17 Web Analytics Tools To Understand Who, What, Why, Where & How People Are Using Your Site
March 30, 2009 · Categories: Analytics, Blog Marketing, Links, Online Behavior, Search Engine Marketing, Tools, Usability, Web Design/Development · Comments
UPDATED: 4/11/09.
- Google Analytics – Google’s free Web traffic analysis tool.
- Yahoo! Web Analytics – will be made available to a wide range of Yahoo!’s customers, partners, developers and advertisers in stages throughout the rest of 2008 and into 2009.
- Yahoo Site Explorer
- MyBlogLog – Social network for blogs that also offers click-behavior analytics.
- Quantcast – Free stats for site owners, online media planning tool for advertisers.
- Clicky – Free comprehensive stats and some real-time analysis.
- ClickTale – Actually records site visitors’ behavior, then replays it for you. Kicks butt! Free and for-fee versions.
- whos.among.us – Free stats widget; no registration required.
- Enquisite – For fee; focused on search analytics for search marketers.
- Crazy Egg – Pricing starts at $9/month but service includes heat maps!
- 103bees – Focused on search analytics; for fee.
- StatCounter – Free and for-fee versions.
- Piwiki – Open source Web analytics built on PHP and MySQL.
- AWStats – Open source Web analytics.
- FeedBurner – RSS Subscriber analytics
- reinvigorate – Heat maps and user-initiated event tracking.
- iWebTrack – Free and for-fee versions.
- VisiStat – Full-featured, for-fee analytics service that includes ability to add custom notes to your reports to highlight/explain key events as well as an API for developers to access raw data for building custom reports.
- WebTrends Analytics – Enterprise Web analytics.
- Omniture Online Analytics – Enterprise Web analytics.
Twenty-Six Twitter Tools To Track Tweets
February 10, 2009 · Categories: Analytics, Blog Marketing, Links, Micromarketing, Reputation Management, Text Messaging, Tools · Comments
I’ve been finding so many Twitter tools and passing them along that it’s hard to keep track of them all. The Twitter tools I want to keep track of are those that monitor, measure, and analyze Twitterers and their traffic. I figured I’d compile them here for your benefit.
- Twitter Search – This, obviously, is Twitter’s own search function. You can subscribe to a search via RSS.
- TweetBeep – TweetBeep is a “Google Alerts†for Twitter
- Tweetscan – Schedule Twitter searches to be sent to your email.
- Twist – Like Google Trends for Twitter
- TwitScoop – TwitScoop is a real-time tag cloud of Twitter buzz that also allows you to create graphs based on keyword tracking.
- MicroBlogBuzz – MicroBlogBuzz tracks the most popular links shared on microblogging services, including Twitter, Jaiku and Identica
- Twit(url)y – Tracks popular links and displays them in Digg-like fashion.
- Hashtags.org – Hashtags tracks the most popular Twitter posts that include a #hashtag. You can subscribe to an individual hashtag using RSS.
- Twemes – Tracks Twitter memes.
- TweetGrid – TweetGrid creates a Twitter search dashboard that updates in real time.
- monitter – monittor is a real-time keyword-based monitoring service that lets you watch three columns of keyword streams side-by-side. You can subscribe to them using RSS.
- ReTweetist – Tracks the most popular retweets.
- minn.citytweets.net – Real-time tweets from and/or about Minneapolis.
- Qwitter – Qwitter notifies you when someone unfollows you.
- Spy – Spy tracks real-time keyword mentions in Twitter, FriendFeed, Flickr, Blog Comments, Yahoo News, Blogs and Google Reader and allows you to subscribe via RSS.
- TweetWheel – Finds out which of your Twitter friends know each other.
- Twitter Charts – Twitter Charts gives you a visualization of when a particular Twitter user is most active. This is an excellent tool to determine the most opportune time to engage a given person.
- twInfluence – Ranks Twitter users’ influence.
- TwitterGrader – Grades a given Twitter user according to influence. Includes power users by geographic location; suggests who to follow and allows you to check if someone is following you.
- TwitterSheep – Creates a tag cloud of all the words in the bios of a given Twitter user’s followers.
- TwitterCounter – Provides stats on a given Twitter user and lets you compare that user to two others.
- Twellow – Twellow is a Twitter directory.
- TweetBoards – Compare Twitter users side-by-side.
- TweetStats – Gives you Twitter statistics about a given user.
- TwitterMeter – Twitter Meter allows you to enter a word to graph its use on Twitter’s public feed.
- TwitterLocal – Twitter Local is a desktop app that finds Twitter users within a fixed radius of a city or zip code.
UPDATED 7/04/09: I knew this as going to happen: I would forget some or others would suggest sites that should be added to the list. For that reason, and so I don’t have to mess with my wonderful alliterative title, I’m listing the additions unnumbered below:
- Twitter Analyzer – The best Twitter analytics tool I have found to date. Offers a ton of statistics.
