I guess I should take it as a compliment that this blog is increasingly being hit by comment spammers looking for “link juice” by writing a lame comment followed by a link to an equally lame Web site. Over the last few days, I’ve gotten some pretty bad attempts at comment spam. First, my recent article about Kayak.com – the travel Web site – received a comment with instructions on how to properly use a paddle in a kayak, followed by a link to an Internet marketing Web … Continue reading →

One of my favorite travel Web sites for many years has been Kayak.com, the AJAX-based travel aggregator that scours multiple Web sites to find you the lowest prices on airfare and hotels. I liked Kayak because I could trust the site to find me the lowest fares, unlike many travel sites that tack on “service charges” or try to push their “recommended choices” first because these happen to give them a bigger commission. I assumed that Kayak made their money from users choosing to purchase their ticket from … Continue reading →

Google has a lot of reasons to care about national politics: potential Department of Justice anti-trust litigation, net neutrality, H1-B visas for foreign workers, corporate tax rates, and so on. So it makes sense that Google would want to use their influence to push the election toward the candidates that will bolster their business objectives. In the last three years, Google has contributed over $185,000 to political candidates through their political action committee (PAC) called NetPac. The top ten fund recipients were: Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) – Speaker of … Continue reading →

Just read this spam message and reflect on it for a minute – this is brilliant! If this email is not spam, click here to submit the signatures to [Name Changed] – AntiSpam Service.

Google has been very aggressive over the last year at promoting the content network (AdSense) to advertisers. One of the best innovations they’ve developed as a result is “placement targeting“, which enables advertisers to bid on a specific site (or a specific section of a site), rather than just buying the keyword “widget” and hoping that Google’s algorithm places their ads on the right sites. Google’s placement targeting tool is very good at helping advertisers discover sites on which to advertise – they even have a mini-directory of … Continue reading →