Everyone’s talking about it (well all the people in a particular geeky subset), there’s going to be a web 2.0 conference here in Toronto in early May.

We share a common fascination and enthusiasm for what’s happening now on the Web and in blogging, and are eager to find a way to showcase Toronto and bring smart, interested people here from elsewhere to join our community for what we hope will be a rousing and stimulating exploration of Web 2.0.

I’ll be very interested to see how this plan pans out. There has been a lot of talk recently (here and here for example) about Toronto being off the curve when it comes to all this 2.0 stuff, events like this can only help.

Personally I have a feeling that Toronto’s, and in general Canada’s, lack of prominence in the ‘web 2.0′ world is not because there aren’t cool people here doing cool things, it’s just because we don’t make so much noise about it (for better or worse, probably both in fact). Reminds me of a discussion I heard about art, that there’s an implicit assumption that art out of New York is better and more important just because of where it’s from. There seems to be almost the reverse syndrome for tech stuff in Toronto, and maybe that’s not all bad.

As of today I am dedicating 100% of my work time to Hogtown Consulting. For the last months I had been dividing my time between Hogtown work and a contract with the Ontario government. That contract has now come to an end and I am very pleased to say that I am free to concentrate all my effort into growing Hogtown.

One practical hope I have for the change is that I’ll be able to blog a little more frequently, there’s certainly no lack of interesting stuff going on.

This is the second of a two part piece, read part one to find out what click fraud is and what it means to Google and advertisers.

I may be way off base, but I see a link between the recent launch of Google Analytics and an attempt to reduce click fraud (bear with me, it’ll take a bit of explaining). I’m not the first person to come up with this idea, many have written about how the extra insight into your site visitors provided by Google Analytics data would help to sort the fraudulent-chaff from the genuine-wheat in click through visitors. But I think there may be something more…
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The most basic form of click fraud involves a website owner signing up with Google to host AdSense ads on their site, with the site owner getting a commission from Google whenever a visitor clicks on the ads. That’s perfectly legitimate, the fraud, at its simplest, comes in when the site owner clicks the ads themselves, to gain click through fees the advertiser (via Google) for a click that was of zero value to the advertiser.
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I’ve written before about the benefits of blogging (here and here) to professionals and business. One particular benefit of blogging can be building authority and trust (in so far as trust can be built in a non-personal relationship anyway).

Since the holidays (and my way-off-the-early-adopter-curve acquisition of an iPod) I’ve been listening to quite a few podcasts*. One particular thing has struck me about podcasts, and that is how much more personal and ‘real’ it feels to hear someone’s thoughts spoken in their own voice compared to the relatively inexpressive words on a screen method. Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders podcast on productivity is a good example of this, in the past I’ve infrequently visited the 43 Folders blog, but I have now taken to listening to their podcast avidly.

There are several reasons I’m a fan, I like the tone, humour and length of the 43 Folders podcasts. But from the important thing about this from a professional perspective is the boost that podcasting has given the podcast’s producer, Merlin, in my awareness and respect (and I would assume the same has happened for many other listeners too). The point is, he had a good blog but it was the added intimacy (at least apparent intimacy) and novelty of a podcast that really made me take notice. Of course in the world of marketting getting people to take notice is pretty crucial, so this may be worth noting, perhaps I’ll even give it a go myself.

* What’s a podcast? A podcast is technically little more that a chunk of audio (often amateur produced and talk-based) that through some technical stuff (RSS and the like) automagically arrives on your iPod (or other MP3 audio player) as each new ‘episode’ is published. Kind of like radio on demand combined with the ease of publishing approaching that of a blog.

According to the Top Ten Promising Small Business Opportunities for 2006 post on the Small Business Trends blog the number 1 business trend for for 2006 will be Outsourced information technology services. That’s good for me, offering as I do web technology outsourcing for small businesses.
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At the recent TorCamp ‘unconference’ I joined a group discussing RSS and how it works in marketing. One of the questions was ‘why is RSS better that email newsletters?’. My immediate reaction was ‘it just is’, but that’s not a terribly well reasoned opinion so I thought I would give that question some further thought.
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I have written before about how blogging can be a useful way to build reputation as an expert, and through that reputation build business. Recently I came across a concrete example that shows how this can work in the real world.
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Today the brand new Hogtown Consulting redesign of the Fox & Fiddle Pub website launched.

I’m very happy with the new design, as is the client most importantly. It’s clean yet attractive and supplies all the information the pub’s visitors need in an accessible way. You can read more about the site’s design in the Hogtown Portfolio.

The era of Internet communications opens up huge possibilities for small businesses that just didn’t exist in the pre-Internet days. Now, with clever use of the Internet, a tiny company can compete with the big boys without needing the money to hire a national sales team, buy high street stores or pay for billboard ads.

That’s all great, but, and it’s a big one, your potential customers know this too. They know that anyone with a little bit of time and money can make a website advertising their services. Those potential customers also know that a website does not a reliable business make, that there needs to be someone behind the website that they can do business with. This all comes down to credibility, and how specific signals given off by a website can either bolster or undermine your credibility as a business.
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