There's a new video series on YouTube that embodies the amazing energy and inspiration inherent in do-it-yourself (DIY) culture. Etsy has created "Handmade Portraits," a series of interviews with artists who sell their work on Etsy's site. These videos not only do a fantastic job of showing the artist's style and telling his or her story, but also they reveal what drives each project and the source of each artist's passion. In one video,

Google's latest move could give everyday users more of an understanding of how it works and modifies their results. It already offers results based on information such as location, previous searches and web history, and now it is to inform users when their results have been modified in this way. In the next few days, users will start to see notifications popping up to notify them their results have been customised. The engine will use IP addresses to customise results,

StumbleUpon recently imposed a site on Darren Rowse, aka ProBlogger, or at least one of his sites. This followed a social link love exercise where everyone was able to connect with liked minded people on the various social bookmarking sites. Once the word had got out, particularly through Twitter, the word on his banning became viral and spread around the blog world extremely quickly. In fact it was one of the fastest viral messages seen in many years.

WordPress is one of the most used blog programs around at present, yet it is one of the least understood. The fact that it is pretty much an 'install and go' program means few user really delve into the power behind the code. Sidebars are a good example. Templates and blog designs come with no sidebars, one, two or even three sidebars.

When you try to optimize your web site for the search engines, one of the most important tasks is to make sure that you know what kind of search queries people out there actually use when searching for the kind of goods, services or info your site provides. Google recently updated its public keyword research tool by adding what seems to be pretty exact numbers for how many people used a particular keyword phrase during the last month.

Over the years I have come across many online businesses that have ranked reasonably well in the search results yet failed as online businesses. The traffic hasn't been sufficient to create sales and the costs of developing their websites exceeds profits. So why do they fail? There are of course many reasons why a business fails, whether it is online or offline. Poor page design, poor products, the list is endless. However,

The three basic PPC campaign components are: Keywords Ad Content Landing Page You cannot run a successful PPC campaign without these three components. But which one is most important? First, keywords are a necessary component of any PPC campaign because you'll never be successful in reaching your target audience without them. Your ad content, however, is dependent upon the proper keyword research and whether or not you target the right keywords.

As the dust settles around Google's knowledge base, Knol, it appears there may be a lot of value for online businesses. Knol's are going to rate well in the search results, that is already apparent. Google's content policy leaves the door open for businesses to publish Knol's on commercial related material including links back to their own sites.

Many website owners concentrate wholly and solely on search engine marketing and little if any time on social marketing. One reason often stated is that it is too time consuming, difficult to measure and doesn't deliver targeted traffic. It can be argued that search engine marketing fits those three criteria as well - but only if done poorly and the same can be said for social marketing. There are counter arguments for each of those points. Time: it can all be relative.

Some bloggers are quite precise in the way they handle their blogs. They perform very tight blog SEO strategies to ensure their blogs rank as highly as possible in the search engines. Sometimes you can go to extremes and find you are harming you blog or your blogs reputation. One tactic I have seen used is to turn comments off on certain posts. The reason? They have crafted their post with carefully placed? keywords and they feel that comments will dilute the keyword ratio.