- Mr. Tweet – A recommendation engine that also provides statistics on your Twitter usage.
- Localtweeps – Find Tweeps near you.
- Twits Like Me – A recommendation engine that suggests Twitterers that are like you.
- Retail Twitter Aggregator – Aggregates the Twitter feeds of a handful of bricks & mortar retailers.
- retweetradar – Tag clouds and trends of retweets.
- Twubs – Find hashtags.
- What The Trend? – Find hashtags that are rising in popularity.
- Tagalus – A hashtag dictionary.
- Twitclicks – Shortens URLs and tracks clicks.
- Bit.ly – Shortens URLs, counts clicks, shows who else shortened a URL and provides metadata about that URL from across the Web.
- Tweetburner – Shortens URLs and tracks clicks on Twitter & FriendFeed.
- Twittervision – Real-time geographic posts to Twitter.
- TweetChannel – Create Twitter channels.
- Twitterfall – Real-time monitoring.
- Twendz – Real-time Twitter search engine coupled with related keywords & word clouds.
- Tweetzi – Advanced Twitter search engine.
- Twistory – Pumps your Twitter feed into a calendar application so you can visualize your Tweeting history.
- Twitlinks – Tracks most popular tech links from most popular tech Twitterers.
- Twitturls – Tracks popular links.
- OneRiot – Twitter search engine.
- twopopular – Tracks hashtags and keywors in real time or by time intervals.
- Tweet Volume – See how often words and phrases are mentioned on Twitter.
- TweetEffect – Find out which tweets gained and which tweets lost you followers.
- Tweetmeme – Tweetmeme tracks the most popular links on twitter every 5 minutes, categorized by types of content: Blogs, images, video or audio.
- Tinker – Aggregates Twitter conversations around topics.
- Splitweet – Multi account manager & brand monitor.
- Tweetizen – Lets you categorize your followers and then follow only that feed.
- Who Should I Follow? – Find new Twitter friends.
- FriendOrFollow.com – Find Twitterers you follow that don’t follow you back.
- Twitter Friends – Compare your tweeting behavior with other.
- Who Follows Who? – Find out the common Twitterers up to five Twitter users have in common.
- From Howard Greenstein at Social Media Today:
- Tweetvisor – A Twitter control panel
- TweetDeck – An Adobe Air desktop application for Twitter. I actually use this. It should’ve been on the original list.
- PeopleBrowsr – A dashboard for many social media accounts, including Facebook, Flickr, Open ID, Digg, FriendFeed, and, of course, Twitter.
- CoTweet – Let’s multiple people manage a single Twitter account in a rational fashion.
- Tweet Later – Let’s you schedule Tweets and vet followers.
Top 10 Internet Marketing Blog Posts Of 2008
These are based on page views. So, without further ado, these were the ten most popular posts on this blog for 2008:
- Does Barack Obama’s Youth Vote Signal A Generational & Political Shift?
- Barack Obama Online
- Brett Favre Saga In Search – Vikings Uniform Photo Drives Traffic
- Mobile Commerce – iPhone Or T-Mobile G1?
- Social Networking Statistics
- Marketing To Millennials Presentation
- Obama’s Multichannel Marketing
- Barack Obama’s Use Of Social Networking
- Texting The VP: Barack Obama’s Mobile Marketing Effort
- Reality Is Nine-Tenths Perception
links for 2008-08-27
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JupiterResearch and Forrester (now one company) predict that the internet will affect roughly $1 trillion dollars in offline consumer spending in the next five years. Forget about whether it’s a trillion or $800 billion; the prediction is directionally accurate in terms of consumer behavior. This online-offline connection is a profound trend that marketers and brands have largely failed to understand, let alone capitalize on.
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Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) is buying up another books-focused social network Shelfari, three weeks after it acquired AbeBooks, which holds a 40 percent stake in Shelfari’s main rival, LibraryThing.
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If online "friends" were a proxy for voters, Barack Obama could accept the Presidency, and not just the Democratic nomination, on Aug. 28. With more than 1.8 million supporters on Facebook and MySpace (NWS), Obama’s base on the leading U.S. social networks is nearly seven times that of John McCain.
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Here you will find quality deals submitted by members from around the world. Our community determines what deals will be included within DealBundle based on ratings and popularity. Everyone is welcome to use any deal on our website!
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We help you find "what" to buy through aggregating expert reviews, user reviews, buyers’ guides, thoughts, videos and questions and answers from a crowd of trusted people and sites. Your crowd is your filter unto the giant world of products out there – helping to narrow your choice down to the right product for you.
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PhotoBucket teams up with Target, some PC makers are seeking software detours around Windows Vista, and Nokia unveils a couple new smartphones. Jim Chesko reports.
