One of the earliest adopters of Second Life in the PR community was the Text 100 agency who established their virtual presence three months ago.

Some interesting updates from the gmaps crew recently hit the google maps API weblog. Imagine this… view KML files with google maps…

A report published by eMarketer shows that 58% of vacation planners are planning their trips online. Conversely, only 23% of respondents made use of travel agents in their holiday plans.

For a brief time yesterday, TechCrunch speculated that Google had removed its Click-to-Call function on Google Maps, due to prank calls. The post was later updated to confirm the function was still in place.

The tech blogosphere was getting boring for the past few minutes so Emre Sokullu and Richard MacManus saves us from the hell of boredom by talking about the Google OS.

Google AdWords team has found a solution to the most common problem in managing AdWords account -why your ad does not show for a particular keyword. The solution is a one-click feature that provides easy troubleshooting.

For the past week you probably have read an article or seen something on TV about how to cook and carve a turkey. What you probably have not seen is what to do with all the leftover turkey.

Microsoft is taking a play from the playbook of “Dirty Harry” by telling phishers around the globe to,” go a head punk and make their day”. They are working with law enforcement in Europe and the Middle East to catch gangs of phishers.

Walter Mossberg takes a close look at the new private blog tools available from Vox.

The BBC is running an interesting article on the number of qualified skilled people wanting to work in the computer industry, and the lack of said people who are coming through the college ranks.

The headline above may be a bit premature as the claimed email received from MSN search team by a SearchEngineWatch forums member has not been acknowledged as coming from Microsoft. A quote:

I’ve covered this in other articles here, but when I went searching for something to point a customer at I had a little trouble finding it, so we’ll do it here:

If you despise cold weather, crowded shopping malls and parking lots, or if you simply want to shop in your underwear, doing your holiday shopping online will be your savior. That is, if you know how to shop online without being scrooged.

Business people often need encouragement in their startup business phase. Getting that fledgling company ready to fly on its journey to success is a challenging and often lonely journey.

Google has introduced sitemaps for Google News. So if you have a site included in Google News, you can creat and submit News Sitemaps to inform Google about the articles that you wish to be included in Google News.

Firstly the “What” – Cleaning a database is done to:

Muhammad Saleem, a very perceptive blogger who is also a top submitter at Digg and Netscape, has written a post that looks at the problems with “socially-driven” news sites, using as an example a fake news story that someone submitted to Digg about Sony recalling 650,000 PlayStations. The story made it to the front page of the site in only a couple of hours, and stayed there until it was apparently removed. Muhammad sees this as another example of how many people don’t read stories.

Blogger Niall Kennedy delved into the murkiness surrounding a site that hit the front page of Digg and several other social media websites, and found a hugely intertwined mix of link-baiting and keyword-targeting in place that profits from the viral nature of stories that grab attention.

Now that we’re over last year’s holiday marketing trickeryCyber Monday my big toe!it’s time to accept what the marketing gods have lain before us, and make the most of it. Google is leading the charge this year, aggressively pushing its new Google Checkout product with Cyber Monday special promotions.

Darren Rowse reports Technorati has launched a Link Count Widget which allows bloggers to display the number of inbound links for any given blog post.

Idearc launched their local search engine, which is a spin off of Verizon.

Advertising.com announced a deal yesterday that it will collaborate with Japanese company Mitsui & Co. Ltd. to serve the Japanese online advertising market.

There is no doubt in my mind, that ASP.NET is the most powerful and versatile platform for web applications at the moment.

A group blog I write for on occassion is hosting a carnival of customer service and invited the group to contribute.This is a business blog directed towards small and medium sized businesses on issues ranging from legal considerations to SEO. The invite made me think about how SEO can affect a customer’s experience with a site and it’s brand.