While the world’s economies reel and Wall Street struggles to keep afloat, how will the online world be affected? Whether you’re a pro-blogger, an Internet marketer, or an online retailer, the state of e-commerce is an important barometer (more purchases means more ad spending, and more profit for everyone). Knowing this, E-consultancy came out with its Online Shopping and Credit Crunch Survey Report a while back. Surprisingly, the results show that online spending will suffer less than traditional retail.

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Being a compulsize AdSense checker, I look at my stats almost every hour, and just now I found that I couldn’t log in. Adsense gives me an error “UsernamePasswdNotMatch” in Opera. In fact, they do match, and yes, I’ve checked if caps lock was on and it’s not. On IE8, it gives me an Error 403. I did a quick Twitter search to see if other people were experiencing the same thing, and lo and behold, I wasn’t alone:

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The UN communications chief has estimated that by the end of 2008, 61% of the world’s population will be using mobile phones – an equivalent of about 4 billion people. Thanks to low cost, better infrastructure, and the human need to connect, mobile phones outnumber personal computers by a mile. We don’t only use them to call, we also text, take photos, play music, watch videos, and even access the Internet – albeit crudely. Several tech evangelists have predicted that the mobile web will be the next great frontier, but as industry players know, that’s easier said than done.

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After Yahoo! signed the controversial advertising deal with Google a few months ago, some critics denounced the company for virtually hanging the glove and giving the online advertising monopoly to Google. However, with the recent launch of Yahoo!’s new advertising platform called APT, Jerry Yang & Co. seem to be keen on proving the naysayers wrong.

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Google never ceases to amaze the webmaster community. The newest controversy involving the most popular search engine started when the team at the Official Google Webmaster Central Blog posted an article about dynamic URL rewrites:

One friend was concerned about using dynamic URLs, since (as she told us) “search engines can’t cope with these.” Another friend thought that dynamic URLs weren’t a problem at all for search engines and that these issues were a thing of the past. One even admitted that he never understood the fuss about dynamic URLs in comparison to static URLs. For us, that was the moment we decided to read up on the topic of dynamic and static URLs.

After several explanations on the subject, they drew these conclusions:

Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That’s our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems.

(…) Although we are able to process this URL correctly, we would still discourage you from using this rewrite as it is hard to maintain and needs to be updated as soon as a new parameter is added to the original dynamic URL.

And this was when the problems began. Reactions among webmasters, SEOs, programmers and Internet marketers have been varied, but most of them can be summarised in the following points:

• Some people say there’s nothing wrong about Google team’s statements. For an experienced webmaster or programmer this whole URL rewriting matter can look irrelevant. But for a beginner it would be wiser not to play with URL rewrites indeed, because they could do something wrong, thus affecting their Google rankings.
• Others have gotten annoyed at that article. Some even seem to have taken offense at it. They claim that this time the Google team just put up a bunch of silly stuff and that Google underestimates webmasters. It’s been also implied that Google once again is trying to tell people how they are supposed to run their own businesses.
• Regardless of their views on this subject, everyone seems to agree that Google team’s article looks confusing and poorly-written.

What do you think? Will you stop using dynamic URL rewrites because Google said you probably won’t know how to deal with them?

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If it’s true the the Internet is nothing more than a waste of time, then who else has the most idle hours to kill?

A survey conducted by Ipsos Mendelsohn between March to July of this year revealed that the higher a person’s household income is, the more likely he is to spend his time online. Additionally, the Internet is by far the most preferred media by the rich, with television and radio coming trailing far behind.

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The famous “Google duplicate content penalty” is a permanent subject of debate among webmasters, bloggers, SEOs and the general Internet marketing community. No wonder the official Google Webmaster Central Blog publishes posts on this topic from time to time. A new one has been recently released and apparently it was meant to put an end to this debate. If it will succeed or no, only time will tell, although I have the feeling that it won’t.

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While online advertising as a whole has been seeing immense growth, its video component has always lagged behind. However, there are signs that this may be changing soon. Recently, video ad company LiveRail released their quarterly report on the state of online video advertising. They predict that industry spending in the US alone will go past the $1 billion mark in 2010. While that’s still a small fraction of the $36 billion total projected online ad spending for that year, it represents a net increase in market share for video.

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Twitter has recently added the nofollow tag to all links left on the users’ bio field. This change has been the object of much controversy in both the SEO and the Internet marketing industries. Why? Because many suspect Twitter to have succumbed to Google’s pressure.

How did this story begin?

Everything started when David Naylor published a Twitter backlink tip on his blog. That same day, Matt Cutts — yes, you read it right — sent an email and a twit to Twitter’s co-founder Evan Williams, regarding Naylor’s post.

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Google has just taken one more step in its quest for world domination: now it has its own web browser, named Chrome. According to the Official Google Blog:

We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.

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