Carphone warehouse buys AOL

Carphone warehouse buys AOL UK, Google buys youTube, my head is spinning thinking about all this money flying in the air around me! What's next, Virgin buying Jazar?

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Could not resist - when I stumbled across this lovely woman, it made my day too!

SEO: to digg or not to digg

Search engines optimisers are scratching their heads trying to make the best out of social bookmarking. Is it a new killer way to get high volume of inbound links, or not.

SEOMoz thinks that Diggs is not worth trying to trick: the argument is that people using digg are techno savvy, and will recoginse that you have tryed to trick them - you'll get some traffic, but without any value. These guys will never come back. And will never digg.

I would say that the post on SEOmoz was probably inspired by someone working at digg, and who sent the artcle to SEOmoz.

Because there are definitely clever ways to spam Digg.

SEO black hat provides with a few good tips.

I love this one: "Insult as many groups as you can. Flamewars are popular for a reason. Throw out bombs that dare people to comment on your story. If you haven’t pissed off half your readers by the end of your article, it’s probably because you don’t have the balls or you’re too stupid to figure out how."

Conclusion: don't listen to the "good content" evangelists. Follow their advice yes, because good content is what makes good web, and we are all consumers at the end of the day. But even good content, without anybody reading it, is worthless, so it's sometimes good to know a few tricks of the trade to help your site out bringing more traffic...

Open Source - Weakness and strength

An article on Zdnet recently highlighted one of open source modele weakness with the example of openoffice.

You depend on contribution from the communauty of developers to move the software forward - but managing these contributions (if there are any!) can be an expensive task. Conclusion, you need to fund an open source initiative, nothing comes in free...

Technewsworld on the other hand posts offers an interesting article about the benefits of open source, listing a serie of projects which have been successful at embracing this modele. Good read

new generation of CPC tools

Efficient Frontier has applied Wall Street analytics to the management of a pay per click (PPC) advertising campaign.

Essentially, their Portfolio Maximization technology incorporates portfolio management techniques that were first developed on Wall Street to manage large stock portfolios.

I think it is a very clever way to handle cost per clicks campaigns - focus on maximising the volume of traffic for a pre-defined cost, introducing Return on Investment at portfolio level (or campaign level in Google for instance).

A usual granular approach to keywords is to assign a ROI value to this keyword. If the ROI is positive for this keyword, we increase the bid until reaching position 3, and maximise volume (or up to position 1 if this increases the volume significantly).

The portfolio approach doesn't remove granularity, but let us potentially "loose" money on some keywords, while keeping the overall cost per acquisition under the cap we have set. You end up spending the same amount of money for higher traffic.

This approach is not really instinctive, and cannot be really applied as easily as the first approach, which can be carried out manually. With the portfolio approach, you need to have calculations in the background providing you with the best combination. And that's where using a management software really makes sense.

It's all good for efrontier.com, which obviously maximise clients spending, and therefore increase their revenue (charge a percentage of your spending). A real killer revenue modele.