These are my links for May 30th through May 31st:

• Listing all ideas – Ideablob: where ideas grow – Where business ideas have the best chance to succeed
• iList Classifieds – Post and Search Free Classified Ads – iList is a classifieds service for Twitter

These are my links for May 26th through May 28th:

• The Forrester Blog For Interactive Marketing Professionals – Microsoft announced today its Bing search engine, a "decision engine" that will replace live.com worldwide as of June 3. A distant third place in the search engine game, Microsoft hopes that this engine will help it gain more searcher share by delivering results and content more relevant to how users actually search. What makes Bing different from existing search engines?
• Micropayments for content and services | Contenture – Every time a Contenture user visits your web site, you make money. Your slice of every visitor's monthly payment is based on how many visits they made to your site divided by the total number of visits they made to all Contenture sites.
• Mozilla Labs Jetpack | Exploring new ways to extend and personalize the Web – Jetpack is a newly formed experiment in using open Web technologies to enhance the browser, with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play
• Linkbait Writing Services | Unique linkbait writing services to help your website grow and get more traffic. – At Linkbait Writing Services, we are determined to bring your website or blog more traffic by creating quality linkbait articles. Our small team of writers strive to create linkbait articles that will not only help you reach the front page of social bookmarking sites like Digg and Stumble Upon, but also bring you traffic for the lifetime of your blog. Save your time for marketing your blog and interaction with your readers and let us take care of the time consuming task of building linkbait articles.
• WordPress Designers – Premium WordPress Themes – WordPress Designers is a small team of talented developers and creative designers. We pride ourselves on our intimate knowledge or WordPress and our ability to push it to its limits. Since discovering the WordPress platform several years ago, we have strived to learn as much as we could about it so that we could bring you some of the most creative and well coded themes on the market.
• Outlaw Design Blog » 34 Brilliant Ads on Semi Trucks – a great post showing loads of advertising designs on lorries
• ConceptShare: – ConceptShare is a simple, cost-effective tool for gathering feedback from team members and clients.
• 5 Basic Rules for Creating an Effective About Page — Des Walsh dot Com – This short list of basic rules for creating an effective About page has been prompted by my frustration with the number of blogs and other websites that either do not have an About page or, more commonly in my experience, do not put their About page to work effectively in the interests of their business.
• Small Screen Blog: All about mobile – (by MoFuse) – If you believe that mobile is a strong medium to reach your customers – you need to be thinking about how your brand will evolve on the mobile web. Today you have a few interesting options and they are not mutually exclusive.
  As consumers wake up to the idea that they can actually reach the internet on their phone, we are about to see an explosion of new mobile devices; ITouch, Kindle, “netbooks” and even Sony Playstation Portable already are rapidly changing the ‘connection’ landscape.
• D u s t y T u n e s | Let your music collection see the light…. – Dusty Tunes automatically creates your own personal web page with a list of all the music in your iTunes library (although you can cheat). It will organise it all into a nice list and provide you with links so you can share it with your friends, on blogs, forums, websites, digg, facebook or simply keep it as a personal reference. You can come back at any time and update your page with all your latest tracks.
• WordPress › SEO Ultimate « WordPress Plugins – SEO Ultimate was developed with WordPress plugin "best practices" in mind:

  * Integration with WordPress's contextual help system
  * Internationalization support
  * Nonce security
  * An uninstall routine
  * Integration with the new WordPress 2.7 menu

• Privacy Policy Plugin For WordPress – At the end of February, 2008, Google started requiring AdSense publishers to display a privacy policy on all sites that displayed AdSense ads or search boxes. Since many WordPress blogs are monetized with AdSense, I decided to write a plugin that would automate the creation of AdSense-compliant privacy policies for WordPress users. Thus the Privacy Policy Plugin for WordPress was born.
• WordPress › CMS Navigation « WordPress Plugins – Do you want to use WordPress to create a full website, with easy navigation and menus? This plugin will let you add essential navigation functions to your template.
• WordPress › WordPress Navigation List Plugin NAVT « WordPress Plugins – The WordPress Navigation Tool (NAVT) plugin is a powerful tool designed to provide you with complete control over the creation, styling and contents of your web site's navigation.
• Why Twitter beats RSS: Context + Content = Added Value – broadstuff – Twitter

I saw this video, and words fail me. Automate twitter, make loads of money. This video talks about automating relationships. If its automated, ‘fire & forget’ – that is not building a relationship.

@billcrosby is the man. Bill, if you read this I would welcome your feedback. It looks spammy.

These are my bookmarks for May 14th from 17:54 to 20:51:

• Google LatLong: Tips & Tricks: Jog your memory with saved locations – For places I don't visit frequently, the hardest part about finding them on Google Maps can be remembering the right address. The dentist's office or a museum, for example — places I've found on Google Maps before, but not quite recently enough to remember the exact address to search for a second time. Fortunately, when I'm signed in to my Google account, Google Maps automatically saves the addresses I search for. The Saved Locations list can hold up to 100 different places — an indispensable address book that I add to each time I search for somewhere new.
• Waiting for the Billionth Download – O’Reilly Radar – Over the next week, the iTunes App Store is set to record its billionth download, an impressive milestone given that it launched less than a year ago. Granted the actual usage of most apps is spotty. To mark the event, I'm updating a few charts that I produced for previous posts.
• #googlefail – Twitter Search – The trending twitter topic of Google #fail
• Apple has made no more than $20-45m in revenue from the app store « Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog – About a month ago Apple announced that one billion iphone apps have been downloaded in the first nine months. That’s an amazing number. I wondered how much money Apple was making from the app store.
• Reports point to widespread Google outages | Digital Media – CNET News – Many people found Google's search site was extremely slow or inaccessible Thursday, and other reports pointed to troubles with other properties including YouTube, Gmail, Google Analytics, Google Maps, Google Docs, AdSense, and Blogger.
• It’s Down! The Day Google Stood Still (Updated) – ReadWriteWeb – We have seen our fair share of failures from web based products, but this morning, for a large number of users (at least in the U.S.), it looks like every Google service has been either wiped off the Internet or is running extremely slow for a large number of users. Even Google Search is only creeping along slowly right now, and YouTube, Google Reader, Blogger, Google Analytics, Gmail, Google Maps, and Google Apps are pretty much unavailable as well.
• Cloudy day: Google falters; Packets lost in key cities | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com – We’re getting various reports via that Google services are down or at least sucking some serious wind. The service appears to be back as of noon-ish EDT in New York City, but packets are still being lost around the globe. The fail whale Google style:

