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How to Become Your Industry’s Leading Expert in 30 Days

By Donna Gunter in Featured

Many online solo service professionals wonder how they will ever become known in their industry, given the easy access to the abundance of information found online. Almost everyone claims to be an expert, so it stands to reason that some percentage of that group are charlatans. How do you create trust and authenticity with your target market and be seen as a real, true expert rather than as a sham?

One of the easiest and quickest ways to do this is by interviewing experts in your industry. People pay big bucks to listen to or meet people like Mark Victor Hansen, Richard Branson, and Bill Gates. While these people may be considered celebrities in their fields, there are celebrity-caliber experts in every industry that members of that industry would be eager to hear speak and would gladly pay for that privilege.

How To Find Hidden Article Ideas

By Steve Shaw in Featured

Are you ever stumped on what to write about?

When you’re doing article marketing to drive traffic to your website, you need to be submitting articles consistently month in and month out. That means that you need to have a steady stream of article ideas, and that can be a challenge sometimes!

I’ve got some good news for you though: You have more article ideas than you realize. Most likely, you have several article ideas right under your nose on your own website or in your business.

Here are some tips for finding hidden article ideas:

1. Look on your own website. You probably have content that would be perfect for one or more articles. For example, if you are a business coach, you might have a page on your website called “Why use a business coach?”. That sort of topic can be turned into an article.
2. Your old newsletters. What messages have you been sending your list? If you have a list you’ve probably been in steady communication with your subscribers. You send them helpful tips, observations, anything that will provide value to them. If you have any teaching topics from old newsletters you’ve sent, you can use them as an article. You may have to rework things a little to meet word count requirements and make the newsletter content article worthy, but you’ve got a great head start on the writing process.
3. Written any e-books? An e-book is a great source of article ideas because you already have the content broken into chapters. When using content from an e-book, you can extract whatever material you would like to use, and then add an intro and concluding paragraph to form an article.
4. Your blog. If you have a well-tended blog, you have a continuous source of article ideas at your fingertips. Look for posts that teach: how to’s or list posts are readily adapted to be articles.
5. Audio interviews that you’ve done. Listen to old interviews you’ve done and write down the questions you were asked and a synopsis of your answers. You may be able to get several articles out of one interview.
6. Your replies to questions from your customers. Sometimes you’ll get a great question on a general topic from a customer that necessitates a more involved reply. As long as you’ve taken the time to explain things, why not use your reply as the foundation of an article that answers the same question?

Here’s what to do when you’ve found hidden content that you can morph into articles:

• Rework the content if it is appearing on your own site. It is beneficial that the content on your own website be original, so you wouldn’t want to submit anything verbatim from your website. This is not necessary if the original content was in a newsletter, audio interview, or a customer support answer. Only content from your own website needs to be reworked to be unique.
• Remove all promotional references from the content–that may be appropriate on your own website or in a newsletter, but trying to make a sales pitch in an article is not appropriate. Save that for the resource box.
• The website content should be used as a general guide for your article. Don’t try to reword the content line by line–it’s too easy to copy the original content. Instead, look at your original work as an outline for your article and write the article fresh.
• Write for newbies and for more advanced audiences. You can cover the same topic writing on different levels.

Did you find any article ideas that were hiding right under your nose? It’s a great feeling when you do. Remember, when you feel like “there’s nothing to right about”, look at your website and your business from a fresh perspective, and you’ll be surprised at the article ideas you find.

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Steve Shaw is an article marketing expert, and founder of the popular article distribution service http://www.submityourarticle.com , used by thousands of business owners. Discover how to use the power of article marketing to reach thousands of potential prospects for your website – download a powerful free report on successful article marketing from http://www.submityourarticle.com/report

32 Spectacularly Useful Twitter Tools

By David Jackson in Featured

Like millions of other Twitter users, I use Twitter as a serious business tool, to enhance my business interests. But I also enjoy using Twitter for the fun aspect that is inherent in its DNA.

Let’s face it, Twitter is a lot of fun! And it has spawned an entire industry of amazing Twitter tools that are not only fun – but can also help you maximize the power of Twitter, as well as enhance your business interests.

Following are 32 Fun and Useful Twitter Tools. Enjoy!

1. BackType Plugins
backtype.com/plugins

Backtype.com is a real-time conversational search engine that helps users find, follow and share comments from blogs, social networks and other social media. Very, very cool.

