SearchRank Blog

New Features at Mixx - Nested Comments, Domain Endorsing & More

Mixx has announced a variety of new features related to the comment system, communities, fighting spam, awards and has even added domain endorsing. All in all they make Mixx an even better user experience than it already is. Read on for a summary of what has been added, updated and improved.

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Posted by David Wallace | Permalink | Comments (0)

"CNN - The Daily Top 10" Email Spam Leads To Spoof Sites

Recently, I have been inundated with email spam from CNN. It's called "The Daily Top 10" which lists some of the top stories featured at CNN. Beware before you click on story links as this is a spoof site that may infect your computer with a nasty virus. Read on for all the details.

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Posted by David Wallace | Permalink | Comments (5)

New Search Engine Cuil Launches But Something is Amiss

Menlo Park based Cuil has officially launched with quite a sizable index of 120 billion web pages, making them arguably a comprehensive search engine on the web. Cuil not only claims that they have found a way to massively reduce the costs involved in indexing the web and how they handle search queries (Google spends a billion dollars a year to run the back end infrastructure of it’s search business), they also make the boastful claims to have better search results than Google and others based on how they index websites.

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Posted by David Wallace | Permalink | Comments (13)

Common Excuses Companies Use For Not Having a Blog

A recent study conducted by Burson-Marsteller revealed that ONLY 15% of Fortune 500 companies communicate with consumers via blogs. This number was quite lower than I expected, at least as far as Fortune 500 companies go. It is not surprising to me however with regards to businesses in general. While any business that has an online presence should be blogging, a large majority of them are not. Here are some common excuses they come up with along with reasons why those excuses are invalid.

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Posted by David Wallace | Permalink | Comments (15)

Has The BBB Outlived Their Usefulness?

I learned today that Google has an "unsatisfactory" record with The Better Business Bureau. How can a company voted "top global brand" in 2008 at the same time have an unsatisfactory record with the BBB? Apparently because out of 331 complaints filed against the search giant over the past three years, 2 were listed as unresolved. that's right - just 2! Despite this, Google continues to lead the way in search and nothing on the horizon seems to be able to change that. This got me thinking as to whether the BBB is still a useful resource in today's online world.

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Posted by David Wallace | Permalink | Comments (0)

Viacom Does the Right Thing: Withdraws Request for YouTube User Data

It was about two weeks ago when some idiotic U.S. judge ruled that Viacom, in their ongoing lawsuit with YouTube over copyright infringement, had the right to access YouTube users' private data. Many including myself questioned the intentions of Viacom. Are they looking to compile a list of all possibilities of copyright infringement? Or even more disturbing, do they wish to compile a list of individuals they can begin suing for watching content that infringes copyright laws? Well, no more need to worry as Viacom has withdrawn their request for that information.

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Posted by David Wallace | Permalink | Comments (2)

How To Promote Yourself on Social Sites Without Actually "Promoting Yourself"

I was recently asked the question, "How do you market your company on social news / bookmarking sites without appearing like a spammer?" This is a great question -- one that has a pretty straightforward answer but which also requires a lot of work. Why? Because it is easy to sign up for a social bookmarking site and simply submit your own "stuff." Submitting your own stuff does however not guarantee that your efforts will be successful. There is actually a lot more to it.

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Posted by David Wallace | Permalink | Comments (4)

Mixx Adds Communities Which is Like Groups on Steroids

Mixx announces today that they are taking their mantra of ultra-personalization to a whole new level with the launch of Mixx Communities. These Communities, described as "Mixx Groups on steroids," are much like the Groups function you may or may not already be using, however Communities allows you to "customize" by importing an image header and/or logo, choosing a custom color scheme, and determining specific topics and categories to include. They are almost like custom Mixx sites within the larger Mixx portal.

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Posted by David Wallace | Permalink | Comments (3)

Plug-Ins & Hacks I Use in WordPress Blogs

While plug-ins for the WordPress blogging platform are in abundant supply, I try not to depend on too many of them due to the fact that I don't want to have to worry about them breaking every time a new version of WordPress is released. That being said, there are four plug-ins as well as one adjustment to the post template itself that I feel are essential in order to have a great WordPress experience.

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Posted by David Wallace | Permalink | Comments (0)