So instead of sending teams of sales people’s to shows or throwing out thought-leadership content out to the community….they are just developing and developing the software. Their latest inventions is called Adsense Advertiser report.

Witht this report you not only going to see the Adwords campaigns of a specific website, but you can also get a full overview about the publishers. And that is..if you have deep pockets….huge, especially when you want to go your competitors in a pretty aggressive way.  Check out what we found for “Linkedin”:

And in detail:

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The following features are included:

- Number of Backlinks
- Ratio analysis of Image Links vs. Textlinks
- Identification of IP addresses, TLD (Top Level Domain), geolocation information for links
- …

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Once more SEMRUSH is leading the pack with innovation and speed:

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@swardley:  ”This Wired post on cloud from Nov ’11 – where it isn’t wrong (repeating unfounded myths), it is tediously obvious – bit.ly/wWLbsL”

I piled on and Simon posted about another post here.

@swardley: “Oh dear, another of the wired author’s articles - http://bit.ly/vHWPZW – is so full of holes, well, no wonder people are confused.”

Stokes replied here.

@jonst0kes:  ”@cloudbzz @swardley And I’d like to think that one of you could write a real takedown instead of slinging insults on twitter.”

Challenge accepted.

Let me just start by stating the obvious – When a respected editor like Stokes at a very respected zine like Wired puts up crap, misinformation and rubbish, it just confuses everybody. If very knowledgable people like Simon Wardley are calling bullshit on someone’s weak attempt at journalism, then you can bet that something is not right.

Wired Cloudline Post by Jon Stokes – “An 11th Law of Cloudonomics“

Stokes:  ”Don’t build a public cloud–instead, build a private one with extra capacity you can rent out.”

I’m sorry, but if you’re renting out your cloud, it’s public – so you’re building a public cloud and you better damned well know what you’re getting into. Anybody who has a clue about building clouds knows that there are tremendous differences in terms of requirements and use cases – depending on the cloud, the maturity of your ops team, and a whole bunch of other factors. Yes, you can build a cloud that is dual use, but it’s rare and very difficult to reconcile the differing needs. I know of only one today – at it’s in Asia, not in the U.S.

Stokes: “If you look at the successful public clouds—AWS, AppEngine, Force.com, Rackspace—you’ll notice that they all have one thing in common: all of them were built for internal use, and their owners then opted to further monetize them by renting out excess capacity.”

Garbage!  Amazon’s Bezos and CTO Werner Vogels have repeatedly disputed this.  Here is just one instance that Vogels posted on Quora:

Vogels: “The excess capacity story is a myth. It was never a matter of selling excess capacity, actually within 2 months after launch AWS would have already burned through the excess Amazon.com capacity.”

Rackspace built their public cloud as a public cloud, and never had any internal use case that I can come up with (they’re a hosting company at their core – what would they have a private cloud for internally??). For private clouds, they actually use a very different technology stack based on VMware, whereas their public Cloud Servers is built on Xen. But again, their private clouds are for their customers, not for their own internal use.

Stokes: “It’s possible that in the future, OpenStack, Nimubla, and Eucalyptus will create a market for what we might called “AWS clones”—EC2- and S3-compatible cloud services that give you frictionless portability among competing clouds.”

Eucalyptus is the only stack that is remotely an AWS clone – and that’s how it started as a project at UC Santa Barbara. OpenStack is based on Rackspace and NASA Nebula – not AWS clones – and Nimbula is something built by former AWS engineers but is also not a clone. There are some features that are common to enable federation, but that’s hardly being a clone (we call it interoperability). And none of them give you frictionless portability between each other.

Stokes: “In that future, we could see a company succeed by building a public cloud solely for the purpose of making it an AWS clone.”

Huh? That’s about the least likely scenario for success I could dream of. If all I do is build an AWS clone to compete against Amazon with its scale, resources and brand, then I’m the biggest moron on the planet. That would be total #FAIL.

Stokes: “…attempts to roll out new public clouds and attract customers to them will fail because it’s too expensive to build a datacenter and then hang out a shingle hoping for drop-in business to pick up.”

Generally I agree with this, but not for the reasons Stokes gives. Most cloud providers don’t need to build a data center. You can get what you need from large DC providers (space, power, HVAC, connectivity) and build your cloud. But you need to have a reason for customers to consider your cloud, and the idea of “build it and they will come” is a truly lame strategy. I don’t know a single cloud provider today that is operating on that model.

Stokes: “And most cloud customers are drop-in customers at the end of the day.”

Most startups might “drop in” on a cloud. But most enterprises certainly are more mature than that. You don’t drop in on IBM’s cloud (which is pretty successful), or Terremark’s or Savvis’s. Gartner MQ upstart BlueLock is (a) not even remotely an AWS clone, (b) having really great success, and (c) does not want or allow “drop-in customers” at all (you need to call them and talk to a sales rep).

