But sometimes, it does make you feel that talking to yourself alone does not justify writing – I wont deny that. Battling with that frame of mind against being stuck moderating thousands of junk posts every day – i used to keep all comments in the typical Wordpress scenario . But I want to give this DoFollow idea a try.  I don’t know wether this will incite more people to initiate a discussion or dialogue , wether my musings are more boring or wether this will bring only incerasing amount of viagra and casino commenters.

But it is fixed that I have made this Blog a DoFollow blog as long as it makes sense.

Microsoft has proposed to Yahoo’s Board Of Directors that Microsoft acquire all Yahoo shares for $31, which is currently estimated to be worth $44.6 billion. Yahoo shareholders would get either cash or Microsoft shares (0.9509 of shares per 1 Yahoo share)

As a follow up , Yahoo! inc. accepted :

Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today said that it has received an unsolicited proposal from Microsoft to acquire the Company. The Company said that its Board of Directors will evaluate this proposal carefully and promptly in the context of Yahoo!’s strategic plans and pursue the best course of action to maximize long-term value for shareholders.

This would probably be too early to analyze what this means, what the repercussions would be on the search industry along with the internet / web in general. However, it would not be out of place to mention a few points i can think of :

This is not the first time MS has submitted a bid to acquire Yahoo! , the last time they did was in previous year almost 10-11 months back, when Yahoo! board of directors openly refused saying , it was no time for such offers.
Even with the current low Yahoo has hit , Yahoo.com is still the website with highest traffic in all internet – in every metrics available on the internet, and Yahoo! also has several important acquisitions which fare highly in the current social web – namely, Del.icio.us , Yahoo Answers, Alibaba, Flickr , Facebook to mention a few. Yahoo email, Yahoo finance rates pretty highly on the radar of very many users , ranking over Gmail and similar applications.

On the other hand , Yahoo! has lost lots of ground on the search front , where Google has grown by leaps and bounds and truly a synergy of Yahoo and MSN could be the only force which might even come close. Microsoft on the other hand might gain a good deal by coming close with the Yahoo Publisher Network users and advertisers – which does have a sufficient base and development.

My personal feeling : I always liked Yahoo as a site , as a brand ( which Microsoft does as well, as Steve Balmer said in his note – intelligent minds think alike ), and a place to be. Google never had that and even less in Microsoft . As a person who has been on the net since 1997, i somehow would not feel impressed by a MSFT-YHOO clubbing. But then , it might be in the best of interest of the shareholders of Yahoo – What do you think ?

The pro’s of using Google’s Site Search is that
:

1. It is a tool from Google , internet’s leading search engine
2. Integrates snugly with Google Analytics, thus all reports are available under one account
3. It has a free version – even though with limited capacity

The cons of using Google site search are :

1. The free version would be displaying competitive ads on search results pages , thus one might have to think of using the paid version, which is around 100 USD
2. The tool might be limited for customization , inside your own site

The base idea is to get an idea as to what does your visitor search for once they have arrived inside your site – the data is required for “Keyword research” and “to find visitor intent” . Now since this can be achieved by using a internal search , I would like to try it out on our own first . If this fails , or after trying it on our ( which is at no extra cost), i might then try out by paying Google , to see the difference . Whats more , if I am not wrong , a internal site search , not made by Google , can also plug into to Google Analytics .
We have almost 68 pages inside the web design website , which is not obvious from the homepage … yet , because of our link building and search engine optimization efforts, many people come into the website using various keywords … or already come without any web links – just by word of mouth and try to locate what they came for . If he is web savy , he might navigate to the page he wants or might even choose to use the sitemap … but if he is lost , the internal search will allow him to find anything he wants at any time ( without using messy dropdown menus ). Furthermore, in the videos i mentioned above … a lot was discussed about a websites / pages – bounce rate . I feel many times this bounce rate is caused by a person not being able to find what he thought there is … with a internal search he would now be able to locate pages or try something new . And this way maybe the bounce rate could be minimized .
If you are a web visitor , you might subscribe to our feed to stay updated on the results of this and various other similar tips.

RSS feeds are data feeds that usually contain headlines and excerpts from news stories, blog posts, etc., and a link to the full content.

It is , as the owner Antonne Roundy says, a script which converts RSS headlines and brief description / content into nice looking HTML to fit on your website, which could be made of HTML , PHP etc. I have also used it on the web design website, recently , but there i came across an odd situation.
Initially when i had used CaRP – the free version, which i downloaded when i had much less php knowledge, I could install it myself and configure it as well, without any hitch. Before CaRP , I had also used Magpie RSS feed parser for converting blog feeds at DiscussTV. Carp has provided somewhat much more functionality, includes good documentation along with a Video for help . Yet , even then if you can’t get it to work for your site, let me know – I can help out for a fee. Anyway, after enjoying a free software, I recently went back to the website , after receiving several of it’s subscribed email newsletter. The site , which nicely showcases all the various other scripts and services made me eager to try out their paid Jawfish service – which provides RSS to Javascript conversion.

Why I wanted that ? because even though I want to display external blog feed, i did not want to use any framed page – as i felt , it could be unhelpful for my seo attempts. So the only option was to get the feed via javascript . CaRP website said, the only way i could get this was by subscribing to Jawfish – and here is something I DONT recommend from GeckoTribe.
Why : Because they will provide you with a snippet of code , including their javascript source , and more often than not , there is a lack connection between your server and geckotribe’s server . Quoting the owner , Antonne :

I can only guess that the problem you’re seeing with Jawfish is caused by some recurring temporary internet problem somewhere between your server and mine.

The problem with Jawfish i faced : I had paid them for 1 year of the service and it specifically mentioned that there won’t be any refund .
The solution : As i did not receive any sayable service – I emailed the owner ( as their support ticket section was not manned , and only after waiting for 10 days i understood ), and I received his reply . He promised to refund the money ,

Current Status : I have not yet received the refund yet , but I am hopeful i will.

Current Status with my requirement : I am using free and friendly Carp which i have got working with iframe with the customizations i wanted . Google does successfully crawl iframes / frames , as I found by doing a site:www.websys.co.in.