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July 29, 2004
Is Google Googled?
Hard times ahead for Google? The myDoom virus that had Google down for about 4 hours a few days ago is probably just the beginning. It is unfortunate that I think that more attacks will start coming on as Google enters the world of big (and 'ugly') business. There are many reasons for this - none of which are justified - but it is a matter that I am sure that is worrying the Google executive triplet more than anything at this stage.
In the meantime, businesses that base their marketing on Google adwords have noticed a drop due to the myDoom virus. Quite a few unhappy bunnies out there at the moment.
Posted by Basileios at 05:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 27, 2004
We Re Back... I think...
I think we are all back in office today, so we will be back to regular blogging shortly .
Posted by Basileios at 08:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 15, 2004
Sparse Blogging Ahead
Rugles will be taking a short break from blogging over the next 10 days or so due to the immense amount of work and the fact that both me and Harry will be taking short breaks next week.
Posted by Basileios at 06:56 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 14, 2004
What's in a name?
(Shakespear couldn't get it more wrong here don't you think?)
Jennifer Rice in 'What's Your Brand Mantra?' has brought to my attention the most complete naming guide that I have seen. Enjoy...
Basil Drolias @ Rugles Website Marketing
Posted by Basileios at 05:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 13, 2004
and Google Acquires Picasa
Google also announced today of an acquisition of a 'small' company: Picasa a company that enables users to easily manage and share digital photogrpahs. Picasa has been collaborrating with Google's Blogger since May this year as part of the blog service for using/uploading pictures in weblogs.
I am very curious to see how this service will be integrated with all the other addons that Google is slowly building. I don't think this is simply a step of Google in the digital photography sector but something a lot deeper.
Basil Drolias @ Rugles Website Marketing
Posted by Basileios at 10:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Yahoo! Acquires Oddpost
Yahoo! announced today that they have acquired Oddpost, a small San Francisco based company that offers webmail services integrated with news aggregation.
It seems as if Yahoo! is looking for ways to respond back to the Google attack of Gmail and the news aggregation integration idea in its portal services - and the pretty much special place Yahoo! holds for aggregation at the moment - seems to be a natural extension.
Basil Drolias @ Rugles Website Marketing
Posted by Basileios at 09:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 12, 2004
Did Microsoft Steal AltaVista Code?
A week after the alleged 'stealing' of the Orkut code by Google the news is that a Microsoft employee has been arrested for having stolen proprietary technology from the AltaVista search engine two years ago.
According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter:
The allegations in the indictment against Chavet "do not pertain to Microsoft," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Chris Sonderby, chief of the U.S. Attorney's Computer Hacking and Intellectual Property unit in Northern California, which is prosecuting the case. The FBI did not seize computers from Microsoft as part of the case, said Greg Fowler, the supervising special agent for the agency's Northwest Cyber Crime Task Force.
As you know Microsoft is experimenting at the moment with their own search engine which is planned to replace the current Yahoo! Inktomi technology that is used by MSN. Will this incident have any impact on the search technology developments? I seriously doubt it. I am more than sure that Microsoft will come out as a strong player in this race. It certainly has the means of getting large chunks of the pie even from day 1. We will see if they play their cards right.
Harry Tzetzos @ Rugles Website Marketing
Posted by Basileios at 08:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 09, 2004
netIQ Pushes WebTrends to WebPosition Gold Users
Some Webposition Gold users may have been a bit surprised to receive yesterday's email from WPG informing them about the new and wonderful Webtrends 7. The fact is that netIQ, the company behind the Webtrends suites have purchased WebPosition Gold a few months ago and are now using the WPG database in order to promote WebTrends.
The integration of search engine metrics (and optimization) and website statistics is a very interesting issue that I am sure we will see a lot more of this soon, than simply a merge of the customer email databases.
Basil Drolias @ Rugles Website Marketing
Posted by Basileios at 05:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 08, 2004
Yahoo! Announces Record Revenue
Yahoo! announced their fifth straight quarter of record revenue yesterady. Second-quarter revenue more than doubled to $832.3 million from $321.4 million in the same period a year ago. Profit rose to a record $112.5 million, or 8 cents a share. That's up from $50.8 million, or 4 cents a share, from a year ago.
