Kudos to Sphere.com

Personally, I’ve never heard about Sphere until today, after checking my traffic logs. Basically, it’s a blog search engine, just like Technorati. But it seems like Sphere really wants to provide something different, with more relevant results and be user-friendly:

From their About page:

Who needs Sphere?

Everybody, of course! In one of three flavors…

1 People interested in timely topics, who aren’t quite sure about this whole blogging hoo-ha.

2 Readers who already use blog search engines, and are sick of disappointing results and spam. Those who secretly crave a faster, more intuitive, and feature-rich experience.

3 Publishers who might like to include some really good blog content in their websites, but only if it’s really, truly good.

Sphere has some really useful features such as:

– Sort the results by time or relevance

– Customizable time frames: you can search results from the last hour only, the last 12 hours, the last day etc… or you can even set a “custom range filter”, that allows you to view the results from one single specific date or between two dates.

– A user-friendly interface

I have played with it and ran a few searches, and compared the results along with Technorati, and it does seem to be able to provide very relevant results.

One missing feature for Sphere though, is the ability to specify the language of your search, the two options are only “English” or “Other languages” while Technorati recognizes 20 languages.

Google Notebook already live?

It seems like Google Notebook will be officially launched today. Garret Rogers reported yesterday that he found the Google Notebook login page but he wasn’t able to login yet.

It tried to log in this morning with my Google Account and it worked:

It’s simple and it looks good. I know they are a bunch of similar applications online but this one seems to be the easiest way to take quick notes online.

Starting a new SEO career

Damn, I’ve been very busy this week. On Monday, I started my new job. I’ve been hired by a french SEO company based in Paris called Aposition. I’m glad I found a company that suited my needs and that has the same vision of SEO than me. It’s actually a big company, they have about 40 full time employees, including around 20 full time SEO specialists and consultants. I thought SEO was very shallow in France, I guess I was wrong – at least it’s not the case for this company.
One thing that I’m really excited about is that this company mainly work for big clients, whose sites contain thousands or millions of pages. For example, they have managed or are currently managing the SEO campaigns of half of the CAC 40 companies (40 most significant French public companies).

Therefore, their methods are slightly different from what I’ve been used to. When you manage ecommerce sites with million of product pages, your approach is more statistic and scientific.

This week has been more focused on introducing the firm, their methods, clients, and tools.

I really look forward to fully start managing the SEO campaigns of some of their clients, it should be fun.

How Bloggers are Influencing Society

Instead of sharing your ideas at your local pub with a few buddies, it has become pretty easy to share your ideas with thousands, or millions of people thanks to blogs, but also forums and all kinds of websites.
According to Technorati, they are now more than 35 millions of blogs, who are most of the time targetting small audiences but also some that are read by thousands or millions of people.

China Daily today published an article called “Study: Bloggers punch way above their wieght” in which they comment a recent research from Jupiter Research.

From the article:

Its study suggests that although “active” web users make up only a small proportion of Europe’s online population, they are increasingly dominating public conversations and creating business trends.

More than half of the Internet users on the continent are passive and do not contribute to the web at all, while a further 23 per cent only respond when prompted. But the remainder who do engage with the net through messageboards, websites and blogs are helping change national conversations, say researchers.

From, this research and this article, we understand that bloggers and web users are becoming really influential and are often the subject of “public conversations” and “are creating business trends”.

“Bloggers and blog-readers are ‘influentials’ the minority that pays attention to events outside of political and news cycles. They also tend on average to be better off, better educated and, more importantly, employed.”

The article notes that thanks to search engines like Google, everyone can easily spread his ideas online.

Companies like McDonald’s, lock manufacturer Kryptonite and computer firm Dell have all fallen foul of Internet buzz in recent years. Because search engines like Google can allow grassroots campaigns to become highly visible, industry insiders agree decisions can be shaped by a small number of activists.

Whois.sc no longer exists

I’m a big fan of the SEO Firefox extension called SEOpen. It’s a great tool to check many SEO related information with only one right-click with your mouse. While I was checking a Whois record for a site with this extension, I noticed that the famous whois.sc‘s website doesn’t exist anymore.

It has been replaced by a site called DomainTools.com, owned by the same people from the original whois.sc, but the site now provides more tools related to domain names.

From DomainTools’s site:

Whois’ was a great name for a site but we are now broadening our focus.
We are now a little more tool focused and a lot more domain focused.
Our name change comes from a desire to let you, our visitors,
understand what we do and to more effectively communicate that ‘Domain
Tools’ is a place for every type of diagnostic widget related to domain
names.

While I appreciate the decision to broaden their focus, I find it kind of sad that you know have to register to use their tools, even for the Whois one. I registered today but haven’t received a confirmation email yet…

Google’s Web Office is (almost) there

Well, you all heard that Google officially anounced the release of its Calendar application today.

Richard MacManus posted a nice chart on his ZDNet’s blog comparing Google’s applications with all the elements included in a Web office suite, and it clearly shows that Google’s rapidly progressing.

Today, it seems like Google would only need a Spreadsheet program (such as MS Excel, or OpenOffice Calc), a Presentation application (i.e. Powerpoint) and a Database application (Access) to provide a complete Web Office suite.

Just wait a few months and Google will just know more about you.

16% of web sites still use frames

I visit hundreds of sites each week and I sometimes see a few websites that still use atrocious frames. But I didn’t know that the average number of websites using frames accross the Web was around 16% in 2006.

Security Space published a study called Technlogy Penetration Report that shows the penetration rate of a number of client side web technologies, including Javascript, CSS, or Frames. A more complete chart is available here.

The study was based on a sample of 1,358,991 web sites, so you can imagine that the numbers can be quite significant.

It’s interesting to see that 50% of all web sites now use CSS for their design, but it’s still very sad to read that 16% of web sites still use frames. I guess this just shows that many people still need to be educated if they want to make a good use of the search engines to get traffic.

Source: ZDnet’s Web 2.0 Explorer Blog