Have I mentioned how much I love these things? While I spent a few minutes yesterday reading lists like 10 Terrible Comic Book Ads, 7 Most Historic Mighty Morhpin Power Ranger Monsters, and (the one that got me there), 6 Weird Inventions From 2007, none of them compare to Wired Magazine’s Saddest Cubicle Contest. While I have been fairly lucky in my office cubicle experiences, there are those that suffer from a variety of problems. Some cubicles go missing while their owners are in meetings, some cubicles are actually steel containers, and some cubicles are pseudo-cubicles made from filing cabinets.

The best moment was when I clicked on the submission from the cubicle that went missing and the picture didn’t show up until I refreshed. Have to love the irony!

I’m not sure how this has stayed off of my radar, let alone the rest of the Tech sector’s. I was reading an article about Who Needs a Quad Core PC when I noticed a little link at the bottom Is Yahoo Working On A Cell Phone. The title alone came as a complete shock, but when I read the article and found out that Michael Arrington had posted about this on CrunchGear, I was shocked that more of the blogs that I frequent hadn’t at least commented on the topic. While the link in the article for the Northwest Indiana and Illinois Times Newspaper is no longer working, I’ll include this chunk from the InformationWeek post (that was from the NWI Times article):

Yahoo will open the center with 120 employees and has said it plans to add more. Most of the first employees will come from a pool of workers left behind by Motorola Inc. when the cell-phone maker closed a software design center on campus earlier this month.

Yahoo plans to put most of its new hires to work developing better ways to use data the company gathers on its users to refine its search technology and its ability to target users for advertisers, Ojjeh said.

While this used to be a subjective process, it has actually been turned into a science with an easy to follow flowchart of yes/no questions. It’s cute and clever, which always gets bonus points, and it seems as though the site has been around for 10 years, which should give it a lot of cred. Normally I’d enjoy the moment on a post like this, but it’s actually spurred on a second article in this genre of How-to posts - How to tell if a web page sucks Part II: view the exact same link in IE.

While I’m sure Bruce Alderson will lose little or no sleep knowing that IE users like myself are unable to really view the page, let this be a warning to developers to ensure their posts/pages/sites are cross-browser compatible. At Superb, we try and test (religiously) in IE6/7 and Mozilla, with a sprinkling of Safari and IE and Mozilla for Mac.

UPDATE: Of course I go to the page on my home computer and it comes up fine in IE7. Regardless, it’s still a fun thing to go through and the point of ensuring cross-browser compatability stands.

I’m a big fan of these things, but this one has added appeal. I can’t really improve on the words written in this article on Computerworld:

In its relatively short life, the World Wide Web has already made many of our most mundane, tedious tasks quicker and easier to perform. But there are still a surprising number of activities — from helping us buy concert tickets to protecting our privacy — that, for one reason or another, the Web still can’t get right, stirring the ire of even the most patient users.

Ranking number one and two are privacy policies and online forms, something that I’m sure we’ve all struggled with, but everything from buying event tickets to complaints about Web 2.0 gets hit in this article. A nice Friday read for everyone.

It’s probably the single most asked question - how do I rank high on Google (or any other search engine). While I’ve said it before, there’s no clear cut, fool proof way to rankings, there are some simple steps that you can follow. The first step, as obvious as it may sound, is to submit your site to the search engines. It’s suprising how often this is overlooked. While there are a variety of search engines you could submit to, the big three are Google, Yahoo!, and Live search. For other search engines, just do a search for search engines, and then search how to submit to them, but for the big three:

http://www.google.com/addurl/ 

http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx 

https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit 

The second step would be to look for major, respected directories that you can add your business or site to. A good example is DMOZ, the most comprehensive human-reviewed directory. While it can be difficult to get a listing, there are submission guides and articles with tips to help you get through the process. You can look to add your site here. While listing with these types of directories can have positive affects on your search engine rankings, it’s important to avoid spam directories. Do research on where you’re listing your site to make sure it will provide positive link juice. Business.com has been suggested as another example, but I’m not overly familiar with the site or the process of getting listed.

The final step would be to become involved in your industry via blogs and forums. It will take time, and almost a daily effort, but it is one of the most cost-effective ways of getting your name out in the community. If your business works locally, target local directories and blogs, and consider being less industry specific. If your business or website is relevant globally, be more specific to your industry with your efforts.

I’ve said it repeatedly, there’s no clear cut, fool proof method to ranking high on search engines, but there are simple steps that everyone can take to get the ball rolling.