After a week of non-writing at STEREO website statistics showed Google search’s contribution for traffic diminished somewhat noticeably - by as much as 20% (approx).

This was deduced from observing the proportions of contributions from two of the top 3 search engines topical for STEREO - Google, Windows Live and Yandex.

Yandex is new here, yet it is perceived as important traffic supplier having provided 1/4 of the Google’s traffic during previous two months. This week the distance between the two was shrinking.

BTW “Add to bookmarks” figure in AWstats felt a bit too: from the whopping 36.6% in the beginning of the month to 34% for the 24 days of November. So you rather have a good reason to suspend writing like this.

Small wonder the traffic in general continued to grow as usual, 1% a day on average - this is the momentum at work.

I switch telephone providers every year or so. As MNP (and LNP for that matter) is not available here, I have to switch actual telephone numbers alongside. In spite of that, I try to keep all of my old numbers - gotta like to stay in touch.

Generally that is attainable (however cumbersome and sometimes expensive) by setting up all the “old” numbers to forward calls to my currently active one. In luckier parts of the world, MNP addresses most of the issues. In addition, a new trend - specialized companies providing an attractive service “one phone number for life” - has been put on rails.

On the face of it, the idea seems very alluring. Probably everybody has gone at least once in his or her life through the horrors of a telephone number change by force.
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Google strives to acquire user data. All those services - Gmail, Earth, Maps, … you name ‘em - are geared to harvest personal behavioral information to “better serve ads to the customers”. G doesn’t even hide its intentions and directly states them in ToS (Terms of Service) pages.
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Very long ago I heard a tale (perhaps from Google itself) about how bad (and dangerous from SEO / SE banning point of view) it is to use extremely low contrast text, i.e. bright yellow text on white background or dark-brown on black. It went like you could be banned from the search engine index immediately for that kind of stunt.

It is pretty clear - by this deceptive tactic you could hide irrelevant keywords from human visitors and present them with some unwanted content of your choice. At the same time those keywords presumably are indexed by search engines making your pages findable by wider audience.
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Крупнейшая американская газета Нью-Йорк Таймс онлайн (13 млн. уникальных посетителей в месяц) отменила плату за доступ к большей части своих статей и архивов в Интернет. Платными остаются только некоторые материалы, защищённые законом об авторских правах, за период с 1923 по 1986 год.

Эксперимент с взиманием платы с веб-читателей оправдал надежды - прибыли с него достигли $10 млн. в год с 227 тыс. подписчиков, которые платили $50 за год или $8 за месяц каждый.
Тем не менее, руководство New York Times online посчитало, что эта бизнес-модель сдерживает рост и в перспективе больше можно заработать на рекламе и свободном доступе.

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В Google Earth обнаружен “недокументированный секрет” - симулятор полётов - Google Earth Flight Simulator.

Взлёт производится с аэродрома в Катманду и дальше можно лететь куда угодно (при наличии соответствующих пилотских навыков, разумеется).
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As you might have noticed already, STEREO.org.ua now offers its most active commentators a “no nofollow” link.

Now, a number of probloggers have been discovered suggesting these tips for efficient promotion (for commentators‘ own sites) with the “Show Top Commentators” feature found more and more often on all kinds of blogs these days:

• Comment under different names on the same blog.
  This way you may get not one, but two (or more) links to your site. This is the biggie.
  (You can also promote different pages of your site, not only the front page.)
• Use a descriptive string in place of your name.
  Personal names aren’t especially descriptive usually, better choices would be sitename or your product/service name.
• and, of course, choose a blog with a higher Google PR - the links you earn will give you greater return on your time investments.

Happy commenting!