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Can Your Business Systems Handle Creative Customer Service?
I don't usually eat dairy and rarely have it at home. I really enjoy ice cream, however, and occasionally will go to a good ice cream store for their high quality treats. In the western suburbs of Chicago there is a dairy run by a family that has several stores, and more recently they've expanded into other suburbs and into Chicago. When I stopped at one of their stores recently, I asked for a sundae with a little chocolate sauce, a little caramel sauce, and a little marshmallow topping.The girl behind the counter looked at the cash register/computer with a furrowed brow as she tried to figure out how to take my order. Next, she conferred with two other teenage employees who were behind her making sundaes and other ice cream concoctions. There was much whispering. After about 30 seconds she returned to the counter and said to me, "We can't do that. Our computer won't let us."Your computer won't let you?"Yeah,"

are linked to express distrust or even disgust might be ranked higher than positively endorsed pages for the same query.There is another approach that would have to be reconsidered. Now if page A links to page B, it propagates a fraction of its authority value to B. If there is a reciprocal link, some authority can be returned to A, so that both pages benefit from the mutual trust. But consider now that a highly ranked page A distrusts page B. Page B also adds a distrust link to A in revenge. Should we decrease the ranking of A because a distrusted page B also negatively links to it? Or should we stop considering any opinion from B?

A Starbucks Coffee Franchise Of Your Very Own
I don’t know what it is with some people, but when an idea becomes a brand and then branches out to become a chain, a lot of folks turn their backs and shun whatever or whoever it is that has become so successful. I've seen this with Starbucks coffee shops of recent years but despite the moans and groans about how naff and overpriced the coffee is, the chain seems to go from strength to strength. In fact a good buddy of mine has just entered into a Starbucks coffee franchise and I can fully understand his reasons for doing this.When I was a youth, there weren’t the trendy coffee shops and wine bars to hang out in like there are today. In fact if you wanted to grab a coffee while you were out it was usually a mug of Nescafe original in some greasy caf?. Oh how things have changed since then! A Starbucks coffee franchise is more than just a place to grab a coffee though. Surely you must have seen students, and businessmen alike hooking up to the

The idea behind the popularity ranking algorithms is that, by linking to a page, you imply that that page deserves attention. Search engines use links to determine the authority of pages in topics described by the link anchor text. The problem is that every link is considered as a positive endorsement with no regard to the real intention of the linking person. There is no effective way for a search engine to distinguish between positive and negative endorsements in links yet.

The earliest web-like development by Tim Berners-Lee - the Enquire program – allowed the usage of various types of relationships between documents, such as similar-to, part-of, or made-by. However in his later work on the World Wide Web and HTML Tim Berners-Lee has abandoned multiple-types of relationships for simplicity. Flat links with no relationship information have been used ever since.

This article was originally published at Trust Problem in the Link-Based Popularity Ranking.

Link Abuse

The absence of this feature has been widely exploited by people trying to manipulate search engines results since the introduction of the link-based popularity ranking. The most notable examples are link farms, which used to flourish just a couple years ago. Search engines had realized the problem of abuse and started penalizing link farms and sites that link to them. But still with the anchor text and the host page’s own authority being the only parameters used to evaluate the link impact, there exist many other ways to manipulate rankings. By using anchor text large web-users communities can perform the infamous Google-bombing: see ‘miserable failure’ search results in Google. And this can be employed against other search engines as well, e.g. ‘друг народа’ (‘people’s friend’) query in the Russian major search engine Yandex.ru returns V.Putin’s bio on the top of the results

Adding Semantics Info into Link Markup

The problem lies in the very nature of HTML. Designed as a document structure markup language it is ineffective for describing the semantics of a document. Some extensions had to be introduced into the link markup to make it able to reflect the nature of the relationship to the linked document. One example is the rev attribute. This attribute is used in the VoteLinks microformat proposed by the Technorati.com to allow users to express their opinion about linked blogs. The rev attribute in the VoteLinks format can have the following values: ‘vote-for’, ‘vote-abstain’ and ‘vote-against’, thus reflecting positive, neutral and negative opinions. This makes it possible to augment or reduce the authority of the linked document respectively.

