It’s been speculated for sometime that Google will do SOMETHING to compete with the massive social networks like Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. After some attempts like Friend Feed and Wave, Google’s attempting it again with their new product – Buzz.

Buzz is actually pretty invasive and is causing serious concerns about privacy. It is a part of Gmail, a link below your Inbox on the left-hand side. It is updated with status updates (done manually), RSS entries, shared RSS posts, Tweets and more from your friends.  Read more... (360 words, 2 images, estimated 1:26 mins reading time)

When Twitter started, an unofficial trending tagging system started up. Known as “hash-tagging”, Twitter users could tag their tweets by using the hash symbol (#, also known as number sign or pound symbol). This was useful for following events like conferences (eg. #ces09) or for silly use, like a follow up thought (eg. #awesome). Sometime last year, trending (with or without hashtags) became an official feature of Twitter’s home page. Users could see the top ten words/hashtags/phrases being chatted about worldwide. Popular topics that came up over the past year include the Iranian election, the death of Michael Jackson and even new fads like #FollowFriday (suggestions of Twitter users to follow) and #MusicMonday (music suggestions).  Read more... (413 words, 4 images, estimated 1:39 mins reading time)

Ann Smart of Search Engine Journal posted a great article today about how to make sure your URLs are SEO friendly.

Given that all pieces of your URL contribute to your organic ranking, this is something that shouldn’t be overlooked.  Most people realize that the domain name is important (www.domainname.tld). Less people realize that the top level domain (www.domainname.tld) has an impact on your geo rankings. Other people realize that directory and page names are important (www.domainname.tld/directory/pagename.html) but don’t take the time to properly plan this.  Read more... (120 words, 1 image, estimated 29 secs reading time)

Yesterday as I was perusing Facebook, I noticed people (mostly female) were posting a colour as their status. I wasn’t sure what this was about, so I asked on Twitter.

Apparently, a meme started somewhere online encouraging women to update their Facebook statuses with the colour of the bra they are currently wearing.  The point? Cancer awareness.

What’s most interesting is that no one knows for sure where on the web this originated from. But someone started it and it spread like wildfire.

And that’s why you can never under estimate the power of social media.

Happy Holidays from all of us here at Canada’s Web Shop!

Our office will be closed starting at noon tomorrow, December 24. We’ll be back first thing Monday morning (December 28).

Merry Christmas!

Happy Black Friday!

This morning, I found something in the Google results pages that I’d never seen before. It’s a “Skip Intro” option.

This is great news if you’re like 99% of web searchers out there who can’t be bothered to sit through a flash movie before getting to a site. Now, you can bypass the intro movie/song and go straight to the information.

It looks like Googlebot is looking for a link with the anchor text being something like “Skip Intro” and feeding that into the results.  Read more... (317 words, 2 images, estimated 1:16 mins reading time)