I was just getting used to Web 2.0.

Want to know what Web 3.0 is going to be about?

So did an audience member at the Seoul Digital Forum back in May when he asked Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt to define Web 3.0. Schmidt’s first response was that Web 2.0 is nothing more than “a marketing term” – which I partly agree with. I think Web 2.0 used in the mass media to create hype is a marketing term. But when I consider Web 2.0 from a user’s perspective (gotta watch this video as well), I can honestly see the difference from the web of yesteryear.

But Web 3.0 already. My oh my!

Schmidt gave a great answer, which you can watch in the video below. What his answer boils down too is much easier application building along with much more robust access to data. And, of course, that data will be stored in ‘the cloud.’

Take a look at the 2 minute video and tell me what you think…

[youtube T0QJmmdw3b0]

You might know that Jeffrey Veen has been working at Google for more than year. But what has he been up too?

Well, he’s been part of the team that has been redesigning Google Analytics. You can read about the whole new experience with Google Analytics to get an idea of what’s changing. Or read a great overview from Avinash Kaushik. Avainash has a ton of screen shots of the new interface, highlighting a number of new features. Last thing, take a tour of Google Analytics new features and design – definitely worth watching.

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Was cleaning out some old bookmarks last night and ran across Nirmal T V’s post about popuri.us. Seems someone was trying to tell me something because I had recently run seen popuri.us at Diary of My Life and Untwisted Vortex.

What is popuri.us? It’s a single site where you can check a number of your blog’s rankings and popularity stats, including:
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I use Google for a lot of my search needs – sites, blogs, images, video, mapping, addresses, reviews, etc. The list goes on.

But I’ve always wondered if Google is always the best option.

Well Phil Bradley has compiled a list of what he calls Finding What You Need With The Best Search Engines. I’ve looked over the list and found the usuals like Google, Yahoo! Search and MSN Live Search for keyword searches.

But there’s some other gems in the list. Like using Encarta and Answers.com for facts searching or GooFresh for new additions to Google. KartOO, of course, gives some beautiful, visual search results (try it if you haven’t) and can be fun to use. I’d never seen Quintura before, but I can see its usefulness. It displays search results with a tag could of similar search keywords.

There’s lots of good stuff on his list. Much you’ve probably seen but some I’m sure you haven’t. So take a look, and let me know what gems you find.

By the way, he plans to continue updating this list on a regular basis. Maybe this is a resource to bookmark.

I’ve been talking a bunch about removing the rel=nofollow code from links made in comments. If your remember, nofollow keeps Google and other search bots from following the links made in your comments – meaning, no link love to your commenters.

Well, Andy Beard started the campaign to get people to remove nofollow. And I, and number of other bloggers have picked it up.

Now Andy has found a post that explains how to remove nofollow from Movable Type. Take a look.

With the post on removing nofollow from Blogger, that leaves us to work on TypePad. Mike Sansone and I thought we had a solution for TypePad, but it hasn’t tested through with credited link backs in Google or Technorati. He’s still working on it.

So please, pass the word to Movable Type users. And, in general, keep passing the word about removing nofollow from your comments. And join the growing list of members in the Do Follow Community on BUMPzee.

For a few weeks I’ve been on a campaign to rid the blogosphere of the dreaded nofollow attribute. Of course, I didn’t start this. But I’m convinced that nofollow must go. So much so that I’ve been asking everyone I know to spread the word.

A few days ago, Randa Clay had the great idea of creating a badge. Great idea, I thought. Why didn’t I think of that? Well, the great thing is, she has.
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Finally, I’ve removed ‘nofollow‘ from comments.

As a blogger, or website owner in general, you want links coming back to your site/blog. Links to your site is one of the major ways to increase your Google ranking. That’s why in the blogosphere, link love is high currency.

If you knew that, then you likely think that each comment you leave on a blog would give you more links to your site or blog. Most often, though, this is not the case. Most blogware has a little piece of code it attaches to outgoing links from comments called a ‘nofollow.’ What does nofollow do, well, it tells Google bots not to follow links off your blog. Hence, no link love and no Google Juice.
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I get asked often…”How do I find topics to write about on my blog?” The answer is pretty simple…I use my feed reader.

What I’ve done is identified a number of topics that I want my blog to focus on. I then search for those topics in Google Blog Search. Once the search results come up, I subscribe to the RSS feed for that specific search. Now each time I update my feeds, I get an update of the most recent and relevant results of from a search for that topic.

This may not seem like such a big deal. But think of it this way…if I want to seach for 10 topics each day to write about, I would need to go to Google Blog Search, search for each topic, read through the results, click on interesting links to read about the post and then somehow capture the link for that post for future use. And, I’d have to do that 9 more times to search 10 topics.
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A few weeks back I got into ‘the 2000 Bloggers.’ It sounded like a really neat idea to build some links and gain some traffic to my blog. And it worked, at least to some degree. Looking at my site stats in Google Analytics, it appears I have gained some traffic from the 2000 Bloggers.

But the place that it made the most impact was on my Technorati ranking. Every day I watched my ranking in Technorati change; and change a lot. Some days I’d jump 30,000 positions. It was amazing. And for a few weeks, I was quite excited. As of today, my ranking is somewhere around 26,000 – a long way from where I began four short weeks ago at 1,618,000.

At first, I didn’t put together that my jump in rankings had anything to do with the 2000 Bloggers. Every day I was writing posts and commenting on a number of other blogs. I figured my ranking was due to my efforts. Until one day early last week I looked more closely at who was linking to me. To my surprise, the great majority, more than 75%, were from the 2000 Bloggers.
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