SEO Blog

I am a tried and true PC user. I’ve been using PC so long I can remember the wonders of experiencing the first Apple graphic user interface on an old AppleII in my English teacher’s office. Getting an old goat like me to convert to Apple (even though I understand several of the advantages) would take something just short of a miracle.

I am an iPod user. Getting that conversion was easy. By presenting me with a card-thin player capable of reproducing near-perfect sound, Apple easily won my business.

Earlier today, Steve Jobs might have sold me on an Apple laptop. Using the same razor-thin engineering that makes the iPod an easy choice, Apple has unveiled the lightst, thinest notebook on the market, the Apple Air.

Weighing in at only three pounds, the Apple Air might take some of the sting out of my shoulders when traveling to and around conferences. At any rate, the product is a feat of engineering and takes the idea of mobile computing to another level.

Believe it or not, Wikipedia is seven years old today. Highly fallible, extremely malleable and recently much maligned, the original version of the world’s first user-written encyclopedia was put online by founders Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on January 15, 2001. It has been an interesting seven years but the last eighteen months have been a challenging time as the experiment in people power grows into maturity.

Since its inception, the people-powered reference tool has grown rapidly with over 9 million entries recorded by December 2007. That popularity has generated extraordinary link-popularity which has propelled many Wikipedia entries to the top of search engine rankings for related keyword queries.

The concept of people informing people for the simple sake of sharing knowledge is one of the underlying philosophies of the Web. Wikipedia’s greatest accomplishment came from tapping the well of scholarly goodwill among a huge number of Web users and creating a truly useful resource from it. Unfortunately, Wikipedia’s greatest strength, its trust in the wisdom of the crowds, is also the key to its greatest weakness, abuse by some of the trusted.

*Okay, no longer ‘currently’ but still worth the post.

So while attempting to locate a particular song which I carry only remnants of a chorus in my mind, I noticed that YouTube wasn’t being very helpful this morning. At 7:22am PST I was struck with a bout of YouTubeLessNess !! I assumed that it was just my local net access but after running the Head Request Viewer at the SEO Tools section I was reaffirmed that no, it wasn’t my connection, the video sharing behemoth and left hand to Google was in fact ‘unavailable’. I’m sure the blogoshpere will be going ape about this today. Check out these snaps.

So just a quickie this morning hoping to pull an early post on this particular item. Have a fantastic Day. Perhaps global productivity will suddenly surge due to the lack of YouTube. Cheers!

-J