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Headlines include Google AdWords Now With Real Time Quality Score, First Page Bid & More, plus more privacy talk regarding Google Streetview
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MP3 – iTunes Starting September 4th, comedian Jerry Seinfeld will appear in TV ads for Microsoft Windows. The Wall Street Journal says Seinfeld will earn $10 million for his services. Gawker and other prominent blogs have mocked the choice, saying…
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The key to running a successful large-scale Web site with a focus on organic search traffic is scale. It is obvious that a site with millions of products cannot be manually managed on a product-by-product basis. You would need a staff of over 1,000 employees and a cost center far beyond anything feasible.
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People ask me all the time, "how can I get ranked in the search engines quickly?" Sometimes, I can point out a couple of things that will make a near-immediate impact on Web sites — such as fixing a duplicate content/mirror issue by implementing a 301 permanent redirect strategy, correcting a robots.txt file (I spoke with someone at the Search Engine Strategies conference whose development team had put "disallow: /" in their robots.txt file — this isn’t good, by the way) or, including keywords in the title tag that are relevant to every page (people still don’t do this — I don’t understand!).
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In previous Profitable PPC installments, I’ve described the process of creating great PPC keyword lists, and partitioning those lists into small, tight ad groups. This week we’ll turn to the next step in constructing a killer PPC campaign: writing PPC search ad copy. Follow these guidelines, and you’ll soon be lifting your click-through-rates from the sub-par .1.0- to 1.5-percent range into the truly atmospheric 10- to 25-percent range. Where they can and should be. Really.
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180 million unique visitors were exposed to display ads in June. On the publisher side, Yahoo reached 130,680,000 and Fox reached 83,714,000. On the advertiser side, Microsoft reached 126,367,000 of them. Ask Networks advertised to 102,565,000, coming in as the 10th top display advertiser.
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Google AdWords will remove older reports from its Report Center beginning September 2. Reports that are 6 months old or older, or before March 2, 2008, will be removed.
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Google Suggest Becomes Search Default
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If you do the math, using the best estimates available to you about text messaging (SMS) usage in the US, the results could be staggering: A single news announcement may mean a small windfall for telcos.
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Adobe has launched Photoshop Elements 7 and Premiere Elements 7, the company’s hobbyist-level photo and video editing suites which are now more closely tied into the company’s growing online toolkit.
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Google has launched Suggest, a search feature that offers query suggestions as the user types in the search field.
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In separate announcements today, Microsoft and its former nemesis, Netscape founder Marc Andreessen, are said to be making investments of undisclosed amounts into development firms that are active in the mobile video space.
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The Conference Board Consumer Confidence Index, which had improved moderately in July, made further gains in August and now stands at 56.9 (1985=100), up from 51.9 in July, The Conference Board announced.
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Amazon.com has acquired social library network Shelfari for an undisclosed amount.
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More than half of B2B marketers surveyed intend to increase their international marketing budgets but are confronting attendant challenges, such as having to deal with different languages, an exclusive survey by BtoB found.
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Point, click, upload, share: Adobe’s new mobile app lets smartphone users transfer photos from handhelds to Photoshop.com.
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The Nielsen Company last week released an overview of the presidential campaign so far this summer, providing a look at the candidates’ online presence and buzz, their advertising campaigns, as well as TV viewership for party national conventions.
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Digital marketers are still fighting for a seat at the big table. Learn why your reputation as a techie is holding you back and what you can do about it.
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With the introduction of the new version of the iPhone and the iTunes application store, Apple has demonstrated the combination of a few critical components that should make every smart digital marketer sit up in their chair and start brainstorming on how their brand can get a share of voice with this prime audience.
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MtvU has partnered with local search specialist Zvents to create a series of Web sites geared to individual colleges. The sites will allow students at those universities to search for concerts, sales, parties and other events in their cities. MtvU hopes the sites will serve as de facto city guides to students at each of the 25 universities it is currently targeting, with more to come before the end of the year.
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One key lesson we’ve learned about e-mail marketing over years is this: one size does not fit all. The more relevant your messages are to your subscribers’ needs, wants, and expectations, the better the response and deliverability.
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Achieving top search engine rankings requires a combination of on- and off-page factors. On-page factors include building a crawler-friendly Web site that’s wrapped around interesting, useful, and optimized content. Off-page factors are all about link building, which starts with your home page and ends with inspiring others to link to much more than just your home page.
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Tumri is a new player in the behavioral targeting space that promises seamless integration of highly targeted content with heightened consumer relevancy, lower cost, and time-to-market. I had the opportunity to speak with Calvin Lui, president and CEO of Tumri, to learn more about Tumri’s revolutionary technology and gain some insight to the targeting arena.
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Podcasting, particularly audio podcasting, is a channel that simply isn’t used enough. In the spirit of full disclosure, I cofounded the business podcasting firm, HearThis.com, in 2005. But even without that obvious bias, I’d argue that podcasting will be a much larger part of marketing in the future than it is now. In my column this week, I’ll talk about why and focus on an innovative new podcasting tool from Personal Life Media that’s perfect for marketing.
