The Internet is Back!!! We're going to party like it's 1999!

A group of friends and industry insiders have been watching internet conference parties for the last few years waiting for the return of 'the good old days' of pre dot-bomb 1999.

We can officially declare the internet is back after attending the ultra-cool Pure Imagination Party at Tryst Nightclub in the Wynn Resort .

The internet is back when the booze and food are free and there are competing parties on the same night!

Beautiful shooter girls and bartenders were pouring free drinks and delicious appetizers were plentiful. Las Vegas showgirls roamed the room and the Wynn also provided a scrumptuous sundae bar.

A big thank you!! to the evening's sponsors
One Network Direct an affiliate network focused on digital products and software and The Wynn Las Vegas Affiliate Program and the amazing organizers of The Affiliate Summit Missy Ward and Shawn Collins from Shawn Collins Consulting .

We look forward to seeing you all at Affiliate Summit East 2007 in Miami in July '07, I'm sure South Beach will be alive with Affilaite parties!

Affiliate Summit Brief Recap

As many of you have been reading the blog over the last couple days know Affiliate Summit just finished up. It was quite an eventful couple days filled with some exceptional speakers as well as those that were not so impressive. I thought one of the more interesting presentations was by Andy Rodriguez of Andy Rodriguez consulting and his presentation on Developing the Right Merchant Mindset. Andy provided some great tips on dealing with Affiliates and how their needs and wants are different from Merchants.

Also during the conference got a chance to meet a lot of interesting people who hopefully we will be able to keep in contact with and work with each other down the road. Going through my notes and numerous business cards some are a blur (it doesnt help that I was at the great affiliate party at Tryst and then out in Vegas afterwards or the fact I just got into the office after flying on the Redeye back to Ft. Lauderdale, but one gentleman definitely stands out, Tony Moskowitz of Yourticketcontact.com now if you could ony get a fellow Chicagoan a great deal on some tickets for the Super Bowl in 2 weeks that would be greatly appreciated.

We will have a much more complete wrapup on Affiliate Summit in the coming hours and days, but first off need to touch base with some more contacts from Affiliate Summit and then on some much needed rest.

Changes in Internet Marketing

I came across 9 Years of Internet Marketing and Everything Continues to Change, and found myself getting a little nostalgic. I've been an internet marketing specialist for five years and in that short time, I've seen the emergence of Google AdWords. I witnessed the end of Inktomi and paid placement's rebirth by Yahoo. I watched Google go from being the new kid on the block to being main search engine that every SEO is courting.

"Today there are 3 main players in the search engine world, content is king and offsite factors are a greater influence in your online success."

I couldn't have paraphrased the current state of SEO better myself. It's great to see businesses moving away from traffic generation and looking more conversation and online branding. More than ever, it's important to understand your customer, creating internet marketing campaigns towards the keyword phrases/buzz words that your customers are looking for, and write your pages with the language that appeals to the different personas that make up your customer base.

We have come to a point where site users play a growing role of the success of your web site. So companies looking for long term success need to make sure that the message, delivery and execution of services are always at the highest levels.

In my opinion, this is an exciting time for internet marketing. In order to survive marketers will need explore permission marketing, turning off the annoying spyware and approach their customers with a relevant message. Long live relevancy!

Free Diabetes Supplies Program Featured at Affiliate Summit

Lorne from
American Diabetes.com Free Diabetic Supplies introduces the Affiliate Lead Program and $100 bonus in the Ten Golden Rules of Internet Marketing booth at Affiliate Summit .

Sign up today at Diabetes Affiliate Program

A Pirates life for me - Sexy Pirate Costume

Our model for
Annie's Costumes Affilaite Program shows off the sexy pirate costume at Affiliate Summit West at Bally's Hotel in las Vegas.

The Annie's Costumes sites include www.ExtremeHalloween.com and www.SantaSuits.com .

2007 NSSTA Conference Explores the Trends of Internet Marketing with Ten Golden Rules

2007 NSSTA Regional Conference Explores the Trends of Internet Marketing

Kathryn Katz, Search Engine Marketing Manager of TenGoldenRules.com, will present “The Ten Golden Rules of Internet Marketing” at the National Structured Settlements Trade Association (NSSTA) Regional Meeting & Conference on Thursday, January 27, 2007 at The El Dorado Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

This dynamic presentation will explore the trends of internet marketing in today's media landscape and outline the Ten Golden Rules for Successful Strategy on the Internet. During the internet marketing presentation, structured settlement professionals will learn about brand new web marketing solutions that they can apply to their internet marketing campaigns. At the end of the presentation, there will be a Q&A session, allowing NSSTA members to ask questions about the web marketing solutions introduced. A version of "The Ten Golden Rules of Internet Marketing" is available for free at TenGoldenRules.com.

