Cre8tive Flow

Considering the reputation of the sometimes outspoken, delightfully raucous one minute and seriously brilliant and remarkably stable minded the next, practitioners from the Search Engine Marketing industry, it should come as no surprise that they have an SEO Related Lyric Contest going on.

Dreamed up by Canadian based Search Engine People, the rules are simple. You pick a song and change the words to something “search related”. People vote on it. If you’re a song writing lyric genius, you stand to win $1000.

We think it’s open to everybody. We certainly hope so, as the Cre8asiteforum moderators have been singing their fool heads off in the forums “Back Room”.

We watched and read all week about the reaction by Digg membership to a decision made by its owner. As an Internet community, Cre8asiteforums can relate to the situation on many levels.

Moderator, Chris Winfield, a strong support of Social Media, and Digg member himself, opened up discussion with What Are Your Thoughts On The Digg Hd DVD Scandal? Some of the comments are thoughtful and important, as we discuss, try to understand and learn from this.

I think Digg just shot themselves in the foot. They “hear” a vocal part of their community that wants to toss a part of the Digg TOS, and then they cave. What’s next? Porn as free speech? Hate as free speech?

RSS has ruined my life. It really has. Everyday, right in my inbox, I get a stream of stuff begging to be read (I use Opera’s excellent built in RSS reader and mail client, which integrates email and RSS).

What originally started as a good way to keep up to date without having to go look nowhere has turned into 300+ posts a day clogging my inbox. Going through all the feeds now takes up so much of my time that it is almost worse than spam. If, heaven forbid, I take a day (or week) off, clearing the backlog becomes virtual torture, as I am forced to sift through yet another post about Yahoo’s new NOYDIR robots directive metatag.

A new topic has been introduced in our Search Engines and Optimization forum today. You can now find and begin discussions on Social Media and Tagging.

We are in the process of bringing on board three new Moderators. One will be announced on Wednesday, February 28. Another one, hopefully tomorrow, Tuesday February 27.

Today, we welcome new Moderator, Liana Evans. She is assigned to join a new team of Moderators who will host the new Social Media forum. Liana is well known for her SearchMarketingGurus blog and “Hatbait” contest during the Chicago Search Engine Strategies conference. She is a presenter for SES as well.

Google Labs Accessible Search is open to the public. A few days ago T.V. Raman, research scientist in charge, announced the beta debut with a post in Google’s official blog. Have you taken a peek yet?

In its current version, Google Accessible Search looks at a number of signals by examining the HTML markup found on a web page. It tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully–that is, pages with few visual distractions, and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off. Google Accessible Search is built on Google Co-op’s technology, which improves search results based on specialized interests.

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association topped yesterday’s newsletter with a plea for readers to go to Wikipedia.

Help save “word of mouth marketing” at Wikipedia. A proposal has been made to close the Wikipedia entry for “word of mouth marketing” and subsume it into the larger entry for “viral marketing”. Viral is a marketing technique of word of mouth equally valid with others such as buzz, grassroots, evangelism, and more.

Read the discussion on Wikipedia. I enjoyed Srini’s observation that WOM is a voluntary result of satisfaction, whereas viral marketing connotes less of a choice.

Among small online businesses, B2B ecommerce is becoming as common as email. A Jupiter Research study released today revealed that 79 percent of small ebusinesses regularly use the Internet to shop for business-related needs. Here’s what I take from those numbers.

Relationships count. When asked for three factors that influence their online purchases, 62% chose familiarity with vendor. 39% gave the opinions of friends and colleagues a major role. Only 21% said emails and coupons were influential. Makes sense to me. A coupon from an unknown does not impress yours truly. A sales-pitch email from an unknown is likely to be deleted. However, a coupon from a desired and trusted source might even get me to cough up my email address. The reverse is not true.

On Wednesday, SEOmoz’s Web 2.0 Awards was spotted at number nine on Alexa’s movers and shakers list, briefly trumping such sites as Wikipedia and Microsoft.com.

I can’t let this go by without a happy rave. Registered mid February, launched mid March and securely into Alexa by April, web2.0Awards.org is sleek, deep, beautiful, usable, interesting and a masterful piece of savvy networking.

Choosing the domain 0awards.org was a strike of creative (fun) genius. The SEOmoz gang already has the domain for web3.0awards and more.

Join our congrats to Rand, Kat, Matt and everyone at SEOmoz.