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This is one of the best screencasts I’ve ever seen: It comes to us from Aza Raskin, head of user experience at Mozilla Labs.The screencast introduces Ubiquity for Firefox, a plug-in still in its early stages that will turbocharge your Firefox browser. As the Mozilla Labs blog says:
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America’s Finest News Source has launched Decider, a local entertainment site that includes interviews, event information, and restaurant reviews. The site is initially launching with content for Chicago, with plans to support more cities over the next few months.
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This latest Pew Internet Project survey confirms that information gathering has become a habit for many Americans, particularly those in the 55% of households with broadband connections. Home broadband has now joined educational attainment, household income and age as the strongest predictors of internet activity. For example, 78% of home broadband users look online for health information, compared with 70% of home dial-up users. Home broadband users are twice as likely as home dial-up users to do health research on a typical day — 12% vs. 6%.
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Advertising Age reported that last year US advertisers spent 64% of their Hispanic-targeted media budgets on Spanish-language broadcast and cable TV networks, while Internet display ads garnered less than 5%.
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Five of the world’s 10 largest cities are located in the fast-growing economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China (the so-called BRIC countries), along with four of the five top markets for new mobile subscribers.
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Last week, the forthcoming Democratic National Convention and Vice-President selection drove the 2nd highest share of visits to each of the websites of the presidential candidates in the past year. The only week with a higher share of visits included the Super Tuesday primaries. The market share of visits to BarackObama.com jumped 53% and 46% to JohnMcCain.com from the previous week.
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H-P is expected today to close its $13.25 acquisition of EDS … AMD agrees to sell its digital-television business to Broadcom … and Apple connects the iPhone to Russia. Jim Chesko has details.
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Malicious hackers appear to be exploiting a serious vulnerability in the Internet’s Domain Name System, or DNS, according to Dan Kaminsky, a security researcher who discovered the flaw.
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Google has its Googleplex, Craigslist has a Victorian flat, and the seventh-most-popular Web site in the world has this: a 3,000-square-foot nondescript loft situated in San Francisco’s South Park below Interstate 80.
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Recently SEOMoz did a survey among the top SEO experts. The results were surprising to say the least. None of the SEO experts could come to a 100 percent agreement on any one subject! So, if they can’t come to an agreement on SEO and link building, how is the rest of the world supposed to?
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In my opinion, anyone working in marketing should be reading Seth Godin’s blog. Seth is a new marketing expert and his brainstorms and thoughts regularly give me new ideas. I am in the middle of reading one of his books, Meatball Sundae. Its contents won’t surprise anyone who reads Seth’s blog; its premise is that mass market products are "meatballs" and the new marketing (in which he includes SEO) are "sundae toppings." Trying to add sundae toppings to meatballs results in a mess, and organisations need to be built from the ground up with new marketing built in.
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This may seem like old hat to many SEOs, but it’s a tip that never fails to get an "oh yeah!" during client meetings. The concept is simple – in any given search engine optmization campaign, you are naturally going to form a list of high-traffic, (perceived) high value keywords that are an idealistic goal for your site to dominate. For a site like SEOmoz, those might be the highly competitive terms like "SEO" or "Search Engine Optimization," while in a field like BuddyTV’s it might be "tv shows" or "tv news."
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In February, AOL announced a partnership with Citysearch to distribute its data across its network. Now, MapQuest has announced that it is integrating Citysearch’s data to provide more comprehensive search results. Features such as reviews, menus, and photos will be available for select listings.
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With the Democratic National Convention starting today in Denver, I thought it would be prudent to see which search engine is handling the highly anticipated event the best. Of course, Microsoft rocked the Olympics and outpaces everyone in mapping Georgia, but who’s got political game?
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Google is adding a feature that brings up suggested searches as you type, Google Suggest, as default on Google.com in the coming weeks. Google Suggest has been working on this feature for years, and it has been available to users in Google Labs.
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More retailers are turning to social media as part of their back-to-school marketing campaigns, according to Jupiter Research. From Facebook to widgets, from virtual worlds to online video, retailers are targeting youth, who may not share the same feelings as their parents about a tough economy.
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Ha Tu and Genna Cohen of the Center for Studying Health System Change released their latest report on how Americans gather health information (HTML report; news release).
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Consumers trust advertising on local newspaper, magazine and television websites, and are very likely to take action after viewing ads on these sites, according to the ‘Local Online Media: From Advertising to Action â? study by the Online Publishers Association (OPA).
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American consumers say in a seven-month period their trust in businesses has fallen in 13 of 15 industries measured, with an overall composite Index decline in consumer trust of 14%, according to the second BBB/Gallup Trust in Business Index survey.
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Brand.net, an ad network for brand advertisers, raised $10 million in its second round of funding, led by Norwest Venture Partners. This brings its total funding to $13 million. The money will be used to build a technology platform for display and video advertising.
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The upcoming release of Microsoft Internet Explorer, IE8, includes features that could make online advertisers’ jobs more difficult.
