Tagging: The Future of Blogging

Interesting article over at Business Week on the use of tagging.
Have to give credit to Flickr for pointing it out to me.
Add this to the introduction of bookmarklets and the sharing of links and blogs should evolve the web to another area over the next year or two, especially as the younger users who have adapted to this technology enter the marketing and business realm.
It also is highlighted today by Technorati - the blog search engine.

MSN To Stop Mac Support

Guess the lovefest is over, or MSN like everyone else sees little return in catering to the Mac folks! Sadly, yet realistically, Mac web users represent such a small number that most websites do not consider it worth their while to even test how they appear there - hey most people don't even have a Mac platform to test on (though there are online sites that will show you).
This CNET articles gives the perspective.
Guess Mac moves further into the offline world.

Welcome to PPC Search Anoox!

We signed up for this months ago and it final arrived. Our username and password and the money we prepaid with is sitting there waiting to be spent.

Congratulations, your AnooX Advertiser account has been approved and
is now activated.

To access your AnooX Advertiser account (aka Paid Listings Account Management)
please go to this URL:

https://www.anoox.com/advman_login.jsp

And log-in with this username & password:

XXXXXXXXXXX

XXXXXXXXXXX

(please make sure to have Cookies enabled.)

Once logged into your account you will then be able to completely
manage your AnooX Advertising and Paid Listings. Some of the things
that you will be able to do once logged in are:

1- Manage money: add money, add payment methods, etc.
2- Manage Keywords: add keyword, change keyword bids, etc.
3- Reports: generate various reports
4- Contact Support
Plus much more.

We thank you for becoming a very valued AnooX Advertiser.
And look forward to the success of your advertising through AnooX.
You can be sure that as a not-for-profit search engine, we are
dedicated to one thing only: that is the success of your business.
This means we will do everything possible, without regard to
our profits or share prices, to deliver the lowest cost in Search
Engine keyword based advertising to you with most accuracy in
targeting of the Ads to the intended audiences.

So Advertise through AnooX and Advertise a lot, because the more
you advertise through AnooX the more you will SAVE in cost of
Advertising and the more sales and awareness you will generate for
your business. Also you will strengthen AnooX which is a Search
Engine dedicated to the success of your businesses based on
Not-for-profit business model.

Should you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact
Advertiser support via the related link from your Advertiser account
or call AnooX Advertiser customer service at (415)-577-5003.

Again thank you and we welcome you to AnooX Search Engine community.

Welcome to the Search Engine Game Anoox!!!

Late Lycos Notice

Lycos would like to notify you of recent changes made to the Legacy SearchSubmit (Inktomi) portion of InSite.s Search Engine Submission product. Effective February 18, 2005, Inktomi search results ceased appearing on the lycos.com and hotbot.com search engines. As a result, URLs submitted for inclusion in the Inktomi search catalog will no longer appear on the Lycos and Hotbot search engines. Inktomi will continue to submit your URLs to other search engine partners, including Overture.com and About.com. And as always, the Inktomi crawler will continue to refresh your URLs every 48 hours.

I gotr this in an email today!!! I really hope they told me about this last month and I have just been too busy to really have noticed the email.

Yahoo/Overture Wake Up MSN Will Soon Be Gone

I can't believe that anyone in this industry could possibly believe that MSN is not striking out on their own. Wake Up!
They are aggressively reaching out to the industry to hire people. They are gearing to do battle with Google.
They do not even see Yahoo/Overture as part of any serious competition. And once Yahoo loses the MSN income they will be bordering on a second-tier precipece...
But keep the stiff upper Overture and maintain the well reviewed customer service (and yes that is sarcasm) and who knows maybe you will get lucky and sold to SearchFeed.

Articles like this show lack of insight

Overture Betas CTR Influencing Positioning

Overture is beta testing CTR as an influencing factor on bid position. They diverge from the Google model, in that they are not using Max CPC and CTR to create a rank and an actual CPC. They are using your actual bid as the price they charge you but move you up if you have a high CTR.
Hope this model works - but something tells me if they find they are getting better click numbers this way it will roll out like a variation of Google.
Hope not I have too many knocks against the Overture system now as it is.

Good luck is all I can say and I will post how it has worked after I play with it for a month or so.

Booth Babes

You know our industry has matured when you walk through the SES convention and see 'Booth Babes'...
And they definitely were noticed by the women at the other booths who were actually there to help customers and provide support and network.
Seach Engine Watch Forums has a few who could be both.