Archive for July, 2008

Google has always had Beta projects and this week, Google opened another one to the public.

Known as knol – which they say stands for ‘a unit of knowledge’ – a neat concept. Superficially, knol would look much like a squidoo lens or a hub page. Google’s blog states ‘A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read’ – which sounds ominously like a knol ought to be at the top of the organic SERPs.

They go on to say that knols can contain ads from which the author will receive a substantial share! They won’t be moderated, only ranked so there is no censoring and marketers will flock to get their affiliate links in this new format.

It certainly seems like it would be worth trying to get in early and write some definitive knols about your pet subjects.

Perhaps this is why squidoo lens fell from favour!

Here is an example knol from the big G – they have a more serious and business-like feel to them than lenses.

While there will no doubt be plenty of rubbish appearing, community tools like ranking will help to make sure the genuinely good ones get to the top.

So go forth and nab your knols.

You can find the service at http://knol.google.com

I am truly grateful for the internet but as I go through my day, there’s always little things that would make a big difference if they were different.

Here’s a few that occur to me, feel free to add any of your own…

OK, obviously we wouldn’t have spam. Or deceptive subject lines.

And using re: when it isn’t a re: would get your internet access banned for a month.

And no marketers would cross that line and still use it just because they’ve proved the open rate is higher. Re: would retain it’s importance.

Emails wouldn’t be marked as important unless…they were important to me.

Scripts that let me buy through paypal but then insist on using my paypal address for emailing me everything would not exist. I don’t want noise in my account email addresses.

In fact everything I have to sign up for where there might be truly important messages like ‘your credit card is about to expire’ would allow you to have 2 email addresses – one for critical must respond messages and one for everything else. And no-one would abuse that just because they know the critals would get opened.

Membership sites that also have a forum would use the same login (oops, my site fails this one before anyone points that out . Same for support desk function.

All sites would allow me to determine how long I want my session timeout to be. I know who uses my PC. Me. You don’t have to take responsibility for my security in that way.

People who register with you and have spam arrest protecting their email address would whitelist you before they sign up for your service. As I saw someone point out recently, the marketer cannot do that for you because they would be declaring they will never send a commercial message.

Joe public would become educated and not send emails with 138 people in the CC field.

Nobody would email me out of the blue by replying to a 3 month old email nothing to do with what they want to say and not even edit the subject line.

No audio on web pages would start automatically. I think many marketers are becoming more respectful of their visitors and doing things right even if they might get lower results. Treat others…

Quicktime wouldn’t exist or if it did, it would respect my wishes to not keep going into automatic start every time it does an update.

Websites wouldn’t pop up a non-resizable window that was too small for the contents so you had to use scroll bars.

Newsletters wouldn’t have an unsubscribe link that unsubscribes you without a confirmation prompt.

If I’ve made a mistake on a field on a form and have to go back, I wouldn’t have to retype anything that was OK, including the password twice.

I wouldn’t have to put my email address twice (because I only copy & paste anyway )

Oh, I nearly forgot: marketers would no longer tell prospects they have to clear their cookies to make sure the marketer gets the sale – what about all the other affiliates cookies that are then cleared? Not to mention the general inconvenience to me when I clear my cookies.

A couple of those are subjective I know…what do you think? What would you add to this list?

Coolest plugin I’ve seen in quite a while. I post to my blog and I tweet without moving my lips (methaphorically speaking).

See that ‘My Twitter Feed’ on the right? That’s part of it.

The coolest things is when I post and my automatic tweet is generated. Twitter users following me or somehow seeing my tweet see an automatically shortened url to my blog post. When they click on the URL, they see my blog post but in a frame with a prominent ‘advert’ for TweetMyBlog at the top – which is of course my referral link for TweetMyBlog.

And if they join TweetMyBlog, I get their email address (via the TweetMyBlog back office) so I can always send them a welcome email with an invite to follow me or some other kind of link.

Sweet!

You can get it for yourself here

Comment here if you like/dislike it