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Spokeo appears to be the latest player in the personal data aggregator space, mashing up public data, web search results and social media to generate profiles about people and home addresses.
Spokeo.com - A people search data aggregator
The concept isn’t new, although adding on social media contents further broadens the dimensions of content that could be compiled about an individual. (more…)
I’m contemplating doing a series of posts on here of “Local SEO 101” tips. Each post would outline a specific tactic for ranking in local search results, including local searches under blended/Universal Search as well as with Google Maps and other local search engines.
Local Search Ranking Factors include a lot of pieces including citations from internet yellow pages, newspapers, vertical directories, community guides, business review sites, and more.
Student designers Rahul Mahtani & Yofred Moik from the Industrial Design program at Syracuse University came up with an interesting mashup. The concept is that one could write a note in Gmail, then click to have it snailmailed for a small fee. The paper envelope for the mail would be printed up with route directions from Google Maps.
Google Maps Snailmail by Rahul Mahtani and Yofred Moik
I think the concept flies a bit in the face of the trends away from print media, but there’s something compelling about the idea all the same. I like the envelopes with destination/route map images printed on them, even though I think the actual route information would be of minor-to-no-use for delivery men. And, I think there’d definitely be some market for sending snailmail notes from the Gmail interface.
Pongsocket has some fantastic satellite maps picked out as “Earth Art” from Google. Ex:
Each of the aerial/satellite pictures highlights some extraordinary terrain or landscape coloration and patterns. The pictures have a wonderfully expressionistic feel to them and are well worth browsing.
However, these selections are not truly “Earth Art”, which is a name that refers to manmade constructions which fit into the natural environment in some way, rather like the works of Christo and Robert Smithson.
I’ve collected quite a bit of Earth Art examples for articles about Google Maps for a while now. Here’s Smithson’s famous “Spiral Jetty”:
Pongsocket’s examples are some really good samples of beautiful satellite or aerial photography. But, for it to be “art”, it requires human intervention of some sort – some level of intention.
A few days ago, a New York Times interview with Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman quotes him as saying that they don’t extort companies in return for suppressing negative reviews, but business owners fail to comprehend that reviews may appear and disappear based upon an algorithm that runs in the background.
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Be sure to check out my new post over at SEM Clubhouse on how Google Maps Labs’ new “What’s Around Here?” feature may reveal PlaceRank secrets.
“What’s Around Here?” is a wildcard feature that allows people to view the most-popular businesses and places for a particular mapped area.
Listing out the most-popular places for any given area, without having a keyword relevance or business category factoring in as well, may allow one further insight into the relative weighting of the ranking factors that influence priority within Google Maps listings.
President of Argent Media SEO Company, Dallas, TX, Technologist, Artist & Commentator.
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Wednesday, March 24th, 2010I can’t believe I’ve been blogging for so long, without ever having launched my own blog before! Doesn’t it seem odd? (more…)
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