I’m a moderately active environmentalist. I’ve got a small environmental site which I built and maintain, and I certainly try and keep an active commitment to local businesses and community as much as I can. So, naturally, when Google announced their latest Google Maps mashup, my ears perked up.
The idea is a mapping tool which highlights environmentally friendly vacations in five cities – Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Orlando, and San Francisco. The project is a cooperative effort between Google and the Earth Day Network.
It’s a cool idea, and I want to make it clear that the ACTUAL Google Maps index contains a lot more environmentally friendly options than just those highlighted in those five cities. The mashup itself somewhat gives the impression that you can easily find great environmentally sound vacations in these five places, and, as an afterthought, suggest searching for environmentalist options elsewhere using Google Maps as well.
It’s not a big thing, but certainly something to keep in mind – if you’re making any big trips in the United States in the future, be sure to look here to try and find good green vacation options.
Today I just want to point out four particularly interesting posts from around the search engine marketing blogosphere. These four blog posts just struck me as particularly interesting for their own reasons.
Wendy Boswell at Search Engine Journal draws notice to a declaration by Amnesty International to demand an end to internet censorship. Amnesty International, the world’s premiere human rights organization, has started their own new site Irrepressible to begin speaking for the rights of humans to speak out or access information.
At the time I’m writing this, Search Engine Journal appears to be inaccessible due to bandwidth overflow – which is, for what it’s worth, pretty surprising.
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Irrepressible
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Adj. 1) Impossible to repress or control.
Chat rooms monitored. Blogs deleted. Websites blocked. Search engines restricted. People imprisoned for simply posting and sharing information.
The Internet is a new frontier in the struggle for human rights. Governments – with the help of some of the biggest IT companies in the world – are cracking down on freedom of expression.
Amnesty International, with the support of The Observer, is launching a campaign to show that online or offline the human voice and human rights are impossible to repress.
The full title of this article from Jason Calcanis, the CEO of AOL property Weblogs, Inc. is ‘Fixing AOL Search (or "we need to love our users a little more")’.
Jason writes a fairly harsh analysis of what AOL search does wrong and why he thinks AOL Search is a benchwarmer in the world of search. Since AOL is, in fact, what feeds Jason this little nibble at their hands is well worth noting.
I’d also recommend a look at Phil Bradley’s reaction to this post at Search Engine Watch.
It may be a little bit early for Christmas wish lists, but I guess if you’re looking for this kind of present you better get Santa your requests pretty early. EGOL writes an extensive list of 12 requests for his Google Christmas from the Adsense program. What he has to say is well worth listening to – and I certainly hope that a large number of Google engineers like what he’s saying. (Or, better yet, I hope that a large number of Google engineers thought of some of these several months ago, and that they’re on their way!)
Everybody knows that a site which hasn’t been updated since 1997 isn’t a great resource. But as long as a site is on the web, is this antique information still getting ranked with the blog posts you wrote yesterday? Bill Slawski writes up an interesting patent filing called
Methods and apparatus for assessing web page decay and looks at the wide variety of problems surrounding algorithmic detection of old web pages.
The post particularly spawns questions concerning what kind of information is both old and no longer useful. Even though information in the tech industry may be out of date within a few months, a scholarly article about 14th century Europe will still contain fairly accurate information after 10 years.
And, on top of that, the entropy of the web is just a really neat idea.
Just wanted to make it clear that in my previous post I did not intend to accuse Quizlaw.com of not being a legitimate site – although I do certainly realize that my comments read that way.
The point I was trying to draw is that a flood of advertising on a page with minimal content for high value terms create an impression of value much like that of spam pages. The results of what I knew full well to be a search results page was an unwise choice of sample.
All apologies if anybody at Quizlaw took offense.