After factoring in ``traffic acquisition costs'' -- the fees that Yahoo pays to other Web sites that carry its advertising -- Yahoo's revenue was $609.1 million, a 90 percent jump from the same period a year ago.
Wall Street also appears to be taking more seriously Microsoft's plans to build a competitive search engine. Investors dinged Yahoo's stock last week when Microsoft unveiled a new look for its MSN Internet search Web site and launched a beta version of its new search technology.
Rugles Website Marketing
However, Wall Street punished the Sunnyvale company in after-hours trading for not beating analysts' expectations (which expected Yahoo to generate sales of $610 million.)
The view among investors this week was that Yahoo needed to handily surpass analysts' expectations -- as it did last quarter -- to warrant a boost in its stock price.
Instead, the company's numbers came in under what some analysts expected, helping fuel a sell-off on Wall Street.
Posted by Basileios at 07:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 07, 2004
The Google Alternatives
I stumbled upon a random article on a - more or less - random Sunday newspaper yesterday (yes, it takes me 6 days to finish reading a Sunday paper) with the title: 'Five alternatives to Google'.
The article simply offered 5 alternative search engines (that included A9.com, topix.net, singingfish.com, lii.org, and scirus.com).
I am not really interested in whether this is an article that many people are going to follow. I simply find its existence very interesting. Just think that five years ago one found articles on 'Five alternatives to Altavista' (who?) that probably included Google.com in their list...
Basileios Drolias @ Rugles Website Marketing
Posted by Basileios at 04:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 06, 2004
Email Privacy and the Wiretap Act
Mark Rasch, talks today in The Register on the recent First Court of Appeals in Massachusetts ruling on the wiretapping of emails that we reported last week.
Naturally he is 100% right in his opinion and we are (all) on the same side. The Wiretap Act should be definitely changed in order to reflect the new technologies and should protect our privacy in more than words.
Posted by Basileios at 04:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 05, 2004
Google Celebrates Euro 2004
Google has two different Google logos in order to celebrate the soccer Euro 2004 finbal between Portugal and Greece (in www.google.pt and www.google.com.gr).
As you may know Greece won the final 1-0 yesterday. Basil, my colleague here is Greek so there is more than excitment today in Rugles.
Harry Tzetzos @ Rugles Website Marketing
Posted by Basileios at 02:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 02, 2004
On Search Engine Optimization
Seth Godin, guru of brilliant posts and effective marketing, talks today about the problems of Search Egine Optimization and his opinion is that most SEO these days is not worth the money. I have to say that I am very glad that the ideas presented in his post are almost the same as the ones we have posted here in the Rugles weblog numerous times ever since it first started six months ago. Search engine optimization is not a panacea. It is just one part in your many efforts.
It is a fact that search engine optimization, has received very bad reputation due to SEO professionals that either use unethical SEO tricks or simply do nothing at all for their customers. (As we all know and we discussed in the past submitting your site to millions of search engines is not the key to your success).
It is also a fact that the search engine rules may change at random times and at with random results (as it happened with the Google algorithm change last November). As we had commented back then
the other hand the internet is a dynamic, living organism with new site changing sites, new ideas, new SEO attempts and new spam attempts to beat the house.
and
the search engine substratum (whether Google or any other Search engine) are part of the SEO game and, fortunately or unfortunately, they demonstrate a strong reason why SEO will keep people busy (and frustrated) for the times to come, and part of their daily changing world.
Under these circumstances, are these grounds on which one can grow a business? The answer is a definite... maybe. Business and marketing is a science of many degrees of freedom so it is not easy to give a straight forward NO answer as Seth Godin gives and this establishes the disagreement that we have with him.
Search engine optimization is a definite fact of business life today and it will be hard to remove it at this stage. Many small and large companies are making large profits out of the simple advantageous position they have in Google for just a few keywords (we are happy enough to have helped some of them achieve these ranks).
However, under no circumstances do we consider SEO as the main element of the success of these businesses and under no circumstances would we ever advise anyone to base their full marketing efforts on SEO.
Success in business is a matter of many degrees of freedom (yet again). Figuring out the mechanics for turning strangers to friends, and friends to customers is not the easiest of things, and to be frank, ranking high in search engines often comes as a result of being able to turn strangers to friends and not as a cause.
