Quora is a hot new startup from one of the facebook co-founders.  It’s a question and answer site but what sets it apart so far is the quality and authority of the answers. Take this question about why Google uses the second price auction to charge for keywords.

All of the answers are publicly attributed to an author and peer reviewed.  The quality of answer is very impressive, not suprising given the pedigree of those answering questions.

You won’t find the same sort of stuff as on Yahoo! answers (all sorts) or Stack Overflow (techie) and that’s to Quoras benefit.  Only time will tell if the quality of answers can be maintained as the site grows.

I’m scratching my head to think of the right sort of question to give Quora a try with, but in the meantime I’m enjoying learning from some of the great Q&As posted by others.

One of our Google AdWords accounts just offered a new beta feature:

This feature allows local storage of your adwords data to make the experience more responsive.  The AdWords help page on the subject is here. This could be a very nice feature but is rather strange.
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Matt Cutts is the face of the Google search index and their efforts to combat spam. He recently posted a State of the Index presentation. It’s an interesting read for the Geekier amongst you. Of all 32 slides, page 15 should be of interest to web merchants.

If you have used the new “Labs > Site Performance” section of Google Webmaster Tools and been frustrated with the results, you will find the WebPageTest a veritable delight!
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Our goal at Contextured is to provide the best possible online marketing solution to small businesses. We can’t do that when our servers are offline so we treat any outage extremely seriously. Recently we suffered an hours outage at 5am when our domain registrar Heart Internet fouled up their name servers. After dialogue with their support staff it was obvious that they were not able to provide the level of service we demand.

This weekend we migrated to DNSMadeEasy. They offer a 100% uptime guarantees and offer 500% credits for any downtime.  This clearly aligns their incentives with our own. The switch was very easy.
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