I received my brightkite t-shirt today from Zazzle.com. I took a picture - because a picture speaks a thousand words!

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The process of buying my shirt is interesting, so here it goes:

BigGuy: Brad and littleguy: Brad from bigguylittleguy.com (bigguy: @boffman and littleguy: @belpers) took a road trip to Brightkite in Colorado and they shared their trip on Brightkite. The first thing I noticed was the picture that was taken outside the Brightkite headquarters. There was Brad and Brad smiling for the camera with their thumbs up! Then came the Brightkite stickers! Oh man once I saw the stickers I had to have one. But wouldn’t a t-shirt be better? I posted a comment asking about a t-shirt. In minutes @brady (one of the founders of Brightkite) sent a message pointing me to Zazzle.com to buy a Brightkite t-shirt. I was done with my purchase in 2 minutes and my shirt arrived within a few days!

I spoke on the phone with littleguy tonight and he told me that Brightkite is about to open up the flood gates for everyone to join Brightkite. So, no need to ask me for an invite any more, everyone will have free access.

I’m looking forward to Brightkite opening up an advertising network because the already localized service it’s perfect for targeting specific geo markets. A little birdy and not twitter, also mentioned a video feature coming soon! I’m so excited and to think, just last week, I was talking about a Brightkite video feature being a natural extension of the already stellar service. Looks like I’m going to need to buck-up for additional memory on my cell phone now!

Think globally and act locally with Brightkite!

Too many times I’ve seen SEO firms that use underscores or hyphens when constructing websites. So I sent a question to my Twitter network and following is what I received. It seems that us SEOers are all over the map on what works and what doesn’t. When I worked at SEOINC in San Diego, CA I was raised to use hyphens and not underscores. During the early SEO years the hyphen was considered a word separator when programming websites for Google.

In that last few years I’ve noticed the underscore has made a come back. My hat is off to @adamlevenson for finding this pretty SEO article from Matt Cutts on July 23rd 2007, but notice Twitter friend SEM_SEO states if you have underscores don’t go changing (heehee his name has an underscore).

In the CNET article Matt Cutts states that Google’s algorithm is referencing underscores as word separators. Which from a development perspective is developer friendly. I like that Matt Cutts is one of the experts in the SEO industry, but I know there are deep seeded constraints for an internal employee of Google to declare anything from a broadcast level. From a non biased SEOer perspective, it’s about testing and documenting results.

I’d like to see a study on this subject since Matt announced this algorithm enhancement in 2007. It’s been a year since his declaration and well, there have been multiple updates since this announcement. Any takers? Aaron Wall where are you?

Many thanks to the following friends that have helped me navigate through my question!

sem_seo: @AnneHaynes In the last Google webmaster chat they suggested if you have existing underscores don’t change, but going forward use hyphens. (about 6 hours ago)

kevinthompson: @AnneHaynes That used to be the case, but it seems most search engines now interpret both as spaces. I still use hyphens just to be safe. (about 9 hours ago)

adamlevenson: @AnneHaynes Yeah, check this out: News.CNET from AdamLevenson (about 9 hours ago)

gregspradlin: @AnneHaynes Hi Anne, I’ve been told that if given the choice, go with hypens over underscores. (about 9 hours ago)

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.

After a several hours of tooling around with Knol I finally sent an email to the Google Knol team asking several questions see the Knol questions in this blog post.

Following is the email reply that I recieved from the support team:

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Knol Help
Subject: Re: [#311279072] Please Help - Anne Haynes
To: Anne Haynes Home

Hello Anne,

Thank you for your reply and continued interest in Knol. Please note that
what you’ve described is expected behavior for recently published knols.

While you can share the URL to your knol directly with friends, there will
be a delay before your knol is reflected in search results. Please note
that your knols will still be visible to you, the author, before they are
made publicly searchable.

Additionally, we have noted that for some folks one or more of the methods
of name verification are not immediately working properly. We appreciate
the feedback you’ve provided as we improve this functionality. For
questions about name verification, please take a look a this help knol for
further details:
http://knol.google.com/k/knol-help/name-verification-faq/3vd571esbn0f5/1#H0-I-ve-tried-and-it-does-not-work

Thank you for your understanding and support of Knol.

The Knol Team

I’ve been watching the O Games and I love the commercials. So many people want to fast forward with the DVR, but I just love to see how music and commercials make a difference in more ways than one. If you think about YouTube and how quick videos do so well, then you have a commercial already. On 08-08-2008, at the time of this blog post, this video had 7,080 YouTube views.

Add Anne Haynes - I Love You 2

Follow Anne Haynes on Twitter
Subscribe to Anne Haynes on FriendFeed
Anne Haynes on BrightKite.com
Anne Haynes on MyBlogLog
Anne Haynes on Digg
Anne Haynes on Delicious
Anne Haynes on Flickr
Anne Haynes on Last.fm
Anne Haynes on Linkedin
Anne Haynes on YouTube
Anne Haynes on Facebook
Amazon Wishlist for Anne Haynes
Anne Haynes on Stumble Upon
Gardenging With Anne Haynes
Doggie University by Anne Haynes

I just spent the morning on LisaNova’s YouTube and she is one funny girl! On Fridays I’ve been making a habit of finding the funny stuff on the internet. I was watching my FriendFeed and this video showed up on TechCrunch “The Rise and Fall of Twitter”. Enjoy, a good Friday Laugh!

Join Anne Haynes on the Web

Follow Anne Haynes on Twitter
Subscribe to Anne Haynes on FriendFeed
Anne Haynes on BrightKite.com

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.

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.

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.