links for 2009-03-26

It seems that once a year for the past five years or so, a search engine representative will stand up at a conference and announce that they are now indexing Flash. Website designers jump with glee, and SEOs lament that all the work they did educating their clients on why they need to curb their use of Flash will be for naught.

The recession is here – but that is no reason to panic. We have been through many downturns in the past and I can guarantee that we will see many more in the years to come. Business is cyclical. There are times of great prosperity – always followed by downturns. Followed once
again by – upswings!

Twittercounter is a new service that creates a chiclet showing off your Twitter follower count. It’s styled almost exactly the same as the Feedburner chiclet that shows your blog’s total number of RSS subscribers, except it uses Twitter’s white and blue color scheme. To add it to your blog, all you do is go to Twittercounter’s site and enter in your Twitter username, which in turn generates some HTML that you can copy and paste.

Speculation is once again running rampant as to how Twitter (Twitter reviews) will make money. Earlier this week, the company threw its support behind ExecTweets, a mashup of sorts that aggregates Tweets from top executives that is sponsored by Microsoft and the brainchild of ad network Federated Media.

Meanwhile, today Twitter once again indicated that paid accounts are in the works, telling The Wall Street Journal that they are “watching the outside initiatives closely as it prepares to launch its own fee-based services this year.”

Wikirank does for WikipediaWikipedia reviewsWikipedia reviews what sites like Compete do for websites. It’s a nifty analytics tool that tracks trending topics on the world’s largest online encyclopedia, displays the 10 most read articles in the last 30 days, and gives users the ability to compare stats for up to four different topics.

Old computer products, like old soldiers, never die. They stay on the market–even though they haven’t been updated in eons. Or their names get slapped on new products–available only outside the U.S. Or obsessive fans refuse to accept that they’re obsolete–long after the rest of the world has moved on.

“Right now I’m reading feedback from users and looking at some updated designs that include ideas from people’s comments,” he wrote Friday. People familiar with the matter confirm that there are likely to be some tweaks.

One of my students at Georgetown, Paul Bove, works with the Air Force. The Air Force Public Affairs Agency just published their New Media and The Air Force brochure, a guide to provide professionals with the knowledge they need to work online.

I recently moderated a session at PubCon in Austin, Texas, about the intersection of SEO and PR. When I surveyed the audience, I found that one person in the room was in PR and most of the others were SEOs. Granted, this was a PubCon event and it's not really known for bringing out the PR people.

However, it made me realize that SEOs are being asked to do an awful lot. And, I honestly don't know how those folks who are the only SEO in-house keep up with this stuff. Companies seem to be demanding a lot from one person. Agencies even have a difficult time rounding up experts in each of these areas.

Google has announced two updates to results pages which they hope will enhance the users experience by better understanding user intent. First up, a new technology has been deployed to understand the associations of a given search phrase. Google offered up the example of "principles of physics." With the new technology, Google now understands that "angular momentum," "special relativity," "big bang" and "quantum mechanic" are terms associated with the original term.

To kick off his keynote speech at SES, a marketing conference in New York, Guy Kawasaki asked how many people in the audience were on Twitter at that moment. Hands shot up across the packed ballroom.

So where do you start? First you need a goal. What do you want users on your site to do? Complete a form, buy something, sign up for a newsletter? Without a goal, it's difficult to optimize, so you should be sure to define one if you haven't already.

Once you have a goal, you can use Google Analytics to identify those pages that are having the biggest negative impact on the total number of people "converting," or achieving that goal. These are the pages to test.

If you’re connecting to the Internet from China, you haven’t been able to access YouTubeYouTube reviewsYouTube reviews since Monday. Not only a particular part of the site, but all of it. The reason is a video purportedly depicting Chinese security personnel beating Tibetans; the Chinese government now claims the video is fake.

Fake or not, now that one of the biggest sites on the Internet is unaccessible to a huge number of people, it has everyone’s attention. Normally, the video would probably be noticed by a handful of people interested in the matter; this way, everyone has seen it (or heard of it).

This week isn’t going down as a good one in Last.fmLast.fm reviewsLast.fm reviews’s books. First, they announced that international users (those living outside of the US, UK, or Germany) will have to start paying for radio streaming, and now they’ve effectively banned all third party mobile clients.