What happens to the Twitterati when the site goes down for scheduled maintenance? Why, they temporarily turn into Facebookerati, lest the world be deprived of their every last thought.
Search engine marketing guru Danny Sullivan says small-time businesses are stealing other's listings in Google Maps. "Florists, locksmiths, payday loan companies and others have found their listings hijacked in this manner." It's a hack so obvious I'm surprised no one at Google thought of it: You can edit the listing for your competitors to include your business name, URL and phone instead of theirs. Wikipedia meets the Yellow Pages! Vint Cerf totally saw this coming. Too bad no one listens to him.
Search marketing icon Danny Sullivan recently moved back to his native Southern California after 12 years in a small English town. Yeah, we thought he was British, too. Sullivan documented several infuriating problems he hit trying to connect with local businesses through Google. One stands out, because it was caused by a local business with too much Web savvy, rather than not enough.
A new version of Firefox, the popular alternative Web browser, is getting close to releasing a third version. That's prompting people to take a close look at the business practices of Mozilla Corp., the maker of Firefox. Danny Sullivan, the longtime search-engine observer, is calling on Mozilla to let Firefox users pick the search engine built into their browser; Firefox 3 defaults to Google in its new release, as it has in the past. Sullivan has a point: Google, which has called for openness, risks seeming hypocritical. But he gets the business side of things all wrong.
The founding editor of Search Engine Watch, the heavyweight in search blogging and the Wall Street Journal for the growing search-marketing set, says he's heading out this winter. Danny Sullivan announced his impending exit — from SEW and his Search Engine Strategies conferences — on his personal site, saying, "My contracts with their owners Incisive Media are expiring, and we've not been able to agree on new ones."
Well of course Danny Sullivan already wrote his story, "25 Things I Hate About Google." When he posted his "25 Things I Love" counterpart at ClickZ today, it should have been clear he was repurposing a week-old idea from his own ClickZ site, Search Engine Watch — idea recycling is what we bloggers do. And he'd already carried that idea to the other side with a hate list.