SEO (either as a cause or effect) these days is unavoidably part of your marketing. But do not forget that marketing is only a part of your business.
Basil Drolias @ Rugles Website Marketing
Posted by Basileios at 03:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 01, 2004
Born on the 1st of July
Harry Tzetzos our CEO has his birthday today... so
Happy Birthday Harry
Records of his birth have been lost due to time and a few world wars so his age is anybody's guess....
Posted by Basileios at 08:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Microsoft Makes a Move
Microsoft has upgraded MSN search today and has taken a step in the ring with Yahoo! and Google. The new MSN search has a very clean front that reminds us of Google and has results that for the first time separate the crawled pages from the paid inclusions. Microsoft claims that this is a $100M invetsment in the word of search engines and that search results have been improved in relevancy by ~45%.
The current crawled results are based on the Intomi search technology that Yahoo! is also using, but Microsoft has been experimenting for some time now with their own search crawler, which I believe we will shortly see.
Competition is always a good means of getting good service to visitors and of progress. Microsoft is in a very advantageous position - inspite 'bad guy' reputation that it has been carrying for the past years. These are definitely 'interesting times'.
Basil Drolias @ Rugles Website Marketing
Posted by Basileios at 08:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
So You Though Gmail Had Privacy Issues?
If you thought that Gmail was bad for your privacy and you better stick to mail solutions that would not threaten your rights here is something that will shake you a bit:
The First Court of Appeals in Massachusetts ruled that Bradford C. Councilman did not violate criminal wiretap laws when he surreptitiously copied and read the mail of his customers in order to monitor their transactions.
Councilman is an owner of a website selling rare and out of print books and as part of the service of his website he offered email accounts to his customers. Councilman installed a code that 'intercepted' and copied any email that came to his customers from his competitor Amazon.com so he could know exactly what books his customers were seeking.
According to the 'Wired News' report 'Authorities charged Councilman with violating the Wiretap Act, which governs unauthorized interception of communication. But the court found that because the e-mails were already in the random access memory, or RAM, of the defendant's computer system when he copied them, he did not intercept them while they were in transit over wires and therefore did not violate the Wiretap Act, even though he copied the messages before the intended recipients read them. The court ruled that the messages were in storage rather than transit.'
"By interpreting the Wiretap Act's privacy protections very narrowly, this court has effectively given Internet communications providers free rein to invade the privacy of their users for any reason and at any time," said Kevin Bankston, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "This decision makes clear that the law has failed to adapt to the realities of Internet communications and must be updated to protect online privacy."
In his dissenting opinion, which contained a detailed description of how e-mail works, Justice Kermit V. Lipez wrote that Congress never intended for e-mail temporarily stored in the transmission process to have less privacy than messages in transit. And he acknowledged that "the line that we draw in this case will have far-reaching effects on personal privacy and security."
Now, can I have ten Gmail accounts please?
Basileios Drolias @ Rugles Website Marketing
Posted by Basileios at 01:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Did Google 'Steal' the Orkut Code?
Affinity Engines, a social-networking company has filed suit against Google claiming that the source behind orkut has been stolen by former engineer of Affinity Engines Orkut Buyukkokten.
The lawsuit claims that Orkut illegaly took the code with him when he joined Google (Orkut Buyukkokten was a co-founder of Affinity Engines) and he had also 'promised' not to develop competing social networking software.
According to the lawsuit: "In its initial investigation, AEI (Affinity Engines) uncovered a total of nine unique software bugs ... in AEI's inCircle product that were also present in orkut.com," and "The presence of these bugs in both products is highly indicative of a common source code.... orkut.com contains software and source code copied, developed or derived from AEI's inCircle software or source code."
David Krane, Google's director of company communications has commented that "Affinity Engines has not provided any evidence to Google that their source code was used in the development of orkut.com. We have repeatedly offered to allow a neutral expert to compare the codes in the two programs and evaluate Affinity's claims, but Affinity has rejected that offer. We have investigated the claims ... thoroughly and concluded that the allegations are without merit."
It must be said that the lawsuit is not helping Google's 'good guys' reputation at this stage. What will the effect of this, and the other, lawsuits be on the Google IPO remains to be seen.
Basileios Drolias @ Rugles Website Marketing
Posted by Basileios at 12:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack