Oppose SOPA and PIPA

It's time to put your PROXY socks on. As I mentioned before this is going to get ugly. Two new pieces of legislation, Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate, and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House have been introduced to stop online piracy. Unfortunately, this type of legislation will introduce harmful regulations to online businesses, and amounts to overall government sponsored censorship.

While good intentions may apply to this type of legislation, the implementation will be disastrous to the Internet and to small business. I highly encourage you to oppose this legislation by writing your representative in Congress. Keep the internet free and clear of additional government regulations.

As you may have noticed today many popular Internet sites staged a "virtual strike" today offering limited or no web service in opposition to SOPA and PIPA. This included Wikipedia, MoveOn, Reddit, Mozilla and Google.

Localized Searches

You probably noticed that some of your searches in Google have started to magically show results in your city even if you didn’t specify a city. This is due to a somewhat new feature in Google whereby they are detecting your location automatically. Someone in San Diego doing a search on “web hosting” is going to find EPhost in one of the top positions. However, the same search originated in Indianapolis, Indiana would likely yield different results.

Should I have two websites or one for SEO reasons?

I met a criminal defense attorney while camping at San Elijo State Beach who asked me whether or not it is better to have a few smaller websites rather than one for search engine optimization reasons. I am often asked this question so I thought I would blog about it.

Google Caffeine

As many of you know Google Caffeine is already rolling its way across data centers and will culminate to full deployment sometime after the holidays. Google Caffeine is a new indexing structure for Google and aims to improve the user’s searching experience by serving up new and more relevant search results. New “weight” will be placed upon certain key website elements to better rank websites and take emphasis off of other elements. Ideally, this will produce better, more accurate, search results. It’s speculated that improvements to Yahoo and especially Bing, which may be taking away some of the search traffic, is the reason behind the change.

Counterintuitive Ideas

The definition of counterintuitive is “contrary to what common sense would suggest”. It’s also the topic of this blog post about business and the economy. I first heard the term, in the context of the current economy, at my annual corporate meeting with my lawyer and C.P.A. I raised some concerns about the economy and advertising during this time and my lawyer, an older gentleman and the head of a massive law firm, suggested that advertising now, although counterintuitive, is the right course of action. It struck a chord with me and wanted to share these insights with you.