Category Archives: Uncategorized

Is Google preparing a new interface?

A few people have seen a slightly different interface while they were using Google this week.
I found this information via Ars Technica. If you want to see what the “new” interface looks like, at least the one Google’s trying right now, you can do this as explained in the article:

– 1: Go to www.google.com

– 2: In your address bar, just paste this string:

javascript:alert(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=fb7740f107311e46:TM=1142683332:

LM=1142683332:S=fNSw6ljXTzvL3dWu;path=/;domain=.google.com”)

and press enter, that will set a cookie in your computer.

– 3: Do a search and check out the links on the left.

Apparently Google would like to relocate to shortcuts to images, news and results categories to the left. The green bar seems to give an idea of the number of results available in each category. They are probably willing to entice users to use other categories to ease their search.
I did a test for “country music”:

Well, not bad, but we’re still waiting for Google to show us something more Web 2.0…

Internet Explorer: Microsoft admits the “Mess Up”

“We messed up”. That’s what Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft Internet Explorer general manager said yesterday at the Mix06 conference in Vegas, while talking about the delay they took in releasing the new version of IE. Indeed, the latest version of IE was released in 2001, and nothing new has been released since, until IE 7.

According to this article from The Seattle Times, Microsoft promised to “refresh its browser technology more often in the future”. If you look at his main competitor, Mozilla, it’s true that they update their browser very often and are fixing all the bugs on a constant basis.

Bill Gates knows that they cannot lag anymore, and have to provide browsers capable of handling new kinds of pages without any problem…
“You can expect to see us moving very very rapidly there because we see great opportunities there” he said.

SEM Salaries: How much are you worth?

P.J. Fusco, writer for Clickz, replied to an email sent by a reader who asked “What’s considered a typical salary range for non-management and management positions in the SEM industry?”

Because SEM is still a new industry, it’s true that there’s a lack of information regarding salaries. That often causes people to wonder if their salaries match with what other earn. Of course, salaries are mainly justified by experience but it’s a good to know the tendency in the SEM job market.

P.J. said that entry level positions tend to range from $30,000 to $45,000. With 3 to 5 years of experience, she thinks that people can earn from $50,000 to $70,000, and even up to $90,000 if you are amongst the most tenured SEOs.

Senior Management Positions are able to earn up to $120,000.

She concludes her article by saying that money isn’t the most important, but rather how much you enjoy your work. I agree, if you’re all about the money, you can make more money elsewhere, SEO/M is more about providing quality, achieving great results and is also a very exciting job and our industry is very diversified and full of fun!

Are you Web 2.0 or not?

These days, it seems that people are talking about Web 2.0 more than ever. Many sites that I visit everyday just changed their design recently to look more Web 2.0, and the number of new web applications is booming.

There are just too many things going on that it can be hard for someone to know what Web 2.0 really is… I am myself sometimes confused and wondering where’s the limit between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

It’s true that some people seem to consider Web 2.0 as the use of the AJAX language only or to community sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Flickr etc. There are actually more elements that define the new Web and some people are trying to help people understand this new era.

Dion Hinchcliffe tries to give a definition of Web 2.0 and seems to be complaining about the confusion amongst people when it comes to define what Web 2.0 is. He wrote an article yesterday called: You know you’re Web 2.0 when… , a very interesting and comprehensive piece of paper where he tries to help people see if they’re Web 2.0 or not.

Here’s his Web 2.0 checklist:

  • You can easily comment on, or preferably, actually change the content that you find on a Web site.
  • You can label your information with tags and use them to find that information again.
  • Your Web page doesn’t reload even once as you get a whole lotta work done.
  • You are actively aware of other users’ recent activity on a site.
  • It’s possible for you to easily share with others the information you’re contributing on the Web site.
  • You can syndicate your information on a Web site elsewhere on the Internet through a feed like RSS or Atom.
  • You can pick and choose the pieces of a Web site that you like and then add that functionality to your own site.
  • There are easy ways to find out what content is the most popular or interesting at the moment.
  • You heard about a new Web site because a friend enthusiastically recommended it to you out of the blue.
  • There happens to be a mind boggling amount information and a lot of people on a site, yet it seems easy to find what you want and communicate with others.
  • Everything you ever added to a given Web site can be removed easily at your whim.
  • The Web site actively encourages you to share and reuse its information and its services with others. And it even provides a license to do so.

That’s a very comprehensive list. That doesn’t mean that every site should respect all these elements, but this is a good list to understand if you are close to Web 2.0 or not… Hmmm, I think my blog misses a few web 2.0 things: should I add tags or links to social bookmarking sites? 🙂

Thank you Search Engine Roundtable

I’m finally back in France, the flight was a bit long from San Diego to Paris and I was surprised to see snow here. Anyway, I’m glad to be back and be able to see my family and friends again. I will stay a few weeks in France and then I will start a new career in the UK with whichever SEM company that would best suit my needs.

Because I wasn’t able to go to the SES in New York, I was following the news at SERoundtable everyday, as they decided to cover the events as much as they could.

I think this is the first time that we are able to get as much information from a SES conference without being there. I’d like to thank everyone over at SEroundtable for their efforts, especially Barry Schwartz (Rusybrick).

To illustrate how precious the information they provided were, you can read their last entry called Meet the Crawlers, where the audience was able to ask various questions regarding indexing and crawling to “Matt Cutts from Google, Kashual Kurapati from Ask Jeeves, a representative from Yahoo! (Tim Mayer was not present) and Ramez Naam from MSN Search.”

A good “new” blogs list

Todd, over at Stuntdubl has published a good list of his favorite “newer” blogs. I recognized a lot of sites on his list but he also included sites that I’ve never heard about before but that seem very interesting. A good example is Fiftyfoureleven, a beautiful web dev resources site and blog. The author seems very knowledgeable and his posts are quite unique. Another good blog is Rogerd’s notebook, who is one of WebMasterWorld’s administrators, his last post about copywriting and marketing is very interesting.

Thanks Todd for sharing this personal list with us!

Week end in San Francisco

I am in San Francisco this week end, so I apologize for not being able to post. You have to understand, San Francisco is such a beautiful town that you don’t wanna miss it for anything.

Yesterday, I have been visiting the bay and today I’m going up to Sonoma Valley.  I just love it here, I’ve visited so many towns and places in this world, but I think this one will rank number 1 in my visit list.

Get your v7ndotcom elursrebmem T-shirt!

This whole contest is just crazy, I’ve already seen more than 20 websites participating! You can already get your goodies at Cafe Press.

I also decided to participate and created a blog for v7ndotcom elursrebmem , lol, we’ll see how it goes. I plan to write a story per day and get a couple of links….

One hour after I published my blog, I already received a comment from someone who visited my blog while I was the only person to know about it! Weird?