Weekend Links

Some weekend reading...

Business Strategy

Want a list of the 10,000 most popular subjects on the web? Here is Wikipedia's 10,000 most viewed pages. Courtesy Wiki stats, mentioned in this Search Engine Land article.

Hitwise shows plural keywords drive more traffic to shopping sites than singular terms. Perhaps singular versions tend to be more navigational and brand related, whereas plural terms are more informational and transactional in nature.

Fred Wilson on the self-destructive nature many driven people possess.

Mark Cuban offers a killer quote on the failed branding of newspaper blogs

Never, ever, ever consider something that any literate human being with Internet access can create in under 5 minutes to be a product or service that can in any way differentiate your business. ... If I worked for the NY Times, or any other media company with any level of brand equity, I would have done everything possible to define the section of our website that offers ongoing as anything other than a blog. I would make up a name. Call it say.....RealTime Reporting.

Indeed it is hard to demonize blogs as being inferior while integrating them into the company under the same name. :)

The Google

Eric Schmidt spoke on video about Google Health about 2 weeks ago. Interesting to think about how Google can provide cloud computing services to any complex or high value vertical (like employment, education, health, financial services) to gain major mindshare and a new revenue stream. And after getting all the publicity Google for some reason took their video down...hmm. Why did they do that?

2007 ad spend shift from old media to Google - hard to imagine this trend will continue at such a rapid clip, but hard to predict what will stop it

Shaking out the bad sites in Google - John Andrews on the delicate balance Google must strike between searcher, advertiser, and publisher:

When a former Google customer (someone who has quit AdWords out of disgust) asks an SEO to help “get free search traffic from Google” it represents a person who is no longer willing or able to play by the established rules. It’s not a sign of criminal intent, mind you, so don’t go hyperbolic on me with the BlackHat WhiteHat stuff. But from a demeanor perspective, that former customer is willing to try things outside of the “let’s do business together” avenue, without telling Google, and recognizing that he is now in competition with Google, his former business partner.

Firefox Extensions

Firefox Ultimate Optimizer - an extension to reduce Firefox memory usage.

Domain look-up extension for Firefox

(Non)Quality Publishing

Harper Collins’ working on coming up with an effective strategy to exploit your children.

Quality Corporate Linkbait

No More Abandoned Carts - even VeriSign is getting into creating quality linkbait. This is what corporate linkbait will look like in a year or two. And like it or not we are probably going to need to be at that level if we want to keep competing.

A year from now heavily advertised linkbait followed by a 301 redirect will be one of the most potent SEO weapons on the market.