Wow, Google fell over today. There have been no shortage of articles about it, so you don’t need me to write more. But here is the interesting thing.If they say that around 14% of their traffic struggled or failed today they could be looking at a potential drop in daily revenue of around 14%.

So, if you take Q1 earnings as the guide, they made around $369 m per day in revenue from Google.com (excluding network and licensing income). If 14% of today’s audience could not see or click, they could stand to lose around $5m. Small change to a giant like Google, but an expensive mistake.

For reference, these are purely estimations at best, using what information that is publicly available.

During early trading on the Nasdaq, Google also saw a drop in share price of around 5 bucks which would have added to the financial ‘challenges’ they had today.

To be fair, they have pretty straight about the problem. Its got to see they are human after all!

Google's Response

If you missed today’s big story. Related articles by Zemanta

• Reports point to widespread Google outages (news.cnet.com)
• College Journalists Want To Erase Their Past From Google (financegeek.com)
• Major Latency With Google Web Search & Gmail (seroundtable.com)
• Google Outage! Users Report Widespread Problems Using Google Apps (huffingtonpost.com)

Image borrowed from PC World

There have been a lot of rumours about  how Apple, with its mighty war chest is planning to buy Twitter . The latest rumours include a price tag of $700m which is no small amount of beans. But if you put the money element to one side (they can clearly afford it) I don’t see why Apple would want to buy Twitter.

I offer 5 reasons why I think Apple won’t buy Twitter.

1. Twitter is not in their business model. They make hardware and software and they make damn good devices. Buying a chip maker is a logical business move – buying a micro blogging platform with no visible business model is not. Don’t forget Apple is a public company so they can’t just buy on a whim.

2. Apple are not in the portal space. If Apple owned its own search engine or portal (I don’t consider Mobile Me to be there yet) then adding on Twitter would be a logical extension. Apple has huge brand love so a portal would be a good move but would need to be in place before a big leap to tweeting. (I have always thought they should buy Ask Jeeves and make something of it…)

3. Twitter still does not have a business model – how can a public company possibly judge the real value of twitter over the hype when there is no real projection of income (that we as the public have seen). There is a real danger of paying way too much for the business – Google continues to be dogged about the YouTube value.

4. Apple does not have a history of such purchases and does not need Twitter to grow its core business. Microsoft, on the other hand does. I would suggest Microsoft has deeper pockets than Apple.

5. Apple is a very strong brand and takes a lot of effort to maintain the brand experience. This is why the machines are sealed, this is why all apps have to be approved. Anything that works with Apple or represents Apple must enhance the brand. Buying Twitter which is a collection of people saying whatever they want, has the potential to be a massive headache to Apple should things go wrong or innapropriate content appear.

So I just don’t see it. Apple do have a habit of suprising us all, but I would suggest their mooted tablet development would have more potential ‘wow’ factor and logical business extension than buying Twitter.

What do you think?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Forget Apple, Amazon Should Buy Twittter. Why Not? (techcrunch.com)
• Apple Buying Twitter? We Call Bull On That (ubergizmo.com)
• iTwitter? Apple Wants to Buy Twitter (blippitt.com)
• Companies buying Twitter: Enough already! (news.cnet.com)
• Follow The Money: Bookies Favor Apple For A Twitter Buyout (techcrunch.com)
• Apple to Buy Twitter? iTwit (pindebit.blogspot.com)
• Apple to buy Twitter? Is there reason behind the madness? (thenextweb.com)

These are my links for April 23rd through April 24th:

• Enterprise: List of 40 Social Media Staff Guidelines | Laurel Papworth- Social Network Strategy – This list also includes policies called; Staff blogging policies, enterprise social network guidelines, Employee Blogging Policies, Staff engagement in online communities, and so on. I’ve done a few press (radio, print) interviews this week re: Telstra so I thought I should have another look at how Enterprise, Government, Corporates, Not for Profits are handling the fact that their staff are members of social networks too.
• Virgin Atlantic’s ‘steamy’ ad dubbed ‘sexist, offensive to women’ | Sindh Today – England’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has received 29 complaints over the ad campaign, which also includes press advertising, insisting that the ads are insulting to women.
• Amazon.co.uk – Fulfillment by Amazon – Amazon can store, pack and ship goods for you.
• Majestic-SEO : Compare domain backlink history – This tool generates unique charts that are rarely seen outside of R&D labs of the best search engines out there: it shows backlink discovery by month. We hope you will enjoy playing with this tool as much as we enjoyed making it! It currently ignores subdomains, but in the future we might produce this data for subdomains too!
• Would you pay for a Facebook vanity URL? | Blog | Econsultancy – As Facebook's unbelievable growth continues unabated, the company is increasingly finding itself scrutinized by critics who are asking a simple question: 'where's the money'?