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by: Anne Haynes
I’ve been spending allot of time on Brightkite.com (if you need an invite I have 3 left). What I like about brightkite.com is it’s not just text communication – you create a connection with images. Additionally, the geographical “sign-in” feature allows you to connect with people in your area or people traveling in your area.

There are a few ways that I’ve been able to make brightkite more useful than twitter, facebook or friendfeed; I can watch someone cook and take pictures from my mobile using details in the subject, I can post pictures of my flowers and ask people to help me figure out what is eating on the leaves, when painting a room I can ask for feedback on colors. The number one reason why I like brightkite more than other social media services, brightkite feeds into twitter which feeds to friendfeed and facebook. Yes this was my number one reason for loving brightkite, but now the connection is true love. It’s the simple old saying – “a picture speaks a thousand words” – and it does!

What I see happening with brightkite is a video extension – and let’s face it as much as we like video it’s kind of a pain unless you live breath and sweat your productions. You need to have a true want to broadcast yourself on the YouTube. When you do the YouTube you need to think things through and well, I don’t have that kind of time. I just want to go the brightkite route, more personal not so much broadcast. I don’t want to be the LisaNova or the Freds in the video world; I just want some help with my daily projects; the things I make decisions on every day. Finding out I need to call 800-dig-rite before I started dropping electricity into my backyard was huge for me! I had no clue I needed to call someone - I just trusted the contractor, but my friend from brightkite @benneplex helped me navigate through my project. I seek the personal touch within the video world – I want someone to speak to me. I feel this personal experience is months if not years away because it’s only the young and tech savvy that are onto this medium now. Yes, eventually I will be doing video, but I want it to be personal and meaningful. What happened to all the video emails that were supposed to happen in our industry? I haven’t received one! Just links in emails that point streaming video on websites. Was it too expensive? Oh you can bet it was and still is…. Who has the secret codec?

Anyway, I love brightkite and again, if you need an invite, I have three left, just shoot me a message.

by:Anne Haynes

A client called me today and asked me if I’d heard of Cuil the new search engine created by ex Google engineers that claims to be better, faster and cheaper than Google. While I was taken off guard because I was clueless about Cuil (how embarrassing), I was curious if this new search engine would become the next NUMBER 1 search engine. So, I decided to conduct some research and a quick test.

Cuil Goal located on the website states, “The Internet is getting bigger and more disorganized every day. Cuil’s goal is to solve the two great problems of search: how to index the whole Internet—not just part of it—and how to analyze and sort out its pages so you get relevant results.”

The Cuil Internet Information Philosophy:
Size matters
Popularity is useful, but not always important
Organization is fundamental
Cuil analyzes the Web, not its users

Based on the philosophy alone it looks like Cuil could be the ideal place for researchers and students to find different information that is unbiased to Google’s popularity filter. It will be interesting to learn more about how Cuil ranks websites and what it takes to get in position one.

As my first test, I used my name as a search term because I study “Anne Haynes” regularly. While the amazing 13,305,408 indexed pages using the term Anne Haynes was impressive, how was the quality on the first page. As we all know the first page means everything and capturing the end-user within seconds is essential to a successful search engine.

If you’re interested in seeing a picture here are Anne Haynes results in Cuil But let me tell you there really isn’t much there….three of the top results were from my VMIX account and 100% of those results were displaying pages that no longer exists. The images that are embedded within the results, while very cool or Cuil, they do not correspond with the pages being displayed. I find it interesting that VMIX is all over the first page for a few reasons; one I know the founders and the lead engineer [shout out to Greg, Ed and Ian], and two, I created that account last year and haven’t logged in for several months. Why is VMIX tied to Anne Haynes in Cuil’s eyes? I don’t know that’s for the geniuses over at Cuil to figure out. It will be interesting to watch this search engine, plus it will be nice having something else to play with besides Google. As a SEOer, it’s time to read about the engine and learn its likes and dislikes - in the hopes that “If” Cuil is the next NUMBER 1 search engine, I’ll have an advantage and so will my clients.

