I’m regularly asked about local domain names and whether they are worth using on a blog.
My answer usually revolves around the question of ‘what audience are you trying to reach?‘ Let me explain.
When I first secured my own domain name I chose a .au (Australia) domain without really giving much thought to it. I figured as I was an Aussie I might as well include that in the domain and as the .com version of the domain was taken I though it was the next logical step. That was a naive decision and one that I regretted later (although it did have some benefits too).
There were a number of impacts of having a local domain:

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Hasbro, the makers of Monopoly, have launched a contest where you can design a 3D building for their new interactive version of the popular board game: Monopoly City Streets.
But you’ll have to hurry. The deadline for the contest is next Tuesday, October 6, 2009 at 11:59pm EST.
You’ll need to use Google SketchUp to design your building and then upload it to the Google 3D Warehouse to enter. Learn more about the contest rules here.
Monopoly City Streets, which launched earlier this month, uses Google Maps for its interactive game.

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AOL has tapped Shashi Seth as Senior Vice President of Global Advertising Products. Seth was formerly with Cooliris and before that was at Google. Prior to leaving Google, he was charged with the difficult task of developing monetization strategies for YouTube. Seth previously was the Product Lead for Web Search at Google.
Seth also spent time at eBay, where he managed APIs & Platform. Before that, he launched Gap’s online stores. Seth began his career at NASA.
“Shashi is unmatched in the industry as an innovator with an outstanding track record of developing new and better ways to serve advertisers on the Web,” said Jeff Levick, President of Global Advertising and Strategy at AOL. “As we move forward on our strategy of becoming the world’s largest provider of display advertising, Shashi will play a critical role in creating the best products in the business for our advertising partners.”
Seth is the latest of the fresh talent to head to AOL. Earlier this year, Tim Armstrong left Google to head up the struggling internet company. A few weeks ago, news came that ex-Yahoo! Brad Garlinghouse of “Peanut Butter Manifesto” fame is joining AOL as well.

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Beginning tomorrow (September 30), Google will send out 100,000 invites to Google Wave. The product has received a lot of buzz, both for being innovative and not quite ready. Actually, Google admits it’s not ready for prime time, which is one of the reasons why the invites are limited.
If you’re not familiar, Google Wave is a collaborative tool that features real-time features. They’re still working on features, including group definitions, draft mode and permissions.
Those who can expect an invite are developers who participated in an earlier preview, the first people to sign up for invites and select Google Apps customers.

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With mobile search on the rise, it’s no surprise that search engines wish to monetize the traffic. Yahoo! today announced that they’re adding search advertising to their mobile search for iPhones, iPod Touches and Android devices.
One ad appears at the top of the search results and two ads appear at the bottom. Take a look:

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I thought I’d prepare a blog entry describing the differences between PubSubHubbub and rssCloud. I’m doing this mostly for myself, as I’m currently implementing a desktop client based entirely on PubSubHubbub and rssCloud. My goal is to solve the NAT traversal problem using long polling thru a notification gateway. It’s not the optimal solution, but maybe we can add a notification gateway to PubSubHubbub and/or rssCloud and make them work behind NATs and firewalls.
Both protocols are classic publish and subscribe. Publishers have a relationship with a hub. Clients subscribe to a hub. Publishers send updates to the hub. The hub pushes notifications out to the Clients. Nobody invented anything here, we’ve being doing this in computer science for a long time. Let’s examine each of the four major interactions within the system; subscribing, unsubscribing, pinging and notification.
Subscribing
Subscribing is when a client tells the hub that it wishes to receive notification from one of its publishers. In this case, this might be a Web-based RSS aggregator (Google Reader) or a desktop RSS client (Feed Demon). In both cases, the client has polled an RSS or Atom feed and discovers that the feed has PubSubHubbub or rssCloud notification support. The client uses the information within the feed to send a simple HTTP request to the hub with varying parameters to setup the subscription. Very similar.
There are a couple small differences. PubSubHubbub only supports their REST API, while rssCloud supports all of XML-RPC, SOAP and REST. This would make rssCloud slightly more […]

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Microsoft has teamed up with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the U.S. Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) and Western Union to serve consumer protection PSAs in Bing’s search ads. The new ads address scams involving mortgages, foreclosure, credit repair and money transfers.
Some of the keywords included in the PSA effort are:

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If you are looking for new web hosting, then Webhostinggeeks.com is the best place to start. Webhostinggeeks is a website dedicated to informing webmasters about the various web hosting services, allowing them to make the best decisions in chosing a Web hosting service. On their homepage, you get the big picture with their Top 10 Web Hosting, Best Web Hosts of 2009. They pic the top ten hosting services and provide detailed reviews of each, including pricing bandwidth, storage, bonuses, technical support, average user rankings and much much more.
Beyond simply the top Web hosts, they also provide reviews of Web hosting services in specific categories; multiple domain hosting, green Web hosting, vps hosting, dedicated server hosting, free domain names, free Yahoo! marketing and free Google Adwords. So, if you have these specific needs, then you can drill down directly to the hosting services that meet your needs.
The web host reviews on Webhostinggeeks.com also provides a section where users can submit their own rankings and reviews, and read those left by others. Some of the web hosts have more than a 100 reviews with a lot of great information. Many of the reviews are from review websites, but others are from geeks like you and me.
Webhostinggeeks also provides awards in various other categories; best budget hosting, best blog hosting, best forum hosting, best UNIX hosting, best Windows hosting, best PHP hosting, best email hosting, best ecommerce hosting, best multiple domain hosting, best vps hosting, best reseller hosting and best dedicated hosting.
Don’t forget to check out their blog and […]

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Click Forensics is enhancing their audience quality measurement platform with real-time capabilities. Now, online publishers and ad networks can identify good and bad advertising traffic in real-time.
“In its simplest form, our real-time audience quality tracking capabilities make it possible for publishers and ad networks to immediately block bad site visitors from seeing ads, and show the right ads to the real buyers,” said Paul Pellman, CEO of Click Forensics. “This instantaneous audience quality determination is an important step in transforming the results that search, display and social ad providers deliver to their clients.”
The new capabilities were built with a RESTful web service API that integrates into existing high-volume ad network infrastructures. As a result, it takes less than 10 milliseconds for Click Forensics’ platform can score requests and process requests. This means traffic quality can be determined before an advertiser is charged for a click.
All of this is also the basis for a new real-time scoring engine in development at Click Forensics. The scoring engine will help advertisers and publishers making decisions about ad-serving based on traffic quality.

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