I was glad to see that the FTC unanimously approved new guidelines regarding endorsements and testimonials. The updated guidelines affirm the principle that material connections behind endorsements should be disclosed. This seems like a great time to offer my own disclosure information.
I am currently an employee of Google. I receive a salary from them and I also own Google stock and options.
Other than compensation from Google, I don’t accept any money or other gifts of value from any companies or individuals. I don’t accept speaking fees, consulting fees, honoraria, or trips. I don’t accept free, discounted, or loaned products. When I receive unsolicited gifts of value from companies or individuals in the scope of work, I give away those gifts.
When I speak at a conference or event, I generally do not pay a registration fee for that event. Some conferences also waive registration fees for that event for one or more of my colleagues or a traveling companion. Either my company or I pay my own travel and hotel expenses when I speak at an event.
I do not run advertisements or otherwise receive any monetary compensation from the operation of my website.
Added January 16, 2010: A few years ago my wife and I formed a non-profit foundation. Neither of us are paid a salary from the foundation. Example groups that the foundation has donated to include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, MAPLight, Change Congress, the Sunlight Foundation, Free Press, the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, charity: water, and Room to Read. The Employer Identification Number (EIN) of our foundation is 203865461.
I have also invested in Perfect Third, the company that makes the WakeMate.
I enjoy posting some of the funny emails that I get. This one made me laugh:
You don’t need to %SI3_rnd10 rod’s %SI3_rnd11 and %SI3_rnd12 %SI3_rnd13’ jokes!
This is a %SI3_rnd14 for %SI3_rnd15 your %SI3_rnd16! It will %SI3_rnd17 in seconds after she %SI3_rnd18 and %SI3_rnd19 as good as if it was a %SI3_rnd20 rod!
No more jokes – you will always get %SI3_rnd21 and moans! The huge pack costs less than 30 %SI3_rnd22!
%SI3_rnd23 can be a %SI3_rnd24! No one will know about your %SI3_rnd25!
%SI3_rnd26 now and save more than $10 regardless of your order’s size!
I think it’s spam about embiggening a specific body part. But the spammer clearly didn’t set up their spam template correctly. 
Anyone have guesses about which email spamming software package this is?
I should be back over at mattcutts.com. I’m sure some bits have sloshed around in the transition from dullest.com to mattcutts.com–let me know if you see anything truly weird.
I plan to talk sometime soon about what I learned in the process of moving to a completely different domain for a month.
This weekend I decided to mix things up on my blog. So I switched things around:
- I took one of my domains, dullest.com, and moved it to TigerTech from pair Networks.
- I installed the latest version of WordPress on dullest.com and copied the MySQL database from mattcutts.com to dullest.com.
- I changed my blog layout to the excellent Thesis theme by Chris Pearson. Previously I was using the Almost Spring theme.
- I added an .htaccess file that will do 302 redirects from www.mattcutts.com/path/file.html to www.dullest.com/path/file.html .
Note: changing your IP address, webhost, domain name, blog template, and blog version all at the same time is the exact opposite of what you should normally do. It’s better to change only one thing at a time so that if something goes horribly wrong, you can trace what caused it.
Also, if you were truly moving a site, a 302 redirect wouldn’t be the right redirect to use–a 301 (permanent) redirect would be better. But if I like these changes, I might migrate mattcutts.com to TigerTech and then migrate my blog from dullest.com back to mattcutts.com. So I’ll stick with a 302 for now.
Sometimes it’s fun to mix things up. It’s not as if I make any money from my blog, so I don’t mind if my search rankings drop for a while. In fact, it will be a pretty interesting experiment to see what happens with search engines and traffic.
I’m sure a bunch of stuff broke; let me know if you see anything especially horrible!
Google Chrome continued its upward marketshare march in March. I was looking at my browser breakdown tonight. Here’s what I’ve got from the last 30 days in Google Analytics:
Some different browser marketshare numbers:
- Net Applications says that Chrome went from 1.15% to 1.23% in the last ~30 days.
- StatCounter says that Chrome topped 2% recently. Click through to see fewer people using Internet Explorer and more people using Firefox and Chrome over the weekends. StatCounter provides CSV export, so I made a separate chart for Chrome:
- Clicky says that in the last 60 days, Chrome has gone from 2.099% to 2.479%
Not shabby for a little over six months since Chrome was released. My favorite Chrome links recently are:
- The dev channel switcher to get the latest/greatest features in Chrome. For example, the dev channel uses the F11 key to switch to full-screen mode. You can also delete auto-form-fill suggestions by cursoring down to them and hitting the “Delete” key.
- The Chrome Experiments site demonstrates how well Chrome handles JavaScript. My favorite demos are Browser Ball, Ball Pool, Wavy Scrollbars, and the bizarrely addictive Twitch.
How do the browser stats look for your site(s)? And does anyone know of other sources for browser marketshare?
