Warmest Greetings,

The Whole Internet Will Be Doing Pushups For This  

:: Wednesday, August 25, 2004 ::

Well, it's official I guess. One US state, Michigan, decided to muck up the raging Internet ecommerce motherload by tacking on a sales tax to web site sales. (See article courtesy of SearchEnginePosition called Internet sales tax a reality)

This means the price of everything from those cheap $3 ebooks to bikinis like the ones worn by the USA volleyball team will cost more than they do now, if purchased on the Internet.

Reminds me of my son's football practice. Every time one guy on the team makes a mistake, the entire team pays the price. They all have to do 10 pushups.

In the US, sometimes they let states govern themselves and other times the Federal government decides what's best for everybody. Like this article says, the Feds will be watching and if they see a chance to generate revenue, they'll jump on it.

We'll all be doing push ups for this, just wait. Laws will be confusing. International commerce will be confusing. Web site shopping carts could be a maze of tax checkboxes, depending on where you live.

Can you imagine trying to tax pay per click advertising plans? Watch how Dell and tools oriented web sites deal with this. Since states have different tax laws, on what is taxable or not, this could become a real disaster.

How sad to see the Internet continue to become a clone of business as usual.

The UK Search Engine That Could (or The Internet Still Has Some Gems Left to Offer)

It's amazing what can be built from someone's cubboard. UK Wizz - new SE in beta. Writes its owner,

     "I'm trying to get everything working as well as posible, then I plan to try and promote it as much as possible. It's pretty difficult because I run the whole thing from a walk in cupboard at my house on pretty much a zero budget.

The aim is to keep it as UK specific as possible. Google, yahoo and the others are great search engines, I just feel they let the average UK searcher down."

And Then There Are Some Who Deserve To Do Pushups

SEO Firm Told to Refund Clients

     "I saw this discussed on another forum, and the focus of the discussion seemed to be about the methods that the company was trying to use to get rankings. They involved what some might call black hat SEO.

In all honesty, the color of the hat doesn't make a difference. This issue is pretty colorblind. If you make a guarantee to a customer, and you don't fulfill it, you're supposed to give them the promised refund. That's true regardless of whether you even have a hat at all."

New SEO Web Site, That More Than Winks At Usability

Derek Chew has launched a web site focused on organic SEO and the relationship of SEO to Usability. Of course, since this is the focus of my most of my work, I was glad to join the list of writers for this site. See Organic Rankings for more. (See also his SEO blog - Organic Blog)

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 8/25/2004 04:15:32 PM

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