We are 38 days away from Christmas but Google decided to give local search lovers their Christmas present early, in the form of HotPot, a personalized rating and recommendation engine from the search giant. While this is not the first type of rating/recommendation engine of its kind out there, i.e. Yelp, etc., the recently delivered [...]

I am a SEO geek – if there were 140 characters on Twitter that have meaning – I might want to be able to find it, or help other people to find it. I know some people look on SEOs as spammers – some are – I look on my job as helping people find [...]

Last night I watched Facebook launch their Places feature, which is their version of a location based application, and thus competitor to Foursquare and Gowalla. The interesting thing about the announcement was the fact that Gowalla, Foursquare, Yelp and Booyah were also in attendance to announce their integration into Facebook Places.

The game used to be relatively simple. Build a website. Make it useful and at least moderately pleasing to the eye. Keep it updated. Make your content at least semi-friendly for search engines. Bingo! A digital marketing success story. Not now. Like print newspapers, basketball players under 6 feet tall, and the McRib sandwich, the [...]

Since Facebook’s launch of the Facebook Application platform in May 2007 Facebook applications have they proven themselves extremely successful at increasing the amount of time users spend on Facebook. According to Nielsen, users of the social networking website Facebook spent over 82% more time on Facebook in 2009 than they did in 2008 Furthermore, the [...]

There is a character on Dilbert called Mordac. If you’ve seen him, you know he is a caricature of an unfortunately real person in many corporate organizations who worries solely about data security at the expense of usability, accessibility and just about anything else: We all hate Mordac. Of course, on a logical level, most [...]

Last year I consulted with a local TV affiliate that wanted to build a localized social network. Part of the plan was to equip citizen journalists so that they could record and upload videos of news stories relevant to their town or county. We would have killed for the new YouTube Direct tool just launched [...]