2. CureCRM
curecrm.com/net

CureCRM is a Twitter CRM (Customer Realationship Management) tool. It works on your desktop and gives you the ability to automatically record email conversations into salesforce cases, contacts, opportunities, and leads entries. It also schedules meetings, manages your calendar, and reminds colleagues to attend meetings.

3. Friend or Follow
friendorfollow.com

This is my favorite Twitter tool. It tells you who you’re following who’s not following you back. This tool allows you to stay on top of your unfollows, as well as “trim your Twitter fat”, so to speak.

4. Featured Users
featuredUsers.com

Featured Users is a Twitter application ad network. It appears to be affiliated with the aforementioned Friend or Follow.  Here’s how it works: When you purchase impressions, your Twitter profile is displayed on the Twitter applications in the Featured Users network. The more impressions you purchase, the more often your profile is displayed.

It actually looks pretty cool. I haven’t tried this one yet, but I’m seriously thinking about it. They also have a user referral program that will allow you to make money when you refer customers to their program.

6. GoTwitr
gotwitr.com

GoTwitr is a Twitter referral service. However, what makes GoTwitr different from other Twitter referal services is the fact GoTwitr gives you the ability to preview in detail everyone you follow or unfollow.

That way, your community will be made up of people who actually share your interests.

7. HootSuite
hootsuite.com

HootSuite is yet another free professional Twitter client. Here are some of the functions that HootSuite performs: Manages multiple Twtitter accounts, tracks how many people click the links you tweet out, pre-schedules your messages, submits your blog feed to Twitter and more.

8. OpenBreak (Formerly TwitterBerry)
orangatame.com/products/openbeak

Billed as “The evolution of TwitterBerry,” OpenBeak is mobile client for posting updates to Twitter. It works over the data network, so you don’t need to use SMS. OpenBeak is the evolution of TwitterBerry, and the new name allows the app to grow beyond both the Twitter platform and BlackBerry smartphones.

9. PeopleBrowsr
peoplebrowsr.com

PeopleBrowsr is a real time data mine and social search engine. It allows you to monitor your brand, manage feedback, share accounts, run campaigns, track keywords, build widgets and engage across multiple social networks simultaneously.

10.Ping.fm
ping.fm

Ping.fm is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables users to post to multiple social networks simultaneously. This is a really great tool!

11. Qwitter
useqwitter.com

Qwitter is a Twitter tool that notifies you when you get un-followed. Qwitter checks your followers and notifies you as often as it can, depending on how many people are using it and how many followers they have.

Now here’s what’s really cool about Qwitter. Not only will it alert you as to who is no longer following you, but it will also show you the tweet you posted that (may or may not) have caused the person to unsubscribe. Very useful.

12. Seesmic Desktop
seesmic.com

Seesmic Desktop is a Twitter client and desktop app which allows you to view multiple accounts in one window. Not only will you be able to view multiple accounts, you will be able to view the window in columns (similar to Tweetdeck).

13. SocialOomph (Formally known as TweetLater)
socialoomph.com

SocialOomph is a free Twitter tool that lets you set your tweets to be sent at specific time intervals, track keywords, automatically send welcome direct messages (DM’s)to new followers, purge your direct messages and more.

14. Trendistic
trendistic.com/_help

Ever heard of Google Trends? Well, Trendistic is similar to that. Trendistic is a tool that allows you to track trends on Twitter, similarly to what Google Trends does for Google searches. It gathers tweets as they are posted, filters redundant ones and compiles the rest into one-hour intervals.

15. TwitterMail
twittermail.com

TwitterMail is a service for users of Twitter that allows them to redirect email to their twitter account.

Here’s how it works: When you give TwitterMail your Twitter credentials they supply you with a unique TwitterMail email address. For instance, abc123example@twittermail.com. If you send an email to that address it will be posted to Twitter.com (By the way, that’s a fake Twittermail address, so don’t use it).

16. Twitbin
twitbin.com

If you’re a Firefox user, this one’s for you. Twitbin is a Firefox extension that allows you to keep up with all of your Twitter conversations right from your browser sidebar. Twitbin allows you to send messages, receive messages, share links, and more. Great Firefox extension!

17. Twibbon
twibbon.com

Supporting a cause? Twibbon allows you to promote your cause through Twitter. Twibbon overlays a small icon onto supporters’ profile images to create a ‘Twibbon’, making an impactful online statement. The user’s Twitter account automatically tweets to let everyone know about their affiliation.

18. TweetMeMe
tweetmeme.com

If you’re an article marketer like I am, you’re going to love this tool.  TweetMeMe is a retweet button for website and blog publishers who want to encourage viral activity of their content on Twitter.

