by Vera H-C Chan Is it Ansel Adams or Uncle Earl? Back in July, a man named Rick Norsigian claimed the photographic find of the decade at a Fresno, Calif., garage sale, where he paid only $45 for long-lost glass negatives from renowned photographer Ansel Adams . The story made international headlines, but naysayers, including Adams' own kin,

If you search Google Maps right now, you'll see little gray generic icons beside the names of businesses to denote their field. Dollar signs for banks, fork and spoon for an eatery, a tiny shopping bag for stores and something that looks like a snail shell for art galleries. (??) In the quest to make every single pixel count, Google is going to change some of those generic icons to tiny logos for popular brands. According to a report by Brandweek ,

Gowalla has launched a new feature called "highlights" which it describes as "little rewards you can give to places that are important to your life". MG Siegler talks about the potential significance of such a feature. "Where this gets really interesting is when you bring the social graph into it," he writes. "So, for example, if I check-in near a spot where a friend of mine asked his wife to marry him, I'll get a message alerting me of that.

Justin.tv has a new Android app for broadcasting live video. This competes with services like UStream and Qik. Unfortunately, it doesn't let you simply watch Justin.tv content like the iPhone app does. Perhaps that will come later. This is the first Android app Justin.tv has offered. "We've been focused on mobile applications since the beginning of this year, starting with the launch of Justin.tv for iPhone," says Caleb at Justin.tv.

In between the announcements about iPods, Apple TV, and a music-oriented social network, Apple and Google's mobile rivalry heated up a little more today. Steve Jobs, while discussing the success of iOS, also tossed out what was likely a veiled insult at Eric Schmidt and Android. Remember how Schmidt said in early August that 200,000 Android devices were being activated every day?

When you see dozens of copywriting formulas promising "the perfect sales page," how do you know which ones to trust? After all, each formula seems to have a successful direct sales superstar behind it, and each one looks like a solid plan. What do you do in the face of these wildly different sales letter styles? The first step is to realize that copywriting is more than any one "formula" " it's an exercise in communication and persuasion. Just like a recipe,

ChannelAdvisors' 2010 Consumer Shopping Habits Survey is out just in time for the holiday season. The free report provides valuable insights for anyone in the ecommerce, B2C space. So, what jumped out at me? Well, it wasn't so much that 59% of those surveyed start their gift search at a search engine -with 28% heading straight to a marketplace such as eBay or Amazon-but what did intrigue me were the starts on just how inconsequential brand recognition is.

Hey, I'd love it if you subscribed to the SEO Copywriting RSS feed! Take a minute and subscribe right now - thanks! Greetings and welcome to this week's SEO copywriting and content marketing roundup! The latest news and links tend to cluster around these topics: the multi-faceted and changing face of search engine ranking, outsourcing vs. in-house content marketing, off-site SEO, and yes,

Today Apple launched Ping. You can get the full story on ClickZ who covered the announcement. Were you expecting apple to launch a music social network today? Click to read the rest of this post.

Yesterday I discussed how Google's Gmail Priority Inbox feature is aimed at combating Microsoft Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 by providing a more efficient messaging experience . I still believe that is one of Google's goals with Priority Inbox. I use Exchange 2007 for work e-mail and Microsoft simply doesn't offer this sort of filtering by importance or even preference. It's not in Office 2010 or SharePoin 2010 either, from what I can tell.