Industry News

Cristian invited me to speak at NetCamp, about Web 2.0.

My presentation will revolve around reputation management for companies and individuals as well as how companies can communicate internally and externally, efficiently, Web 2.0 style.

Will upload my presentation in this post, after the event is finished.

More information about this event can be found in the official website. Registrations can be made online.

This event will be starting tomorrow.

Update: This was my presentation (PPT).

This is already old news, beeing first reported in Seopedia, two days ago. PayPal is now fully accepting Romania, with sending and receiving capabilities, merchant account included.

That means every Romanian citizen can now accept website payments (through PayPal funds, or through Credit Card payments) and can withdraw the money to a Romanian debit or credit card (not a bank account).

Read more in SeoPedia (the largest Romanian SEM community), again, the first source in Romania who unrevealed this braking news.

These days, I am testing BlogRush, an ad network built by John Reese of Income.com. I want to state from the beginning, that BlogRush is not breaking news. Everybody has wrote about it. Below I will write my own input and that’s it. Moreover, I will try to get a few hundred referrals with the help of the Internet God. :)

BlogRush is your average pyramidal (meaning you can have sub-affiliates and sub-sub-affiliate and … you get the idea) banner / link exchange network, just that it’s presented in a Web 2.0 form: a widget, which you can put in your blog’s sidebar, or in your website’s utility spot.

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Georgeta Teodorescu, the Public Relations Manager from American Experience (a very friendly company) just left an interesting e-mail for me. American Experience (East Central Europe Division: Romania, Ukraine, Russia) is searching for a Regional Marketing Director for Eastern Europe.

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A frinedly company, Intrasoft, is looking for 8 J2EE programmers (minimum 2 years experience).

Minimum monthly wage: very rewarding (depends on experience).

Bonuses:

• Dinner checks
• The 13th wage
• Wage increase, every year, with minimum 10-20%.

Please send your CV to alin.salcu@intrasoft-intl.com.

PS: Location: Bucharest (only).

Beeing at the 2nd edition already, the Romanian e-Commerce Awards conference is the only Romanian award show that repays the performance and efforts of those involved in eCommerce, starting from banks and ending with payment gateways, online stores, services suppliers and ecommerce solutions as well as specialized press.

The awards (the same as in the first edition, on 8 June 2006) are classified is 3 categories:

1. Awards based on statistics offered by RomCard (Credit Card processing company)
2. Awards based on the Jury votes (not disclosed until launch day)
3. Awards proprietary to Link2eCommerce

ePravalie (online IT&C shop) is already subscribed, so hurry and reserve your spot.

Google has introduced a top 100 searches words / phrases chart called Hot Trends. More than that, what we never had from Google (except the Zeitgeist), a daily history of top 100 searches.

The top was compiled starting from 15 May and continues till the day I posted this article (23 May).

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I once wrote about a lot of Google “secret” features (and part 2), including an ad-free Google search.

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A member in one of my discussion lists just got his account banned by Digg.

What was the reason you say ?

Your account was banned for the rate of Digging activity you’ve engaged in. We’ve determined that the time in which your Diggs happen, it isn’t possible to actually read the stories. Please read each and every story before you Digg or bury a story. Once you agree that you will Digg/bury more responsibly and read the stories, we will unban your account.

Recently, the Digg staff, trough their automated algorithms, is watching if a user is reading a story, by counting the time the user stays on that particular page, and the time it takes him to press the Digg button.

As another member in the discussion list said :

That’s funny. I have a feeling this is going to bite them in the ass.

I agree … This algorithm tweaking and fear of SPAM is going way to far … I mean, come on guys, banning users for voting stories too often ?

I would really love a response from someone at Digg.

PS: Noupsell has a really good personal explanation and clarification for this situation, at the Digg page.

PS2: Apparently, the Digg community catalogues this post of mine, as SPAM :)

“dig_count”:”31″,”area”:”Upcoming”}, {”type”:”report”,”itemid”:”2071615″,”date”:”2007-05-23 13:41:42″,”timestamp”:”1179927702″,”reason”:”Spam”,

Google has played with the interface layout a lot, over the years.

Now it’s settled with the tabs in the upper left part :

They also enhanced the bar that displays the number of searches and other information, to make it more appealing, with a gradient.

A few weeks ago, RobotReplay was created, one of the most useful analytics tool in the web today.

In a few words, RobotReplay is what I reckon, the most convenient accessibility and usability workshop in the world, for free, anytime, anywhere. Basically, RobotReplay records all the sessions of your visitors, and shows you what every visitor did on your websites, from scrolling, clicks, completing of forms and selecting text.

The most important thing is that the end result / report is NOT a video but the page itself, and a little bit of javascript, so the bandwidth you save is from 1000% to 5000% perhaps. All you have to do to start monitoring your users, is to put a simple one line of javascript in every page of your website.

The guys from Nitobi Inc, the creators of RobotReplay, were happy enough to answer a few questions for me, clearing up a lot of aspects about RobotReplay but not only.

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SEOmoz has just uncovered the Web 2.0 Awards.

41 categories, 25 judges, over 200 websites, a must see.

Via Manafu.

David (Bio) has just finished his new book, The New Rules of Marketing & PR (Amazon buy link, without any affiliate code), featuring the foreword by Robert Scoble.

Apparently, I’m in it, and I will receive a copy of it from David as soon as possible. I will post a review of the book after I read it :)

What made me really happy, were a few words which reflect a state of mind that so many people in the publishing world either do not know, don’t want to know or refuse to believe it:

In the blog world, when someone writes a great post, you link to it. It’s a virtual pat on the back and acknowledgement that the effort was worthwhile. And it recognizes the original idea.

The best reward available today for a blogger or a publisher owning his own piece of real estate on the web, is a natural link.

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PayPal now allows users from Romania to register an send only account (Personal / Premiere / Business). That means you can only send money trough Paypal, with funds fueled from a Credit Card.

If you want to receive money (or to have any other type of Paypal merchant services) you will have to wait.

Via Sandossu (with an additional check by me, just to be sure).

Update: The official PayPal Press Release about the expansion to 190 markets worldwide. From it, we learn that PayPal currently has 143 million accounts globally. In the first quarter of 2007, PayPal’s total payment volume was over $11 billion. So we can estimate an aproximate total of $45 billion sales for 2007.

Update 2: Everyone can see what are the services supported for his country, in this very easy to use interface.

Google Analytics just upgraded the interface we were all getting used to, with a new enhanced BETA version.

Neither the Google Blog or the Google Analytics blogs have any posts yet, for this new interface facelift.

From the FAQ Section:

Many accounts already have access to the new version. If your account does not yet have access, you won’t have to wait long. Over the next several weeks, we will be migrating all existing Analytics accounts to the new Google Analytics interface.

Any insights ? How do you guys find the new interface ?

Update: The official Analytics blog published the news just now.