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Seth MacFarlane, Google and Burger King

Family Guy Characters Crossed With Simpsons

Creating a TV show with characters like a matricidal diabolic baby who speaks fluent English with a classy accent and uses typical villain phrases, a dog who not only talks and walks on two feet but also drinks martinis and an all time horny airline-pilot who speaks phrases like “I did giggity goo that girl with my googus”, is sure an enormously creative job. Yes! I am talking about “Family Guy” and its creator Seth MacFarlane. Now Seth MacFarlane is creating ads for Burger King and they are teaming up with Google to launch a new high profile project called “Seth MacFarlane’s Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy,” an animated show that will be available only on the internet and exclusively via Google Adsense. John Battelle at BattelleMedia.com has predicted that the project will be an utter failure saying:

“My prediction, and I could be entirely wrong here: This will fail utterly. Why do I predict this? Two reasons. One, context is everything. Until Google acts like a publisher, and works with sites specifically to place advertising that is relevant to them and integrated, Adsense is an afterthought to those sites. And second, the web is not organized top down. It’s organized bottoms up. Distribution is not something you use to push shit AT people, it’s something that happens when people organize TOWARD something. That’s the whole point of the web, ain’t it?”.

Battelle is saying that Cavalcade could be successful in-spite of distribution method but not exactly because of it. Well I think this is true in any case because the distribution method doesn’t guarantee success, usually a TV program is also successful only after first few episodes not because it has been broadcasted on a rather popular channel but because people like the program and its quality.

Posted in Google, Internet, Media | No Comments »

Doh! Duplicate Content

I have a website in a fairly competitive niche which is doing well because I am working my ass off and putting a lot of effort to promote it and improve my ranking in search results, part of that effort is article submissions, I write unique original articles on regular basis, make a few copies of them by spinning and submit them to hundreds of article directories. I’ve been noticing that people copy my article and post them on their blogs with my pen name intact but without leaving a link back to my site. Though today I saw something that really got me thinking that I should do something about it and I sure would have done only if I could think of anything that can be done. This one guy has copied my article to his blog exactly in the same manner as I mentioned above he has a higher page rank than me and in his blogroll he has sold a permanent link to one of my competitors. Now I am sitting here wondering that what is all that fuss about duplicate content and stuff, does that affect a website even at all? I am not saying that, that blog is guilty of duplicate content only because of my one article, not only he has posted my several articles on his blog but it seems like he has some Ctrl+C – Ctrl+V sort of content publishing model going on there, every damn thing on that blog is copied from somewhere and that blog has more than 21 thousand pages indexed in Google. Now when I think about it, I don’t remember if I have ever came across any instance where a website has been pulled out of Google index because of duplicate content (I am talking about content not a duplicate website with same content and code). While average webmasters like us sit in front of their computer screen wondering what are the daddy Google’s criteria about its several services like pagerank and others that contribute to provide more relevant results on SERPs, Google seems to be more concerned about projects like Google Knol. Seems like couple of years from now first search results page for all major keywords would be stuffed with encyclopedia and knowledge base websites like Wikipedia, Google Knol, Squidoo , etc. Please share if you have any example of a site that has been banned from Google for having duplicate contents.

Posted in General, Google, SEO | No Comments »

Google Gets The Title Of UK’s Number One Superbrand

Google was ranked number one in a poll out yesterday by UK public and The Centre for Brand Analysis (TCBA) expert council. The entire selection process was administered by TCBA. Google managed to beat Microsoft with an index rating of 100 points whereby Microsoft scored 98.56 and was ranked number two in the list. Microsoft maintained its dominance upon rival Apple which managed to get 11^th position in the list of Top 500 Superbrands. In another recent survey by TCBA Google acquired 5^th position in a list of UK’s Coolest Brand. Even though the population of this study is only UK citizens and the sample size is 2200, but it is still very obvious that Google has remarkably managed to gain the affection of consumers around the globe in recent years. Ranked 75^th in the list Yahoo still has a long way to walk up to Top 10. Stephen Cheliotis, chairman of the Superbrands Council said in an interview to BBC that “The results are also a further sign that Google is continuing its dominance in the UK. It is clear that Google is the brand that people value at work and in their personal lives.”

This Monday morning by far would have been one of the most pleasing “Monday Morning” for Larry, Sergey and Eric. On the other hand Steve Ballmer might be constantly reminding himself of Apple’s 11^th rank to make it through the day. If you are wondering what other companies have made it to Top 500 Superbrands list, you can see this top 500 Superbrands list here.