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Google Ad Manager, which has been in beta since March, made its public debut today.
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The daypart might still be an effective advertising tool, but unless the product has an association with a time of day, consumers only care what’s on the screen.
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To set the stage for successful buys and long-term business partnerships, get the right information up front.
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Does metrics mean watching the clicks and hoping for the best? It doesn’t have to. Find out how a few simple steps and a little math can make you a marketing monster.
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Shortly after Microsoft bought aQuantive it quarantined the ad company’s agency unit, Avenue A/Razorfish, in its own division with its own CEO. There were two ways to interpret that move: A) Microsoft wanted to keep the unit — and its substantial profits — while diminishing the appearance of conflict of interest, or B) Microsoft wanted to sell it and was reducing the barriers to such a sale.
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ClickZ_Campaign08_katefinal.jpg Barack Obama, The Democratic National Committee and "Car Wash Babes"? They may not seem a likely grouping, but yesterday, ads paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Illinois Senator’s presidential campaign showed up on an array of local Clear Channel rock radio station Web sites featuring content some would consider inappropriate for a radio station, much less a presidential campaign.
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Earlier this year, the American Press Institute (API) released its "Newspaper Next 2.0" report, a follow-up to its 1.0 report released in 2006. The original report focused on "discovering pragmatic and practicable ways for newspaper companies to create new growth." Though it was received well, the API found that not much progress was made by 2007, particularly in the area of monetizing the Web.
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With that in mind, in coming weeks, I’ll concentrate specifically on this talent — both new and established. More important, I’ll explore how agencies can best evaluate, engage, and manage this new emerging talent. To start, here are some high-level considerations to keep in mind.
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We all know the power of understanding our visitors’ behaviors online — using Web analytics to understand clicks, movements, patterns, conversions, segments, and more. We have found ways to identify opportunities to improve site performance based on this behavioral data, which is great.
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This year US travel sales booked online will reach $105 billion, up 12% from 2007.
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In 2007, US domestic box office spending for movies reached $9.6 billion, according to the Motion Picture Association of America’s "Theatrical Market Statistics" report. Spending on PC and console video game software alone, excluding hardware, accessories and subscriptions, reached $9.5 billion, according to the Entertainment Software Association.
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Ever since Nokia preloaded the game "Snake" inside a mobile handset back in 1998, mobile carriers and game publishers have expected the mobile gaming market to explode. The inherent attraction of killing 5 or 10 minutes playing a game on a mobile phone seemed obvious. And research studies indicate that consumers enjoy games on their phones and play often.
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More than one-third of US adult Internet users read online newspapers, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press’ "Audience Segments in a Changing News Environment" report. The researchers reported that was close to the percentage who said they watch cable news regularly (39%), and more than those who regularly watch the nightly network news (29%).
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The sites consumers are visiting on the Web, and average length of visits. Nielsen Online tracked the brands with the highest number of unique visits and time spent on their sites.
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Benefiting from the growth in broadband Internet access, NBCOlympics.com served up more than 1.2 billion pages and 72 million video streams through Saturday, more than doubling the combined traffic to its site during the 2004 Games in Athens and the 2006 Games in Turin. The popularity of the site will very likely make digital rights more significant in next year’s bidding for the 2014 and 2016 Games.
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The Twins are building the stadium with some significant environmental features designed in, said Kevin Smith, the team’s executive director of public affairs. Among them: a system to recycle water for maintaining the field, and a steam line from the neighboring Hennepin Energy Recovery Center to provide power for electric generation.
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Across the consumer electronics industry, leading players are revamping their audio and video equipment for a future centered around the Internet, a world in which televisions, stereos and computers ‘ even dishwashers and refrigerators ‘ can communicate with each other over a wireless home network.
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Sen. Barack Obama’s pledge to supporters that they would be the "first to know" his running mate turned out to be a savvy but unworkable communications strategy.
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In a first, Fox will stream the premiere of "Fringe" and season opener of "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" online at the same time as they bow on TV. But there’s a catch: Only computer users on college campuses will be able to log in to watch the simul-stream. Move helps Fox expose the trend-setting college audience — who are more likely to have computers than TVs in their dorm rooms — to the shows.
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The study found that 83 percent of Internet users in the 10-14 age bracket spent an hour or more online a day, but only 68 percent devoted that much time to television.
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The practice of multichannel marketing gets increasingly important with the establishment of new online venues. But as new channels gain traction, think hard about abandoning your existing, established channels.
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The market for touch screens has grown quietly for years, both in commercial applications like restaurant point-of-sale systems, credit card signature readers or automated teller machines, and in consumer devices like global positioning systems and game platforms. But touch screens haven’t created much excitement as the main way for people to use things like phones or computers or other consumer electronics ‘ until now.
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The idea is that anyone can propose a story, though the editors at Spot Us ultimately choose which stories to pursue. Then the burden is put on the citizenry, which is asked to contribute money to pay upfront all of the estimated reporting costs. If the money doesn’t materialize, the idea goes unreported.
