A few days ago I wrote a piece about the importance of the Christmas season when it comes to online sales. Now I’ve just read news about Amazon’s ‘05 “Holiday Season” sales results which confirm that blog post wholeheartedly.
For the ‘05 Christmas sales period, Amazon has reported that they shipped over 108 million items. Yes,

It seems that search engine optimisation has well and truly hit the public consciousness. Over the past few weeks there have been numerous big articles written by major media organisation about the impact of “black hat” SEO practices.
Anyway, yesterday the UK’s Guardian newspaper wrote an article about “black hat” SEO industry practices. For the story,

“It is the best of times; it is the worst of times. In the year 2014, people have access to a breadth and depth of information unimaginable in an earlier age. Everyone contributes in some way, everyone participates to create a living, breathing mediascape. However the press, as you know it, has ceased to exist,

Despite building a reputation on its clean and uncluttered user interface, the Google search results may soon be augmented by graphic image ads.
Although common practice to have banner ads or other promotional images on most commercial websites, Google has always prided itself on easy to read, exclusively text based pages. This may

November remains the month to be seen online if you’re interested in attracting Christmas related purchases. This is the verdict from Nielsen//NetRatings, who reported that the average Australian Internet shopper spent AUD $471 online in November 2005. This represented a spend increase on the Christmas 2004 online shopping season.
Netratings reported that six (6) million Australian

If you’ve ever wondered how the hell Google’s products and systems work so quickly and reliably, then let me tell you something: you’re not alone. For anyone with even basic software or computer network knowledge, it’s truly an inspiration to witness Google’s ability to deliver fast, solid products.
Despite their great track record so far however,

Finding it hard to concentrate at work in the countdown to Christmas? Me too. Here’s somethingI just wasted a few hours on. Now you can drive your boss crazy too.
Many thanks to the ingenous crew at C.L.I.O for brightening up my day.

I know it’s a year old but it’s still as beautiful as ever: Vincent Flanders’ Biggest Website Design Mistakes of 2004 article.
For any website owner this is mandatory reading. Same goes for website designers. Maybe we can excuse interactive artists who create websites purely for artistic expression - the rest of us have no excuses.
If

The pressure on search engines to provide data about click fraud has risen further with a large US-based web host joining on the class action lawsuit currently against Google in the United States District Court.
As posted on Web Guerilla’s blog a few days ago, there is currently so little data on real click fraud rates,

Everyone knew it was coming but very few people would’ve expected it so soon: the extension of search technology into TV advertising.
In the US last week, TiVo announced it had partnered with several large media and ad agencies to allow its users to select categorises of TV ads they would be interested in receiving via