Posted in Google | No Comments »

5 Coolest Windows Live Agents

Here’s a list of five windows live agents that you will find very entertaining and informative. For folks who are not aware of what Windows Live Agents are, well, Windows Live Agents are conversational robot that you can add to your Windows Live Messenger. These are not real people but the way they chat is pretty close to the way real people do. You might not get the actual idea so its better to add one of these WLA to your Windows Live Messenger to see what I am talking about. All right let’s check out the list below. Read the rest of this entry »

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Top 5 SEO Add-ons For Firefox

Many moons ago SEO was not the biggest concern of webmasters but lately the scene has been different. A webmaster has to be immensely equipped with information of all sorts of SEO techniques and most importantly the right SEO tools. Firefox Add-ons have some of the best SEO tools available on the internet, some of them are so awesome that they would almost eliminate the need of any SEO software. I am going to jot down a list of top 5 SEO Add-ons that are available on Firefox. Probably many of you are already using some or all of these tools, but I believe those who are new to search engine optimization would find this list quite helpful.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in SEO | 1 Comment »

Google Highly Open Participation Contest

Google has been showing a tremendous interest in Open Source Projects lately, Google Highly Open Participation Contest is one example in that regard. GHOP was arranged in order to engage pre-university students to Open Source contributions such as Joomla, Drupal, Plone etc. It was first GHOP contest and it concluded on February 4, 2008. There were nearly 400 students who participated in the contest. On July 11, 2008 Google hosted an award ceremony for 10 GHOP winners at Googleplex in Mountain View, California. There were 10 winners, one for each participating open source project which includes Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla!, MoinMoin, Mono, Moodle, Plone, Python and SliverStripe. On top of $500 each winner received an all-expenses paid trip to Googleplex in Mountain View, CA with a parent. Below is the video of GHOP award ceremony at Googleplex.

In my opinion Free Open Source Software is a better choice in many cases including, due to the fact that FOSS’s are highly functional since these softwares are developed in a public collaborative manner. Feel free to share your opinion about the significance of corporative use of Free Open Source Software.

Posted in Google | No Comments »

A new semi-automatic link building service

Link building, well it needs no introduction. I believe it’s quite a useful criteria that Google has implicated in order to evaluate a website. Backlinks are like the juice for your website that give energy to your website to compete in search engine ranking. One of the widely used way to increase backlinks for your site is directory submission. I came across this new website submitterbot.com and found it worthy to be shared. They let you submit your website site to more than 300 directories and 70 Bookmarking site in a semi-automatic manner. Though it is semi-automatic but it’s not like those directory submission software that load the entire actual submission form page of a directory in a built in web browser and automatically fill in all the form fields by clicking a button and then you have to fill in the captcha if required and then press submit to complete your submission to one directory.

In Submitterbot you have to fill in your website information once (Title Description, URL, Keywords etc) and then when you go to start submission page, it only shows you a two field form that ask you to fill in captcha and select category and hit submit as shown in the picture above and after submitting your website it doesn’t load the entire page again but only that two field form.

The bookmark submission is also quite same, you don’t have to sign up at the bookmarking site. All you need to do is hit submit select category and hit next. Below is the image of bookmarking submission page.

So to sum it up I found it quite fast but there are only around 300 directories which makes it not so useful for me, I tried it with one of my website and turned out that my site was already there in almost all of the directories they has to offer. Anyways when it comes to directory submission I prefer to outsource it because its simply too hectic even with the semi-automatic submission services too. I’ll start posting a list of directories that offer free submission I think it will be a very big list. Well thats all for now, Hope you will find this review useful. Please provide some feedback if you find it useful and If not still I would appreciate if you could let me know why you didn’t like it.

Thank You
Be happy
S.F.Imtiaz

Posted in Directory Submission, General | 1 Comment »

Hello world!

My first post on my first ever blog. So who am I? Well lots of people might think, “what difference does it make?” but still we ought to be nice to the people around us, and a good introduction might lead to a long healthy friendship, or any other kind of relationship, say for instance that of a blogger and his readers . So my name is S.F.Imtiaz and I am from Karachi, Pakistan. I Studied Business Administration with International Business Management as my major.

Mostly I’ll be blogging about Internet, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Software, Web 2.0 and many Tips and Tricks about Web development, Content Management Systems, Search Engine Optimization and some How To’s about online business and Internet marketing strategies. Since these are my primary interests I believe I’ll be able to provide some quality information to my readers. Time to time I might also write about philosophy and movies or say things that inspire me a lot. I am into web development since 1999, I feel like sharing one of my old stupid website hosted at geocities sfixperimentz. Though it became more of work than a hobby early last year.

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