Social Media Guide for the Big Brands – No Fear – No Rush!

Collection of useful tips for the big business brands out there, to lose fear for social media and put it to good use, be prepared to deal with the unique issues and manage the efforts properly, which includes throwing away the phone book with the number of your PR-Agency.

See the full article here.

It’s a long and detailed post aimed towards big brands to learn how to use social media for their benefits, loose the fear of it, but be prepared and ready as well, without rushing into an adventure that can have serious consequences for the company.

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The Oracle of Mountain View and Googles PageRank Update

The recent PageRank™ updates by Google stirred up quite some talk within and outside the search engine marketing industry and opened room for many more or less far-fetched speculations about what this could mean. There no need to panic just yet, but it also does not mean that you should do nothing.  A list of facts was provided, followed by a few assumptions that are tied directly to the mentioned facts without going off too far into the realm of pure speculation. 

Summary and take away from the post:

“If you saw a PageRank™ drop as a direct or indirect side effect of all this, you will probably be affected by the things that are likely to follow, but so is your competitor, if he was affected by the recent PageRank™ updates as well. If all sites in your space were affected by this update, chances are that they will be affected the same way by any other changes that might come. If everybody is affected the same, nothing changes overall.”

Read more about the Oracle of Mountain View and Googles Recent PageRank Update

The Ultimate Guide to Podcasting

A comprehensive guide for podcasters to setup their own podcast, submit it to iTunes and other directories and integrate it into their blog. Additional resources to audio editing, content, related conferences, books and tools that make things easier or save cost are also included.

This guide is for people who have a podcast or think about starting one and NOT for listeners to podcasts. There are good guides for podcast audience available, for example: The podcast listeners guide by Mathew Honan. You can also check out Apple iTunes, PodcastAlley.com, Digg Podcasts or any of the other podcast directories available on the internet.

Podcasting – once reserved for technical types or those with the financial backing to hire a podcasting specialist – has become mainstream and is no longer limited to geeks and early adopters. With this popularity and concurrent availability of tools, it has become easier to publish podcasts (although it is still not as easy as configuring a VCR).

Thanks to over 100 million iPods sold and the improvements to software and tools to make access and consumption of podcasts easier for regular people contribute to a steady growth of people who tune in to podcasts on a regular basis, which is soon reaching double digit percentages of the US population.

The increasing popularity of podcasting has fueled the number of available podcasts and the competition for audience share. Just having a podcast is no longer enough to attract listeners or engage subscribers.

Learn more about setting up your own podcast and promoting it on the internet and integrate it with your existing blog (if you don’t have one yet, create one, even if it is just for the podcast itself).

Check out the “The Ultimate Guide to Podcasting“

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Update on DefCon 15 Videos

Update on the DefCon 15 videos. After the initial 47 of 125 videos were all other remaining videos uploaded to Google Video as well, in addition to some other goodies for all the DefCon fans out there. Read the full details here.

Enjoy the 125 videos and spread the word!

DefCon 15 Session and Panel Videos Available On-Line

47 of all 121 sessions and panels from the world’s largest hacker conference, DefCon, in video format available online. This are the sessions from the 2007 conference, which was held on August 3-5, 2007 at the Rivera in Las Vegas, Nevada.

See the list of available videos here.

All session videos make up a set of 10 DVD-Roms full with MPEG-4 videos (.MOV) in Quick time format. The sessions were professionally recorded and are also sold commercially for a several hundred dollars. You can now watch them on-line and for free.

The videos show security exploits and vulnerabilities of networks, operating systems, web servers, database servers and Web 2.0 technology and also includes some panels with discussions about general internet security issues and sessions that are related to hacking and computer security.

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Spoofed Google Sites with Official Google IP. Got Google Hacked?

This was discovered by Heather Paulson and then published by SearchEngineJournal.com earlier today. 

There are sites that looks like Google and even have an official Google IP from their headquarter in Mountain View, California showing up in their domain registration records (Who-Is) and “Ping” results, but the domain is something like xxxdisc.net or ckopo.org.

Ckopo.org is even referenced twice by the Russian Wikipedia in the article about Firebug (Firefox plug in) and “Dozory.Forbidden Games”. The references made in the Russian Wikipedia point to sub domains of Ckopo.org, which look like the Russian Firefox homepage and Firebug plug in help pages.

• What does this mean?
• Got Google Hacked?
• What is going on there and what is the purpose of this?

Every answer found so far only raised additional questions and made the whole thing even more fuzzy and suspicious.

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Don’t Get Your Web Pages Filtered out by Search Engines

Search Engine RoundTable is reporting from the Search Engine Expo Advanced. Transscript from the SMX session about the duplicate content issue (Duplicate Content Summit) with representatives from Google, Yahoo!, MS Live Search and Ask.com.

• Information about what webmasters should and should not do.
• How each of the four search engines deal with duplicate content.
• Questions and answers.
• Suggestions and ideas to improve on the issue.

The workshop was moderated by Danny Sullivan
Speakers: Vanessa Fox, Google; Amit Kumar, Yahoo; Peter Linsley, Ask.com; and Eytan Seidman, Microsoft Live

Pictures are also available. If you are a web master, you should read this.

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