Apple continued to have problems with its new MobileMe service over the weekend and into Monday, with several users unable to access their e-mail.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a summary of complaints from its readers up on its site, and I’ve been hearing from some CNET readers as well about problems accessing e-mail accounts that were once known as .Mac, and now fall into the MobileMe service. Apple’s discussion boards are filled with angry MobileMe customers who haven’t been able to access their e-mail all weekend.

Apple’s MobileMe status page has a note up at the moment that says “1% of MobileMe members cannot access MobileMe Mail. We apologize for any inconvenience.” It’s just the latest in a series of problems that has plagued the launch of MobileMe, a $99-a-year service that lets you access contacts, calendars, and other files from one computer on other Macs or PCs, as well as your iPhone. (link)

How would you respond if you had paid Google $136.11 for advertising that appeared not on quality sites like The New York Times, but on parked domains and error pages? If you were lawyer Hal Levitte, you might file a federal lawsuit in California over Google’s behavior and then seek class-action status for the claim.

That’s exactly what Levitte did on July 11, when his lawyer filed a complaint against Google (first reported by Information Week). The complaint, a copy of which was provided to Ars Technica, argues that Google is guilty of “unjust enrichment” by promising high-quality ad placements and then serving a substantial portion of ads on low-quality sites.

Levitte learned this the hard way in 2007, when he mounted an $887.67 campaign to promote his law practice’s web site. Levitte hoped the click-throughs would generate phone calls, e-mails, and filled-in online forms, but he was surprised at the number of clicks that came from parked domains and errors. According to the lawsuit, 16.3 percent of all the clicks in the campaign came from such sites, but not a single one of those clicks led to a conversion.

“These websites result in a lower conversion rate than standard search traffic or websites with actual content on them,” says the complaint. (link)

Almost 142 million unique users watched video in May, which comScore says is a whopping 74 percent of the total US Internet audience. Users watched an average of 85.3 videos per person during those 31 days for an average of 228 minutes of video. Unsurprisingly, the most popular online video property was “Google Sites”—that is, sites owned by Google like YouTube and Google Video, which made up 35 percent of all videos viewed during that time period. comScore says that 4.2 billion videos from YouTube were viewed in May and made up over 98 percent of the videos viewed from Google’s properties. (link)

The layout for a website is as important as the content that is chosen for the website itself. This is because the layout decides how easy a website is to navigate and how easy it is to find things on it.

You have probably noticed yourself that there are layouts which are fast and easy to use and ones that you spend more time looking for what you want than it takes to obtain the information once you have found it.

Overall people are more likely to visit and return to websites that are easy to use. Also layouts that are easy to use are usually easier to create. There are a couple of different aspects to a website layout. The first is going to be the design. (link)

1. Directory submissions
2. Write articles
3. Make comments
4. Buy links
5. Exchange links
6. Blog
7. Create a viral video
8. Expert content

I see the “sandbox” as being a term that some person working in SEO derived to explain why so many of his client’s new pages appeared in Google’s search results for about one month, before the pages disappeared into the deep recesses of the Google index.

In absence of a better explanation, some SEO person coined the term “Google Sandbox” to explain to his or her customers why a page disappears from the Google index and stays missing for months or years.

According to those who preach the Google Sandbox theory, the lifespan of the Sandbox is six months to one year. That is a lifetime when you are running an online business. (link)

Background - black background with white text, black background with dark text, small tiled images which do not link together to form a smooth background.

Text - centered text, overuse of bold text, flashing text is one of the most annoying features a site can have. This is a deal breaker.

Content - a page full of links or too many links, questionable or controversial content, wrong content or tricking the customer.

Media - too many images or icons, too much flash or video, embedded audio which automatically plays and has not mute.

Whitehat and Blackhat SEO is a comparison that is a take-off from the old cowboy westerns, where the good guys always wore white hats and the bad guys always wore black hats. So, in theory, we can assume that Whitehat practitioners are the good guys of SEO, and Blackhat practitioners are the bad guys of the industry.

But, the truth is a little bit more opaque than this. SEO is never a pure “white vs. black” issue. Just as in Mad Magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy” series, sometimes the white spy whipped the black spy, and vice versa, sometimes the black spy was victorious.

In theory, Blackhat SEO is the type of search optimization that will eventually get your website banned in the search engines. And sometimes it will. (link)

ICANN will press ahead with plans to introduce new top-level domains, including some so-called Internationalized Domain Names written in Chinese and Arabic scripts, its board decided unanimously Thursday.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) began discussing extending the number of gTLDs (generic top-level domains) in 2005. Existing gTLDs include .com, .org or .biz.

Thursday’s decision will not, of itself, create specific new gTLDs: The board has simply approved a policy proposal that will form the basis of a set of rules for creating and managing new gTLDs.

Until now ICANN has kept close control over the creation of TLDs, but Thursday’s vote could allow the creation of as many new gTLDs as there are domain names under the .com TLD today — over 70 million. It could open the way for big corporations to run their own domains — france.ebay instead of ebay.fr, for instance — or for linguistic communities to create transnational domains on the model of the existing .cat domain for speakers of Catalan. (link)

If you’re reading this blog you know having a page rank tool built in to your browser (or having an add on or toolbar) is extremely useful. As well if you one of the many people who jumped on the Firefox 3.0 download bandwagon you probably noticed Live PageRank no longer works. Well someone’s gone ahead and finally released a compatible Firefox 3.0 add on and not from the original creator. Download it if you need it.

Live PageRank add on for Firefox 3.0