Google is changing the way it ranks pages! People everywhere have noticed their page ranks dropping.This isn’t across the board, but a significant amount of people are talking about it. Apparently, Google is penalizing sites that are selling links on them or have paid links that are not Google paid links. Some other things in the Google algorithm may also be changing.

Some guru’s are emerging for the newest web marketing tool = VIDEO. And they are letting us in on the secrets of web video marketing.

AOL mobile application!AOL finally comes up with something new! My question is: Will we now be getting 100’s of CD’s in the mail with this application for the next 5 years?

 So, has everyone heard of Jaiku and Twitter?

For those who haven’t these are posting sites which can be seen/sent via SMS (text messaging), Instant Message and on the online message boards. You can subscribe to certain people’s accounts to receive all of their posts via text message if you want! It is the very latest in blogging, and is being called microblogging.

Now for the kicker: Google just bought Jaiku! What does this mean to you? Well, it could mean that a lot more websites and web-based programs such as these mini-blogs will be viewed on phones. And there is also talk of a Gphone from Google. If you have ever had to work on optimizing someone’s (or your own) website for Google you know how obsessed you can get, and how important it starts to seem that you get a good page rank. Now we might have to worry about if the site is optimized to be viewed on a mobile device!

Speaking of SEO, check out this article:

“10 reasons why I don’t care about Google Page Rank?” at DailySEOBlog

In other news:

If you ever send out mass marketing emails you might want to check out this article:

Best Practices for Bullet Proof Email Delivery

Web Publishing: The Dark Side of SEO
Here’s a GREAT article about SEO. There are a lot of things to look out for, so educate yourself so that you dont waste a ton of money or get black listed by a search engine for bad practices.

Web Services Policy Primer and Guidelines for Authors: Working Drafts
2007-08-10: The Web Services Policy Working Group released two updated Working Drafts. The Primer introduces the policy language and policy attachment mechanisms. The Guidelines for Policy Assertion Authors provide best practices for creating policy assertions. Both are companions to the Web Services Policy 1.5 Framework and Attachment specifications.

• Here’s a great forum and educational website for developers and designers.
  http://www.webdeveloper.com/
• Vista users learn how to create a workgroup in the new Windows Meeting Space
  http://www.developer.com/net/net/article.php/3690051
• Meri Williams Talks about the importance and technique of time/project management for web “Geeks”
  http://www.sitepoint.com/article/project-management-web-geeks

Thirteen years ago, in 1994, Yahoo! had just launched. Can you imagine the internet now without a major search engine like Yahoo! or Google to help? There is so much more content, so many more sites, and so much more stuff in general on the internet that we cannot get by without these tools now.

Most websites back then were text based, with no Flash, and virtually no plug-ins. They were an exchange of educational information only. Now you can see and buy almost anything on the web. With the advent of sites such as YouTube, MySpace, EBay, and Amazon the sky is the limit. Now we are no longer concerned with just text and FTP, we have a whole myriad of plug-ins to integrate to make a site truly great. So, while design standards such as clean lines, clear flow, and consistency have stayed the same, the back end has changed considerably. Chat rooms, Shopping Carts, Email Databases, games, videos, television and basically anything a good programmer can think up can go into the making of a site that users will feel happy using and returning to time and again. That’s a lot to think about!

So, good luck to all you surfers out there! There’s a lot of crap to wade through, but a ton of fun new and innovative things happening all the time.

[Some ideas in this article were taken from an article on BBC News. A Decade of Good Website Design by Mark Ward, Tuesday, 7 December 2004, with usability guru Dr. Jakob Nielsen for the BBC World Service Programme. To read more visit http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4061093.stm]