From the OpenID website:

This morning the OpenID Foundation announced that Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign, and Yahoo! have joined the board. The OpenID Foundation was formed in early 2006 by seven community members with the goal of helping promote, protect and enabling the OpenID technologies and community. Today’s announcement marks a milestone in the maturity and impact that the OpenID community has had. While the OpenID Foundation serves a stewardship role around the community’s intellectual property, the Foundation’s board itself does not make any decisions about the specifications the community is collaboratively building.

If you’re not quite sure why this matters, consider the future of online usage.  There’s a school of thought that would argue that everything will be connected and social networking will continue to grow, evolve and bring in millions of additional users.  In addition to social networking, blogging and other community and interactive websites will flood the internet like never before.  With this in mind, by soliciting the assistance of the major players in Silicon Valley, OpenID has all but solidified it’s status as the standard for online authentication.  Additionally, by agreeing on a standard for OpenID, there is potential for large companies to work on a reputation and/or profiling system for web users at-large.  To learn more about OpenID and the latest  news related to the maturity of the OpenID community, check out the following: “Evolving the OpenID foundation board“

There was a time when Yahoo! melting into Microsoft seemed laughable. After all, they were two different companies with two different cultures and two different visions. Now with everyone chasing Google, many are proclaiming that this deal makes a lot of sense. Google currently has such a huge lead in search that it dwarfs Microsoft and Yahoo! put together. But is there any reason to think that Microsoft and Yahoo! can accomplish together what they weren’t able to accomplish on their own?

One interesting aspect to this deal, however, are the reasons underlying Microsofts offer. Does Microsoft really feel that this offer to purchase Yahoo! will really “synergize” the company and lead to some great new products and/or services? Does it geniunely feel that a Microsoft/Yahoo! combo can give Google a run for its money? Or, is Microsoft, which is lagging severely behind Google, completely out of ideas. Is buying Yahoo! a hail-mary attempt by Microsoft to catch up with a company that it can’t compete with otherwise? Microsoft has a history of trying to catch up to where the competition IS, instead of focusing on where an particular industry is headed for in the future. I would hope that a Microsoft-Yahoo! deal, should it go through, would result in innovative and original ideas that range beyond simple re-branding.

Lately, it seems Google has turned to the dark side on several levels. If you’re politically savvy, you know there is a serious problem with government invading our private lives. Now, the CEO of Ask.com is fighting back.

Ask.com is serious about privacy. We are committed to meeting and exceeding emerging privacy trends in the search industry. Not only will we proactively delete the search activity of all Ask.com users from our servers after 18 months, but we also offer AskEraser, which, when enabled, deletes your search activity within hours.

Your privacy on Ask.com

At Ask.com, we believe that you as a user should have the power to control the usage of your search history. When enabled, AskEraser will completely delete your search queries and data from Ask.com servers, including: your IP address, User ID and Session ID cookies, as well as the complete text of your search query–all within a matter of hours.

Read more about Ask.com’s new privacy policy and features

I first heard about this strategy over the summer and my initial thoughts were that I’d dump Google in a heartbeat if Ask.com protects people from invasions of privacy. Of course, everyone’s hope is that Google will implement a similar feature. The problem with that is that they may be in too deep. At this point, it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re already giving the government tons of user data or profiting off of user’s private information in much the same way Face Book does.

Could net nerds put the heat on Google? Any chance of a revolution that would turn the tables and save our future from unwarranted invasions of our privacy? I won’t hold my breath, but if there was enough interest in such a movement, I’d gladly help lead the way.

Instead of a grand introduction, I’m just going to dive into the meat of my post. Ask questions in the comment section if you’re confused.

Niche Market: Understand your Audience

First things first, you need to make some simple calculations regarding your niche, audience, and the competition that exists for the audience.

Determine what is popular and useful in your niche and figure out how you can get that information to your audience. If it is hard for you to conceptualize the user process, think about how you browse the Internet when you have free time and compare that to how you operate while at work. What happens when you need information and what kind of search terms do you use? Additionally, think about how you phrase your search queries. Do you do this in the form of questions or are they simply topics? And What about generic information? What search phrases do you use and why? Write this stuff down, it helps if you’re a student of the search engine optimization game.

Beware the SEO Expert “References”

Many SEO experts will write crash courses on proper website optimization and they’ll also try to sell you “expert” services. Paying the price of a SEO expert is well worth the investment if you can manage to find a SEO pro and don’t have time or know-how to research this subject yourself. Hey, it’s OK if this stuff just isn’t your thing, but maybe you just don’t want to pay for something you could do on your own!

Search Engine Optimization made simple: Learn to communicate using properly tailored titles and phrases.

One of the biggest problems with Search Engine Optimization is poor communication.

It doesn’t help that a lot of “experts” out there throw out phrases and terms that are industry standards but not conducive to SEO learning for beginners. Along the same lines, a number of SEO articles are written for the wrong audiences or for the wrong purpose: profit. Sadly, because of the SEO niche audience, profit is often the sole motivating factor behind helpful guides on blogging and design.

SEO Tip: Optimize your site for your audience and search indexing or your “masterpiece” will not get the exposure it deserves.

Ever wonder why “SEO Experts” use 10,000 word articles and shady tactics, like bolding the title and bolding key words that appear throughout an entire article? If you’re reading this article, you’re probably intelligent so I don’t have to answer that question. Aside from keyword stuffing and trying to game search engines, however, they’re doing something that every blogger and designer needs to learn. They are trying to direct search engine crawlers to properly categorize the article during crawls. This can lead to higher search engine rankings for the site and higher listings for the article which is especially important in highly competitive niches.

Bold titles and sub-headings

If you’re just getting started, this is key. Make an effort to bold sub-headings to help your readers understand your content. Think about it, if you were creating a search engine indexing algorithm, what is the first issue you’d want to tackle? Relevance: how helpful and relevant is content to potential search users. One warning, don’t be like the “SEO experts” out there that bold several dozen words and phrases throughout the entire article without rhyme or reason. It is cheap, they look more like desperate losers rather than “professionals”and frankly it is annoying and makes it harder to read what might otherwise be a quality article. If Google has any sense, it’ll start penalizing these so-called experts, because it’s exploiting and cheapening the search experience.

Try and figure out how search engines work:

Some people will tell you not to fret and simply write content that your writers want to read, it’s true, this is good advice. However, when you’re stuck in a difficult niche to crack, you -must- write for search engines in addition to targeting your audience. Google owns the world of search and this is significant for a number of reasons. If you aren’t finding ways to optimize your website to help crawlers and users find you, why bother wasting your time with blogging or sharing your creative mind with the world? I’m not trying to be mean here, you simply won’t be discovered or it’ll take several years before your work pays off. Seriously, unless you are an established blogger, you are going to struggle if you don’t learn to manipulate titles so both users and search engine crawlers will love your site.

The Lost Art Of Creating Quality Titles

Title phrasing is KEY

I cannot emphasize this enough. Pick a title that is both descriptive and interesting to your niche audience. Blogging is often driven by emotion and bloggers make the mistake of thinking their emotion can be conveyed to a prospective reader by using clever sounding titles or being “funny”.

Example: “This rocks!”

The title might entice bored users to click, but most people will roll their eyes and move along. If your article is about chimps besting humans in a memory competition, the title will not give your work-of-art, justice! Why?

1. Too vague, no description makes the title useless to search engines and it’ll get indexed improperly and your audience will likely never find you.
2. Social Network users will ignore vague titles because they are spoon fed juicy and descriptive titles on their social news site of choice.
3. If indexed by a blog engine like Technorati, people aren’t going to read your article. Most people seeking content are limited in their time so they’ll click on the title below that may be a spam article but has a script smart enough to provide quality titles.

Use your knowledge of human behavior and psychology to optimize your titles for Search Engine queries and social networking

For a more sophisticated audience, a better example:

“Chimps tested better than humans in cognitive study.”

If your crowd is a bit younger or the tone of your blog is dumbed down a bit, you might want to try this example:

“Proof that monkeys are smarter than humans”.

A final example that helps you cast a wider net:

“Are chimps better at memorizing numbers than humans?”

Before we move on, consider what these titles are doing for users and search engines alike. The latter title is useful because it is descriptive, it gives users what they are looking for, and even those that aren’t seeking the information might click because you piqued their interest with the inquisitive, provocative, if not humorous title.

Title Structure:

Keep it simple: Use as many relevant key words, make it readable and if you must, place the site name at the end.

Example: [title] [topic] [web site name]

The reason you place the title first is because sometimes words at the end of titles are truncated. Also no one likes seeing the domain name as a title, it looks like spam! Finally, the higher concentration of key words must be near the beginning of the title because that is the stuff that’ll probably be checked against your content to determine your web site’s relevance and subsequent search listing.

I hope this was helpful, if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. If you haven’t done so, please subscribe to the itola.com – RSS News Feed. It’s a regularly updated column and costs ya nothing!

Katina Schubert, a deputy leader of the Left Party charged the Wikipedia’s German site with containing too much Nazi symbolism and a fetish towards a Hitler Youth movement.

…there may be a Nazi plot afoot on Wikipedia itself: “There are signs neo-Nazis are trying to take advantage of such structures, and this needs to be stopped.”

Wikipedia Germany denied the allegations, saying that the imagery used was used for educational purposes.  Read the entire article at Tech Crunch: “Wikipedia Sued for Nazi Sympathies“

If you saw this one coming, give yourself a very large prize. Google is experimenting with Digg style voting features on search results that allow users to vote up or bury search results they see.

I’d like the very large prize! A bit over a year ago, I wrote up a business plan to create a search engine with social networking features. Imagine a search engine like Google that could be sortable and carry only quality material? What’s the best way to filter out spam? That’s right, have users regulate the content. Of course, there are issues with users abusing this kind of system and competitive jerks burying quality items to move their sites up lists, but there is some potential in having search engines revolutionized to encompass social network elements.

The tech crunch article continues:

This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made.

At the moment the results of the program will only be stored per user and not applied to the general search index, so that sites buried (”I don’t like”) will not appear in future results for the user, where as sites voted up will stay up. Google Labs notes that “this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks,” still, who would have thought that Google would even experiment with Digg style social voting.

Honestly, I think Silicon Valley gurus need to get out and discover talent. They’re too bogged down by their corporate structure that innovation and advancement in technology is almost predictable. The difference between the evolution of Google’s ideas and those ‘creative’ minds out there is that there are ideas that will sit in notebooks years, maybe even decades before some of the juggernauts catch on. If Silicon Valley wants to do the Google shuffle, they really should reach out and look for rainmakers in nontraditional places.

Maybe it’s just my bias, because I’m a budding entrepreneur, but these companies are falling flat (Microsoft, Yahoo, and other ‘mainstays’) because they can’t think outside the box, it’s really sad!