Komodo Links: Connecting with Customers, Great Company Blog, and EDU Blogs

Komodo Links is our only post for this week, but its full of quality links for any small business owner looking to grow their business online.


Nick Berliner posted five more solid tips to help you connect with local customers through your website. To read the first five tips, click here.

So what makes a great company blog? Check out Mack Collier's series of posts at Search Engine Guide for some solid insight. All four are definitely worth reading. On a related note, we are in the process of overhauling and upgrading our blog. The final product won't be ready for a few more weeks, but we'll keep you posted.

ZDNet has an interesting post about a newly-launched site called blogs.pi.edu. For the low low price of $50, you can have your own blog with a .edu domain. This has bad idea written all over it.

Check out this clever graphic by Elliance. Search benefits of the Blogosphere....for song birds. ;)

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Komodo Links: Widgets, Semantic Web, and Website Legal Liability

This week's Komodo Links is all about variety. Everything from US law and websites to widgets and the semantic web. Check out the links and have a great weekend.



Greg Howlett wrote an interesting post over at Marketing Pilgrim about online retailer's approach to social marketing and widgets. Take a look at the widgets we developed for Abrakadoodle.

Nick Berliner posted 5 tips for locally focused websites to connect to local customers. The five tips are basically 5 best practices that all locally focused websites should follow.

The CNET News Blog has a great post regarding some interesting legal cases and decisions that could have wide ranging affects on website operators' broad legal shield from lawsuits.

"But a pair of recent rulings by federal district judges have chipped away at that protective shield. If those decisions are upheld on appeal, and if more judges follow suit, Web site operators and Internet service providers may find themselves compelled to police what their users post--or face the unsettling prospect of being held liable for the contents."

The Economist has an informative article about some promising software services and initiatives to help online content publishers mark up their web pages for the semantic web.

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Search Engine Users Prefer Their News, Video, and Image Results Blended...Not Vertical

Search marketing firm, iProspect, published the results of a study regarding user behavior and blended search results. The study was conducted by Jupiter Research and sponsored by iProspect. Blended search results are a combination of traditional web page results and one or more specialized results such as news, videos, or images. See the screen shot below for an example of a blended search result. (click to enlarge)




Over the past year Google, Yahoo, and MSN/Live have launched versions of blended search. The iProspect study revealed that search engine users click on news, image, and video results in blended search results more than they click on results in a vertical only search such as Google News or Google Image search.

Key statistics from the study:

• 36% of search engines user click "news" results within blended search results, while only 17% click a "news" result after conducting a news-specific search
• 31% of search engine users click "image" results within blended search results, while 26% click an "image" result after conducting an image-specific search
• 17% of search engine users click "video" results within blended search results, while only 10% click a "video" result after conducting a video-specific search
• While images are the most clicked type of result after a vertical-specific search, news items are the most clicked type of result within blended search results

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