The Venture Skills Blog

When StumbleUpon started integrating there results into Googles they effectively changed the way I search. If I’m presented with 10 results I am now more likely to click through to a site with a StumbleUpon review and in particular if it has a friends review.
I have an inbuilt trust of stumblers even if they are strangers over Google strange that!
Given the choice I value a Stumblers opinion more then any ranking factors
The problem of course when that trust is abused, If I do a search for credit cards I’m presented with 3 stumbleupon reviews on the front page. Now I have to ask myself are credit cards sites really interesting enough to warrant a thumbs up? Even if it’s the best deal? particularly if they have just one stumble? Read the rest of this entry »

My attempt at showing a working model for stumbleupon mathematics certainly got (is getting) a lot of attention with several questions being asked I thought I would at least try to answer some of them and pass some more generic comments.

If you haven’t read the stumbleupon mathematics post then this will not make much sense but to recap the proposed “simplistic big model”

(Initial stumbler audience /# domain) + ((% stumbler audience /# domain)+ organic bonus – nonfriend) – (((% stumbler audience + organic bonus) + N
http://ventureskills.wordpress.com/2007/09/19/stumbleupon-mathematics-for-stumblers/

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I was chatting to a friend the other day about his newly created site (it looked really sweet) and I was looking at the CSS (very neat) but misstyped the URL my whole world came down no literally not only was he using IIS to host the site he had no custom error pages.

A few days later I noticed he was starting to pay attention to this problem, interesting articles started to appear in his del.icio.us account, and I started to think about the humble 404 and other error messages.
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Welcome to another edition of the almost seedy Stumbling Voyeur a dirty dark look at the stumbling habits of the rich and famous, but due to legal reasons we couldn’t post so you will have to make do with some of most well known bloggers as before our volunteers (in the looses sense) will have their dirty laundry on display for all to see.
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We got a question from a concerned reader…

I have a question for you is it better to develop 1 large site or several smaller ones?
I’m preparing to develop a new ecommerce site with nearly 500 products should I create several sites?

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A recent Google Webmaster blog post finally put the last nail into the coffin with regards to content substitution or to give it the demonic blackhat term Cloaking…

A technique like sIFR still lets non-Flash readers read a page, since the content/navigation is actually in the HTML — it’s just displayed by an embedded Flash object.

Source:http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/07/best-uses-of-flash.html

So its ok for us to write text and then substitute that text with a flash or image file, now to be fair most SEO I think have been doing this with CSS image substitution for some time, but this is the first time that I have seen Google come out and say that its ok to use these techniques.
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So now more or less fully restored Hackday I thought I would introduce a few of the more interesting concepts that were being banded around the event some of which are relevant to search engines and online presence. However before getting to anything interesting I thought it was discussing some of the under pinning technologies.

Geo RSS

RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a "feed," "web feed," or "channel," contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually. source: wikipedia

Georss is an extension to the standard rss which provides additional location awareness tags in their simplest form these are

<geo:lat></geo:lat>
<geo:long></geo:long>

Yep that’s longitude and latitude so now an RSS node can be given a geographical location but why would you want to do this?

Yahoo amongst others have been busy adding georss to a range of products and services including maps and Flickr both are great examples of what can be done.

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Do you have a question, perhaps you been trawling the forums, and your question has gone unanswered, maybe your not sure how to word your question or your afraid you would be laughed at?

We want to help and will be running a weekly column where we will try to get you the answer, and if we don’t know the answer we will try and find it for you. So what sorts of questions can or will we answer?
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I wish to tell you a tale of how the on-line world can suck you in, it all started when I joined the Stumbleupon beta group you can to! The beta group gets to try out all the great new things like the new user interface, it also give you new buttons to press! and here is where it all went wrong…

As you can see the new interface is a much more polished feel to it then the old one, it also now made some features that were perhaps buried more easily accessible one of them is “stumble sites they like” button so now you can start going through other stumblers likes and dislikes all your secrets are mine muhuhhhhaaaa
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How British is your site? Is it British enough to get into google.co.uk?
Regardless of where you come from you will no doubt have a regional Google be it China or Brazil but getting into these various search engines can at times be difficult unless you know what to look for.
We have discussed this subject before but now I want to give some sort of ranking to the various factors so here is our guide to Geo Targeting.

Through out this article we refer to regional rather then country tld (top level domain) and search engine, while most regional search engines are country specific a couple are not and with new domain names making up a series of countries such as .eu (urgh Europe ) we are starting to have to think of Geo Targeting on many levels.
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