A new trend, a new meaning for SEM: search engine magic! Tired of all those SEA/SEA, Google certified agencies? Try N’Bolo Googlyaoo, a magician who can even influence your competitors positions … :))

I wonder what his fee might be …

Article from the nytimes :

…On Thursday at the International World Wide Web Conference in Beijing, two Google scientists presented a paper describing what the researchers call VisualRank, an algorithm for blending image-recognition software methods with techniques for weighting and ranking images that look most similar.

Although image search has become popular on commercial search engines, results are usually generated today by using cues from the text that is associated with each image…..[full article here]

Damn…I would like to see that in real time :-)

Nice article in the New York Times on what is the best kind of traffic for web sites. Paid or unpaid search results? I am not surprised of the outcome. “The study found that paid listings had a slight edge over “organic,” or unpaid, search results: visitors who clicked on paid links were 17 percent more likely to buy something, and they spent about 18 percent more on each order.”

What makes the article interesting is the last paragraph; “But neither of these is the most valuable kind of Web site visitor. That honor goes to the people who arrive at a site by typing its Web address directly into their browsers…”

To me this means another important factor is the recognition and relevance of your domainname. What’s the most relevant to you; www.freddyproperties.com or www.highendrental.com ?

Source : New York Times

If you have missed the 2008 hot trends, you can find them on Read/Write Web.
What I have noticed is that Mobile is in the list again, I have seen that a few times in there before but it never lifted off like it should (to me). Let’s see what it brings this year…

Source: Read/Write Web

Art2blog is going on holidays for 1 week to Bodrum. We’ll be back on October 4th. In mean time don’t stop reading our favourite colleagues. If you still have some holidays planned, check out Fasten Seatbelts where you can find the “Do’s and Don’ts” of the country you’re visiting.

We will certainly remember that:

• In Turkey, it is rude to show the sole of your shoe.
• In Turkey, the “OK” sign is very rude.
• In Turkey, in crowded busses (Dolmus), the way to pay for your ticket is to pass the money from passenger to passenger towards the bus driver.
• In various countries, you may be asked to remove your shoes before entering a home.

The last few days it has been quiet…well…now you know why. I moved our blog to my own hosting.http://www.art2blog.be is the place to be now…I’ll make some more changes the coming days on the design but all credits go to Design Disease which created this great 3 column wordpress theme. Furthermore you don’t have to change your rss feed address, that stayed the same (http://feeds.feedburner.com/art2blog)!

Hope you enjoy…

Do unflattering photos or embarrassing blog postings pop up when someone Googles your name? Or are you concerned about your privacy in this new digital age? With Google’s excellent indexing of the Internet, the reality is that friends, family members and employers can find out more information about you than you potentially want them to, just by “Googling” your full name. This site shows a few ways of getting out of this situation.

Tafiti is a new search tool created by Microsoft, using its Silverlight technology. You’ll get a more visually appealing search. You should give it a try, pretty cool. The tree view option is also available, which lets you see your relevant results on a moving tree.

Received several mails from contacts to join their social network on the Quechup site. Ignore these! Don’t know what the final plan is, but once you register the engine behind the site proposes to import online contacts from your webmail account like Hotmail, Gmail, … once imported all these get a mail from you inviting to join Quechup again. Pure spam with hopefully no other harmful intentions (viruses?) behind.

As most of you know, Gottabet is giving away 1 million $. We would like to get at least 100$ of that, and you can help with just participating in our bet!

Our indoor football team (ZVC 1891 - Belgium) would like to buy some new shirts for next season. We are first in the league at the moment with 1 point difference on nr2 and I started a bet here >. We would like to get at least 100$, like that we have a good start to buy new shirts… More then 100 would be even better of course. Any sponsoring is welcome…any new participant gives us 1$.

It’s fairly simple and it’s FREE;

• just go to our bet
• click ‘Bet on it’
• Register
• And bet

That’s all…

Thanks!!!