Going forward I expect better from Stokes and the folks at Wired.

(c) 2011 CloudBzz / TechBzz Media, LLC. All rights reserved. This post originally appeared at http://www.cloudbzz.com/. You can follow CloudBzz on Twitter @CloudBzz.

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The plus points of RankRanger

There are quite a few advantages to RankRanger and the first one is that of the enormous amounts of data you can collect. As it searches through over 30 search engines, you will be able to analyze your own as well as your competitor’s rankings, the page rankings of their site, as well as the positioning of their backlinks, inlinks, etc. All of this will help you make your SEO efforts all the more effective. Additionally, this software will be able to pull together all the data you need from similar tools such as Google Analytics and bring it all in one place. It will even show you whether your ranking on a search engine is organic and how your pay per click ads are faring.
The software comes with an extremely friendly user interface. This means that it can take you little under a minute to set up. It is rather self-explanatory. You can easily navigate through the entire software with the help of the tabs as well as the columns and graphs that point out the way. Since the process is largely automated, you will have no issues in generating the info you need. You will also be able to get customized alerts in real-time and monthly reports in the form of PDFs.

With RankRanger, you will be able to organize results based on the campaigns that you are working on. You can have as many campaigns as you want in a single user account. There is the added advantage of having the ability to group all your campaigns in folders and use them how you need. You will also be able to organize the data the way you want, as there is no pre-determined setup.

Another advantage of RankRanger is that it is completely white label. Which means every SEO company that makes use of it will be able to put their own logo on the findings. This way you will not need to let out your trade secrets on how you got your own information and data.

The kind of results you get with RankRanger is quite versatile and there is a great deal of emphasis placed on keyword rankings. Since there are a number of ways in which ranking can be measured, the near perfect results that you get each time will help you monitor yours as well as other rankings and work towards improvement.

The Negatives

There are a few who feel that the RankRanger focuses entirely on the tracking of Keywords, PPC campaigns as well as all those elements that go into the basic structuring of a site. If a website owner is deep into analyzing data, then he will also want to look into other social media such as tweets or even YouTube stats and Facebook. While these features are available with some other sites, it is not with RankRanger.

Review and rating

RankRanger is the perfect tool for those who are just starting out in the world of SEO. The reports are easy to generate and equally easy to organize and track. What’s more is that you can label it with your own logo.

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The FBI seized popular upload site Megaupload.com yesterday.  They took the site down and now own the servers.

I am not an attorney, and I have no opinion on whether or not the MegaUpload guys were breaking laws or encouraging users to violate copyrights through illegal uploading and streaming of movies, recordings, etc.  Right or wrong, the FBI did it and now we need to deal with the fallout.

The challenge is that there were very likely many users who were not breaking any laws.  People backing up their music, photos, websites, documents and who knows what else.  I highly doubt any large corporations would want to use such a site, but I bet a lot of small businesses did.  My focus here is on the ramifications to the enterprise, and how to protect yourself from being impacted by this.

What if the offending site was using Amazon, Google or Microsoft to store their bad content?  I’m sure that the Feds would have had no problems getting the sites shut down through these companies without needing to resort to taking them offline.  But legally could they have gone in and seized the AWS data centers?  Or some of the servers?  Maybe legally, but perhaps not easily for both technical and legal reasons (Amazon has lots of money for lawyers…).

What if the cloud provider was someone smaller, without the financial ability to challenge the FBI?  I mean, those guys usually don’t call ahead — they just bust in the door and start taking stuff.  The point is that IT needs to take some steps that protect themselves from getting caught up in an aggressive enforcement action, legitimate or not.

Recommendations to IT

1. Stick with larger, more legitimate vendors that have the ability to square up with the Feds when necessary – not that will stop them but it could slow them down enough to let you get your data
2. Encrypt your data using your own keys so that even if your servers get taken, your data is secured (of course, that’s just a good idea in general)
3. Back up your data to another cloud or your own data center.  Having all of your eggs in one basket is just stupid (and that goes for consumers who are more likely to just trust a single backup provider like Carbonite (who stated in their S1 offering docs that they expected to lose data and that the consumer’s PC was assumed to be the primary copy!)

Feds, Please Consider Doing it Differently

Perhaps we need some legislation to protect the innocent legitimate users from the enforcement fallout caused by people who are clearly breaking laws.  I don’t understand why, for example, the FBI could not have copied off all of the files, logs, databases etc. but left the site running.  Even watching the traffic that occurred after the announcement could have given the FBI some interesting insights into some of the illegal usage.

Bottom Line – protect yourself because this is a story that could be coming to your preferred cloud someday.

