Last week, I spoke with a Web designer from an established Web design and development firm in Singapore to find out why many of these companies have not adopted SEO as part of their offering to their clients.

The Web designer questioned the need for SEO when their clients could pay for sponsored links to get visitors to their sites.

I want to know what other people thinks, so I posted this question to my Linkedin community:

Why bother to SEO when you can pay for sponsored links?

And here’s some of the replies I received.

(more…) Why SEO When You Can Pay For Sponsored Links

My friends, it gives me great pleasure to announce SpringLoaded, the 449’s very first free theme! With support for Widgets, Gravatars and a handful of other nifty plugins, SpringLoaded is one sexy little number designed and built by the 449!

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LET US BE WILLING TO LET THE CARNAL MIND ANTICHRIST IN US, DIE !

This song turns out to be all about what is about to happen, God turning His Overcomers into flames of fire, transfiguring us into the image of His Dear Son, in the which process, we all DIE to that carnal mind/man, and our individual souls are SALVAGED, in Christ.

GLORY GLORY HALLELUJAH

Every verse tells a part of this event that is upon us, and everyone by faith says, it is THIS WEEK!

They won’t take it back! This is the first time, they won’t hedge.

Battle Hymn of the Republic. So now this Republic is the Republic of the Kingdom of God.

First Stanza

Other Stanzas

Exactly one year ago, to the hour, I was just coming out of surgery having been the unexpected and grateful recipient of a desperately needed kidney transplant.

This new chance at life has meant an awful lot to me, my wife, and two wonderful boys. Not needing to go to dialysis four times a week, to have gigantic needles stuck in my arm and having to sit still for four hours while toxins were mechanically removed from my blood being not the least of them.

To my wonderful donor, whose decision to have their license stamped with the words “Organ Donor” has meant that my sons have a much greater chance of having a dad who lives long enough to watch them grow up, and my wife, less of a chance that she will be left to raise two sons on her own, words aren’t enough to express my gratitide.

To the family of my donor, my heart cries out for you in the darkeness of the grief that this anniversary of the passing of your loved one must bring. I know it will be little consolation to your grieving, but I want to thank you, not from myself, but from my sons, and my wife, for allowing their daddy and husband to be there when they need him now, and into the future.

Sincerely, I wish I was eloquent enough to express my thanks, but I’m not, so once again, if you’re up there keeping an eye on all the people who were lucky enough to be the beneficiaries of your amazingly generous act, this humble blogger says thankyou.

They say that great things come in threes. We’ll today I received three excellent pieces of news that I want to share.

Drupal 6 has been released. This is big news for publishers. The Drupal community has added some major features to this release. Setup is easier. You can now drag and drop menus and blocks. There are new localization features that allow for page translations “on the fly.”

There’s more. OpenID support is included. An update status module has been added. This lets you know when Drupal core or contributed modules have been updated. The theming system has been updated. The forum functionality is improved and a lot more. I haven’t tried this release yet but hope to get a test site going this weekend. I’ll share my experiences.

My Netvibes account was updated today to their much anticipated Ginger release. Netvibes is what many call a start page application. You can gather content and applications from around the web and can have it all in one place. I use Netvibes to keep track of news, rss feeds, email and even Twitter.

My favorite Netvibes feature is the ability to keep track of multiple Gmail accounts on the same page. This is a real time saver. You can see a video screencast of an earlier release of Netvibes here.

Ginger is an upgrade to the service that adds more functionality including sharing features and social networking. This video shows some of the new features in action. The Ginger release also allows you to publish content and create a “universe” that you can share with the world. I’m just trying out some of the new features but so far the experience is enjoyable.

Finally, the most interesting new thing I found out about today was Riffly. This service allows a site owner to offer audio or video comments directly on their site. Users don’t need to login to the Riffly service. If a user has rights to post a comment to your site they can record right from their computer and the comment will show up inline with the other comments.

This functionality is a very big deal as far as I’m concerned. This really opens up the ‘conversation’ that so many people are talking about. The main Riffly site has the download for a WordPress plugin. There is also a brand new Drupal module that I downloaded this evening. I’ve installed it on one of my sites. You can see the first test comments here.

