Recently, my significant other landed an opportunity to work in a retail company. Due to my past experience within the retail sector, she asked for my advice. My response was simple, “Keep your clients happy, regardless”. My reasoning was that word of mouth spreads faster than wildfire, and wildfire is bad for any company trying to make a few bills. Also, my father recently had a vehicular issue and subsequently called the insurance company to get it sorted out, but he was shunned to the extent that he is considering publicly stating his unhappiness at the manner in which the situation was dealt.

A corporate blog can be a potent business tool for many companies, as long as effort is made to keep it up to date and relevant. A corporate blog can act as that vital connection between the organisation and the public (especially if it is an international org.), as well as a portal of views and advice on the particular industry or services offered.

We live in an age of gizmos and gadgets, where the people with the latest and most expensive toys get to lead a growing group of technophiles. Technophilia, far from being the depraved practice it sounds, is a much coveted and envied state throughout the world. As revealed in a report by consumer and media research firm, Scarborough Research, these are the people who drive trends and influence the behaviour of others, especially online. According to the report, this makes them important people to watch.

Competition is healthy, it keeps people and companies on their toes, and without it there would be nothing new and innovative in the world. The same theory applies to search, and despite what many people in the industry think, search is not going anywhere. In fact, it`s still in its infancy and has yet to reach its full potential. It`s all very exciting!

The other day, I read a blog post on Tech Crunch where Michael Arrington discussed why he thought that search innovation had just began, and how wrong Mr O`Reilly was when he stated that eventually all the search engines would just give up on search and outsource to Google.

SEO is technically still considered as a rather new niche market. This has resulted in many scammers trying their hardest to pocket as much cash as they can while SEO is still crawling its way through infancy. Unfortunately, because it`s quite a young market, the public are largely unaware that it exists, let alone what it can do for websites. Its relative youth and inexperience also make it difficult to determine which agency`s promises are actually reasonable, or at least believable.

Google Analytics development began after Google acquired Urchin three years ago. The popularity of which has since soared beyond that of a mere supplementary side-service.

WebProNews reports a study by Pingdom that indicates that 32 percent out of the Alexa global top five hundred performing websites on the internet use Google Analytics to monitor their web stats.

Somewhere along the line, Google worked out that if they offer their powerful analytics reporting software for free, website owners everywhere would grab at the opportunity, subsequently offering up their valuable web statistics to Google to do with whatever they please. An immediate resulting benefit for Google is that many commercial website owners are signing up for AdWords.

Many people believe that their results drop in rankings because Google has penalised them, others believe that these penalties don`t exist and that a drop in rankings can be attributed to Google`s re-indexing. Both sides have valid points, as well as some arguable flaws in their arguments, however, it`s better to be safe than sorry so let`s just consider the possibility of Google penalties.

We all know what YouTube is and we have all watched a video clip of some sort on it. It`s undoubtedly one of the most popular sites on the net, and has a strong following that grows daily in all of the demographic sectors in every country in the world.

There is a lot happening over at YouTube, innovation is alive and kicking as they keep launching better additions to their service.

A while back, You Tube launched search suggestions internationally. It`s easy to activate and deactivate and comes in really handy when you not 100% certain of what it is that you`re looking for.

Yahoo has discovered that outsourcing data storage and management has become expensive and inadequate in capacity to meet their demand, and is consequently developing a multi petabyte SQL database. The system will, like Google`s BigTable, use a system of distributed columns rather than the typical tables system, which is organised by rows and columns. The difference from Google`s BigTable is that Yahoo`s database is designed for a SQL interface.

Google`s BigTable method of using distributed columns employs a plurality of storage servers, one with a database engine that partitions database tables into column chunks.