Kathryn Katz is a seasoned SEM specialist more than five years experience in search engine marketing and more than 10 years experience in web copywriting. She has worked on Internet marketing campaigns for several companies, including: BankAtlantic, 1-800-PetMeds, NBC’s The Biggest Loser Club, and Sandow Media, publishers of NewBeauty magazine.

Ms. Katz is a volunteer editor at DMOZ Open Directory Project, and a contributing writer for Wikipedia. She has been published in the field of search engine optimization by High Rankings newsletter.

How many CEO MBA's does it take to screw in a wing nut?

Ten Golden Rules is at Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas. Here is a photo of CEO Jay Berkowitz and Franca setting up an easel for our booth. If you're in Vegas for the show please come by booth 325 and say Hi!

Washroom Advertising Gross or Genius?

I attended an NHL game at the BankAmerica Center http://www.BankAtlantic.com and noticed some intriguing advertising.

The first ad was for a South Florida Sinus and Allergy Center
http://www.sfac.com and it was stuck on the mirror. This seemed like a somewhat strange location for the ad, do you suffer allergies in a cold hygenic arena? I'm not sure but it seemd odd to us.







The next ad we saw was in the urinal.

This one was quite relevant, if the same customer saw this ad 4 or 5 times in the game they might want to call the doctors at South Florida Urology http://www.southfloridaurologyconsultants.com

Here is our question?

Has advertising gone too far?

Do you think this is ingenious advertising, or have we invaded a private space?

Please share your comments!

Blogs for and about Women

Here are some really cool blogs about women and marketing to women, our fav is the
Diva Marketing Blog by the amazing Toby Bloomberg

Marketing to Women: http://www.michelemiller.blogs.com/marketing_to_women
Marketing to Women Online: http://marketingtowomenonline.typepad.com/blog
Learned on Women: http://learned.typepad.com/learned_on_women

And here are some blogs targeting beauty and cosmetics, we particlarly love the stunning new blog from New Beauty Magazine http://www.DailyBeauty.com and super cool designer Jerry Mica.

Product Girl http://www.product-girl.com
Lip Gloss and Laptops http://www.lipglossandlaptops.com
Koneko's Mostly Beauty Diary http://beautydiary.blogspot.com
The Beauty Newsletter http://beautynews.blogspot.com
I Am Pretty NYC http://www.iamprettynyc.com/blog/index.php
Damn I'm Cute http://www.damnimcute.com
Beauty Addict http://beautyaddict.blogspot.com
Jack & Hill: A Beauty Blog http://jackandhill.typepad.com

And who could not click on the incomparably named:
Lipstick is My Crack http://lipstickismycrack.blogspot.com

Marketing to Women Presentation

Yesterday at the Florida Direct Marketing Association (FDMA) event “Marketing to Women: Reeling in Your Most Discerning & Influential Customers,” I had the opportunity to hear two great speakers, Heidi Richards, Founder & CEO of WECAI (Women’s Ecommerce Association International) and Megan Connolly of Medelia Communications, a south Florida agency specializing in marketing to women, present on the ins and outs of marketing to women.

Here is a list of the top ten things to keep in mind when marketing to women:

1. One size does not fit all – Women are different than men and different from other women.
2. Be aware - Know what women want to deliver the best marketing message, know her priorities, preferences, and communication style.
3. The marketing message should meet the sales experience – If you’re advertising that your company is “in tune” with women, then your sales force or customer service team needs to be trained on how to interact with women.
4. Give her something to talk about – When women are pleased with your products or services they talk about them to others and provide your company with the best viral marketing – word of mouth.
5. Build a relationship through trust and nurture that relationship – Women are relationship people, be authentic, be committed, and follow up.
6. Details matter to women – Women generally want to know everything about a product or service before they buy it - not only how it works and what it costs, but also what kind of support can be expected and how long it will last.
7. Provide Simple Solutions & Convenience.
8. Enlist women as marketing partners – Women know women, make them part of your marketing team.
9. Support a cause - Find something that you or your company is passionate about or survey your clients to find out what they are passionate about.
10. And lastly LISTEN! – Women know what they want and are very willing to tell you, survey your clients to find solutions to fit their needs.
    
    For information on FDMA or future events please visit FDMA.org.

