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If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.

Buy or Sell, I'll Treat You Well!
(In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
 

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I have a pretty simple blog post here. What’s a good Facebook vanity URL? We only have a couple days to decide but it’s sort of like getting a tattoo in that it’s permanent. Will your Facebook URL get saggy, wrinkly and hairy? Will you want to remove it with a laser when you get older?

Seriously what are you going to pick and why? Please post in comments below.

Don’t forget its FRIDAY at 11PM your time zone and not Saturday.

http://www.facebook.com/username/

Crap I just realized that today is FRIDAY!!!!

 

Looking for Eau Claire Homes For Sale?

If you have something to say please leave a comment. I will try to comment on your blog as well.
If you really like this story flag it for a feature!
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.

Buy or Sell, I'll Treat You Well!
(In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
 

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There have been a few new search engines lately and all the hype in the world doesn’t seem to add up when the engine itself doesn’t really do much (wolfram Alpha for instance) it seems nearly impossible of a search engine to actually replace Google. There have been plenty of articles talking about this topic recently but it all boils down to what you like and I like Google. I know how it works and I know what results to expect. I tried Yahoo the other week when Google was down for a few hours and I didn’t like it. I got weird results and that’s not what you want. So Bing comes a long and it’s supposed to shake things up a bit. Ok let’s see what it can do then.

Here are a few articles directly comparing Google and Bing.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/02/search-smackdown-bing-vs-google/

http://www.loiclemeur.com/english/2009/06/hello-bing-i-am-loic.html

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/31/go-bing-yourself-right-now/

There are some obvious differences in the results. I don’t know if those articles cover this but Microsoft has already been caught cheating the results and not showing competitors. For instance do a search for Apple or Macintosh and they are tweaking the results and limiting what you see and to me that is petty and a hindrance. Do I want to be using a search engine that I know gives faulty results? Nope.

But one of the most important new features of Bing is the video capability. Bing provides playable thumbnails in results and is just one step ahead of Google in this area. This is the universal search that everyone in the SEO world has been talking about and Bing is doing it now. There are some interesting consequences of this that are detailed below. You might want to be an adult to see what I mean.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/01/badda-bing-indeed/

An interesting test of the video aspect is to perform a local search for video and see (if you are doing video) where your videos stack up in results.

Overall I see Bing as a good thing since it will force Google into coming out with new features but I don’t see it replacing it or even taking a large market share. It seems to give similar results so trying to focus on Bing for SEO seems pointless. Who knows what the future will hold though.

Looking for Eau Claire Homes For Sale?

If you have something to say please leave a comment. I will try to comment on your blog as well.
If you really like this story flag it for a feature!
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.

Buy or Sell, I'll Treat You Well!
(In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
 

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Google recently added a new feature to their 411 service that tells you what intersection a business is on. Of course that’s really cool if you are on the go with a mobile phone and need directions. This feature is pretty cool and will hopefully lead more people to businesses easier than ever.

Bing a new search engine from Microsoft just released their own 411 service to directly compete with Google’s. I have mixed feelings about Bing in general (I think it’s mostly useless when compared to Google but hey competition is good right?) but Bing seems to have some cool stuff like “local business listings, as well as local traffic, weather, and movie listings”

Check out the links for more information on both of these 411 services. While you are at it stop paying for expensive 411 when you can use either of these services for free!

Looking for Eau Claire Homes For Sale?

If you have something to say please leave a comment. I will try to comment on your blog as well.
If you really like this story flag it for a feature!
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.