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AdParlor is an advertising network designed specifically for social networking sites. Currently we support advertisements on myspace, facebook, hi5, and bebo and will soon be expanding to include friendster and orkut.
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Fifty-three percent of those polled said they expected a cutback within the next six months; 87% said they’re already weathering the pinch.
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At Work Rewired you’ll find reviews of the best places to work.
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Konnects is a place for people building a circle of professional contacts, open to sharing new business opportunities, and looking to fully promote and showcase their capabilities.
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The startup formally launched its site Wednesday with the aim of filling what it views as a gap in the marketplace between business-focused LinkedIn and socially driven Facebook.
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Advertisers have fallen short in actively targeting this portion of the population, in particular with search marketing. Marketers are missing a golden opportunity because Hispanic online users are prime candidates for responding to a search marketing campaign.
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The Yahoo Search Blog announced that they are testing out a new design for Site Explorer plus offering a variety of new stats about web sites.
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Flickr offers an embeddable photo slideshow feature.
links for 2008-08-21
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Nearly 9 in 10 people exposed to advertising in healthcare facilities could recall at least one advertisement that they had seen during their visit or shift, according to a recent Health Media Network study conducted by Arbitron Inc.
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The FCC has decided to launch a marketing effort "to increase awareness and educate consumers" about the Feb 17 conversion of televisions from analog to digital, featuring personal appearances from commissioners and teams of FCC representatives circulating 80 regions of the country
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Online Job Searchers, those adults who have
conducted an employment search online during the past month, represent a youthful,
educated, racially diverse group, according to consumer and media research firm
Scarborough Research. Scarborough finds that Online Job Searchers are 62 percent
more likely than the total adult population to be ages 18-34; 23 percent more likely to
have at least some college education; and 47 percent more likely to be African-
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Extreme Gamers spend an average of 45 hours a week playing video games and have purchased 24 titles in the past three months, according to Games Segmentation 2008, the most recent report from leading market research company, The NPD Group.
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Some publishers are suspicious about the accuracy of panel-based measurement systems (e.g., comScore, Nielsen NetRatings), believing their count to be grossly underneath the real number of unique visitors to their sites.
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The back-to-school season isn’t just for kids. Now is the time for marketers to get a leg up against the competition and shake off the end-of-summer blues.
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The Wall Street Journal today has an interview with Federal Trade Commissioner Jon Leibowitz regarding the agency’s investigation into marketing to kids. One question deals with digital advertising in particular, and exemplifies how marketers are integrating on multiple platforms to reach kids.
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Despite a weakening U.S. economy during the past year, the level of investment deals and acquisitions involving companies in the online advertising world have remained healthy, says a new report by ContentNext Media.
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Today, there are 262 million domestic mobile subscribers, according to CTIA.org. In 2007, the teen market accounted for roughly 16 million subscribers, according to MultiMedia Intelligence, with 91 percent of females and 78 percent of males having cell phones.
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Microsoft enlists Jerry Seinfeld in ad battle, Salesforce.com boosts profit but disappoints investors, and Intel and Yahoo team up to bring the Web to your TV. Jim Chesko reports.
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The Federal Trade Commission has finalized new rules prohibiting telemarketers from calling consumers with recorded messages, known as robo-calls, unless consumers give their permission first. One exception to the new rules: political robo-calls.
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In fact, most conversion actions are incremental micro-events that reduce friction and allow a visitor to continue moving toward your ultimate desired outcome. That outcome may not occur during their current visit — it may be delayed for months, or even years. The key criterion for defining conversion actions is that they must be measurable and have a clear value.
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Ladies and gentlemen, another guide has seen the light of day! Hooray! Our newest debut is The Professional’s Guide to Advanced Search Operators. Available in web and document format, it covers advanced searching and identifies various search operators that can help with competitive analysis, keyword research, site auditing, link building, and more. The guide also shares some valuable SEO tools available on the web.
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When it comes to local advertising, the best conversions come from local media sites, such as newspaper and tv station sites, according to a new report from the Online Publishers Association (OPA). Local media sites see a higher percentage of visitors taking actions on local ads compared to a user review site or a portal.
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As U.S. workers continue to check out the Olympics online during the work week, Yahoo is beating the competition in drawing eyes to its Olympic content. But if your in management, don’t freak out. Peak time for your employees’ daily Olympic fix is lunch time. Check out this data from Nielsen Online.
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How do searchers interact with search engines? New research is constantly coming out revealing how searchers act. This session explores the latest studies and findings to provide tips and tactics for search marketers to consider.
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Discover how search engines rely on link analysis as an important component for rank web pages. Learn also how to increase traffic to your site by building quality links in an appropriate manner.
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How can you best tap into long tail terms? Are there targeting techniques you’re overlooking? This session examines these and other techniques to help you get more out of paid search.