SEMPO's 2006 State of the Market Survey

It's that time of year folks! Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) is conducting it's 3rd annual State of the Market Survey. Devoted completely to Paid and Natural Search Engine Marketing, this survey asks SEM professionals about their experiences in search engine marketing for 2006.

Why should you take this search engine marketing survey?

First, SEMPO is a great organization, which devotes a lot of time and research to develop resources for search engine marketing professionals. This year's survey will influence where this organization puts their research efforts. Secondly, as a participant, you'll get the first copy of the survey results sent to you before it's released to SEMPO members. Lastly, SEMPO is offering to send one marketer to Search Engine Strategies (SES) for free!

Just make sure you give yourself a good half hour to answer the search engine marketing survey because there's a lot of questions for you to answer. Hint: One of the hot topics on this year's survey is whether or not an organization like SEMPO should be enforcing best practices to SEM professionals. If you have an opinion about that, make sure you fill out the survey.

Affiliate 2.0 – Discover the Ten Websites Defining the New Internet

Ten Golden Rules CEO Jay Berkowitz has been invited to present at the 2007 Affiliate Summit West on January 23, 2007, at 3:30 pm at Bally's Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. He will present an interactive marketing presentation titled "Affiliate 2.0 – Discover the Ten Websites Defining the New Internet"

Consumers are blogging, posting, digging and searching at unprecedented rates. You Tube was purchased by Google for $1.65 Billion. MySpace.com sold for $580 million. The next wave of an internet explosion is upon us. What does it mean for affiliates? What can we learn from these exciting new trends, and how can we apply these strategies for our business?

* Discover the ten websites defining the new internet
* Blogging. Podcasting. Wiki’s. What new technologies are important to affiliates?
* What innovations are driving Web 2.0 success, how can you integrate these strategies for business?
* Where are affiliates hanging out, which Web 2.0 websites are important to them.
* Who is dominating search engine marketing and how can you position your website to take advantage of this opportunity?
* What is Web 3.5 an amazing three dimensional world about to revolutionize the internet?

Previous Attendee Testimonials:

“Very simply ---- GREAT job. I was overwhelmed at how much I learned.”
Keith Fletcher, President, MarketScan USA

" I've never seen so many people approach a single speaker. Jay had everyone in a room of over 150 people completely engaged."
Barbara Zucker, CEO, Golden Direct

Missing Pages on Live/MSN

At the South Florida Interactive Marketing Association (SFIMA) event “Friends Don't Let Friends Waste Search Engine Advertising,” I had an opportunity to speak to Martin Gilliard from MSN about a recent concern that's been talked about on the SEO boards. Since MSN implemented their new search engine, Live.com, many website owners are noticing that pages that were previously in MSN.com's old search tool are now missing, and more importantly so is traffic that came with them.

Martin admitted that during the transition, it's possible that some of the pages that were previously indexed may have gotten lost in the switch over. So let out that breath you've been holding and shelve the MSN conspiracy theories. According to our friendly neighborhood MSN representative, the missing pages were not dropped on purpose.

So how do you fix this problem and get your MSN/Live traffic back?

Go to MarketLeap's Search Engine Saturation tool and see how many pages are currently indexed in the search engines, specifically MSN. Then click on the trending report and see if there have been a dramatic change in the last few months in the number of pages indexed in MSN.

If everything is the same, relax, you missed the bullet and can stop reading this post. If the number has dropped dramatically, then you need to do a few simple tasks to get into Live.com's new index. First, create a XML sitemap of your existing site. If you don't know how, check out the easy-to-read instructions at Sitemaps.org. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft all support the protocol detailed on this site so you'll be helping not only your chances to get indexed by Live.com but also Google and Yahoo.

Then submit your site to Live.com. It might take a little bit for Live's spiders to come back and crawl your site, so don't panic if you don't immediately see all your pages back in Live.com.

If you need assistance setting up sitemaps for your site or need additional search engine optimization advice on MSN/Live, please contact Ten Golden Rules at 561-620-9121 or blog at tengoldenrules.com.

Top Ten Answers From the Google, MSN, Yahoo and ASK Search Engine Marketing Panel - Part 1

I hosted a panel on Search Engine Marketing in Ft. Lauderdale, below are the top ten answers* to questions from the audience and your humble host.

* small disclaimer, I was busy moderating so my note taking was limited :) most answers are paraphrased.

A big thank you to Brett Goffin from Google, Brett Wein of Yahoo, Martin Gilliard, representing MSN and ASK's Michael Wesner. Your Answers were candid and concise, the audience of 169 attendees was very appreciative of your participation!