Buy or Sell, I'll Treat You Well!
(In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
 

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Google recently made the local business center a whole lot cooler and added a whole lot more functionality. All they did was put in some analytics and suddenly I realized how powerful local business center is. I took out my own stats because I know competitors are reading my blog but on a day to day basis I can see that literally hundreds of people are given an impression and a link to my site. That’s good news for me. I think a lot of people fail to see how important analytics can be for their websites. Some people dismiss this as someone who is just too focused on stats and how many people come to their site but really analytics is a lot more than sheer numbers. This was the first time I got to see how mine were doing and I can see that I have far more impressions than actual clicks. There could be a variety of reasons for that but of course you have to consider that this is almost always horribly skewed. But taking a look at how someone found my result can hopefully lead to why they clicked on the result. Being able to control why is the key.

To see what it looks like log in to your Google account and go to local business center. Then take a look below where to view the report.

You can see some of my stats below and a few examples of what keywords they used to see the impression of my site.

This feature was rolled out Monday across the country. (Sorry I was late getting this info out!)

You can check out this article for more details.

Looking for Eau Claire Homes For Sale?

If you have something to say please leave a comment. I will try to comment on your blog as well.
If you really like this story flag it for a feature!
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.

Buy or Sell, I'll Treat You Well!
(In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
 

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Yup those hackers are at it again and it appears that 40,000+ sites have been hacked. The article has all the details as to how they did it. The problem when these types of attacks occur is that it’s not always easy to spot the hack. In this case people coming to your site are redirected to several other sites. You should go to your site now to see if that is the case. IF you ever see anything that seems fishy it’s better to play it safe, after all people rely on your site as a safe place to be and if it becomes no longer trust worthy you could see a significant impact on the number of people who use your site. This really seems unfair but that’s just how things are in the internet world. Security is a very hard thing on websites and depending on how popular your site is it can really become a target for hackers. They want either big sites with a ton of visitors who they can in turn infect with whatever malicious application they dream up or generate traffic to a site of their choosing to in turn generate income. There is a lot to this sort of thing. Sometimes they want low traffic volume sites that they subtly change because the owner of the site would never notice.

What can you do about this? Unless you are a security expert there is probably not much you can do on your own. I would highly suggest if you think your site is affected to take this very seriously and see if you can hire someone to fix it. It could end up costing you quite a bit but think of the impact if you don’t fix this.

Looking for Eau Claire Homes For Sale?

If you have something to say please leave a comment. I will try to comment on your blog as well.
If you really like this story flag it for a feature!
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.

Buy or Sell, I'll Treat You Well!
(In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
 

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If you are into SEO then you probably have heard of page sculpting (you can check out this link to see how all the top SEO sites basically recommend doing it). In short it’s the art of trying to control page rank to ensure that only the pages you select for a high page rank receive page rank from your home page. It basically involves putting a series of “no follows” throughout your site to make sure Google bots don’t follow links to all your interior pages. I remember reading hundreds of articles telling you to do this but I also remember reading one that said it’s pointless. I am really glad I came across that last article. The reason it’s pointless is that if you have a menu system (what good website doesn’t?) then you are already leaking page rank to all your interior pages because you link to them from your home page. Some people were actually limiting site navigation in order to better sculpt their sites. In short they were focusing more on what Google might think of their site rather than making it better to navigate it for humans. I know some sites even said not to link to more obscure interior pages and only use interior links sparingly. To me this seemed counterintuitive to everything else I had learned about SEO and the golden rule of SEO is always don’t do something for bots, instead focus on humans.

Well a new article says that Google has basically backtracked on their policy and apparently this is a first. They warned not to undo the page sculpting for now until the news is finalized but it looks as if you don’t want to page sculpt at all. It might mean that shortly however many thousands you paid to an SEO company to do this to your site be for nothing and having to pay thousands more to undo all the work. Long story short the page sculpting might have a huge negative effect on your overall SEO for your site by Google automating how the “juice” is spread around. If you put in no follows it might effectively short change your site. That can’t be good and that’s why I said I am so glad I didn’t worry about this with my site. It would mean going back through hundreds of links to make sure that everything is ok.

Apparently in 2007 Matt Cutts said this was more or less something to do (so everyone in the SEO community for the most part jumped on the bandwagon) and now he says not to do it. OUCH!
 

