Guy Kawasaki speaking with Steve Ballmer about Xbox Live subscribers at Mix 08. Guy starts praising Xbox and the technology, then asks Steve how many subscribers Xbox Live currently has.  The results are devastating to Guy.

Wordpress 2.8 offers 790 bug fixes from v2.7 provides  several cool new features. You can now upload new themes using the admin panel, edit plugins from the editor, standardized drog and drag widget activation and placement and many other things that speed up wordpress’s performance. I chose to manually download and FTP the unzipped files into my hosting account. I pulled up the admin area as soon as the uplaod was finished and was greeted with a “Upgrade Database” button, that I pushed, then was promptly presented with a Success page. It couldn’t have been easier. I...

Rand Fishkin (founder seomoz) and David Mihm discuss Google’s location prominence score, local search results, and how Google uses information from local sites in your area to decide how important you are to your geography.  Watch this video to learn how to boost your site’s ranking within your town for the key terms and phrases that are most important for generating new sales. SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday – SEO for Local Search from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

It’s lunchtime on Monday and I have a few minutes to read over some of my coworkers recent blog postings.  One that caught my eye a few weeks ago was Dennis Yu’s article on “Brutal Efficiency“.  Dennis makes some great observations in his article about working hard, being efficient, and getting the job done.    Ironically, his article, coupled with a 20 hour weekend of work, made me realize that  stopping yourself from working all the time is just as important as starting and completing work in the first place. Remember to take a break (for your client’s sake)...

AT&T BlueRoom featured great live performances this weekend from the scene of the Bonnaroo Music Festival in Manchester Tennessee.   One unplanned gift AT&T gave Bonnaroo fans watching from home was multiple live video streams being webcast from the iPhones in the crowd. As I write this article, a fan is broadcasting tonight’s live Phish show on his Ustream.tv Channel to over 4700 remote viewers. The viewers can “Tweet” in a side chat panel. Once submitted, each tweet is automatically tagged with #phish and the URL of the video feed, what great promotion. Tweets, YouTube...

Local service companies need to focus their ads within a specific radius from their office to target customers they could realistically service.  Setting a physical radius for your ads in Adwords is simple. To locate the geo-targeting setup area, log in to your adwords account, then select the campaign that you wish to target.  Click that campaign’s “settings” tab at the top.   Scroll down a bit until you see “Audience”.  In the Audience area you will see “Locations”.  Here you will be able to select between continents, countries, states, and cities....

1) In the top of Gmail, click “Create Filter”. 2) In the “Has the words” field type some keyword, or email address (for to: from:). 3) Click “Test Search” to make sure you get an accurate list of the emails you’re hoping to find, then click “Next Step”. 4) Click the checkbox next to “Apply the Label”, then create ‘new label’ using the drop down, then type in a label name. 5) To add the label to emails you’ve already received simply check the box next to “Also apply filter to X conversations below”. 6)...

Colorado Roofing and Exteriors is a great example of how some local service companies are leveraging Search and Social Media marketing to help local consumers easily find their website and contact information.  Local service businesses may be the best suited group to leverage search marketing because their potential consumers are located in a specific geography and the businesses are not competing with Fortune 500 companies that have large budgets and professional PPC managers. In other words, you’re only competing with other local businesses in the same service niche  for Google placement...