DISQUS

This looks like it's setup wrong to me. Publishers should be searching for advertisers, not the other way round. That way twitter users can search for products or services which fit into the topics they normally talk about - the ads would seem naturally placed and they get paid. Think more word of mouth marketing with disclosure, rather than paid ad spots.

You may also be interested in Cli.gs - again it's a URL shortening service with analytics. It's nearly as short as is.gd (only 5 characters) so you don't have to give up any space.

http://www.cli.gs/

It makes sense, I don't see how people can follow 2000+ ppl.

I know there are scripts out there to automatically add followers. Some are even advanced enough to do this in a two-step process. After following the user they will check to see they are following back, if not they will drop the connection in a few days.

I would even set it to randomly drop some users who follow anyway, to give a better looking follow/follower ratio (i.e. more followers than following and some one-way).

Nick Wilsdon's last blog post..Google, Ethics and The Myths of Social Media: An Interview with Jill Whalen

@SEO Ranter

It's a US trademark he's going for. If he is successful with that then he can apply for an international trademark through the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO). He would have to contend with any other national level trademarks (say someone does the same as this in Russia).

You still have to pay to get your trademark class registered in every country you want it to apply to. Each national office gets a set amount of time to object to the trademark, if they don't, it is accepted at a national level. Look at the http://www.wipo.int site or the Madrid System for more info.

I guess the test is whether the iPhone lets you 'Google' using any other provider? If not then Google are probably OK with this usage.

From their blog:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/do-you-g...

Usage: 'Google' as verb referring to searching for information on, um, Google.

Example: "I googled him on the well-known website Google.com and he seems pretty interesting."

Our lawyers say: Well, we're happy at least that it's clear you mean searching on Google.com. As our friends at Merriam-Webster note, to "Google" means "to use the Google search engine to find information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web."

I see what you are saying though, it does encourage usage as a verb.

Hi Andy,

I'm getting an error on your sample URL?

"XML Parsing Error: mismatched tag. Expected: .
Location: http://andybeard.eu/google-reader-test-opml.xml
Line Number 5, Column 7:"

Good tips Andy. The most popular page is pretty much the second place I check these days after the home page. It's strange though there isn't a link to it on the menu?

Don't forget the most popular link, that's been really helpful for me and usually my first port of call on the site these days (I'm actually surprised they haven't linked it from the top bar).

http://sphinn.com/upcoming/mostpopular/

Thanks for the kind words about the report John. As you say one of the most interesting things for me was the number of country markets where Google is not the leader, 5 out of the 17 surveyed. 10 out 15 also had a local competitor in 2nd or 3rd place.

It will be very interesting to look back on this report in a year's time and see how these positions have changed.