Reposted from Website Magazine. In lieu of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) downtime over the past several days, optimizing websites for high performance in the cloud may seem a bit too risky for many Internet businesses.  Yottaa however believes differently, today launching a new Web performance optimization service which aims to help improve website speed and development through a variety of techniques including domain sharding, CSS spriting, and CDN balancing. “Web-based businesses understand that visitors to their sites have a ‘need for speed,’ but many are held back by the complexity and expense of manual optimization,” said Coach Wei, Yottaa’s…more»

Few Web professionals should be surprised by the 2011 forecast in SEMPO’s recently released State of Search Marketing Report. If the words “social” and “mobile” are at the top of your business plan, pay close attention to the following. If they are not, drop what you’re doing and pay even closer attention. With over 900 companies and agencies participating in the global online survey, the report estimates that the North American search marketing industry will grow by 16 percent in 2011 to a value of $19.3 billion, up from $16.6 billion in 2010. Just under half of the respondents said…more»

Is Google on the Ropes? Google’s stock is in a tailspin. Since Friday, it’s down about 10 percent, around $522 per share as of this writing. That’s what happens when you miss projections, even though earnings are again on the rise. Earnings of $8.08 missed the mark by two cents and, as reported by Adweek, expenses went through the roof — to the tune of 34 percent. What is Google paying through the nose for? In large part, employees. Out of fear. Apparently Google offered two employees a combined $150 million in stock grants to keep them from defecting to…more»

Popular self-hosted blogging platform WordPress received an update that brings it to version 3.1.1.  This version contains several important security fixes including two relating to the media uploader, an XSS flaw, and one that caused a PHP crash in certain conditions when handling “devilishly devised links in comments.” Keep in mind that failing to upgrade may leave your blog vulnerable to attacks. Current WordPress users should have already received notified about the update in their Dashboard. If not, or if you aren’t a user just yet, you can download WordPress 3.1.1 from the official website. Alongside the security patches come…more»

This week Yahoo! launched version two of BOSS(a “build your own search service”), a data API that gives developers access to web search, image and news content for a usage fee. Version one of BOSS will be shut down this summer, scheduled for July 20, 2011. The primary changes in version two are that web and image search results and now sourced from Microsoft’s search engine, Yahoo branding attribution is now required (the first version allowed for white labeling), and arguably the most significant in that developers are now charged based on query volume. The Yahoo! Search Boss v2 API…more»