The button shows a live count of the number of times your content has been tweeted. I love this tool!

19. TweetDeck
tweetdeck.com/beta

TweetDeck is your personal social networking dashboard for staying in touch with what’s happening now on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites. In fact, you can do so many things with TweetDeck, you are limited only by your imagination.

20. Twitterfeed
twitterfeed.com

Twitterfeed allows you to publish updates from any RSS feed to your Twitter account. You then have the ability to decide how frequently you want Twitterfeed to check your feed updates and how many updated articles to post to Twitter.

21. Twitpic
twitpic.com

As its name suggests, Twitpic allows you to share photos on Twitter. You can post pictures to TwitPic from your phone, their API, or through the Twitpic site itself.

22. TwitterCounter
twittercounter.com

If you have a lot of Twitter followers and want to show them off, you’ll find this is an interesting tool. TwitterCounter is a statistics tool which allows you to display the number of Twitter followers you have on your blog.

It will also display whether your followers are increasing or decreasing. The service also has a Twitter Remote widget that you can add to your blog sidebar for more interaction with your followers.

23. Twitterholic
twitterholic.com

Want to know who has the most followers on Twitter? Then Twitterholic is the tool for you. But Twitterholic goes one step further, not only does it allow you to see who has the most followers, it also allows you to check your own ranking in the Twitter universe. Great tool!

24. Twellow
twellow.com

Twellow is a directory of public Twitter accounts. It features hundreds of categories and search features to help you find people in specific niches.

Here’s how it works: Twellow grabs publicly available messages from  Twitter. Twellow then analyzes and categorizes each of the users responsible for those messages into the various categories found on its website.

25. Twaitter
twaitter.com

Twaitter is a tool that allows team accounts, scheduled tweets, RSS integration, tweet calendar and more.

26. Twibes
twibes.com

Twibes is an interesting Twitter tool that allows you to find groups of people who share your common interests.

27. TwitterLocal
twitterlocal.net

TwitterLocal is an Adobe AIR based application that allows you to filter Tweets by location. You can generate an RSS or XML feed, which allows you to receive Tweets from a specified area, including city, state, postal code and  mile radius.

28. TweetBrain
tweetbrain.com

TweetBrain is a crowdsourcing service powered by the Twitter community. It enables you to get quality answers to your Twitter questions quickly – sort of like Yahoo Answers for Twitter users. Very cool.

29. Tweetvisor
tweetvisor.com

Tweetvisor is a web-based, multi-column Twitter interface that enables users to better manage multiple Twitter accounts. Tweetvisor returns real-time updates about favorite topics, news and tweets – plus, much, much more. Nice!

30. TwitterFox
twitterfox.net

TwitterFox is Firefox web browser plugin that TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that notifies you of your friends’ tweets on Twitter. This extension adds a tiny icon on the status bar which notifies you when your friends update their tweets.

It also has a small text input field to update your tweets. In addition, TwitterFox allows you to view Tweets within your own web browser, in a popup menu. This is extremely convenient and eliminates the need to constantly go to the Twitter website.

31. Wickett Twitter Widget
wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wickett-twitter-widget

This is a popular WordPress plugin that display tweets from a Twitter account in the sidebar of your blog. It is without question the easiest way to add Tweets to WordPress.

32. Yahoo Sideline
yahoo.sideline.com

Sideline is an Adobe AIR desktop application that allows users to create and group custom queries by topics of interest.

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David Jackson is the owner of http://reviews-by-customers.com – the Internet’s most exclusive, free business directory. If you would like The Secret to Non-Stop, FREE Targeted Traffic, read this: http://tinyurl.com/ygdrd68

The hitchhikers guide to Copenhagen using Google’s real-time search

By John Sylvester in Featured

Not to be out-manoeuvred by its search rivals, Google has announced its very own “Real Time Search”, which will focus on social, mobile and real time. This is due to be rolled out over their search engines very soon.

For a quick peek into its usefulness, I took a look at the Copenhagen Climate Summit as an example.

In the twenty minutes or so I had real-time results updating, there was slurry of entries, including:
•    Bangladesh to seek 15 percent of any climate fund – Reuters
•    Copenhagen climate summit issues: money – Telegraph
•    US rock star sings to save shrunk Kashmiri glaciers – Xinhua
•    They opened climate talks in Copenhagen today and not a single polar bear showed up. If they’re not worrying, why should I? – StephenAtHome

But topping the bill was a story published on the Telegraph’s website – Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges.

Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen’s largest limousine company, said that during the “summit to save the world”, the total number of limos in Copenhagen had already broken the 1,200 barrier. She remarked: “We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand…We’re having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.”

What’s even more alarming is that the number of electric and hybrid cars totals a paltry five: “We don’t have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it’s very Danish.” A very Danish sense of humour is it, to have organised a critical environmental event that prices out alternative energy? Anyway, the result is that the conference, including participants’ travel, will create a total of 41,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, equivalent to the sum produced by a small European city over the same period.

Not to be discouraged in their efforts to avoid the next Armageddon, Denmark is expecting up to 140 private jets, which is so far above its capacity to cope,  the planes will have to be parked next door in Sweden. To soften the effect, perhaps the limos being driven in can give hitchhiking participants a ride?

Unlikely though, as in attendance will be 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists, 98 world leaders, Leonardo DiCaprio and Prince Charles, who are said to be already mulling over their sustainable scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges. The Great Unwashed (a term coined by Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, describing the protagonists), will be tactfully located elsewhere carrying out a “funeral of the day” to mark their deep contempt for the Great Satan of all “heatist” concepts, economic growth.

According to the Telegraph, “Denmark has taken delivery of its first-ever water-cannon…plus sweeping new police powers. The authorities have been proudly showing us their new temporary prison, 360 cages in a disused brewery, housing 4,000 detainees.” Sounds promising.

To top it all, Ed Miliband, Britain’s Secretary of State at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, delivered a speech in which he said: “If Martin Luther King had come along and said ‘I have a nightmare’, people would not have followed him.” But no doubt they will follow those that declare: “I have a limousine (because my private jet’s parked in Sweden)”. At least the billowing hot air that will fire the conference’s central heating systems this week will be personally sustainable.

But I digress. This story is surely about real-time results and how useful this addition is to Google search. I have to say that Spiked Online’s Tim Brown, who once remarked Twitter was “…a seething mass of self-affirming emotional incontinence…” was mostly filtered out and the information was relevant to subject. And after pressing the pause-button to stem the flow and analyse the results, the entries came variously from the Twitter accounts of the major dailies.

Google’s “Real Time Search” does, after all, seem rather useful.

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John Sylvester is the media director of V9 Design & Build and an expert in search engine optimization and web marketing strategies.

Google Home Page Turns Minimalist

By Kalena Jordan in Featured

Visited Google.com lately? If so, you might have spotted something a little different about Big G’s home page.

Remember back in September when I blogged about Google increasing the size of the search box? Well it turns out that Google have been experimenting quite a bit with the layout and design of their home page, playing around with different versions of it, visible only to a handful of guinea pigs in their control group and users of a few select data-centers.

A major feature of the home page testing (and one that exists in the final launched version) is a fade-in effect where the content on the page “fades in” over a few seconds. I had noticed the fade-effect a couple of times during October and wondered if it was a glitch. TechCrunch noticed too and blogged about it quickly.

With the testing period over, Google officially launched their new home page across all datacenters and most regional Googles this month. When the page first loads, it shows only the Google logo, buttons and the search box. The remaining links appear only once the user moves the mouse over the page.

Google’s VP of Search Products Marissa Mayer says this design provides a focus on site usability:

“For the vast majority of people who come to the Google homepage, they are coming in order to search, and this clean, minimalist approach gives them just what they are looking for first and foremost. For those users who are interested in using a different application like Gmail, Google Image Search or our advertising programs, the additional links on the homepage only reveal themselves when the user moves the mouse.”

Google hopes that the minimalist page will soon become second nature to users and encourage them to use the home page features more efficiently.

What to Tweet About on Twitter

By Phyllis Zimbler Miller in Featured

Figuring out what to tweet about on Twitter requires considering your overall Internet marketing plan.

For example, if you are trying to increase the traffic to your blog about books, you may decide to focus on tweeting links to news items related to book publishing and book marketing along with the links to your own blog posts. In this way you are establishing yourself as an expert in the book field by both the links you share and the original content you write.

Now let’s take this example a little further. You may decide to sell an ebook on publishing off your website on which your blog also resides. You may begin to add into your tweet mix occasional announcements about this ebook.

There’s a range of opinions as to how many of your tweets should be what’s called “self-serving” – promoting your own products or services – and how many should be informational or conversational or whatever.

Let’s say, though, that you do not yet have a blog or a website or a business of any kind that you want to promote.

What to tweet about in this case? Do you have any hobbies or interests?