The rel attributes values such as ‘friend’, ‘colleague’, ‘sibling’, ‘neighbor’ or ‘spouse’ allow a different approach, reflecting the nature of the relationships between two documents, rather than the opinion. This approach is also used by Technorati.com and might have certain value within a community of bloggers.

None of these approaches is currently used by any major search engine. The rel attribute value ‘nofollow’ is the only one to be taken into account by Google, MSN and Yahoo. This value is intended to show that the linking person is not certain about his approval of the linked document. The search engine crawlers are supposed not to follow such links, but many webmasters report that actually they still do. However it is possible that such links do not propagate authority.

Possible Impact of Trust Links

What if search engines were able to determine the trust or distrust nature of a link? Would the existing ranking be significantly different? Currently inbound links show the measure of attention to a certain page. Therefore even those pages which are linked to express distrust or even disgust might be ranked higher than positively endorsed pages for the same query.There is another approach that would have to be reconsidered. Now if page A links to page B, it propagates a fraction of its authority value to B. If there is a reciprocal link, some authority can be returned to A, so that both pages benefit from the mutual trust. But consider now that a highly ranked page A distrusts page B. Page B also adds a distrust link to A in revenge. Should we decrease the ranking of A because a distrusted page B also negatively links to it? Or should we stop considering any opinion from B?

Shifting Goal Posts
If transport industry is a game of soccer, there are sure signs that the goal posts are shifting*. (Note: for better viewing experience with appropriate colour highlights, please refer to original article, url attached)Goalpost #1: Previous goal post (1996): LTA White PaperWe only started MRT operations in 1987. We cannot grow a comprehensive network over the next few years. However we will build up the network incrementally, properly sized to match our city of the future. Over a decade or two, the results will be significant and clearly visible. Our target is to have as high as percentage of trips on a quality public transport system as in Zurich, where 75% of trips into the city centre are by public transport.Current goal post (2006): Speech by Raymond Lim, 23 OctThe aim is to increase the proportion of trips taken on public transport during the morning peak period from 63% today to at least 70% over the n

sence of this feature has been widely exploited by people trying to manipulate search engines results since the introduction of the link-based popularity ranking. The most notable examples are link farms, which used to flourish just a couple years ago. Search engines had realized the problem of abuse and started penalizing link farms and sites that link to them. But still with the anchor text and the host page’s own authority being the only parameters used to evaluate the link impact, there exist many other ways to manipulate rankings. By using anchor text large web-users communities can perform the infamous Google-bombing: see ‘miserable failure’ search results in Google. And this can be employed against other search engines as well, e.g. ‘друг народа’ (‘people’s friend’) query in the Russian major search engine Yandex.ru returns V.Putin’s bio on the top of the results

Adding Semantics Info into Link Markup

Possible Impact of Trust Links

Essentials to Customer Loyalty
Every business, whether online or offline, needs customer loyalty in order to be established for the line of work it is trying to be known for. All businesses work hard not just to get a good impression but to make a lasting one of reliability and value that makes them acquire the hard-earned customer loyalty. Especially with industries that are mainly service oriented, having customer loyalty is synonymous to bigger earnings and more opportunities to grow. There are different essential that can pave the road to customer loyalty for businesses.Link up with other subscriptions If you are still new to the business, linking up with other more well-established websites related to what you are selling will help you get noticed. The loyal followers of what you are linking up to may also link up on you and conjoin thoughts of your website to be related to that which they faithfully subscribe to. If you manage to invest a certain amount to advertise your si

ery in the Russian major search engine Yandex.ru returns V.Putin’s bio on the top of the results

