I’m currently working on Alan Moore’s SMLXL engagement marketing and mobile blog and adding podcast features as part of our internet marketing campaign.

I chose the PodPress plugin to manage and deliver his podcasts.

The online documentation for the plugin seemed unailable from the wiki that the author’s website directed me to. So I then did some searches and came up with a number of video tutorials. These are very nice because you can also see the exact options that they are talking about. There appears to be an explosion of video tutorials on the web as many are attempting to add value added service to their web sites.

Here is one of the best I found for PodPress.

WordPress by default is set up with only one ping service. But you can add more to increase your chances of extra traffic. In my convoluted internet wanderings while searching on various WordPress plugins I came across the WordPress Ping Blogging List from Breeze Media. The list and the instructions on how to use it can be found on their website. It is a good tip that will help a lot with SEO.

As a footnote, I’ve now found an more extensive XML-RPC list of sites on OptimizeYourWeb.net.

Sixty percent of chief marketing officers (CMOs) intend to spend more than half of their total budgets on internet marketing in the next 12 months, a new survey has found.

This is likely to result in a decline in expenditure on more traditional channels of marketing, the poll by Rackspace indicated. The survey found that out of 130 marketing bosses, 61 per cent will make the online medium their biggest outlet in 2009, despite 40 per cent saying they have had difficulties in the past due to technical problems, New Media Age reports.

However, the majority of respondents said they believed the effectiveness of social networking campaigns in an online strategy was limited, with only 35 per cent of CMOs stating that they thought the online medium offered the best results transparency.

Furthermore, the survey showed that not enough marketers are considering website performance when rolling out new campaigns – fewer than half (48%) of respondents said that they took steps to make sure their websites could cope with higher traffic levels when running an internet marketing campaign.

Last month, TNS Media Intelligence research found that US advertising spending was on the decline, with a 1.6 per cent drop during the first half of 2008.

However, online advertising was one of the few sectors that bucked the trend, with spend increasing by eight per cent. A recent eMarketer report suggested that spending on search marketing in the UK will rise to more than £2 billion by the end of this year. While in the U.S., a recent study commissioned by the American Marketing Association and carried out by the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University revealed that US business-to-business product marketers intend to increase online spending by 12.87 per cent in the next 12 months, eMarketer reports.

Dean DeBiase of TNS remarked: "It appears marketers are placing an emphasis upon enhanced efficiencies for their brands and the ability to engage with well-defined audiences to ensure ever greater return on investment."

Here are some very sucinct tips for growing your website's reader base.

5 Things That Will Improve Your Web Site Traffic (Plus 1 to Avoid)

Webworker Daily – 9/10/2007

Following a posting by Adrian Lukas, I was reading Web 2.0 is now Business as Usual 2.0. They raise some interesting points. There was one in particular that grabbed my attention.

Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years

The only reason you’ll watch these videos is because you trust me to add value to your lives and not sell links.

 Now, I don't know the poster, and therefore can confer trust to them, but the title was enough for me to watch the three videos on offer.

• Part I Social Graph Based Search by Scobleizer
• Part II Social Graph Based Search by Scobleizer
• Part III Social Graph Based Search by Scobleizer

Robert Scoble is of the opinion that the business models of the large search engines such as Google are so locked into their search methods, that they will not be able to change and keep up with innovations and expections. He points out that current search engine results are suffering from the new industry of Search Engine Optimization. People have become so adept as optimizing their pages, that it is become in difficult to find meaningful results. Even the search engine designers are complaining.

Scoble then goes on to say to say that there is a new future in search, and that being via social networks, such as Facebook. He goes on to explain that a website suggested by a social network friend, and one that has considerable social network behind them carries more more weight. The proof in his argument being that the only way you came to view his discourse was via social networks, he did not publicize it any other way. So the search engines of the future will be driven by social networks, as people come to expect more quality and less marketing pumped at them.

He's got me thinking. 

Increasingly, Google Inc's impartiality is being called into question, especially when it comes to living up to their motto, "do no evil". From complying to requests from the Chinese government to censor search results, to allowing the American military to post video clips of Iraq operations on it's newly acquired YouTube, to the recent doctoring of Google Maps satellite imagery. Up until this week, Google Maps displayed the damage to New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina. Google Maps now displays pre-Katrina imagery of the city. One is left questioning why.

Google Maps returns to pre-Katrina status, leaving some wondering why

One is also left to remember that we are dealing with a corporate giant, and it of course has vested interests. We tend to forgo the thought of any bias, and look to Google as our trusted source of answers and information. How much of our online business is being shaped by the designs of one company? The term "google" even has a place in dictionaries now, a clear mark of the impression Google has on our minds. Is Google really that a good of a search engine, providing us the results we want, or have we now been trained to provide Google with the information it wants? 

When we talk in terms of SEO, it is almost always in terms of what Google wants.