Check out Cuil.com.

by: Anne Haynes

Today on FriendFeed, using my trusty iGoogle set-up, I noticed a link from Matt Cutts about Knol. So, I clicked on the link and poof I was in the new knol world. Knol can be thought of like About.com meets the Wiki. But it also has a global blogging feel to it as well. Many of the successful blogs out there are built with multiple authors and contributors and knol makes this happen very quickly. Following is my review of knol and my initial thoughts on the usability. Understand that my review could contain user errors, so if you find something incorrect please send me a message and I’ll fix this post. I’m sorry you can’t comment right now, I’m dealing with updating my WordPress and it’s not on the top of my priorities right now.

So when I arrived at knol I screwed up immediately because it wasn’t clear where I should be writing my content. It took me a few times to realize that the beginning content field was for a summary of the article and not the article.

Once I figure this out I was cruzin. The editor is sensitive to MS word documents and prefers article written in a txt editor - duh. I “published” my article and then searched on my name and the keyword “SEO” and there were no results, so there is a lag from writing the article to seeing the article in the knol search results. I few hours later I found my knol article in the search results and I feel pretty special to be right next to Danny! Please note, I’m logged into my iGoogle account so the search results vary. Continue reading and see the new results after knol was update.

I then took it one step further to verifying my name. Well this feature is tied to a phone directory database, so if you are like me and only have one number (private) this feature won’t work. The other way to verify is by credit card and ATMs won’t work, so if you’re only source for paying for things is using your ATM, this won’t work either.

Then there was the cool AdSense feature that gives me control over who’s AdSense is where and of course I want my AdSense. This could get tricky with the co-author model.

All-in-all knol is a cool product and with it’s recent launch there are some bugs

Update: Same Day -Different Time

I just received an email from and anonymous knol user that is reviewing my article. The only people I invited are in my gmail account. I’m no longer in the search results. I love “the” Google!

So I just tried to login to my knol account and I got this cool update:

So in the previous search results my article was published and now it’s gone and only Danny Boys is left:

SEO Overview by Anne haynes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at knol.google.com.

by: Anne Haynes

While this might not be a “totally” funny story, it’s interesting to say the least based on the look I received when I said “Twitter” in public.

So, I’m in the process of building out a big pay-per-click campaign. My client just launched a radio ad and the PPC campaign needed to be up ASAP. I called on one of my trusty industry friends to ask for help in making things happen within the time constraints and the phone calls started. Last night, when I was in line at Whole Foods, my friend called me. She was going into all these details and I was focused on placing my items on the conveyer belt and queuing behind the woman ahead of me. During this time I noticed the woman ahead of me was wearing a “Sprint” t-shirt. For those of you that don’t know Kansas, Sprint has a huge campus. If you’ve been to Cisco Systems headquarters it resembles Cisco but with a college look and feel. If you’ve ever visit Kansas for an extended period of time, you will meet someone that works at Sprint.

So, I’m in line talking back and forth on the phone about the PPC campaign and it dawns on me that – I’m not focused and for those of you that manage PPC campaigns you know how focus is tied to ROI. I quickly ask my friend, “Are you going to be on Twitter?” When I said Twitter, the Sprint woman did a drastic head move towards me. It was as if she was thinking – are you following me? Ahhhhahhhahhaa I laughed to myself.

Twitter is fun, Twitter is cool, Twitter is more interesting when in line for food!

I have 8 BrightKite invites if anyone wants one – just shoot me a message.

by: Anne Haynes

Tonight I came home, logged into my iGoogle and within my FriendFeed gadget I found a link from Jason Calacanis – clicked on the link and was sent to revision3.com - poof I was taken back in time 13 years to 1995 and my days on CU-SeeMe . In 1995 I was a San Jose State University college intern working at KSJS and being mentored by Dan Fortune; the first guy to play guitar over the internet. It was a crazy time! I was the production assistant managing the Sound Byte radio talk show that aired over the radio waves and internet bytes. Dan Fortune introduced me to CU-SeeMe and the PowerPC, so I decided to purchase a MAC and in retrospect I wish I purchased an AV model. Within weeks of my home computer purchase listeners/internet viewers were sending 14.4 modems and Connectix quick camera s to the station. Did someone say free gear? I had free electronics and these guys were helping me configure my stuff over CU-SeeMe. At this point, I knew I was one of the first women on the internet. Let’s remember this was before instant messaging – actually this was instant messaging with a video enabled option. While the 14.4 modem had resolution issues, the black and white streaming video was totally cutting edge at the time. Think about it like air brushing an image or using a filter when you take a picture. You could look like hell and still look good on CU-SeeMe. Following is the Cornell University photo for CU-SeeMe - this University created the technology and later sold it to WhitePine Software.

