General

The military rulers in Fiji are very unhappy with Bill Gates and friends at Microsoft. Microsoft has allegedly named a new operating system, Window's Fiji.

Bill Gates will not return the phone called of Fiji Attorney General Aiyaz Sayed-Kaiyum. Sayed-Kaiyum has written to Gates in which he says "Fiji asserts its absolute ownership over the use of the world ‘Fiji’."

As recessionary fear and paranoia grips businesses in the USA and UK, Google does what Google does best, defies the market and paves its own way. Revenue has soared 42% in the first 3 months of this year from $3.66bn to $5.19bn. Profit has risen to $1.31 million, which is 30% higher than the first quarter of 2007.

I thought it was about time I redesigned this site, after sporting a contributed Drupal theme for far too long. I built the new theme from scratch. I was keen to keep the site simple, with minimal colour and a strong head section. It is a CSS only layout, with the left navigation bar coming after the main content in the HTML, which is good SEO practice.

News has broke that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion. Yahoo was once the giant of the Internet but has been struggling since the rise of Google. Microsoft, while dominating the operating system and office software markets, has failed to make any sort of dent in the online world. Microsoft and Yahoo have already been working together in the past few years in an attempt to claw back some market share from Google.

Will Google be worried?

I was very saddened to hear the news this morning that Sir Edmund Hillary has passed away. It is hard to put into words my feelings for this man, but he is nothing short of a hero. He is one of the giant figures in living memory, not only for being the first person to conquer Mt Everest, but also for the tremendous work he has done for the people of his beloved Nepal and his (and my) homeland New Zealand. Sir Edmund is a national icon and a guy that we can all be immensely proud of.

I know I know, its been a few weeks with no blog entries. That is because I have been on holiday! It is the worst possible time of the year for an affiliate to go on holiday, but it was for the wedding of a very dear friend, so a the sacrifice was well worth it. And we had a fantastic time.

I'm back now, so there will be many more blog entries flowing through this site on affiliate marketing, SEO, web design and development and of course, Drupal development.

Today eBizMBA has published a list of the 25 most popular eBusiness websites. They have analysed websites that focus on all aspects of eBusiness, so sites that concentrate on just one aspect are excluded, such as SEOMOZ (which focuses solely on SEO). Factors to determine popularity include the number of inbound links, Google PageRank, Alexa Rank and some US traffic data.

Struggling to think of a new idea? Need new word combinations to find niche markets? Try this little idea generator gadget!

CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, has been interviewed by TIME. It is an interesting and refreshing interview. Facebook is nothing sort of a phenomenon, with 150,000 new users per day and 40 billion page views per month. Mark Zuckerberg is not looking to cash in on its amazing success though, despite being offered $1 billion by Yahoo. Instead, Mark is focused on building the Facebook product.

Read the full Mark Zuckerberg interview.

Google has developed a product that small business can use to add search functionality to a website. Many websites that do not use content management systems do not have search functionality, so users cannot search the content on these websites. Because Google is crawling the web anyway, website owners can tap into their results.