Kudo's to Mark Evans SFIMA Pesident, and new Director of Sales, Southeast Region for www.SpecificMedia.com for record attendance for a SFIMA educational event (events co-promoted with www.FDMA.org and www.AMASouthFlorida.org featuring Jerry Shereshewsky from Yahoo and Jeff Eisenberg from Future Now drew larger crowds) and the phenomenal programming superstar Michele Piernick of www.SpiritAir.com (check out their 1 cent sales and let me know how they do it!?)

1. How does your company differentiate your search engine from other search engines?
MSN - We offer the ablity to target based on demographics such as gender and age
Yahoo! - We are providing more results based on Social Search and Communities such as Flickr, Deli.cio.us, and MyWeb.
ASK - We dropped the butler in March of last year and we have developed tools such as smart answer, Mapping functions with a virtual test drive and binoculars with the ability to preview a site before you click
Google - We are focused on the end user and relevance of searches

2. How important do you think natural search is versus pay per click?
Yahoo! - I think most of us would agree you need to do both natural and paid search to try to capture as much search 'real estate' as possible for important searches.
MSN - Both are important, while natural results are 'free' the don't come without an investment of time or money or both
Google - Natural Search is like PR. You have a bit of control of the results you'll get and any 'press' is good press. You have a lot more control over paid results more like paid offline advertising. The most important opportunity is to learn from each other to improve efficiency. Analyze the keywords that are working on paid search and develop content for your website, identify terms people are searching for and improve your paid keyword selection.
ASK - Natural Search levels the playing field

3. What one piece of advice would you give to someone who is just starting to use PPC advertising?
Yahoo! - Retail has the three L's Location, Location, Location, search has the three T's Test, Test and Test. Do lots of testing to tweak campaigns, massage results and continue to optimize.
ASK - And add one 'T', Track. Track and measure your results.
MSN - Build a strong list of high quality keywords
Google - Make sure you have very well defined objectives. Do you want more visits, sales, sign ups? And,how much can you afford to pay for each. All of the search engines have free tools to help you track your results.

4. What do you suggest for someone looking to improve their natural search rankings?
Google - There are two pillars to success in natural search. 1. Build excellent content with high relevancy to the query. 2. Our Page Rank tool represents 'democracy of the web' evaluation how important your site is based on links from important sites in your category.
Most important, don't fall for a search engine company that guarantees page one results. Be very, very wary.
Yahoo! - All of the major search engines have developed a site with great tools at Sitemaps.org
ASK - Work with a strong Search Engine Company, keep your site code clean and build links from your community
MSN - You need a strong link building strategy and great content. If you are ever unsatisfied with a search on MSN or Live.com, please click on the link at the bottom and let our engineers know why so we can improve it!

Jay Berkowitz

Top Ten Answers From the Google, MSN, Yahoo and ASK Search Engine Marketing Panel - Part 2

5. What leading strategies and tactics can you recommend for someone with a little more experience?
Google - Spend the time to develop your content search performance. The web is 10% search and 90% websites, be patient, test and find sites that perform for you
MSN - Determine how different types fo people search. Men and women use different terms to search for the same things
ASK - Understand portfolio management, when people start a search buying cycle they are searching broad terms such as ' Flat screen tv' at the end of the search they are looking for a Sharp Aquos LCD 42" Wall Mount best price. Thei si now being called th esearch tail (a refernce to Long Tail popularized by Chris Anderson's excellent book http://www.thelongtail.com/)
Yahoo! - Local Search and geotargetting is being under-utilized.

6. What are the major growth areas for search? Such as mobile/video/local/Second Life?
Google - I want to differentiate between user applications such as the ability to text message Google(restaurant name) and you will receive directions to the restaurant vs. a property we aquired called YouTube, it is a quality application we need to determine how to generate revenue without playing a 30 second add before the video, users won't stand for that. We need to rationalize efficieny for users vs. efficiency for advertisers.

