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1. Facebook Takes Another Step Towards IPO

November 24th, 2009 | by Ben Parr

“Facebook, now worth $9.5 billion and rising, may have just taken its next step towards what many believe to be the company’s inevitable IPO. Just as Google did when it went public in 2004, Facebook has opted to adopt a dual class stock structure….”

2. Toys”R”Us Explodes on Facebook With Black Friday Preview

November 24th, 2009 | by Jennifer Van Grove

“Black Friday tends to bring out the animalistic side of shoppers looking for great bargains. Smart retailers are hip to the craze, which has been somewhat of an internet meme ever since October, and they’re using the web and social media as platforms to generate even more interest. Toys”R”Us appears to have found the magic formula for not only building buzz but gaining thousands of Facebook fans by the day…”

3. STATS: Xbox Live Generates One Million New Users for last.fm

November 24th, 2009 | by Barb Dybwad

“Last week Microsoft rolled out a long-awaited social networking integration to the Xbox 360 console that included support for Twitter, Facebook, and CBS-owned social music site last.fm. The early reports are coming in about adoption of the new update, and last.fm is reporting they saw a whopping nearly one million new users sign up for the service via Xbox Live in the U.S. and UK…”

4. Cashmore: Block Google and consumers will lose

November 25, 2009 | by Pete Cashmore

“If Rupert Murdoch gets his way — and he’s not simply bluffing — you may one day need to “Bing it” rather than “Google it” to find news stories online.

Murdoch’s News Corp., which owns the Wall Street Journal and New York Post, among others, reportedly has discussed with Microsoft a plan to remove its newspaper content from Google’s search results. If it’s enacted, news consumers would have to head to Microsoft’s Bing to find stories from some of the world’s biggest news sources…”

5.  Google Profiles Turn Into OpenIDs

November 25, 2009 | by MG Siegler

“As part of its push to go more social, Google has been attempting to unify its various account profiles into one Google Profile. And now it’s more useful. Google’s Brad Fitzpatrick has just tweeted out that Google Profiles can now be used as OpenIDs.

What this means is that you can sign into any site that accepts OpenID simply by using your Google Profile domain. Luckily, a few months ago Google started allowing these profiles to have vanity URLs, like /mgsiegler, instead of the previous /32090329039402903. Chris Messina, a huge proponent of the open web movement, has just sent out a picture of what signing in with OpenID via your Google Profile looks like…”

6. Facebook Marketing: IKEA’s Genius Use of Photo Tagging

November 25th, 2009 | by Christina Warren

“We talk a lot about how big brands are embracing social media as a mechanism to connect directly with customers. Still, it’s much easier to talk about integrating social media into your brand than it is to actually do it.

That’s why IKEA’s recent Facebook campaign is so awesome. The Swedish furniture company opened a new store in Malmo, Sweden and rather than spread the word the old-fashioned way, they decided to go directly to the people using Facebook…”

? Got your own idea for the ‘Social Media Story of the week’ ?

then post it in the comments.

Voting for the weeks stories begins every Friday evening.

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Let the major search engines know about updates to your site by pasting the links below in your browser address bar and substituting the address of your sitemap.

Google

• http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=WWW.YOUR-SITE.COM/SITEMAP.XML

Microsoft Bing

• http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=WWW.YOUR-SITE.COM/SITEMAP.XML

Yahoo

• http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=WWW.YOUR-SITE.COM/SITEMAP.XML

Ask.com

• http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=WWW.YOUR-SITE.COM/SITEMAP.XML

Moreover

• http://api.moreover.com/ping?sitemap=WWW.YOUR-SITE.COM/SITEMAP.XML

Then just hit enter and the engine will be notified of your new sitemap.

You can also resubmit website sitemaps from within the Webmaster Tools section of each Search engine.

Do you know of any others that should be on this list? Comment it below.

Most search providers offer a range of tools to webmasters to use to submit / monitor their inclusion in the engines index. The question is ‘Are these tools any good?’. Do they provide accurate info ? and, when things go wrong, how easy is it to sort out any problems?

Let us know what your experience with these tools has been like or how they could be improved.

Google continues to work to address the threat posed by the real-time search capabilities of services like Twitter and Facebook.

In May, they launched “Search Options” to allow users to refine search results by content type and time (within the past day was the timeliest you could get), but today, they’re launching a “past hour” filter to make its index even fresher.

Along with this key update, Google is rolling out 8 other search options which should be available to everyone at some point today. Those include the ability to search within a specific date range, shopping site filters, a visited pages filter, and an option to see only results from Google’s book, blog, and news search tools.
… [more]

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