Looking for Eau Claire Homes For Sale?

If you have something to say please leave a comment. I will try to comment on your blog as well.
If you really like this story flag it for a feature!
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.

Buy or Sell, I'll Treat You Well!
(In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
 

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The new service is called YouTube XL and you can see it here http://www.youtube.com/xl.

To be honest this seems pretty cool and it must be an obvious push to answer the question “when is YouTube going to start making some money” of course that would mean ad revenue but what can it mean for the real estate industry?

Well this is purely speculation on my part but I like breaking out the crystal ball and guessing as to what the future holds. I imagine that once real estate as an industry really takes a stronger hold on YouTube that more and more people will naturally go there for information on buying and selling, choosing an agent, finding a good inspector, the entire buying process, tips on selling, how to stage your home, etc. This of course assumes that those in the industry start filling YouTube with great content that consumers would be looking for.

I am sure you have a “real estate channel” on your local cable station and I am also sure you realize the suckiness of these channels. The biggest suckiest part of these channels is that it costs an extreme amount of money to even put content on them. Well that’s because the cable companies enjoy a monopoly and those with the means of production and distribution especially in a monopoly situation means they can fix prices; hence the overpriced suckitude of cable advertising. But that would not be the case with a YouTube real estate channel. For the most part you would be able to make videos for free and distribute them for free and reach an even wider audience than cable can for free! The problem here is that cable and other ISPS are one step ahead of the consumer and are doing everything in their vast power to limit access to this type of thing. There is a huge battle going on right now that you probably aren’t even aware of. Your cable company does not want you to watch TV on the internet. They don’t want you to get anything for free. They want you stuck using their corporate controlled monopoly with limited access and service and charge you an insane amount of money. Hopefully the FCC steps in and fixes the situation.

In the meantime I would (as I always suggest) take YouTube very seriously and start (if you have not started) putting up some really good content. Established content will become featured content and featured content will get you noticed. All it takes is a little vision on your part and a dash of motivation.

Check out my Youtube channel and be my friend on Youtube. Check out my post here as to why you want friends on Youtube.

 

Looking for Eau Claire Homes For Sale?

If you have something to say please leave a comment. I will try to comment on your blog as well.
If you really like this story flag it for a feature!
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.

Buy or Sell, I'll Treat You Well!
(In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)
 

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The other day I saw Google is talking more about dropping the Beta off Gmail and a few other products. Speculation is that this is just to seek out enterprise users and not scare them off with the Beta label. What it means for you and me is probably not much because this does not necessarily come with any fixes or additions. Although they very well might drop the Beta name and add a few more details along the way.

Looking for Eau Claire Homes For Sale?

If you have something to say please leave a comment. I will try to comment on your blog as well.
If you really like this story flag it for a feature!
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.

Buy or Sell, I'll Treat You Well!
(In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)

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There is a new phone to compete with the Iphone. Its hard to say which is better, I guess honestly the Iphone still seems like the way to go especially since a new Iphone is coming out in a few days but the Palm Pre might appeal to you. I know a lot of people in the Tech World have been waiting anxiously to see what this thing could do.

Here is a link.

Looking for Eau Claire Homes For Sale?

If you have something to say please leave a comment. I will try to comment on your blog as well.
If you really like this story flag it for a feature!
If you would like to work with an agent who is leading the way call 715-894-1001 today or send me an email.

Buy or Sell, I'll Treat You Well!
(In case you do not agree with something I said or feel that my blog or my beliefs could be construed as libelous I hereby declare that my entire blog is meant as a joke. I consider myself to be a comedian and everything I say or have said should be considered comedy. I want nothing I say to be taken seriously and if you do take it seriously take a break. If you do not think what I said is funny then that is your opinion. But for anyone who wants to sue me everything I said or say is meant purely as satire.The only thing that is not a joke is this disclaimer.)

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