Aroxo, the website that lets buyers “say what they’ll pay”, is unveiling new software soon that lets buyers and sellers negotiate automatically. Professor Nick Jenner, Aroxo’s new Chief Scientific Officer, has developed software agents called ‘Negotiation Ninjas’ that use information from both buyers and sellers to come to an agreement on price.

The BBC reports that these new software Ninjas will make it even easier for people to find bargains online. Buyers say how much they want to pay, and sellers say how eager they are to make a sale, and if the price can be lowered when stock reaches a certain level. If the Ninjas find a good match between a buyer and a seller, the seller is prompted make a personal offer and try to close the deal.

What’s even better for buyers is that the Ninjas will be free to use – sellers pay 0.3% of the buyer’s asking price however if they choose to contact the buyer.

The Ninjas will be trialled on Aroxo this autumn, just in time to help credit crunch Christmas shoppers find the best deals.

With on a few days until The Open kicks off I’ve been looking round the official site to see what interesting features they have planned. The desktop widget caught my eye and I went to download landing page hoping to install a desktop gadget or Adobe Air app to show the latest open news all week.

Unfortunately I get something that needs to be embedded into a 3rd party site rather than a desktop app and it seems everybody else is just as unhappy. Out of the 14,528 people who have visited that page only 188 have actually installed it!

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Google’s search suggestion feature has become familiar to users everywhere since it was rolled out earlier this year. It works by making suggestions based on the overall popularity of various searches related to the word you’re typing in. Sometimes those suggestions get a little crazy, which is why myself and Gary have launched Google Suggest Of The Day, a brand new site offering one bizarre search suggestion each day for your amusement.

Here’s one of my favourites so far:

In 2009 there are loads of strategies that we expected to stop working in 2006, then again in 2007 and certainly in 2008. The problem is that most of them still seem to be working.

Of all the things Google could fix I would have expected this to be the first. What happens is that SEO companies use link spam and networks of sites to get top rankings for keywords that send them customers.

Customers assume the company must be good at SEO and hire them to work on their sites. The SEO company uses spam to promote their clients and links back to their site from all their clients and gets even higher rankings.

If Google was to just start banning dodgy SEO companies then clients wouldn’t find them and the whole industry would clean up in months. Few clients are going to hire an SEO company that’s been banned from Google.

My question is, why don’t Google ban these sites? Of all the search results that should be manually edited I think SEO related ones are top of the list.

Firstly, hello everyone – I’m the newest member of Branded3’s SEO team! Whether you already know me or not, you’ll probably be seeing quite a lot of me from now on

I’m not sure what to tell you about myself, so here are some facts in no particular order:

I’m 23. I write a blog called Piggynap which talks about SEO and whatever else is on my mind (normally something weird). You might find it interesting or you might just wonder why I keep posting things about cats. I like Adwords which is great, because that’s one of my new responsibilities at Branded3. I live in Harrogate with my web designer boyfriend (that explains the Twitter background) and like a typical girl I really like shoes…and chocolate.

We’ve been snowed out of work today so I’m writing this from home, but I’m really looking forward to working with Patrick and everyone else

I’ll be attending Think Visibility so if you’re going, see you there!

We are hiring a business development manager, if you are interested or know somebody that might be please drop us a line.

• Company Name : Branded3
• Location : Aberford, Leeds
• Salary : £28-£35k per year

Contact Information

• First Name : Vin
• Last Name : Chinnaraja
• Email Address : vin@branded3.com
• Website : http://www.branded3.com
• Phone Number : 0113 2814100
• How to Apply : Email CV

Job Description
Branded3 is an innovative digital agency with offices in Leeds and Malaysia. We have delivered work for a number of leading organisations such as Interflora, Heinz, and Airbus. We are a team of digital enthusiasts with the drive and passion to deliver outstanding work for our clients.

Having a ‘can do’ work ethic, you’ll discover the core culture of our agency:
‘We like to challenge and be challenged.’

We are now in a good stage of our growth and are looking for a dynamic, talented and committed marketer who can help take our agency forward. Working directly with the MD of Branded3 your role as Marketing Manager will be to develop, define and execute marketing strategies and generate new business leads to contribute to our ambitious growth plans over the next few years.

If you like the sound of us, we can offer you a role that will stretch you, challenge you and reward you fairly.

Responsibilities

• Develop cut-through long-term marketing strategies for Branded3
• Generate leads
• Execute all agency marketing campaigns
• Manage agency PR
• Manage creation and updating of agency literature (website, email, credentials)
• Manage pitches and presentations
• Agency brand custodian
• Event management and networking
• Outbound communications (email, DM)
• Contact and prospect database management

Skills
The successful candidate will have significant B2B marketing experience preferably for an agency. You will be comfortable dealing at different levels (from Chief Executive to managers). You are ballsy but grounded, witty but humble, friendly and focussed. We are looking for someone who has a good contacts book and is driven to succeed.
Any experience working for a new media/digital agency would be preferred but is not essential.

Relevant Work Experience
2+ to 5 Years

Salary
28,000.00 – 35,000.00 GBP per year
expenses, car allowance and uncapped commission

The popularity of the SEO Toolbar is on the rise with recent offerings from SEOmoz and today a new SEO Toolbar from Aaron Wall at SEO Book.

The SEOBook Toolbar seems to work best on FireFox 3 and includes as much data as you could ever need to evaluate a page quickly. Best of all it has an in-built RSS reader with the Blogstorm feed included meaning I get lots more RSS subscribers which is why I decided to help Aaron promote it.

Last year I switched to Google Chrome and don’t use Firefox much at all. Chrome is faster and allows me to get more done in a day. The disadvantage is the lack of toolbars although Dave Naylor has an overlay bookmarklet that does enough for me.

Do you use SEO toolbars? Which is your favourite?

While I was away it seems a few plugins have sprung up to integrate Twitter mentions of blog posts in the style of trackbacks and normal blog comments.

The options available seem to be TweetBacks from Joost and TweetSuite from Dan and I’ve tried both of them today finally settling on Dans implementation after struggling to get Joosts working with Thesis.

Check it out below.

Has anybody managed to do a really good implementation of one of these plugins using Thesis and WP 2.7?

Link re-working is something that keeps popping up on my radar and few recent events have prompted me to blog about it.

Basically link re-working is the process of contacting people who already link to your website and asking them to change the link to make it more valuable from an SEO perspective. For example if somebody linked to my blog with the anchor text “Blogstorm” I could ask them to change it to “Blogstorm SEO blog” or even just “SEO blog”. Read more >>