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What would you do if you glanced up toward the sky and noticed a piece of the 1,400 pound Early Ammonia Servicer careening toward you at 100mph? This, of course, is one of those crazy scenario’s that you’d never have to plan for. Right? Yeah…. right.

The EAS was installed on the international space station in 2001 as part of the emergency reserve coolant system. The EAS became obsolete after activation of the mature thermal control system and so the long journey of the Early Ammonia Servicer began.

The size of about two refrigerators, the EAS was dropped from the international space station in 2007. Researchers predicted the largest piece of space debris would stay in orbit for 300 days before giving in to gravity, but that little out-dated coolant system surprised all the critics by staying in orbit for a full 15 months!

Every dog has its proverbial day, however, and the EAS is finally looking to take that plunge back to Earth. At this point in time, very little is known about where the EAS will impact Earth. Odds are good that the 1,400 pound space fridge will impact into one of Earth’s many oceans, although the only continent ruled out at this point seems to be Antarctica.

So, wear your hardhats and pay attention to the skies! If you don’t, you might just become the next toilet seat girl.

Printed newspapers will one day be extinct, much like the Newsies of yesteryear.

In April 2008, The Christian Science Monitor will abandon its daily paper edition for a newer, sleeker business model. Moving from print to online, the 100 year old news publication will focus more dollars into the website, a daily email newsletter and a weekly magazine for subscribers only.

This is a good move by the seven time Pulitzer prize winning news organization, and is likely a glimpse at how newspapers with higher circulations might make a smooth transition away from print and more toward the Internet.

As a Search Engine Marketer I can’t help but smile at the thought that as the subtle fabric of this society shifts away from conventional mediums like print, it shifts toward technological mediums that couldn’t even be imagined throughout most of the time the large print media outlets ruled the roost, so to speak.

Moves like this by corporations in the future will likely result in job loss as newspapers close down or severely down-size the volume of print operations. The good news, however, is that Marketing departments will probably benefit and get more resources as a result simply because of the much greater efficiency that can be met by advertising online.

The Moon & Venus at sunset as photographed by Dan Bush in Albany, Missouri.

I could spend hours staring up at the night sky and it doesn’t even have to be nearly as breath-taking as this. Maybe it’s God’s little gift from above during this part of the year, which is usually known more for stress and anxiety than for being generous and in that holiday spirit!

If you can find just a little bit of time just after sunset, in the twilight where celestial bodies are better illuminated, you’ll have a front row seat to some of the most beautiful interactions between celestial bodies in the solar system.

The Moon, Venus and Jupiter will all make appearances in this cosmic ballet of sorts, and, as we know from history, they will surely not disappoint. If you can keep this sky-tinerary handy until December 1st, you’re lucky and people should want to be you.

Why? Because you’ll probably have reviewed the sky-tinerary and, of course, skipped ahead. On December 1st, you’ll find Venus, the Moon and Jupiter VERY close together on a patch of sky about the size of a quarter.

For those of you in the North, i’m sorry. But the good news is that everything should be especially beautiful with everything nice and cold and dry. Mark your calendars and get your telescopes, you’re not going to want to miss this.

Artist's conception of the Sun-Earth System.

Ever heard of a “Flux Transfer Event,” or an FTE? Me neither. Fortunately for those of us who just can’t keep up with the ever-changing landscape of Space, space physicist David Sibeck of the Goddard Space Flight Center does.

“Ten years ago I was pretty sure they didn’t exist, but now the evidence is incontrovertible,” said Sibeck. On October 30th, Sibeck spoke to space physicists at the 2008 Plasma Workshop in Huntsville, Alabama about FTE’s and just how active they really are in our own solar system.

“We used to think the connection was permanent and that solar wind could trickle into the near-Earth environment anytime the wind was active,” says Sibeck. “We were wrong. The connections are not steady at all. They are often brief, bursty and very dynamic.”

So, what’s the big deal? I mean, if I didn’t know what a Flux Transfer Event was before today, and I am still alive, then what’s the problem? Nothing, really. But discoveries like this speak to the ideas that we live in an Electric Universe, a theory that has been widely suporessed by the scientific elite.

I prefer to think of these magnetic “portals” as a rope that connects from the Sun to the Earth. When the rope connects both celestial bodies, high-energy particles from the Sun are able to reach Earth on a sort of solar freeway.

I can’t wait to find out what else these researchers can find out about how the worlds around our world operate, what makes them tick, etc.

Lately i’ve been playing around with ExitReality, the latest and greatest virtual technology that lets users surf the web in 3D. I have never been a Second Life kind of guy, and never got into these virtual worlds before so i’m kind of a technological virgin in that respect. That being said, I am conflicted with the idea that ExitReality is going to revolutionize search on the web.

