Holland americas

From an American legal perspective, the recently established European Right to Be Forgotten (RTBF) is a disaster. It’s a confusing, vague, impractical and possibly even dangerous decision. But from a European historical perspective, it makes considerable sense. The different histories of the U.S. and Europe in the 20th Century have shaped different attitudes and rules surrounding privacy. As Jeffrey Toobin points out in his piece on RTBF in The New Yorker, in America, speech trumps privacy; but in Europe, it’s mostly the opposite. There’s no question that the internet is laying waste to privacy, from rampant profiling and data mining to NSA spying and perpetual hacking. The iCloud celebrity photo scandal is the latest high-profile example of electronic communication’s threat to privacy; storage of photos or other personal data that makes our “private lives” and personal histories vulnerable to unwanted discovery all the time. Americans are just as … [Read more...] about World War II, Communism Subtext In Right To Be Forgotten

In my last post here I gave some tips on which events you could go and visit in Europe. One of the sentences I used was “The SES circus opens its tents in London.” After that post I got an e-mail from someone asking whether I meant that in a positive or a negative way. A “circus” in the US apparently isn’t always a positive thing. Over here in Europe it is. When a circus is in town everybody is happy. It’s a show which travels around and makes people happy, hence the analogy I chose. The e-mail got me thinking, however, about the differences between Europe and the US and what I have been writing about here during the past one and a half years. There are more of these differences in language which make it hard for Europeans and US-based SEOs to work in each others areas. Let’s take a closer look at three languages which you have to be careful with. English: UK English Vs. US English The first and most obvious one is the difference between UK … [Read more...] about Your English Might Not Speak To Europeans

Google is the dominant force in Europe—there is no other search engine which even comes close to Google’s market share. As I wrote in my last article, Europe could use some competition for Google. Bing should be the designated search engine to become that big competitor, but for now that is not the case. Despite its dominance, there are alternative search engines in Europe, and for search marketers they’re worth looking at. With Europe’s more than 800 million people, of whom about 60% spends time online, even a small percentage using alternatives to Google offer attractively large numbers, and targeting users of those search engines could be very profitable. Lets take a look at some of the alternatives. UK and France: Bing The UK offers the closest step from the US market to the European market. As in almost every country Google is the dominant force, but here we see that Bing is more popular than anywhere else. Bing now accounts for about 4% of the search … [Read more...] about Alternatives To Google In Europe