The news of Osama Bin Ladens execution was broken first in a tweet by Keith Urbahn.

Keith Urbahn, chief of staff for the office of the former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, appears to be the first to have broken the news that Osama bin Laden, 54, the man responsible for the attacks of September 11, 2001, is dead–via his @keithurbahn Twitter feed.

Well its about bloody time!

Full story here

Initial report on the NY Times here

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Who would have thought that coupon deals would make billionaires online?

Just goes to show how desperate local business are to get paying customers in the door.

Got to admire the guys at Groupon though; plus the 1200+ other billionaires!

Groupon co-founder Eric Lefkofsky is the newest Chicagoan to make Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s richest people. With an estimated worth of $1.6 billion, the serial tech entrepreneur ranks 782 on the list released Wednesday. He is tied with Chicago’s Joe Mansueto, founder and president of Morningstar.

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I'm stunned that a company the size of JC Penney has seemingly blundered into the SEO world so recently.

I would have a expected them to have been honing and refining their search engine optimization strategy and the rankings that go with it for years.

However, from the article I'm about to link you too, it seems that they have very recently decided to 'boost' their search engine results and done it way to quickly and overwhelmingly.

Sadly, they will bring all sorts of attention to themselves; Google see this a mile off; and now they have been publicly slapped by G.

The New York Times asked an expert in online search, Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media in New York, to study this question, as well as Penney’s astoundingly strong search-term performance in recent months. What he found suggests that the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue. And the intrigue starts in the sprawling, subterranean world of “black hat” optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.

Not nice is it JCP (the slap); check it out here

Well hardly surprising really but the chaps at Google must be rubbing their hands with glee. Why?

It's estimated Google’s full-year search advertising revenue last year rose 20 percent to $25.4 billion.

That's $25,400,000,000.00 folks.

This gave Google a market share of 83 percent in 2010, up from 81 percent in 2009.

Well hoohar! But that's not a bigger market share in number of customers is it? Oh no, they've been kicking paying customers off their platform in the thousands.

The greater market share comes from the big players; those with enormous, so big we dare not track roi and who the hell cares any way old boy advertising budgets.

Read full report here.

Well I have to admit I find it hard to believe that people search for Facebook and related terms but there you go.

Here's an article that describes the details;

New York, N.Y., Dec. 29, 2010 - Experian® Hitwise®, a part of Experian Marketing Services, has analyzed the top 1000 search terms for 20101 and Facebook was the top-searched term overall. This is the second year that the social networking website has been the top search term overall, accounting for 2.11 percent of all searches.1 Four variations of the term "facebook" were among the top 10 terms and accounted for 3.48 percent of searches overall.

Oh and Facebook was the most visited website; doesn;t say it was the stickiest too but I'm sure it was…

Get the full skinny here.

No doubt this will be an ongoing issue for years but with the popularity of Facebook and the number of developers creating applications it's going to be hard to police and control!

The Wall Street Journal said applications were providing access to Facebook members' names and, in some cases, their friends' names, to companies that build detailed databases on people in order to track them online.

All of the 10 most popular applications on Facebook were transmitting unique user ID numbers to outside companies, it said. They include Zynga's FarmVille, with 59 million users, Texas HoldEm Poker and FrontierVille.

==> Read the full report here.

Despite the ailing economy a new record has been set for Internet advertising revenue in the first half of 2010 – $12,000,000,000, that's 12 billion!

Search advertising produced the most revenue, pulling more than $5.7 billion of advertising spending in the first half, an 11.6% improvement over last year.

Display advertising—which includes banners, digital video and rich media accounted for $4.3 billion, up 15.9% over the year earlier-period.

Lead generation dropped from $728 million to $642 million.

Email advertising spending was $120 million.

Here's the full report.

http://www.iab.net

There was a rumor going round a while ago that banners didn’t work anymore. They may have become a bit cheaper, which is a good thing when your handing over a large portion of your budget to the Pay Per Click networks. Advertising.com alone handles 10billion transactions a day!

And all of them with sophisticated targeting systems

http://www.advertising.com 10 Billion transactions a day…

http://www.tribalfusion.com 230 Million people per month

http://www.valueclickmedia.com 28 Billion display advertising impressions  per month

http://www.247realmedia.com – 162 Million unique visitors per month

Just 4 for now so you don’t get bogged down by the choices available…

My previous WordPress backup plugin broke when WordPress version 3.o was released. I tried a few different options and finally settled on Automatic WordPress Backup, which is a plugin that backs up your WordPress database, themes. plugins and htaccess files.

Here’s why its really good!

It backs up to Amazon S3, in the cloud data storage. This is great because it’s very unlikely that Amazon will lose the data! Yes, you have to register an account at Amazon, but it’s free and the storage cost is really tiny, I mean, 20 cents a month tiny and I’ve got a big one (website).

If you’ve ever lost valuable data you know that backups are:

A) Tedious and really dull

B) Vital to your continued well being

Therefore, a few cents a month is nothing and the process is seamless.

It exports the database; a lot of backup plugins just backup the WordPress files, but thats only half of the WordPress installation. You need to have a dump of the database too if you are going to retrieve your valuable posts, pages etc. Automatic WordPress Backup does the job nicely.

It also backs up themes and uploaded content; some plugins just export the database. AWB does the database, as an SQL export and the themes, plugin files and uploaded content. So it covers everything you need to be able to restore you whole wordpress installation, which is what you want.

It allows you to schedule backups; daily, weekly or monthly backups can be set, so you can cover your options if your a daily poster or just one-in-a-while kind of poster.

I’m using AWB on many of my blogs and am setting it up for clients too.

You can download the plugin at Automatic WordPress Backup.

Go here to sign up for an Amazon Web Services account.

You’ll probably be relieved to know that this article is not all about the technical structure of your website. I could go on about that for days on end, but fortunately, structure for you is non-technical and pretty easy to understand. So here goes…

Getting Rid Of The Brochure Mentality Most small business owners and entrepreneurs build a website without understanding the fundamental reasons for doing so. As such, they create what I call a ‘brochure’ website. You may have done this already.

Well don’t be upset, it’s a pretty natural thing to do. For some reason we decide to follow the lead of the majority, thinking if everybody is doing it, it must be the right thing to do… WRONG!

So, going against all conventional wisdom, why do we put up a website? What is the best way to use it?

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