Search on ExitReality begins in the city square, a 3D world composed of a number of virtual store fronts. Websites like FOX News, MSNBC, Hardees/Carls Jr., NASA, eBay and others are the first to create 3D versions of their websites, and clicking the front doors opens a standard 2D web page.

I’m not sure how this makes search any different than Google, Yahoo or MSN, but you can input the web address of your favorite website into the ExitReality address bar to go directly to the 3D version of that page which basically looks like a room where you can walk up to links that appear as 3D pop ups. Click the link and go straight back to the 2D version of the page:

ExitReality 3D Web Pages

All in all I would say ExitReality isn’t bad for a time waster, but it’s nowhere near useful at this point. The guys over at ExitReality are still working out the kinks and the technology is in its infancy, so don’t expect too much off the bat.

I feel like a tremendous weight has been lifted off of my shoulders now that i’ve discovered TinEye, my favorite Image Search Engine on The World Wide Interweb. I’ll admit the lengths of my experience with image search engines extend to images.google.com and sifting through SERP after SERP of thumbnails for something that looks vaguely similar to what i’m really looking for. So, to be able to upload an image and search for that same image is honestly the best news i’ve had all week.

I spent the better part of an evening plugging different images files into the search engine to see what would come up. I studied the Employee Profiles on a shady paid links website and got some surprising results! It wasn’t long before I was going through my professional websites, image by image to make sure we didn’t have anyone using our copyrighted images.

As if this new little tool wasn’t already well on its way to making my job easier, I literally stumbled upon the proverbial cherry on top. Apparently, there is a nifty browser plugin that makes it even better. After installing the plugin, all I have to do to perform an image search is right click on the image and search away.

I mean, how much easier is it going to get? If things keep going this way, I might actually have time to… I don’t know… do more work?

We all know that Link Building is one of the primary focuses in building a long-term web presence. Countless hours are spent, sometimes wasted, sifting through an unending wave of SERPs for those diamonds-in-the-rough, websites that are relevant to yours, and most importantly, are willing to link to you.

As the internet evolves, marketers have become more creative in how to acquire meaningful links. Reciprocal Links have been very successful for quite a long time now, and continue to be the most common forms of link requests I receive day after day.

In the past couple of months I’ve noticed an onslaught of paid link requests, companies that offer to pay me a sum of money if i’ll take existing text on my site and simply attach a link to sites of their choosing. For years i’ve been hearing how the prominent search engines try to weed out paid links because they may not reflect true relevancy, and could dilute SERPs. But, as I examine the links they want to pay for, I don’t see anything that would be considered irrelevant.

As near as I can tell, the only mark against my website would be too many external links (these paid links just being part of that), and possibly unaffiliated links that, while relevant, only serve to draw customers away from the site. If you’re okay with sending a small amount of visitors away from your website, and you’re confident that the links are relevant enough to not trip up any red flags, then there shouldn’t be a problem with accepting these links for money. If it’s relevant, right?

This all sounds fine and good, however, until you start to examine the companies that are soliciting these links:

Ground Up Advertising: Created 4.15.08
Web Matchers: Created 7.8.08
First Day Ads: Created 7.8.08
Grass Roots Advertising: Created 3.27.07

Inlinks to Grass Roots Advertising, the oldest of the four sites, reflect some contempt over the website. All of the other sites return errors, so at the very least I can assume there aren’t many links there either. Isn’t it a bit strange that these link building companies don’t seem the least bit concerned about their own inbound link building campaigns?

Due to the lack of creative design and relative ineptitude regarding general SEM for their own web presence, I have to wonder about the integrity or legitimacy of the sites that provide this already shady service. There are so few pages to each of the sites, and the content that does exist there serves as a vague reminder of the general overview. Thanks for the specifics, guys!

Now, onto the Employee Profiles. I appreciate, to an extent, the casual nature of the profiles but something struck me as odd about some of the images. Don’t they seem a bit generic? A couple of image searches brought up some interesting results. Stock photo’s!

I recently had a conversation with one of these attractive young women looking to pay me $150 to place a few simple links on my site, about five minutes worth of work. I questioned the legitimacy of the websites as well as the reputation and was left with the same impression.

If you break down what they’re asking you to do, and if you examine the links they want you to create, you’ll see that they’re not irrelevant and they really shouldn’t affect your site in an adverse way. Despite the fact that they’re paid links, they’re not designed to brute-force the search engine algorithms into ranking the site higher. They focus on relevance with the content of the link, but the motivation for the link is money.

Maybe I’m stubborn but I don’t want money to be a factor in determining which websites I want to associate myself with. These companies are probably not doing anything wrong, technically, but are you willing to risk the integrity of your site, OR are you willing to put in the research necessary to determine which link neighborhood you’ll be moving into by accepting these link bribes?