Marketing

I must confess, I really don't fully understand how the Internet ranking systems actually work.  Ranking systems such as Google's PageRank and Alexa's Traffic Rankings seem to use a mystery of statistical analysis, algorithms, and a sprinkle of voodoo calculus to come up with the numbers they do.  Although most people lack the understanding to how these numbers are derived it is still fun to watch those rankings change from day to day.  For example, since the Fall of 2006 I've seen the rankings for CMSReport.com change from 830,790 to around a steady 90,000.

Did you hear the reports about all that money to be made from online advertisements?  In 2006 alone, Internet ad revenue was estimated at $16.8 billion USD.  You have also likely heard of bloggers making thousands of dollars in just a short amount of time through online ads. If you believe this is another post about making money from online ads or how to optimize your site for the search engines, you are going to be disappointed.  I'm not here to tell you how to make money online but when you shouldn't be making money from advertisement on your site.

A couple weeks ago I mentioned that Alexa, a Web search and site statistics company, had wrongly merged CMS Report with a couple other unrelated sites under uly.net. At the time my traffic rank stood at 218,200. Luckily, Alexa has a procedure that lets you contact them so they can separate your site from the other sites.

In that story, I also mentioned that:

"The label 2.0 has become so overused that it is now a tic, a reflex action, a device that gets trotted out because someone thinks it sounds both hip and techie. And it did — for a while. Now it’s tired."

-Steve Fox, "Too Tired of 2.0", InfoWorld, June 26, 2006

No matter how big or small you are, does it not seems that the marketing department always lures us into these discussions?

I had mentioned a while back that we planned to call the version of IE7 in Windows Vista “Internet Explorer 7+”. Well, the feedback we got on the blog was overwhelming – many of you didn’t like it. So, as we’ve said on our website, we heard you. I’m pleased to announce that we’re switching the name back to “Internet Explorer 7”. No plus. No dot x. Just “Internet Explorer 7”.

The Google Adsense module for Drupal has been updated by 2bits. Since we use it here at CMS Report, we thought we would also talk about it here. Some of the new features include: