My friend Nick Byng invited me to join him in running Birmingham half marathon on the 26th of October, I accepted his invitation and registered, that was the easy part. The challenging bit is to be fit enough to run 13 miles, I am doing quite well so far, I am sure I will manage it, I will try avoiding breaking the world record for the person who run 13 miles at the slowest possible time.

I am hoping to use the marathon to raise money for Amnesty international, you can sponsor me by donating to Amnesty International via this page.

While you are here, why not visit the page Nick put up for his own run and sponsor him as well if possible.

Skeptics may argue that the announcement by Yahoo of its new advertising platform; Advertising Management Platform or AMP for short, is another way to forestall Microsoft battering down the boardroom doors, other could argue differently and say that the announcement was Yahoo’s want of strengthen its online advert dominance which will come under server test from Google, because of Google’s recent acquisition of Double Click. Regardless or what skeptics or anyone else might think, Yahoo announced AMP today, though AMP is still in development, when its completed, it will enable Yahoo’s publishing partners to place advertisements on Yahoo! as well as other sites in the Yahoo Advertisement Management Platform. AMP is also expected to enhance ad-relevance for advertisers, simplify online marketing for Agencies, Publishers will receive better revenue and Ad networks will be able to connect to advertisers, publishers, agencies and other ad-networks easily. Wether AMP will be rollout anytime soon remains to be seen.

In a statement not unlike the plan set up my Microsoft some years ago when it presented its Xbox gaming console and promise to make it one of the leading gaming platform in the world, Kevin Johnson, president of Microsoft’s platforms and services division set out his companies aim to be one of the top two players in the online search engine advertising marketing in the next three to five years.Kevin Johnson, speaking at a UBS investor conference unveils Microsoft’s aspirations over the next three to five years to increase the company’s share in Web search, page views, percentage of time on the Internet and percentage of advertising dollars.

Microsoft has been been very active in this area of its operation by improving its search results, rebranding some of its online services and the most significant of all, acquisition of Aquantive digital advertising company for almost £3 billion in August of this year.

So far, non of Microsoft’s efforts seem to have closed the gap on the two leading companies in the search engine marketing advertising field; Yahoo and Google. Microsoft’s share of online search remains 10%.

At least two major new features are arriving in Google’s webmaster tools console according to information from the SES San Jose conference and the official Google webmaster tools blog.

The latter has announced support for the Internationalizing Domain Names in Applications (IDNA) and a series of further enhancements are expected. IDNA enables webmasters to use domain names which exist outside the original 26 characters used for the English-language - but not for too many other languages since many have odd accented characters. Additionally, this brings greater support for asiatic and arabic character sets. (more…)

Microsoft is copying yet another service provided by Google search engine. Their Live Search team has announced their Webmaster Portal which would provide tools, content and resources for SEO professionals and webmasters.

This is similar to Google’s Webmaster Central & Yahoo Site Explorer service.

They are also going to re-enable the back link search tool for the users on the Live search engine which was disabled sometime back.
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