Thanks to a post by Tom Crandall in Smallbiz Central, I was alerted to yet another addition to Google Maps Place Pages.  For certain listings that have a rating and review at Judy’s Book, a new field entitled Reputation Trend is shown, with a value of “Reputation Trend” (I presume this will eventually show an actual number), which links to the same business on judysbook.com.

Reputation Trend in Place Pages

Being do-follows, Judy’s Book  might be thrilled by these links, although I don’t believe that they count for PR.

Reputation Trend links to a rating graph on judysbook.com

In my studies of IYP rankings, judysbook.com has never rated anywhere for organic SEO. However, they seem to have a band of loyal users who help to create user-generated content by way of reviews and ratings. This is the only site I know of that uses a reputation trend chart to plot the average rating over time.

Other Yellow Pages sites (particularly ones not chosen to power Google Place Pages) should appreciate how this differentiator has allowed Judy’s Book to get a piece of the traffic pie.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Deepak Ramanathan of Google Australia has blogged “Australia is going Google … along with millions of businesses around the world” in the official Google Australia blog.

It’s a rosy picture – companies such as Konica Minolta, Rentokil Initial, De Bortoli etc have switched to Google Apps for their company operations. They no longer

have to deal with the hassles of managing email servers or rolling out software updates, and their employees now enjoy the convenience of shared documents and calendars, Gmail and more.

Gmail had outages in February, March, May and September this year according to this SMH article or this Computerworld article. Last year there were some more outages including one lasting 15 hours.

I have been in situations when my company’s network or email was down for several hours, so I know how unproductive it can be with several thousand employees unable to use their PCs. Multiply that across millions of SMEs and educational institutions and not only do you have a lot of frustration but a lot of unemployed sysadmins.

On paper, the use of SAAS (software as a service) looks attractive to bean counters, but did the soon-to-be-redundant IT staff have a say in the decision?

How are Australian companies dealing with the implication of moving personal data offshore (National Privacy Principle #9)? I am an early adopter in many ways but I am not ready for the cloud yet. How about you?

Popularity: 2% [?]