“What happened?”, you might ask!

Well, before I tell you, let me take you back a few weeks to where the story really starts….

Regular readers know that I’ve recently been making a whole raft of improvements at John’s Tech Blog.  You’ve seen the changes, haven’t you?  New design, more respectful navigation, more regular (and I hope, better quality) posts for your entertainment.

If you owned your own blog, wouldn’t you want it to be more popular?  That’s certainly my desire for John’s Tech Blog, and that’s why I posted my “Fave This Blog” competition last week (read the post here).  The essence of that post was that I was offering a free ad for a reader chosen at random from my “Fans” page on Technorati.

Yesterday, I sat at my computer in my hotel room in Poland and wrote a post reminding everyone about the competition.  Oh, and that was before breakfast, too!

I was getting excited about the buzz, so today I clicked the bookmark for my Technorati page to see how everything was going.

I was anticipating the page loading.  I could already see in my mind what the page looked like and where I’d have to scroll to in order to see how many fans I had.

Do you know what I saw?

“Network Timeout”.

Network Timeout???

Yup – Network Timeout!  Technorati was down!

I’ve been monitoring it all day and there have been a variety of messages and obvious attempts to get it up and running again, but as of now, it’s dead!

I can picture the frantic scenes at Technorati HQ.  I can imagine the huge quantities of coffee and pizza that are keeping the technicians functioning whilst they try and fix things.  But they don’t know what I know….

Think about it – Technorati was running perfectly well until recently, but then something changed.  Do you know what that was?

I posted my competition!

That’s my theory – Technorati died as a direct result of my competition being announced.

OK, so maybe my ego needs a rest!  I hope the guys get the site up and running again soon.  They do a fantastic job and we bloggers are proud to be associated with them.

If the outage lasts too long, I may change the competition – watch this space….

At this stage, I’ll just share with you the description from the home page:

Who said that Twitter needs to have Groups?
Now you can create your own Group tag and invite your friends on Twitter to join you. Expand your Twitter experience by sharing links and allowing other to follow you and join your group.

Create a new Group or Join an existing group. Follow people with the same interests as you. Find new people to follow. Let people follow you. Share your favorite website links.

Create and promote your own groups… It is that simple…

In order to fully understand what it’s all about, I’ve created my own Twitter Group on the subject of Copy Writing.  Please join the group at http://twittgroups.com/group/copywriting so we can all share the experience as we move forward.

Oh, and if you’re not following me on Twitter already, you can link to my profile at http://twitter.com/jlandells.

Happy Twittering!

On his blog (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/) Matt links to a recent video interview that he did at PubCon where he talks about how ranking is having less impact on SEO.  Watch the video and see what you think!

(BTW, for my UK readers, Matt does acknowledge on his blog that “Thomas Cook” is NOT a UK bank….!)

I’ve heard some talk recently in search engine optimization circles that Google and the other major search engines are looking to provide more relevant data by getting to know out preferences.  For example, if I search for “Java”, I might prefer to see results on the programming language, coffee, or the country depending on my own interests.  If Google could find a way to tap into my preferences, they could start tailoring their results specifically to me.

That’s where I see SearchWiki coming in.  It provides a mechanism for me to re-rank any search results that I get so that they’re listed in MY order of preference, and that sites that don’t interest me are excluded.  As Google starts to build a picture of what I like and what I don’t like, how much attention do you think it will pay to (for example) keyword density when it returns results for me?  I would imagine very little!

From Google’s perspective, this means that they provide more and more relevant searches to me as their end-user which will encourage me to use them over, say, Yahoo.  For Internet Marketers though, this shift in SEO strategy means that sites now really do have to provide value in order to stay in the listings.  In particular, how likely is it that single page sales letters will get shown (in spite of SEO) if many people remove them from their listings???

Now, I also consider the timing of this announcement interesting.  I blogged last week about how Google had finally opened up how to do SEO (See Google Spills The Beans).  So they finally come clean on SEO, then turn it on it’s head – you’ve got to love the irony in that!  However, even in their own document they state:

Creating compelling and useful content will likely influence your website more than any of the other factors discussed here.

This is very much in line with other wisdom on SEO (study the SEO Mindset for more great SEO strategies).

So How Do You Access SearchWiki?

