Google's acquisition of the one character g.cn domain for China, reminded me of the old question about one and also two character domain names in the gTLD (generic top level domain) space like .com, .net and .org.

Who has domains that are only one or two characters long and how did they get them and why are they rarely in use? All one and two character domain names considering only of English language letters and numbers sum up to 1,332 possible domain names for every TLD, that are almost 4,000 domain names for .com, .org and .net alone. (more…)

Not only is America fatter than the Brits, but we watch more TV, too. According to Group M, a subsidiary of WPP Group, advertising on the Internet will overtake television ads in the UK by next year. Sweden's day is expected to come even sooner, with estimates that Internet ad spending will overtake that of television ads by the end of 2008. That's very soon; even sooner than expected for the US, where print and television ads are still rather prominent, and advertising overall is expected to slow.

Posted by great scott!Howdy, Gang, and happy 2008 to you all!  Here we are with our first Whiteboard Friday of the New Year and it's one that many viral marketers out there should pay close attention to.  This week, Rand discusses what it takes to make viral content and linkbait hit home with users in order to gain links to boost your rankings, rather than just landing on the front pages of social media sites.

At the tail end of 2007, President Bush signed into law the "Openness Promotes Effectiveness in our National Government Act of 2007." Cut that down to size and what you get is an amendment to the Freedom of Information Act.

You know, that legal documentation that protects the likes of Perez Hilton when he decidedly scribbles all over images and posts them on the web.

With blogging, the most obvious things that we should all do are usually the ones we forget to. If you are looking to increase the popularity of your blog in 2008, here are some simple things you need to start doing:

Email Subscriptions - if you are using Feedburner, you are probably already using the email subscription service. What you may have not noticed is that when you use the Feedburner email subscription service, when someone gives their email to Feedburner to subscribe to your blog it doesn't mean that they are a subscriber. They usually get a follow-up email from Feedburner verifying that they subscribed, but many people end up missing this email and never fully subscribe. So if you log into your Feedburner account and go under email subscriptions you will notice that some email address are not active. For those non-active email addresses, take them and re-subscribe them to your blog. This way they get another verification notice to subscribe to your blog and many of them will end up subscribing.

Not every site needs, nor should have, an on-site search feature. But those that do must be sure that the search isn't just an after-thought. It needs to be more than something to add because you think visitors want it. Adding a search function is not necessarily good for on-site usability. Implementing a search function improperly is often a greater source of frustration than not having one altogether.

As we head into the new year, small businesses across the web will be looking to boost their presence by sparking conversation, attracting links and driving new sales. If you're looking to walk the path to viral success, consider two statements made by popular marketing bloggers this week.

Seth Godin writes: "Make promises and keep them."

Stage 1 - Research

The first stage of a successful social media strategy should involve identifying industry related areas of the web that will provide opportunities to create a buzz online for your clients industry. These include looking at niche social bookmarking sites, blogs, forums and social networking sites. You should have records kept on file of what sites work well for which industries, this will save you time in the long run, this file will eventually get very large (trust me!).

I think these two comments do a nice job of showing the difference between how people perceive something they paid for and something they got for free. If people do not have a tangible opportunity cost they often tend not to respect or value the product or service.

Compare these side by side reviews:

StomperNet is an online business-building membership website. They currently have some great quality videos published online featuring "cutting-edge content." I'd like to share with you their "Click Fu" video which I found to be an excellent learning experience.

I have embedded the "Click Fu" course video in this post. In total it is 30 minutes long, separated into four parts, but is worth every minute of your time. You will learn through the eyes of your website visitors how to optimize your content.