I like this service a lot so far. There’s not much info on who’s behind it so I hope to find out more in the coming days. I think this is a feature worth paying for if you run a high traffic blog or social network.

Whew! So that’s it. A busy day but I’m happy to share.

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© Robert J. Safuto - visit the Awakened Voice Blog for more great content.

In the small list of book I have read regarding investments they all mention the same rule. Buy things that are considered to be assets not liabilities. Basically buy things that will profit/appreciate in the future versus buying things that will lose value in time. Cool I understand that, that’s pretty clear but where is that golden list of assets that I could buy/afford that will appreciate. I understand Stocks, Bonds, CD, Art, and I guess real estate can all be considered great investments. I’m not in a position to buy art, or real estate, so for a person like me what do I do.
Investing into Domain Names. I’m sure this is debatable but in my opinion domain names seem to be a very cheap and easy way to turn a profit. A domain name at Godaddy.com can cost you $8.95, $9.20 with tax. To make a profit all you have to do is make $0.77 a month for a year on that domain. With an Google Adsense account you should be able to generate this amount with no problem. I lease a managed server so I’m able to setup hosting as soon as I purchase a domain. With a free template I downloaded, a little PHP scripting and a Google Adsense account, I’m able to create a standard SEO template with dynamic Title and Meta information that will generate income. It’s that simple. People get wrapped up with the idea of investing a small amount of money ($10.00) into something and making a million dollars, not saying it could not happen but it’s very unlikely. Remember Pennies make dimes and dimes make dollars.
Let’s imagine for a minute. Suppose in your domain portfolio you own 35 domain names. Each domain rendered its own page which has unique Title and Meta tags, dynamic content and carefully placed Google Adsense ads. Applying some minor SEO tactics, cross linking and etc. it’s very possible to generate $0.10 per domain name multiple that by 30 days and you could possibly make $105.00 per month, give or take. This is just a small example but I think you understand what I’m getting at.

Neil Patel has put up an article which goes over the basics of “Digg Promotion” in depth.

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Technorati Tags: Neil Patel, Digg

Lawyers[’] Writing Wrongs is a relatively new blog that exposes humorously-bad legal writing. Author “Legal Literatus” lists the following subtitles:

• Your briefs are shitty.
• You get paid $200/hour for this?
• Displeasing the Court with Shitty Writing.
• Counsellor, why?
• Sometimes pro se is better.

I think the “pinata brief” is the best example of the brand of humor provided by Lawyers[’] Writing Wrongs:

Defendant [prison guards] entered [plaintiff’s] cell with plans for a party. And though [plaintiff] was invited to this party, his only purpose at this party was to be their personal pinata. Once Defendant[s] entered the cell they began putting a whooping on [plaintiff] like none he had ever experienced before. Each of the Defendant[s] took turns punching and kicking [plaintiff] in the head and torso of his body. Unfortunately, when the beating had ceased, no candy spilled out of [plaintiff], rather, he was left with three broken ribs from this brutal and savage attack.

(Emphasis added.) If that isn’t humorously-bad writing, maybe you need a copy of the Elements of Legal Style more than you thought.

[via Minnesota Lawyer Blog]

For those of you who listen to podcasts and are interested in social design, here’s an option: Alex Barnett and Ted Haeger (the Bungee Connect folks) recently interviewed me about my take on social design. Long-time Bokardoans might remember me doing a series of podcasts a couple years ago with Alex, who was at Microsoft at the time. I’m happy to say that he’s now even more into podcasting. He always was a great host…ready at a moment’s notice with an insightful question.

Here’s the show post.

Here’s the RSS Feed (love the name of it) The Bungee Line.

Here’s the mp3: Social Design Interview (47min, 22MB)

The interview was part of a series that Ted and Alex are doing for Bungee Labs. They’re stretching out the role of the new community manager, who serves to not only help out with the community but also helps to lead the discussion in and around it. I think this will become a common model going forward.

Anyway, I’m honored to be part of their series, which includes the likes of Jeff Barr of Amazon and Chris Messina of Citizen Agency.

In the podcast we talk about The Del.icio.us Lesson and other topics of social design. The level of depth was meant for everyone, even folks who have never heard of social design before.

If you listen and have any feedback/questions/concerns, I would love to hear it. Either leave a comment or shoot me an email.