Well, that’s the interesting part…!  Google are not making it generally available at the moment – rather they’re going to serve it up randomly to guage the takeup (see the SearchWiki FAQ for more details).  In my opinion, this is a mistake as I could imagine that many of those who get to see the SearchWiki options won’t know what to do with them.  I would have thought that a better approach would be to have a beta programme available to anyone who wishes to participate.

Google, if you’re listening, I volunteer to beta test SearchWiki for you!

For example, did you know that Google have a Conversion University?  Or that they regularly post helpful videos on YouTube, cunningly disguised as the user “Google“???   Of particular note on Google is a great video that they provide on the Google “Trifecta”, which covers Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and Website Optimizer in an hour long webinar!

Believe me – this stuff’s great!  I’d encourage everyone to study all of this content – it’s not often you get something for nothing!  It provides a wonderful foundation onto which the rest of your SEO learning can be built.  Even if you consider yourself proficient with SEO, wouldn’t you like to have your assumptions confirmed or debunked by Google themselves?

As I said, all this information will get you on the right track.  Once started though, I would strongly recommend that you build on these foundations whilst it’s all still fresh with something link Brad Callen’s excellent SEO Mindset.  He comes from the “school of hard knocks” branch of SEO and has figured out all the basics that Google have now publicly confirmed, then built a sound methodology on top of it for getting strong search engine rankings.

Before I leave this post, I have just one question:  Why do you think Google haven’t made this new guide easier to find???

Like many Entrecard users, I have around 300 bookmarks that I use in order to maximise the number of sites that I visit, and to restrict myslef to those that I’ve visited before that I deemed both “intersting” and “safe”.  This allows me to open the sites in blocks of 10 and quickly scan them for new, interesting content and to drop my Entrecard on their widget.

This worked really well until yesterday, when one of my regular sites suddenly hit me with a full-screen popup ad, which bypassed my Firefox popup blocker!  By the time I’d closed the popup, there was a new window open telling me that I needed to install some new XP Antivirus software, which had only a “Accept and bgein install” button!

From the task manager, I found that this was a real program that was running so I quickly killed it, only to find that I had a new desktop wallpaper, with a replica of a dialog showing that I had a virus threat!  At this point, I tried to put my original wallpaper back, only to find that the tab on the dialog box had been removed!

Further investigation revealed a whole host of new applications, with seemingly random names, and some new entries in my registry.  I cleaned the PC by hand, but it was too late and the damage was done – my PC was useless!

Facing the prospect of delivering a training course next week from my laptop, but being in Birmingham at a client, I had no choice but to change my plans and make the 2 hour drive to my office to re-image my laptop.  This process was relatively painless, but has left me wary and missing a few key applications.  FUrther research seems to suggest that some form of trojan made it onto my PC, which tried to then install the XPAntivirus virus.

I would urge you all to be ultr-cautious at the moment, and to watch out for some research that I’ll be doing into personal firewalls!!!

I came across an interesting new site today called Streamocracy.  In general, it seems to be a technology focused website aimed specifically at video sharing.

However, what caught my eye was their Newswire section.  It seems that what they’re doing here is aggregating RSS feeds from other technology-related sites across the Web and archiving recent content on their servers.  It’s essentially the same idea as what we see with Slashdot, only in this case, the posts are re-published “as-is”, rather than having a comment written by an editor (which is how Slashdot work).

I would encourage you to check them out – particularly the Newswire section (http://www.streamocracy.com/newswire/index.php) and to leave a comment here to share with us all what you think of their service!

Enjoy!

I’m writing this post at around 4am as I’m just about to leave for the airport.  My company’s got a booth at TechEd, and they’ve also arranged a full delegate pass for me!

I intend to bring you news, insights and hopefully pictures on a daily basis so that anyone who can’t make the event can keep up with the 100% Platform Independent Opinions that this site is famous for!

Watch this space……

[Exit John  - running late and having to trek to the airport now....!]

I did some research, as this had piqued my curiosity….

http://www.linux.org had nothing specific on this – even in their section on the “Timeline” of the Linux OS.  Even Wikipedia – usually a great source of information for me – was unable to help!

I eventually uncovered a post in another blog that talks about the release in some detail.  You can read that at http://kerneltrap.org/node/14037.