7. What changes and annoucements can we expect from your engine in the coming weeks, months?
Google - We are focused on marketer efficiency we purchased Dmark allowing advertisers to bid for radio ads and we are running print tests (I sense we can expect another announement in this direction)
Yahoo! - At the CES show we announced that we would provide email for iPhone (and Google will provide mapping for iPhone), we are rolling out Panama
MSN - 2007 is a year of ramping up, we just launched in 2006
ASK - In December we annuunced ASk City, following Ask Mobile in October

8. What is your company doing about click fraud & what can marketers do to help monitor click fraud ourselves?
Google - All of the major search engines joined with IAB to form a click fraud panel. Collectively and individually we are doing everything we can to block click fraud.
ASk - We don't charge for foreign clicks
Yahoo! - We scraped out sites that are bidding on expensive phrases and showing a basic sirte redirecting clicks. We scraped these sites off the network

9. What advice can you give us for improving results after some one comes to the site (also clled 'post click' marketing).
Google - We launched a new product Website Optimizer that goes beyond A:B testing and lets you test different versions of sections of the landing page. And, Google Checkout is making it easier and faster for consumers to make a purchase and merchants like it because it is free until the end of the year.

10. What suggestions can you give us for ad copy.
Google - Make sure you have minimum 2-3 text ads in test.
ASK - If you are the 'Official Site' say this in the ad copy. Make sure the ad copy is concise
MSN - Use dyanamic keyword insertion and inset city names

Bonus - for reading to the end of this post, if you call me at 561-620-9121 I will share an ad copy trick that is increasing click through rates in 9 of 10 categories.

Thanks for reading!

Jay Berkowitz

Internet Marketing Presentation with Google, Yahoo!, ASK and MSN

If you haven't made your reservation for the SFIMA Internet Marketing Presentation this Thursday, what are you waiting for? Over 150 internet marketing types will be in attendance for a panel on search engine marketing, what a great networking schmoozefest!

Our CEO Jay Berkowitz has been asked to moderate the panel featuring Brett Goffin the National Vertical Markets Manager, Google, Brett Wein, Yahoo's Regional Sales Manager responsible for Search Marketing at Yahoo!, Martin Gilliard, the Lead Search Media Strategist from the Digital Advertising Solutions Group at Microsoft and from ASK.com Michael P. Wesner the Director of Eastern Sales.

For more information and to register, please go to, SFIMA Internet Marketing Presentation

The whole Ten Golden Rules team will be there, please come up and say Hi!

PS - Thanks to David Berkowitz (no relation, but a real sharp Internet Marketer) from the Inside the Marketers Studio Blog and Roger Parker author of over 32 books and the Design to Sell Blog for promoting this event!

How to Measure SEO Success

It's the start of a New Year and like most of us, senior marketing and advertising executives are looking over the past year's search engine marketing efforts, trying to figure out what worked and what didn't. Now PPC (pay-per-click) is a little bit easier to measure. If you've implemented any type of conversion tracking, you can see not only the impressions and clicks/visitors that came to your site but also the cost per conversion and additional revenue streams your advertising dollars brought you.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a little bit harder to measure; however, don't let that discourage you from trying, it can be done. "SEO's success metrics...are actually quite cut-and-dry." explains Todd Friesen at OMMA (Magazine of Online Media, Marketing and Advertising) in his article, How to Measure SEO Success. He recommends comparing data year-over-year because it averages out the effects of seasonality and takes into account that SEO campaigns progress in phases.

When it comes to revenue-producing SEO (as oppose to brand building SEO), Todd recommends using these five key metrics to define the success of an SEO campaign: rankings, traffic, revenue, return on investment (ROI), and exposure. Rankings covers where your site is placing in the search engines for words that are important to your business. Traffic measures the number of visitors coming to your site through these rankings. Revenue is the amount of money you've made from the utilization of SEO. Return on investment (ROI) measure your net profit after you remove the costs in implementing the SEO campaign. Exposure is the overall effect the SEO campaign has on your ability to reach your type of customers on the internet.

What kind of success can you expect from your SEO campaign?

Using the metric of rankings, over a year's time, Ten Golden Rules was able to increase a yacht broker's Top 10 rankings by more than 515%. Another client, a Chicago personal injury attorney, had their Top 10 search engine rankings by more than 260%. All these different SEO metrics are interconnected with each other. By increasing rankings, Ten Golden Rules was also able to increase traffic, revenue, and exposure at a reasonable ROI for these clients.

While we'd love to brag some more about our clients' SEO successes, due to client confidentiality, we can't post that information on the internet. However if you're interested in hearing more about implementing a successful SEO campaign and how to measure those results, please contact Ten Golden Rules at 561-620-9121 or email seosuccess@tengoldenrules.com.

A rare taste of AMAZING Customer Service!

Unfortunately it is very rare to get great customer service. When is the last time you actually felt like you were treated with respect by a company?

I had a very pleasurable experience this week in the last place you'd expect it, my new dentist!

