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How Much Can you Trust Google With Your Email?

Like many people, I've been using Google's hosted email solution for some time. Google is pretty good at filtering spam, so (again) like many others, I let my email go to Google, have them filter the spam, and then pull it down via Thunderbird. When I notice a lull in email, I usually think something is up, and today upon logging in to the hosted email account directly, I see dozens of legitimate emails in the spam folder, including my Google Analytics report from Google themselves. Wonderful.

Now my spam folder is thousands of messages large, so it's not really a good use of time to go through them all looking for false positives, but I'll have to sample the last few days at least.

Conspiracy threories aside (I've never bought into any of the Google conspiracy theories I've heard), the question that has to be asked is at what point does a free service like this become a liability to your busniness? It's definitely made me think twice about hosting any more domain email accounts with them.

I just thought I'd warn some of you about my experience and I'd be interested in hearing if you've experience the same issue lately.

Content Is King, But Marketing Is Queen...

Problogger.com recently posted 13 Tips on Building a Profitable Blog, derived from Gary Vaynerchuk's Blog World Expo keynote. In this article, one line in particular struct a chord with me:

content is king but marketing is queen and the queen runs the household.

I really like this and I obviously could not have said it better. This statement concisely summarizes what I was trying to say in my recent post, entitled "Debunking The 'Build It And They Will Come' Myth For Websites, and Is Content Really King?."

In non-analogy terms, content creation alone is usually not enough to create a hugely successful blog or web site, and the content you do create should be part of and integrate with your SEO and marketing efforts. Marketing is usually what really puts a site over the top in success. Sometimes the marketing and content are one in the same (e.g. linkbait, controversial articles, viral content) and other times the marketing is totally separate.

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Miss Teen USA 2007 South Carolina For V.P.?

Is it just me or does this:

remind you of this?:

Oh wait, I just noticed someone actually posted the latter as a response to the former on YouTube, so I guess it's not just me.

I really don't care for politics on any level, but Palin sure isn't doing her party any favors with a number of comments I've heard.

P.S. 45 minutes of tonight's debate is about all I could take.

More Tips To Improve Web Site Performance

I was catching up on reading one of my favorite web development/performance related sites this weekend, High Scalability, and read some more gems on improving performance (perceived speed) of your web site. There's this massive article about latency to start, in which they state:

Latency matters. Amazon found every 100ms of latency cost them 1% in sales. Google found an extra .5 seconds in search page generation time dropped traffic by 20%. A broker could lose $4 million in revenues per millisecond if their electronic trading platform is 5 milliseconds behind the competition.

That will get your attention. I think the quote itself confuses the matter of latency with load time, and one must wonder how perceived load time of partial page rendering fits into the equation as well.

The article goes on to define latency and touch on a number of related topics and links to articles that go more in depth on various facets.

Many of these points are related to and boil down to Yahoo's Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site, of which they've added another 20 to the original set of 14.

Continue reading "More Tips To Improve Web Site Performance."

Web Typography and Fonts Still Being Discussed

With all the recent activity around typography on the web and font embedding, this College Humor video (after the jump) was timed perfectly (or at least my friend sending me the link the other day week). I can't believe that someone would put this amount of effort into a video about fonts, but it is very well done and chock full of geek humor.

Continue reading "Web Typography and Fonts Still Being Discussed."