Perhaps you are a green environment advocate. Then you could tweet information that you want to share about going green, such as links to books, news articles, and blog posts. You can add your opinions about the articles you are linking to in order to personalize your tweets.

You are establishing a brand for yourself even though you made never use that brand in connection with business. Still, you have a starting point from which to morph into a new brand if that’s what you decide to do.

Even before you get on Twitter you should decide what to tweet about. Will you be emphasizing your business views or your gardening interests?

Once you have made this decision, you can use Twitter’s own search capabilities or a third-party application such as tweetbeep.com to alert you when there are tweets connected to the topics on which you tweet. Then you can jump into the conversation and reply to people who are tweeting about these topics.

You can also follow Twitter lists that are on subjects of interest to you in order to easily track tweets connected to your topics.

As you participate more and more on Twitter, you will begin to follow people whose tweets you find especially valuable. You can study their tweets in order to decide which tweets you think are most effective in attracting followers. Then you can emulate the patterns you uncover.

Warning: Whatever you do, do NOT tweet in anger or use swear words or viciously attack someone. This is not proper etiquette and can quickly lose many of the followers you worked so hard to get – if not getting you kicked off Twitter.

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Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is an Internet business consultant. If you liked this article, you’ll love her free report on “Power Marketing’s Top 3 Internet Marketing Tips” – claim your report now from www.TeachMeToUseTwitter.com

How to Build Massive Traffic With Video Marketing

By James Trent in Featured

Imagine that you purchased a new Apple IPod Nano and you are really excited about using the new advanced features provided with it. You open the user manual and try to understand the huge chunks of words describing the features. You try to match the pictures describing how to use it with the buttons on your Nano. Finally you’ll be able to learn the features, but long hours are wasted.

Now try this. Get on YouTube, enter the Nano’s Features in search and you will surely get a video providing you complete details of what you want. And yes, the video will be short and also, will give you a practical experience that the owners manual fails to give. What Apple gains from the video is huge viral marketing of its IPod as videos flood the social networking world and content networks like wildfire. Video Marketing- Gives you that Added Edge in Generating Traffic.

Better To See Than Read

Videos can emotionally trigger a person when a static text simply cannot do. There are millions of dead websites on the internet with lots of static text content stuffed in it. People are bored reading the elaborated long paragraphs used by marketers. They end up getting lost in the content. This dosn’t happen with video marketing. The theme gets marketed in such a way that it makes an impression on the mind of the viewer. The viewer talks about it, and that’s how traffic is attracted.

Basic Rules to Lure Traffic – All in One

• Focus on the benefits of your service or product. Your business video length should be short ranging from 2 to 4 minutes. The theme and purpose of your website or business should be in propaganda in the video.
• The website address should be displayed in an early part of the video. If the viewer wants to check your site out early, he can get the address and move on to your site.
• Do not name the video randomly. Use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to determine highly searched keywords relating to your service or product and use those words in your title. This will help your video appear in the search engine result pages for those specific keywords.
• Make sure you provide quality information about your service or product. Tell your viewers something unique or important so they will want to visit your website to learn more. Avoid blasting on the scene and just blurting your website.
• Upload your video in video sharing sites like YouTube, Metacafe and Dailymotion.
• Upload the videos on your affiliate sites or make some squeeze pages and propagate them.

Exploiting the Social Networking Platforms

Traffic can be generated in a huge manner if you market your videos on social networking platforms. Get your company or business profiles on platforms like twitter, Facebook to which the whole world subscribes. Join forums and follow people and companies with your same interest field. Tweet your videos with fancy keywords related to your service or product. Write mini blogs related to your videos and provide your video link; messages spread virally on these social networking platforms.

Traffic is always crazy with videos. All you need to care about is how fascinating you can make them in terms of quality.

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James is a business coach and mentor that assists serious entrepreneurs in building a profitable online business with multiple incomes streams. James and his team have assisted hundreds of people in generating profits in their very first year. For more information and to contact James, visit his website.http://thesevenfigurepro.com

Google Caffeine And The New Ranking Factors

By Titus Hoskins in Featured

Google Caffeine is the name given to Google’s “Next Generation” search engine, which it will use to rank and index all the pages on the wonderful world wide web. According to all indications, this is not just another one of Google’s infamous Updates, but a major “Overhaul” of its index and algorithm – the complex formula and calculations Google uses to rank all web pages, including yours.