Adding Semantics Info into Link Markup

Possible Impact of Trust Links

Seven Tips To Get Your Press Release Noticed
If you're seeking to promote yourself or your new business on a limited budget, you probably cannot afford the benefit of hiring a public relations agency to work on your behalf - at least not in the beginning.You've probably spent considerable money to get to the point of your grand opening or new product release, which could easily fail if nobody cares that you exist.The cost of hiring a marketing professional is usually worth your money as what you're ultimately purchasing is results. In theory if they don't deliver, you don't pay.However, there are no guarantees. It is probably easier, less time consuming and less stressful, to pay a professional to perform this work for you. But if you don't have a lot of cash as you start out in business, you can still get people and publications to notice you without spending a fortune to hire a public relations agency.If you've been down the solo road of self-promotion in the past and wer

>, ‘sibling’, ‘neighbor’ or ‘spouse’ allow a different approach, reflecting the nature of the relationships between two documents, rather than the opinion. This approach is also used by Technorati.com and might have certain value within a community of bloggers.

Possible Impact of Trust Links

How to Take the Mystery Out of Domain Name Meanings
Domain Name has various meanings. It could be the name entered by the users in their address bar of the computer and then looked up in the global Domain Name System-DNS to visit the particular site. All domain names have their own assigned IP address and the DNS translates the IP address into words. It could also be a unique address on the Internet referred to as Internet address. Domain names are also referred to as Uniform Resource Locaters or URLs.In DNS a label could be the digits, hyphens and each string of letters used between the dots. There are certain rules that are applied for these valid labels which have been changed with time. Before labels had to begin with a letter and end with a letter or digit .Any intervening characters may be letters, digits, or hyphens. They must be between 1 and 63 characters long. Now they can begin with a digit and can have internal underscores but no domain name can be all numeric. These rules depend on the do

To determine the effect of the search engines’ ability to distinguish between positive and negative opinions in web links Paolo Massa and Conor Hayes have conducted an experiment using the linkage data from the Epinions.com website. Epinions.com is a web community where users can write their opinions on movies, books, goods and services. It is also possible to rate to use other users’ reviews, thus expressing trust or distrust. In the experiment’s model, users are considered as web pages, while their ratings are seen as incoming links. The 20 top ranked users were sorted by their total number of ratings (positive and negative) and by the number of the positive rankings only. The total number of rankings shows the attention to the user, which is similar to the link popularity of a web page. Using statistical methods P. Massa and C. Hayes have determined the alignment factor between the attention ranking and the trust ranking. The value is 0.8 and it should be noted that since people tend to assign positive ranking more frequently than negative (often a disappointed user would simply not rate ate at all) – the actual alignment value can be even less.

However trust linking would be ineffective in the web. The introduction of trust/distrust linking would create wide opportunities for abuse, and not just from gray spammers. Any highly-ranked website would be able to destroy authority of any less ranked competitor with a power of a single link! While in relatively small communities of bloggers (Technorati.com) or reviewers (Epinions.com) such wars can be prevented by human moderation, the existing technology still doesn’t allow search engines to perform a similar task in the Web.

References:

Massa, P. and Hayes, C. 2005, ‘Page-reRank: using trusted links to re-rank authority’. Istituto Trentino di Cultura.
Ntoulas, A., Cho, J., Cho, H.K., et al. 2004, ‘A Study On The Evolution Of The Web’. University of California.

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Imagine standing on the field of a stadium packed with 100,000 people. Every one of them is a potential customer, and in front of you a microphone waits. Your task is to deliver your sales pitch to every single person there. As you reach for the microphone, the murmurs subside. The stadium is silent. The vast field and towering stadium consume you like a hollowed crater. You wonder if your nerves will be heard in the echo of your words.

Telemarketing success will be greatly improved if you adopt a process. If you want to greatly improve your effectiveness then take a few minutes prior to picking up the phone to plan what you want to achieve - particularly the outcome. You may be very surprised with the results.

Great tips on starting a vending machine business... Business owner with over 10 years experience offers time and money saving advice!

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