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Krishnan posted a very good article over on CloudAve, and at one level I fully agree that PaaS will be come more of a data-centric (vs. code-centric) animal over the next few years.  To some degree that’s generally true of all areas of IT – data, intelligence and action from data, etc.  But there is a lot more to this.

Most PaaS frameworks have very few actual services – other than code logic containers, maybe one messaging framework, and some data services (structured and unstructured persistence and query).  You get some scale out, load balancing, and rudimentary IAM and operations services.  Over time as the enterprise PaaS market really starts to take off, we may find that these solutions are sorely lacking.

In the data and analytics space alone there are many types of services that PaaS frameworks could benefit from:  data capture, transformation, persistence (have), integration, analytics and intelligence.  But this is too one-dimensional.  Is it batch or realtime, or high-frequency/low-latency?  What is the volume of data, how does it arrive and in what format? What is the use-case of the data services?  Is it structured or unstructured? Realtime optimization of an individual users’ e-commerce experience or month-end financial reporting and trend analysis?

Many enterprises have multiple needs and different technologies to service them.  Many applications have the same – multiple data and analytical topologies and requirements.  Today’s complex applications are really compositions of multiple workload models, each with its own set of needs.  You can’t build a trading system with just one type of workload model assumption.  You need multiple.

A truly useful PaaS environment is going to need a “specialty engine” app store model that enables developers to mix and match and assemble these services without needing to break out of the core PaaS programming model. They need to be seamlessly integrated into a core services data model so the interfaces are consumed in a consistent manner and behave predictably.

Data-centricity is one of the anchor points.  But so is integration.  And messaging.  And security in all it’s richness and diversity of need.

This gets back to the question of scale.  Salesforce has the lead, but they also have a very limiting computational model which will keep them out of the more challenging applications.  Microsoft is making strides with Azure, and Amazon continues to add components but in a not-very-integrated way.  But will a lot of other companies be able to compete?  Will enterprises be able to build and operate such complex solutions (they already do, but…)?

This is a great opportunity and challenge, and I have great expectations that we will be seeing some exciting innovations in the PaaS market this year.

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Seeing SEOMOZ or Majestic up there is something that makes sense, but how the hell did Screamingfrog get in there :

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Anyways…we look forward to seeing several vendors such as Searchmetrics, Sistrix and others go in the back link data game. It’s going to get crowded, which will be great for all the users, who had to suffer quite a bit after Yahoo pulled the plug:

“We have a brand-new Backlinks feature that’s currently in beta. Quite a lot of people have been looking for a backlinks feature in recent weeks, so we’re quite proud to be rolling one out! Although it’s still in beta testing stages at the moment, once we roll it out – it will be rock solid and dead accurate!”

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The Good
The Screamingfrog SEO Spider Tool is a free program unless you want to pay for the developer’s license or the extended version. While the free version does have some limitations, it should be strong enough for small to medium websites, and it lets you try out the program for as long as you like before buying it.

Overwhelmingly, most SEO tools only work on Windows, leaving very few tools for Mac users. Screamingfrog breaks this mold by making their SEO Spider Tool available for both Windows and Mac.

When tested, this software is able to find backlinks and sections of a website that are typically very hard to find for other comparable tools, and it does not take too long to load all the elements of a website. Not only that, but the information loaded seemed rather accurate.

After loading all of the elements of a website, you are able to mix and match elements and then export them into an Excel document for further viewing or analyzing. Not only that, but the information this tool can dig up is very exhaustive, so even experienced SEO auditors should be able to make use of this program.

The Bad
While loading speeds are pretty good, large pages do take a long time to load. If you need a fast program, this may not satisfy your needs as you may have to wait an hour for very large websites to properly finish.

The information presented is not very newbie-friendly. Thankfully it comes with a user guide to help teach you how to use the information, but even still people new to SEO may find this program confusing.

Most SEO tools report on backlink numbers, PaegRank and other similar factors. This program shows the amount of backlinks goes to a website, but it does not show you the total number; they are just laid out in a large list. PageRank and other similar factors do not show up, so this tool may not be useful for people outside of auditing a website for search engine crawling issues. Otherwise there is not really anything bad about this free SEO Software.

Review and Rating
This program gets a 4/5, even though most new SEO people will not get much use out of it. Unlike so many other free programs, this one offers very powerful features, and it has both Mac and Windows support, a rarity among SEO programs.

What really pushes the rating up so high is the breadth of information this program can dig up. Very few similar programs can dig up so much accurate information, making this program well suited for SEO auditors and anyone seeking out crawling issues.

While there are a few problems with how the program works, it is still a very good program. Give it a try, just be sure you read the user manual first so you don’t get confused by the presented information.

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