Interesting that AMEX's website was the subject of an SEW site clinic last month.

The current edition of AMEX's 'A Practical Guide for Business Growth' cautions its readers against seeking professional search engine optimization help for their websites, advising them not to "waste money on so-called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialists"

I like the functionality of Vista's sidebar, although I'm not too keen on it's memory consumption. But after recently reverting back to XP I have found myself missing some of the basic functionality of the sidebar, including the built-in memory monitor widget.

So I set out to make a new program. A light-weight application that monitors your RAM without the need for the Vista sidebar. It's perfect for those like me who have downgraded to XP or have turned off the sidebar in Vista.

Filed under: Internet, Web services, web 2.0

There's no shortage of ways to keep up to date with your Twitter contacts without actually visiting Twitter.com. And TwitterFox is... well, it's another one of them. But what sets TwitterFox apart from Firefox add-ons like TwitBin is that TwitterFox doesn't take up space in your browser sidebar. Rather, it hangs out in your system tray and pops up only when your contacts post a new tweets or when you click on the icon to read your latest messages.

One of the non search-related blogs I keep handy in my feed reader is LeahPeah. Somewhat Dooce-like, Leah Peterson writes on an assortment of lifestyle-related topics and does a really good getting a chuckle out the cynical likes of me. (Okay, another reason why I like her is because she's the mom of Devon, one of my all-time favorite Bruce Clay people.) Yesterday's Leah non-SEO blog transcended all genres when she wrote a post appropriately titled Newsletter Spam, an issue that has become increasingly frustrating to many of us as of late.

Have you heard the latest doomsday scenario? In thirty years, the internet will stop working! Apparently, a bug similar to the millennium bug will affect Unix-based systems, like those that run the tubes, in the year 2038. The bug, being dubbed the "2038 bug," arises because Unix-based systems store the time as a signed 32-bit integer, in seconds, from midnight on January 1 1970. And the latest time that can be represented in that format, by the Posix standard, is 3:14 AM on January 19, 2038. After that, times will wrap around and be represented as a negative number.

News blogs are fast-paced blogs which track, aggregate and disseminate current news on a set range of topics. Their main selling points are comprehensiveness and timeliness: a good news blog must cover the field throughly and speedily by pointing readers to new information or developments.

Content for news blogs is published regularly on a daily basis and sometimes multiple times throughout the day. Apart from the value of the actual opinions offered by news bloggers: people subscribe to or follow these news blog largely because they help them to stay on top of current issues, innovations or ideas concerning a industry.

On Monday I had the distinct pleasure of speaking to a crowd of about 250 local search marketers at SEMpdx Searchfest in Portland. The audience reaction to my session, entitled "The Dark Side of Reputation Management," highlighted a stark reality out there in the corporate trenches. While nearly every hand in the room enthusiastically shot straight up when asked if they "believed their company should be leveraging social channels," fewer than 10 were actually engaged in social media marketing—let alone proactive reputation management.

Visualization is a technique to graphically represent sets of data. When data is large or abstract, visualization can help make the data easier to read or understand. There are visualization tools for search, music, networks, online communities, and almost anything else you can think of. Whether you want a desktop application or a web-based tool, there are many specific tools are available on the web that let you visualize all kinds of data. Here are some of the best:

Over on PerfCast I just put up an interview with Lyndon Antcliff, who you might know better as Linkbaiter extraordinaire Lyndoman or CornwallSEO.

Get an insight into the mind of a professional linkbaiter, find out how he earns his living, what the right way to approach linkbait is ... and more.

Enjoy!

Filed under: Internet, Web services, web 2.0

There's no shortage of ways to keep up to date with your Twitter contacts without actually visiting Twitter.com. And TwitterFox is... well, it's another one of them. But what sets TwitterFox apart from Firefox add-ons like TwitBin is that TwitterFox doesn't take up space in your browser sidebar. Rather, it hangs out in your system tray and pops up only when your contacts post a new tweets or when you click on the icon to read your latest messages.