If that doesn’t sound ominous enough, according to Matt Cutts (Google Spokesperson) one database is already showing Google Caffeine, and the full blown version will be released after the holidays. The reasoning behind this – Google doesn’t want to upset webmasters and site owners during the lucrative holiday buying season. In the past, other major Google Updates have come around this time of the year, most notably the “Florida Update”
which severely affected many web sites and webmasters.

Killer Campaigns Volume 2: Making Emotional Connections

By Jerry Bader in Featured

We live in an age of clones: somebody makes a very profitable movie about vampires, and the next thing you know we’re all inundated with movies, television shows, books, blogs, websites, and every form of blood-sucking permutation you can imagine.

CSI begets CSI Miami, which begets CSI New York, which begets NCIS, which begets NCIS Los Angeles, which is just about as much as anyone can take. If something is successful you can be sure more of the same will follow.

The Phoney War: Google and News Corp make up?

By John Sylvester in Featured

The Phoney War, also referred to as the Twilight War by Winston Churchill, was the description given to first few months in World War II following the German invasion of Poland, marked by a lack of military operations in Europe. The same could perhaps be said of News Corp in 2009.

Only last week we heard of an “exclusive deal” to list News Corp’s content on Microsoft’s Bing, but today a happy compromise has been suggested by the plaintiff. To many, dropping the company’s content from Google’s indexes was slated as a septuagenarian not understanding the concept behind the internet, while Hooray Henry newspaper chiefs curtsied in front of the great agitator-in-chief for taking on the titan of search.

Google, meanwhile, mused over the “kleptomania” furore and, according to a report in the NYT, said it, “provided news organizations’ websites with 100,000 clicks a minute, every one of which offers a business opportunity for the publishers to show ads, win loyal readers and sell subscriptions.”

As I have argued before, it is not easy for online news to make much revenue and an advertising model is perhaps the best anyone can ever achieve with regard to the established modus operandi of content provision and the monetisation of it.

In support of this and in a recession such as the one that has just descended on the world, vast volumes of online traffic do not necessarily translate into significant advertising revenue. Furthermore, news is a fickle business in that unless the entire industry pulls together in the same direction, people will read the news somewhere else — and that has been Mr Murdoch’s major gripe about the BBC.

So, with ad revenues slashed, Mr Murdoch’s great new architectural plan was unveiled to introduce subscriptions, which also flies in the face of how people use the web. This week Google seems to have softly entered the debate, looking at ways to appease Mr Murdoch and accommodate paid content.

As the NYT dismissively commented: “Critics of News Corp said last week that Google should just let Mr Murdoch walk away, and that he would be shooting himself in the foot by doing so. News is a commodity on the web, and the loss of one of many sources of it will make little difference to internet users…”

A Guardian article (you see how much I need the web for quotes and information that is published for free?), quoted Josh Cohen of Google News saying: “Media companies that want to erect paywalls around their online content still need to be visible on search engines. In fact, they have an even greater need for their content to be listed.”

He added that: “Google had achieved this by updating its First Click Free programme, so that publishers can limit Google News users to looking at no more than five pages of content a day without registering or subscribing.” The Financial Times is also using this service.

However, as always, there is a hitch: all a user needs to do is to go back to Google each time; and it is this “loophole” that Google is seeking to address so that it will limit you to five pages per day before registration, regardless of how you get to the website.

Arianna Huffington, whose site is largely known for aggregating content, said at a recent Federal Trade Commission workshop on “Journalism and the Internet Age”: “Murdoch is confusing aggregation with theft…” and added: “Aggregation is part of the web’s ‘DNA’ and that Murdoch plays both sides, noting that some of Murdoch’s own sites also aggregate or ‘steal’ content.”

Others think the move is a significant initial victory for publishers, as Rory Cellan-Jones of BBC News said: “By playing hardball, [Murdoch] appears to have got Google to blink.” But as Mark Cuban, an HDNet exec, put it: “Platforms allow news sources, like Newscorp, to post breaking news and gain value from their brand. Google does not.  In other words, if I trust a newspaper, TV or any brand, I can follow it on Twitter and expect the news to come to me…Having to search for and find news in search engines is so 2008.”

So, the phoney war may just stay that way if the compromise is broad enough to placate Mr Murdoch. All said and done, the changes put forward by Google seem fair enough given the territory that’s at stake. But some observers have commented about the long-term sustainability of the model. One said: “The internet is open source at its core, is it not? So is content. Revenue models back to the drawing board…” Maybe, but the draughtsman’s contract has been gathering dust for over a decade now, still with no firm resolution in sight.

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John Sylvester is the media director of V9 Design & Build and an expert in search engine optimization and web marketing strategies.

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