Affiliate Marketing Blog by James Little

Edit: 03/12/06

5 things you didn’t know about Ted Leonsis€¦

1) Ted Leonsis is actually an alien that landed in the Roswell €œincident€ in July 1974. When the US Government decided that Aliens are not vastly different they let them free into the world. Around the same time, Ted, and a few of his friends from UFO, setup AOL and proved that humans really are dump - the reason AOL is so popular.

2) Ted Leonsis once cooked a meal for the Queen of England. He made one of his favourite dishes, a monkey brain and dog stir fry, service with rice. The Queen of England asked for seconds and said it tasted €œrather like chicken€

3) Ted Leonsis advised the President of America to go to war with Iraq. It was a ploy to win more democratic votes as Ted was planning on running for office, but decided against it after being blackmailed about point 1.

4) Ted Leonsis was once a guest star in the popular US hit comedy €œFriends€. He played Chandlers gay housemate in Episode 192

5) Ted Leonsis once played for UK Football side Manchester United, where he was infamous for a €œkung fu€ kick against a Crystal Palace fan. He was later suspended but retains a hero status due to the footballing ability that helped Manchester United lift the FA Cup and win the League title for a record number of years. He now ownes a stake of Chelsea FC and is looking to return to the popular sport.

Interestingly it’s only been three days since my Ted Leonsis post and since the Ted Leonis threadwatch post about his excellent SEO skills.

In a few Google Data centers Wolf Howl (who is in Las Vegas for the Pubcon at the moment) is already showing up on the front page for his Ted Leonis page! To learn more about Ted Leonsis why not visit the Ted Leonsis Wikipedia page.

Edit: 20/11/06

An excellent piece of Ted Leonsis and the vanity searching on thingsthatmakeyougohmm (Ted Leonsis)

And another post by xensen (Ted Leonsis)

Edit: 28/11/06

Ooops. I almost forgot about Ted. Wolf Howl has now created a Ted Leonsis SEO Contest! Nice.

It’s just been announced that the “big three” search engines (Google, Yahoo & MSN) have joined forces for the support of the sitemaps protocol.

Here’s the full announcement from the big G:

We’re thrilled to tell you that Yahoo! and Microsoft are joining us in supporting the Sitemap protocol.

As part of this development, we’re moving the protocol to a new namespace, www.sitemaps.org, and raising the version number to 0.9. The sponsoring companies will continue to collaborate on the protocol and publish enhancements on the jointly-maintained site sitemaps.org.

If you’ve already submitted a Sitemap to Google using the previous namespace and version number, we’ll continue to accept it. If you haven’t submitted a Sitemap before, check out the documentation on www.sitemaps.org for information on creating one. You can submit your Sitemap file to Google using Google webmaster tools. See the documentation that Yahoo! and Microsoft provide for information about submitting to them.

If any website owners, tool writers, or webserver developers haven’t gotten around to implementing Sitemaps yet, thinking this was just a crazy Google experiment, we hope this joint announcement shows that the industry is heading in this direction. The more Sitemaps eventually cover the entire web, the more we can revolutionize the way web crawlers interact with websites. In our view, the experiment is still underway.

Check out the official sitemaps site or the full details from Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Sitemaps is supported by the Creative Commons license that Google donated $30,000 to earlier this month.

Threadwatch (my first choice for SEO news) had a link though to John Andrews’ Blog and an article about Ted Leonsis (Vice Chairman of AOL).   It seems that Ted thinks he’s pretty good at that SEO lark as his blog, which started a year ago,  is Number #1 in the rankings when search for, err, Ted Leonsis.

It seems as if his comments have caused a bit of a stir in the SEO community and already those who didn’t make it across to the Pubcon in Las Vegas are twitching their fingers and starting to target a new search term.

It will be interesting to see how this one pans out - let’s hope dear old Ted doesn’t get too upset when he’s no longer #1!