But does Google have something else in store for its profile? Could they be planning something big and just waiting to release it? We know they’re trying to change the game in regards to online collaboration—just look at Google Wave—but will they try something similar here?

Google Already Has a Social Networking Application.

Yep, it’s called Orkut, and chances are you probably don’t use it. Unlike the ubiquitous facebook, orkut never really caught on in North America or the UK, and most of its user base comes from Brazil and India. While those are most definitely not places to be ignored, it’s safe to say that any big Google innovations are generally going to be ‘launched’ with the English-speaking market in mind. It’s just the way things go, Google being a Silicon-Valley based company.

So if Google would already like you to use their social networking platform and you’ve politely declined, is the point of Google Profile pretty much exactly what it says? That it provides a home for your contact information as searched with Google, and nothing more?

Why Profile is Currently Limited, But Might Not Be For Long.

At the moment, yeah—that’s pretty much it. I started poking around for a way to display my Twitter feed on it, or my shared items in Google Reader, and they just weren’t available. All I could do was add a link to my twitter page, and Google had already provided a link to their own reader feed. No robust APIs were on display here.

Much of the reason Google Profile seems like it could expand into something bigger is because of its name. Profile makes us think of our facebook or linkedin profile, full of information, photos, comments, wall posts, posted items, and the rest. But facebook, until very recently, was a closed environment. It was impossible to access the feed of content attached to any particular user.

How Facebook’s Big Announcement Could Change Everything.

Now that Facebook has introduced their Open Stream API, however, all of this could change. Is there anything that might block Google from integrating the open stream of Facebook information into a Google Profile?

Not exactly, although Google’s own attempts to create an open-source, social media API across all platforms (that would be OpenSocial) read quite similar to what Facebook is now trying to do with its activity streaming.

Since Facebook has not previously embraced an ‘open’ style of development with its API, preferring to keep things closed for many reasons (monetization being one important factor), this tentative step in that direction is a big risk.

Once all the rich user data from Facebook is openly accessible, readable, and modifiable, who’s to say that Google won’t simply step in, harnessing its unbelievable search capacity, and create an open facebook-alternative, displaying Google advertisements and providing an even better user interface?

So—while Google Profile seems strangely static and rather limited in its scope at the moment, keep watching for developments among the big social media APIs. The framework for a potential game-changer could be sitting right under your nose.

Yahoo! has once again proven why they are Google’s top competitor. For small businesses, Yahoo! will provide real time “enterprise level data” on their e-store including products and marketing. The Custom Microsite service provides tools to track and analyze how visitors spend their time on a merchant’s website and give owners a better idea of how to plan online branding and make their website more user friendly. The third part of Yahoo! Web Analytics, called “Yahoo! Open Strategy” (YOS) is for the developers. It was designed to provide API users with “analytics-enhanced reporting” in order to better understand user engagement and habits. These will be custom made reports and allows developers and e-biz manager follow the latest trends and visitor behaviors.

Yahoo! Web Analytics boasts ten specific services and benefits:

An Executive Dashboard which allows managers to customize the metrics, benchmarks and gauges in order to track progress, identify issues and set achievable goals. What I like about this feature is that every employee can have their own dashboard if you want them to. Personally I would stick with strictly management access, but the point is that you have a choice.

Custom Reporting Wizard allows managers to organize reports and include/exclude data according to what your business needs are.

Advanced Campaign Management measures CPC, CPM, CPA and ROI of each form of advertising. Because it’s real-time information, managers can adjust their budget, and organize reports as needed.

Real Time Segmentation analyzes each customer demographic and segment individually. This will permit managers to view how website visitors are responding to landing pages, campaigns, layouts and calls to action. It also enables managers to identify target groups of visitors so that they can better utilize their marketing budget.

The Live Cost Analysis compares search engine prices from Google, Yahoo! and MSN and integrates the data from revenue on your website, measures your paid search ROI and analyzes keyword effectiveness.

Managers can also analyze purchasing patterns, track product and product combination sales as well as preview their carts and suggest additional items they may be interested in with Yahoo!’s Merchandise Reporting feature. Reports can be created to track cancelled or changed orders and calculate your campaign’s profitability.

Scenario Analysis actually allows mangers to track visitor paths, behavior, and task completions allowing managers to redefine processes for the future as well as how those would have worked well in the past. This goes hand in had with the Advanced Path Analysis feature which allows managers to view popular user paths as a branched map.