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In what could be dire news for the world’s #2 search provider, as Nielsen Online reports, Yahoo in July lost a full 11% of the US-based search traffic it had the previous year, down to only 17.4% of the nation’s searches, or about 1.4 billion.
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Three of American Airlines’ routes out of New York will get in-flight Wi-Fi: Los Angeles, Miami, and San Francisco. The service will be available on all Boeing 767-200 planes in the fleet.
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Two new AIM updates geared toward keeping the mobile user connected, were launched by AOL this morning: AIM Express (IE6 & 7, Firefox 2 & 3, and Safari 2 & 3) and AIM for Windows Mobile (5 & 6).
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To remain competitive as user activity levels off, eBay has announced that Buy it Now sales will incur a reduced flat fee for an extended listing period.
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In its latest Stop||Watch commercial rankings, TiVo found that, while viewers fast-forward through most paid advertisements, movie trailers are among the least skipped.
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Bloggers have uncovered paperwork for two possible applications from Microsoft having to do with keeping the details of a user’s browsing session private.
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Today, IBM announced a $300 million investment around building upon its 154 existing data centers in 2008, with the addition of 13 new "Business Resilience" service delivery centers in ten countries, including the US.
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If you own or run a website and are not following these six tactics for properly linking your website together then you’re losing Google traffic as you read this. First some definitions. Internal linking is the links on your website that point to other pages within your same website. External linking is when you link to another website. Tactics are specific things to do to achieve desired results, or any mode of procedure for gaining advantage or success.
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To successfully engage in Actionable Listening, the corporation must make an investment not only in Monitoring tools but in providing infrastructure changes that back-up the lip-service with speedy and effective results.
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One of the biggest trends shaping technology today is called "cloud computing." Consumers and business are moving more of their data off their computers and into rich Internet applications that are available everywhere – e.g. "the cloud." You can experience this for yourself on sites like Yahoo Mail, Google Docs, Salesforce.com and Mint.com.
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The majority of the UK’s advertising growth in 2007 came on the Internet. Ofcom, the country’s telecommunications authority, said in August 2008 that online ad spending had risen an average of 70.2% in each of the past five years, and reached £2.8 billion ($5.6 billion) last year.
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It is a worldwide phenomenon predicted to generate $4.5 billion in 2012, up from $1.2 billion in 2008, according to In-Stat. The research company said the technology’s mainstreaming would drive growth in what was once a plaything mainly for students and young adults.
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Summer is the busiest time for car hire companies, and this applies to their websites as well. Weâ??ve recently carried out some analysis of car hire search behaviour in the UK, and I wanted to share some of the key finding here.
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After winning 8 gold medals, it is no surprise that Michael Phelps tops the list of most searched for Olympic athletes in the week to 16th August 2008. The following chart shows the five most searched for Olympic athletes last week – with searches for "Michael Phelps" more than three times higher than for "Shawn Johnson", the gold medal winning US gymnast.
links for 2008-08-20
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American Airlines expanded the availability of in-flight Internet access Wednesday, launching airborne e-mail, Web and other online services on some of its longer, nonstop flights.
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Creating a page for your local listing could be a determining factor in your listing’s appearance.
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Amid the constant stream of circulation declines, vanishing ads and staff reductions that have afflicted print newspapers, some major publishers are seeing online-revenue declines for the first time.
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Younger people tend to get more of their news on the Internet, while older folks use traditional media such as television and newspapers, the Pew Research Center’s biannual survey on news consumption habits said.
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HP beats the Street and issues an upbeat forecast, Microsoft revises its licensing policy for big customers, and Circuit City says selling the company remains an option. Jim Chesko has details.
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Dwight Silverman shares his thoughts on living 30 days with the second generation iPhone
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Everyday a fiercely competitive battle takes place online over capturing the attention of millions of readers. As a result the blogosphere constantly changes shape and different players thrust forward as content kings for the day. Lately, I have been trying to find out what forces control this volatile scene. I have been looking for recurring themes and hoping to find useful correlations.
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Over the weekend, Microsoft rolled out an update to adCenter. The update released new credit card options for users.
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SearchIgnite has announced the release of the next generation of its media optimization tool. The updates featured in Version 3.0 are:
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What kind of impact will a domain name have on the success of the website hosted there? There are basically two schools of thought around the
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SES is well underway. Yahoo does indenting. Yahoo launches Buzz to all. Is the Olympics killing your earnings? Google Maps phone verification is buggy. Google gets sued, once again. Google leads in satisfaction study. Google sorting web results by date? Google launches a 404 widget.
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Websites for women, by women, have undergone rapid growth in the past few years, nearly doubling since July ‘06 and rising 35 percent last year alone, reaching 84 million visitors in July, according to comScore.
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YouTube Mobile has enjoyed a happy reception since its debut, expanding to Latin America in February. According to the GoogleBlog, it "continues to grow exponentially," with "hundreds of millions of YouTube videos" viewed from mobile devices each month.