Good friends of ours were raving about boca raton cosmetic dentist Dr. Peter Blumenthal http://www.drpeterblumenthal.com .

When I arrived Wednesday morning I was greeted by a warm, smiling receptionist who made light of the few short forms I would need to fill out. Within two minutes I was whisked into a clean friendly room for teeth cleaning. My hygenist Patti was understanding and funny, she made the time pass easily. Best of all there was a constant flow of laughter from the lobby. Staff shared a joke or a smile with patients and each other, and one staff member was very helpful with an older patient who need a bit of help to get to his appointment room.

They also used technology to improve their service. All of the staff used a small walkie talkie system to communicate with each other and it seemed to speed communications and efficiency. The offices were equipped with computers and two times they used animated computer demonstartions to explain what I was going through.

Then I met Dr. Blumenthal. He was a soft spoken gentleman who passionately walked me through a 'lesson' on how to brush and floss my teeth and care for my gums.

Most dentists today are agressively selling various teeth whitening methods, Dr. Blumenthal was very honest about the options for whitening, and he was very frank about the pros and cons of services they offered and inexpensive over-the-counter programs.

A big tip-of-the-hat to Dr. Blumenthal and the team at http://www.drpeterblumenthal.com, 561-368-2674 who I highly recommend . Thank you for turning one of life's less pleasurable experiences into a rare treat.


Jay Berkowitz

My Top Ten Business Books of 2006 - Part 2

4. The Long Tail, Chris Anderson. This highly buzzed about book defines the web phenomenon of selling 'less of more'. Anderson explains how the internet has created markets for tens of thousands of books, movies and music titles that don't fit in a book store, Blockbuster or record store. A must read for internet marketing professionals!


5. The World is Flat (Updated and Expanded), Thomas L. Friedman. Orginally published in 2005, the new Release 2.0 explains how the internet has created a new 'flat' worldwide economy, Friedman expands on how this evolution will affect employment for us and our children.


6. The Little Black Book of Connections, Jeffrey Gitomer. If you are like me, you flip to Jeff Gitomer's article as soon as you get the new Business Journal each week. IN The Little Black Book of Connections Gitomer provides the best networking advice since Andrea Nierenberg's Nonstop Networking: How to Improve Your Life, Luck, and Career.


Jay Berkowitz

Where Is Search Going in 2007?

It seems as though everyone is writing about and trying to find the "Next Google." Google has been the dominant Search Engine for several years and now it is the beginning of the year and writers are wondering if this will be the year that Google really gets challenged. Over the weekend there was an article in the business section of the New York Times that was about this exact subject

What made this article standout is the direction the article went, instead of focusing on Panama http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/rc/srch/?mkt=us or MSN Adcenter http://startadcenter.com/nooff/ which according to some are gaining popularity, the author decided to focus on five search engines that were either just launched recently, in beta or in some cases still in development. Powerset (http://www.Powerset.com ) which will use natural language for search (I say will as the site is not yet live). Hakia (http://www.hakia.com ) which is supposed to be like Powerset which is similar to what AskJeeves tried to do years ago. Chacha (http://www.Chacha.com) which similar to the Wiki model the results are determined by real poeple, which is such an interesting concept that Wikipedia itself is trying to get in to this itself with its own search engined designed and updated by users and programmers. Chacha is currently live, the Wiki engine is in developments.

Other search engines are mentioned in the article, including Snap (http://www.snap.com)and A9 (http://www.A9.com ) which is part of Amazon.com. We will keep an eye on all of these sites and many more to see if any of them deliver better results and begin to get a foothold in all of the searches done online. What other sites are out there that you use for search, or is everone still using Google?

My Top Ten Business Books of 2006 - Part 1

These are the top ten business books I read in 2006 (a couple were written before '06).

1. Don't Make Me Think (2nd Edition). Steve Krug updated his classic on website usability with three new chapters, so I re-read it! With entertaining words and crisp images, Steve Krug explains how websites really work. This is still my favorite guideline for web design.


2. The Search - How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed our Culture, John Battelle. In his role as an editor at Wired Magazine John Battle had the opportunity to interview the key figures who built search marketing. Discover that Google was actually late into the search game and how the the identification of the importance of back links made Sergey Brin and Larry Page unfathomably wealthy.



3. Life After the 30-Second Spot, Jospeh Jaffe. The Ad industry doesn't get it, their world is crumbling around them, and Jaffe calls them to task. I also discovered his fantastic podcast Across The Sound in '06 -- it is highly recommended!



Jay Berkowitz