email communication trick

Found an excellent email in my mailbox today - it was a forwarded email, starting with "Hi Emmanuel,....", with a proper signature, and then a newsletter attached - "Hi Emmanuel, just wanted to check if you had a chance to register for this event bal blah". Oh, the guy is writing to me personally in case I missed the newsletter.

If I had received the newsletter directly (I may have actually, and maybe was it a genuine follow up), I would have probably sent it to the bin directly. But the way this one was crafted, and personalised (even though I am damn sure that this email was sent automatically) caught my attention, and..I eventually checked the event out.

So I guess this is a good trick for the communications you send out, until everyone starts doing it obviously...

Find out about commercial intentions

Funny little tool from MSN: website commercial intentions detector

This can provide with useful information, specially if you want to find out about the competitiveness of keywords.

Add your feed to Google News

Here is the URL: http://www.google.com/support/news/bin/request.py

But it looks like Google is fussy about feeds, and your site must meet some "quality guidelines", as outlined on digitalpoint.com forum.

GET versus POST - everybody needs a reminder sometimes..

Was reading some HTTP documentation this morning, and came across the classic use of GET versus POST.

One paragraph is specially important:

In particular, the convention has been established that the GET and HEAD methods SHOULD NOT have the significance of taking an action other than retrieval. These methods ought to be considered "safe". This allows user agents to represent other methods, such as POST, PUT and DELETE, in a special way, so that the user is made aware of the fact that a possibly unsafe action is being requested.

Now, imagine you develop a content management system - you collect the page name through the method GET obviously, and retrieve the content. Nothing wrong obviously here - but you may be tempted to store this page name in your DB along with other posted data, for navigation analysis or other purpose - this is not good programming practice, and you make your system unsecure, as outlined below:

If you use GET for operations with side-effects, you make your system insecure. For example, a malicious Web page publisher outside a firewall might put a URI in a page that, when dereferenced unwittingly by someone inside the firewall, could activate a function on another system within the firewall.

squidoo.com - new generation of Blogs?

what I like with Squidoo is that it makes blogging dead easy, and integrate your blog automatically into a community environment. Release in October last year, the site is already quite popular.

Just created a blog on Squidoo, let's see if I can stick to it.

Link Worth Calculator

Hard to tell how much you should sell links for - I posted recently about how to run a quick evaluation manually.

this is not too difficult: stick a Google ad, and see how much you make out of it - then multiply by two and this gives you how much you should sell your link for (a "nofollow" link of course).

A new tool is now available, providing you with an automatic quote.

This relies on on Alexa ranking, link popularity, site theme, numbers of links available to be sold, sitewide versus single page link and the location of the link on the page.

Using social sites to target your victims

Let's say you sell a fantastic Content Management System. And you want people to link from their blog to yours.

=> 1) You need to find a group of people who are 1) Likely to have a "successful" blog 2) who are likely to be interested in your product
=> You then need to make sure that they will be willing to link to your site.

I am Jonathan explains how to use myspace, friendster, tagworld to target the audience. Once you have your target audience, post something like this on their blog: "Hey Matt, thank you for the advice last month - I gave a call to Emmanuel regarding the content management solutions they provide, and we have decided to go for it - could not be more pleased with the results!".

That's it, just have to wait that the bait works - There is still 24h in a day. People haven't got more time than before, and most of bloggers often cut and paste, without really thinking about what they do, just taking info from a source they think is reliable. That's why links baiting works, and why the tactic described by Jonathan is likely to be a success in your quest to find referrals.

The Figures Behind DropSend

An excellent article from one of the founder of dropSend: The cost of bootstrappping your application.

£25000 to produce something like dropsend.com - This is good news, this is roughly what I would have quoted for it - always conforting to look at business cases like this one.

Young web entrepreneurs

Young web entrepreneurs are back. Tom Forenski gives the example of his 14 years old son Matt. Tom runs SVW, which barely makes any money out of advertisement ($20/month...). On the other hand Matt has bought 50 domain names and makes $310/month out of online advertisement.

And teens start being asked by small businesses to set up blogs or websites for them.

This example can be extended to offshore companies - if you partner with an offshore company, spend a bit of your time training them to "how to make money out of personal websites". And allow developers to work 1/2 day a week on personal projects.

In our case, this is ideal, since they use the JDD as website development tool. While using the software for their personal projects, they program add-ons, fix bugs, improve architecture. They get payed through the advertisement we stick on their site (Google, which is currently the highest ROI), and they get a chance to test the application in a real life environment,

Meetup Podcast

Thanks to Matt, who blogged about the webdesign meetup in April: Language Learning... 2.0 style

I am sure robbie will be pleased with the picture....

Your site indexed in MSN within 24h

It always strikes me that whenever I meet someone who is involved in getting a site ranking well in search engines, he/she always manage to get their site ranking pretty well in MSN. It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but this is actually the case. Conclusion is: if you can manage to get your site ranking top in MSN, there is no reason why you should not be able to do so in Google.

Ok, for those who are still not indexed in MSN, he is a little trick, quoted from SEO Junkie:

1) Go to MSN.com

2) Search for domain or sub domain and if isn’t indexed yet, it’ll show no results.

3) Then, you look down, there’s a sentence there saying: “Send the address to us” — click that, follow what it says, enter your URL and verification code…

4) Then wait for the next day and re-checked your URL with MSN.

usability testing - follow the steps

I wrote a post recently about how to check the new results page of Google. You can find this type of info on blogs, or press releases. It is an excellent way to get feedbacks about a page/website redesign, before an "official" release.

Yahoo is following now the same steps: http://events.yahoo.com/326123171.html

Anyone can test their new UI, and they'll collect useful feedback before releasing their new design.

Google re-invented beta release for software applications. They have now re-invented beta release for UIs. And everyone follows.

Blog 2.0 Awards

http://web2.0awards.org/

you can find the usual suspects such as Technocrati, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, etc ... but the list is quite interesting to browse, and it is a good exercice to spot in new challengers.

Geocode not available for France - what's the point

The Google API relies on geocode conversion - Yahoo provides with a pretty good API for US and Canada, but almost nothing for France. Which makes the French Google API quite pointless at the moment. Let's hope that Yahoo will follow Google steps, and release a French Map API top convert street addresses to Geo Codes soon!

google Map France finally released

At last, Google Map France is now available:
http://maps.google.fr/

We have just launched a property website (http://www.logetoi.fr), and Google Map API is great fun for this type of sites - you can display the map dynamically for each property. Very easy to implement, it makes a real difference, and a good topic for a newsletter release, or PR release.

nslookup to the rescue

For those of you who get baffled when Google results don't match with the ones your client/colleague is getting, you can try this command line out (to open the command line, press on start/command prompt if you are using a PC):

nslookup www.google.com

It will provide you with the address(es) of datacenters used by Google to return the results - sets of results are different from one datacenter to the other. If you get more than one IP listed, it means that Google will be using any of them randomly.