Yahoo! Web Analytics allows managers to view and compare multiple reports side by side with their Comparative Reporting feature. Managers can bookmark reports and analyze their history to improve future processes and campaigns.

Marketing Workflow Management allows internet marketing managers to monitor the website and manage reports. This feature allows you to see how random and planned events (such as power failures, website changes or holidays) can affect website traffic. It will also send out an email alert to bring any changes to the manager’s attention. Colleagues can communicate, share notes and reports on their dashboard as well.

But that’s not all. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but here in the USA teenagers have astronomical amounts of buying power. Not only do they hold their own part time jobs, but they also have tremendous influence over their parent’s purchases. According to the US National Center for Education (2008), there are approximately 15 million high school students and 8% of them (or 1.2 million) own an iPhone. In spring of 2008 about 9% of teens who did not already own an iPhone wanted to buy one. In six months that number jumped to 22%. Out of all the students who planned on purchasing a new phone in the next six months, 33% of them specifically said they wanted an iPhone.

Anyone in the marketing field knows that technology such as smart phones and the internet have become important parts of teenage life. They are incredibly dependent on these as an intricate part of their lives in school as a learning tool, socially outside of school and for recreational browsing. Granted they aren’t the only customers that businesses should cater to, but they are the immediate future of internet browsing and purchasing. Their habits are the future habits of America.

So the question remains: Do you have an iPhone friendly website?

With phones being so much more than just phones, it’s important that websites and bloggers ensure they are iPhone compatible. By either making your current website iPhone compatible or setting up an additional iPhone compatible website, you are making yourself more accessible to customers. Not only that, but your original site will collect more quality links for it.

There are two problems that iPhone users face when using their mobile browser. The first is a download speed that is slightly slower than their desktop counterparts. The second is the small screen resolution of only 320×480. Website managers need to develop a site that loads quickly and doesn’t force users to scroll through the page as much. They can do this by reducing (or eliminating) any unnecessarily large pictures, Flash or “heavy” content from the new/updated website. Also, many websites are optimizing, coding and configuring themselves to work with iPhones accelerometer so that different content can be displayed by holding the iPhone different ways.

It’s also a good idea to start developing some relevant iPhone apps. Applications for the iPod are relatively inexpensive and they are a huge market right now. In economically hard times, the iPhone apps can be considered a small, affordable luxury and provide the user with news, games, weather, music or whatever. Creating your own application not only helps to drive traffic to your website, but can make you a little extra on the side as well.

There are websites that can help you build apps and configure your website for use on the iPhone as well as other smart phone brands. However, you may at some point reach a point of difficulty that a professional becomes necessary. Whatever you decide keep in mind that the iPhones have been and will most likely to remain the most popular mobile browser in the world. But after the iPod phenomenon, did we really expect anything less from them?

“These highly relevant news stories and videos are being posted to the hackers’ fake blogs to increase the site’s Google search rankings.”

Webroot went on to state that “These fraudulent blogs contain several video links about the news story for which the users were originally searching. Once a user clicks on one of the video links, they are prompted to download a video codec that downloads a rogue antispyware program designed to goad the user into purchasing an illegitimate program that may put their personal information and data at even greater risk.”

The motivation behind all this is not surprising. There’s a lot of money to be made and according to Dancho Danchev, an independent security consultant and cyber threat analyst, ten or more malware blogs can start to appear in the top ten result pages in less than an hour. “Upon clicking the link, the user is exposed to the typical ActiveX Object Error message that is attempting to trick them into installing TrojanDownloader:Win32/Zlob.AMV with 10 out of 36 AV scanners currently detecting it (27.78%).” stated Danchev.

Granted, black hat is nothing new. What is unique is the fact that by using this ongoing research technique cyber criminals actually have a better chance of increasing their traffic and getting users to purchase their malware-ridden products.

How can you protect yourself? Webroot gives these five tips:

1. Always have a current version of antispyware, antivirus and firewall product;

2. Never download free product or purchase them from unknown Web sites and vendors, or peer
to peer networks;

3. Download videos and other multimedia files only from known and trusted Web sites or blogs;

4. Make sure the computer is up-to-date by always installing the latest Microsoft or Apple
security updates; and,

5. Use a credit card that has sufficient fraud protection when shopping and never use a debit
card online.