Cameron Olthuis

Last year I wrote how Delicious was quickly becoming my search engine of choice. It looks like Rand is starting to feel the same way about it as he compares several Delicious search queries to Google.

The problem with social search is that it’s not yet ready to replace traditional search. While Delicious is great for finding certain things it’s nearly impossible to find good results for others. Case in point, long tail search queries.

Although it has significantly improved since I wrote the post last year, there is still a long ways to go before it can gain any sort of market share in the search industry. There just isn’t enough people bookmarking content yet, and I’m not sure that there ever will be.

What do you think? Do you like using Delicious as a search engine and is it better than Google?

Looks like the Digg crowd is rioting.

This will be very interesting to see how it all plays out. Will it be the straw that breaks Digg’s back?

Read more at Pronet.

Update: Gotta respect Kevin Rose for taking a stand and doing what’s right. Well done!

In an attempt to get a piece of the $25,000 pie (I am being paid for this post) that ReviewMe is offering, the following is my review.

ReviewMe is service that pays bloggers to write paid reviews about advertisers who pay a pre-determined fee based on that particular blogs value. ReviewMe determines the value of each blog with an algorithm that is based off Alexa, Technorati and most likely a few other sources. Bloggers can decide to write either a positive or negative review, but they must disclose that they are being paid to write the review. ReviewMe splits the advertising fee 50/50 with the bloggers.

I know the guys behind ReviewMe (Text Link Ads) and I think for the most part they have done an excellent job on the execution. The site is well designed and the UI is pretty good, I had no trouble signing up and finding my way around. The one thing I noticed that could cause a problem is that you can signup with any blog. Just for fun I signed up a few popular blogs under my name just to see what their posts were worth, I quickly deleted them from my account. They should probably add some kind of security feature to make sure this doesn’t happen.

Overall I am fan of these kind of services. I think it offers a great revenue model for bloggers to make a decent chunk of change for writing. The problem I see here is that Google and the other search engines will frown upon it, since they are against people paying for text links. At least ReviewMe requires full disclosure for the posts and because of that I think they have a great shot of kicking Pay-Per-Post’s Ass. That and the guys behind this business know this market inside and out.

Here’s a good Introductory Guide to Social Media. It is a thirty-page pdf download that is aimed at educating larger corporations on everything social media. If you or your company needs to be brought up to speed then give this a read.

[via: Micro Persuasion]

The first time I met Hiten and Neil they showed me this project they were working on called Crazy Egg. It was a click tracking application so you could visually see where your website visitors were clicking. At the time they had a working prototype and when they first showed it to me I was literally blown away. Not only was I impressed with Crazy Egg itself but I could also tell these guys were very passionate about it and I knew it would be something great. Since that time Crazy Egg has gone through a long closed beta test where it was continually being improved upon to become what it is today, which is far better than I ever imagined it would be.

Early this morning Crazy Egg was officially launched. There has been some great reviews and some not so great reviews. If you have a website I suggest you give it a try for yourself to see what you think. I’m sure you’ll think it’s just as cool as I do.

** Crazy Egg is a product of ACS which is where I work.