When I arrived at revision3.com and tried to get into the chatroom I received a message, “Room Is Full - Try Joining This Room Later” Ya – thanks for the message, but someone please fix this issue! There is nothing more frustrating for an internet user than to NOT get into the chatroom! It brought me back to 1995 when I had to keep clicking the ENTER button to get into the BikerBar on CU-SeeMe. When everything is said and done – I bounced when I saw revision3.com’s message and in 1995 I became a determined user on CU-SeeMe.

If you want to leave a comment, send me an email – I’m overloaded with blog spam and updating my own database and site – it takes time. Email me now!

This morning a message from Twitter came through my FriendsFeed and I read, “Amazon.com Is DOWN”. I didn’t give it a second thought because systems go down and come back up within seconds. Well, I’m still reading about Amazon being down and at 2:41PM Central. So I visited Amazon and yes it’s still down.

When I worked at Kintera (recently purchased by Blackbaud) and the system would go down accidentally the business side of the house would joke about going home; “Sphere’s down”, “someone unplugged the internet”. But then there were times when internal teams were alerted of a scheduled maintenance and it was routine not to notify the customer. While most of the times the clients wouldn’t even notice, when they did project managers would back peddle and make up excuse after excuse. So, with Amazon being down it’s hard to say what’s really happening; accident or scheduled maintenance. When Sphere would die and all our clients became unable to access the back-end - the Error Page was always the last thing to edit or fix. One time there was a typo. Typos and misspellings are always a good way to showcase the brains behind a system when the sites go down. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not much of a speller, but I’m not a software company either….

Update: I just published this post and refreshed my Amazon.com browser and poof it’s back 2:56PM Central.

Ok - so this is how it goes. I have gadgets all over my iGoogle and during my gadget twitter or digg experiences I ran across FriendFeed. I found the Google gadget and added it to my dashboard. I just watched FriendFeed for a few days then I started adding Favorites to my YouTube and Twittering and I noticed that all my stuff was showing up there…hence the “feed” in the name. I’m not a Super User - infact I’m a good tester because features that engineers and spec writers think are common sense, are not to me. Tonight I started looking closer at FriendFeed. I asked myself, “Yo Anne, why are there gray texts and black texts and the gray texts are indented? Honestly, if you knew me - you’d think I knew better, but really I’m overwhelmed with the internet - so sometimes I’m passive and tonight I took some time. FriendFeed is now my bestfriend! With Friendfeed it’s like being in a room with people in their lives and with twitter it’s like shouting from across a room. And here is the best of the best:

I decided to participate in the discussion tonight. I threw out a couple of comments and then added additional comments on inviting people to DropBox. A person named Defcon asked for an invite and within seconds, I had music sent to me from last.fm and digg shouts - it was awesome! It’s amazing what draws people to people! It’s about ideas, logic, feelings and just words. It’s official, twitter is lower on my iGoogle and FriendFeed is uptop and centered.

Need an invite to DropBox? Send me a message-6 more DropBox beta invites left.

Finally, a tool that integrates email, IM and soon social media sites. Orgoo allows you to access your email and IM without downloading any software. If you use GMail for Email and Yahoo! Messenger for instant messaging, then Orgoo is the tool for you. Check out the video below to learn more about Orgoo’s technology and features.

My most recent invite to DropBox was to Nathan Bollinger. He sent me an email stating, “Thank you so much! I have been looking for this for a few days now!” Nate, your welcome enjoy the next technology that will eliminate flash drive storage devices. Remember if you need a Beta DropBox Invite send me a message.

I have 8 more invites to DropBox Beta. send me your name and email for an invitation.