Link Building Blog, News and Articles - Textlinkbrokers.com/blog

There is yet another debate raging over whether the Internet should truly allow unfettered free speech.

This debate is over Craigslist and whether it should be more proactive in censoring those who post on it.

The debate began when listings for apartments were posted that were obviously racially slanted.  In this article I look at the issue and ask the question:  Should the Internet be censored?

Now that MSN search has changed its look and search results I thought I’d do a little digging into the new look to see what I could come up with.

Overall I am impressed with the new look even if the current results aren’t that spectacular.

But is the new MSN really that much better?

Search engine technology is a male dominated field.  Sure there are females involved in search engine algorithm design, but generally, search engines are built by men.

This leads to the question, how would a women design a search engine?

I recently read an article explaining how, if telcos get their way, those web properties that pay for the right will load faster than their competitors.

To me this goes against the very nature of the web.

In this article I look at the implications of this proposal and what it could mean to the web.

Yup you read right - Verizon and Nextel plan on testing cell based ads in the near future:

Link

As an SEO we all have our favorite tools.  Most of mine are SEO tools such as server header checkers, backlink checkers and so on.

But there are a variety of other tools I use just as often.  While not SEO related they are just as handy and crucial to my job.

In this article I look at a few of those tools in hopes that you too will find them helpful.

I’ve been watching this news develop for a couple years now.  So when I read today that a major game manufacture has made a deal to distribute games with ads I wasn’t terribly surprised.

What surprised me is how long it took to come to the realization that ads in games is a highly lucrative market.

In this article I look at what some of the impacts of in-game ads could be.

I just happened to stumble on a pretty interesting tool today.

I was trying to find a word for “People that are behind the times” for my previous blog post.  I did a couple of searches in Google without avail and eventually started scouring for a tool that did a reverse lookup on a word.  A tool where I would give the definition, and it would give me some words that matched that definition.  What I discovered was Onelook.com’s Reverse Dictionary.

Reverse Dictionaries allow you to “Describe a concept” in order to find words that match that description.

Cool Stuff, especially for all of us non-harvard graduates.

What I find the most interesting though is all of the uses for this tool.  It is actually a very smart search engine.  You would be suprized the sort of answers you could get from asking a variety of questions.  Here are some of potential applications that OneLook describes:

- Find a word, when you know its definition, [or a portion of the definition].
- Explore related concepts. Baseball, clouds, cities.
- Generate a list of words in some category.  I.E. Large Birds, Green fruit, Canadian authors.
- Answer basic indentification questions.  What is the capital of Vietnam, Who is big birds friend on Sesame Street. What is the longest River in the world

In actuality Onelook is indexing much more then just dictionaries to find these answers.  They index encyclopedia’s and other reference sites as well.

I dont know about you guys, but if I had a very large amount of money, I might consider trying to buy their technology.  There are a lot of times I wish the major search engines could do some of the stuff that they are.  Ask.com (askjeeves) does some of this, but you cant get lists from Ask, its usually websites that come up that require you to sift through several pages to find your answers.

For all of you content mongers out there, this sort of technology could feed some very interesting sites.

I would love to see some sort of API.

http://www.onelook.com/reverse-dictionary.shtml

"Struck The Sponsored Links Nerve, Did I?”, says Jeremy Zawodny(Yahoo employee and owner of a very popular blog)in his recently published article on Webpronews talking about all of the hub bub everyone is making over him starting to sell text links on his website.

http://www.webpronews.com/blogtalk/blogtalk/wpn-58-20051214StrucktheSponsoredLinksNerveDidI.html

Jarrod at TextLinkBrokers.com (hadn’t heard of them until today) says that there’s lots of excitement over this. It’s too bad that he didn’t say more, since he’s clearly got an insider’s viewpoint.

This is definitly an article worth reading.

Jeremy, if you are interested in knowing a veteran’s viewpoint, let me know.  I would be happy to do an interview for you!. Although it may take several to tell the whole story:)

Your an excellent writer by the way, your site is on my list now.

The geek in me cant help but get excited at the thought of the million possibilities for using Alexa’s new Web Search Platform. 

http://websearch.alexa.com

Some good readings:

http://www.threadwatch.org/node/4999
http://battellemedia.com/archives/002116.php

I really wish all of our current programmers werent overwhelmed with work..  If any of you have any extra programmer time, let me know.  I wouldnt mind taking this thing out for a spin.

http://www.threadwatch.org/node/5002

For those of you who dont know who Jeremy Zawodny is, he is a Yahoo employee who has a very popular blog online.

He has recently started selling sponsered links on his blog.  Lots of excitement over it.

Hello All,

Im doing a little research into BPM systems.  We are a process-centric business, unfortunatly our in-house process management software is much in need of an overhaul.  I have 3 of my experienced programmers working full-time on a new system, but after months of intense planning, we are just now starting to build it, which means we are months away from completion.

So, In the mean time I’m spending some of my time to further research current solutions that are out there and thought it would be a good idea to ask you guys for any experiences you may have had.

The problem with the BPM software solutions that are out there is that it they tend to be fairly expensive, and unless you have an experienced programming team and a good understanding of process management, it can be very tough and expensive to build your own system. Yet, process management is one of those things that almost every business can benefit from. 

We are building our software to be very flexible and platform independent.  One plan is to offer the software to other small to medium size businesses on a per user web based service model.

We are also looking for partnerships with other companies to share some of the cost of development.  We have spent nearly 6 months blueprinting the software out and have included just abut every feature imaginable, along with making it extremly flexible and easy to maintain.  Flexibility is the key to any process management software.  It is critical to be able to change or build new processes very quickly, and the user interfaces have to be very robust and easily configurable.  It is also important that it be platform independent and able to connect to any data source; having access to all of your data (customer, inventory, accounting, billing, sales, fulfillment, etc) is the key to any BPM system.

If there are any of you interested in this sort of system, I would love to speak about ways we can share some of the cost in developing it in exchange for access to use the program.  The way I see it, if a few of us pool together, we can get it built faster, with more features and with less cost.  I am also entertaining the idea of taking on investors.

Here are some of the solutions currently available.  For those of you with an IT background you will notice that most of them are built with open standards, which is exactly what we are striving for.

http://www.fuego.com/product_fact.html

http://www.jboss.com/products/jbpm (opensource, java, j2ee)

http://www.adeptia.com/ (http://www.adeptia.com/data_integration/data_integration.html)

http://www.global360.com/solutions/bpm/

http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/10/04/40NNbluecode_1.html

http://www.seagullsoftware.com/products/bpm.html?gclid=CIPawOvJ4oECFQLISAodzD4WrA

There has been a lot of talk lately about search engines like Google launching their own branded operating system.

While such a system doesn’t necessarily correspond with Google’s vision of making the world’s information universally accessible, it could be a consideration in that plan.

In today’s article I revisit a common theme.  One which I have written about in other places.  That is:  search as a platform unto itself.

Google is planning on floating another $4 billion in shares.  The question then becomes, with reserves of over $2 billion, what does the company want with the extra cash?  This article provides my own speculation and insight and it might surprise you.

The future of the web is so bright, not only do you have to wear shades, but you have to also wear fire retardant clothing just to keep up with the rapid pace of change, without igniting yourself.