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Most businesses need local online visibility if only so people can find your office for meetings. In the case of retail businesses, the importance of being found in the local sections of search engines is obvious.
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New research findings indicate inbox advertising provides benefits beyond acquisitions alone.
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You can’t afford to blow it when meeting with new clients. Digitas, T3, BBDO Atlanta and others share their secrets for pitching success.
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Even though Google is a $20 billion company, Web search is still in its infancy, several technology experts said Monday, and it’s likely to be years before users will be able to type a question into a search engine and get exactly what they’re looking for.
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Have you ever stumbled upon a site and thought, "Good God almighty, what has this brand done?" Graphics gone awry, no distinct call-to-action, a blinding or bland color scheme — all poor choices on the brand’s part.
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Google rolled out new features today for Website Optimizer, a tool that helps digital marketers and others test and improve the performance of Web pages.
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Consumers who view ads on local media sites are more likely to act on those impressions as opposed to those who view ads on virtual yellow pages, portals or city guides, according to a new study by the Online Publishers Association.
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Unlike eight years ago, paid search campaigns are no longer a hard sell. Still, search marketers say they are haven’t reached the equivalent of marketing nirvana — ensuring that search is always part of an integrated campaign. However, search marketers and others speaking at the Search Engine Strategies conference this week in San Jose, CA, pointed to inroads being made.
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So as a review of some of the topics we’ve covered this year, here’s a quick rundown of my best exercises for maximizing the performance of your e-mail creative.
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In an ideal world, the behavioral targeting news that would have us all talking would include case studies of incredible results, announcements of new and truly beneficial technologies, industry definitions accepted, government bodies and industry representatives in blissful harmony, and educated consumers content to get anonymous, relevant commercial messaging in exchange for the free content they enjoy.
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Let’s talk security and why you should take advantage of Gmail’s recent SSL feature, and why you might want to be careful using other non-SSL webmail services.
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Americans still have a good six months before they lose analog TV reception on Feb. 17, 2009. While civil rights groups complain that the FCC isn’t doing enough to raise awareness of the transition, those consumers who are aware of it, still aren’t buying converter boxes, according to recent research.
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Wireless audio-equipment manufacturers and producers of live events are up in arms against Google’s efforts to open up a little-used patch of radio spectrum.
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The University of Michigan’s quarterly customer satisfaction index came out today, and in the Website category Google came out on top with a score of 86 out of 100 (up 10 percent from last year). Yahoo slipped 3 percent to a score of 77. MSN’s score was flat at 75, and tied with NYTimes.com and ABCNews.com. AOL came in at 69, and that is 3 percent better than last year.
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The real estate slump may still be helping to drag down the economy, but real-estate sites like Trulia and Zillow seem to be holding up just fine. In fact, the number of monthly unique visitors to Trulia has more than doubled to 2.4 million over the past year, according to comScore. Zillow, in contrast, remained steady at 1.9 million U.S. uniques in July.
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For those of you who read WSJ for the articles, the new BlackBerry-compatible WSJ.com Mobile Reader will open up the nasty walled garden that is WSJ.com. The application will be free and most of the content will be open, although there are plans to lock it down in the near future. The application will draw in stories from WSJ.com, AllThingsD.com, and MarketWatch.com.
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A team of developers have partnered to finally bring a legitimate copy and paste solution to the iPhone – one that can actually move data between different applications (previous solutions could only shuffle data within the same app). But as great as it is to see a team of developers work together to overcome one of the iPhone’s shortcomings, it probably won’t see much use.
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The local ABC affiliate dropped by YouNoodle’s offices in San Francisco to get an idea of how useful their new startups valuation predictor is. ABC’s Sue Thompson interviewed CEO Bob Goodson on how the service works, and I dropped in for a cameo and a dose of healthy skepticism.
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TripAdvisor is in an expansive mood. In July, it acquired two small startups, VirtualTourist (user-gen travel guides) and OneTime (booking price comparison). And today it announced a majority investment in FlipKey, a guest review site for vacation home rentals. The amount of the investment was not disclosed.
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It’s been a slow, painful separation that’s taken decades: divorcing Microsoft from its reliance upon per-processor licensing of its software. Today, the company took another hard step toward turning its back on an obsolete practice.
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Just two weeks after the initial update to the iPhone’s second generation firmware, another has appeared with promises of more "bug fixes."
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Inexplicably, for the second time in four days, Palm has leaked and then pulled information from the Web about its (still forthcoming?) Treo Pro (a.k.a. Treo 850) smartphone, a product originally slated for announcement today.
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Two videos on Social Media Releases. Interestingly, both of these (terrific) videos were produced outside the U.S. Not sure what that means.
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New mobile ad spending projections seem to appear every day. One of the latest is from Strategy Analytics, which predicts that advertisers worldwide will spend $2.4 billion on mobile in 2009, up from $1 billion this year.
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While the top reason that respondents reported e-mail as spam was because they had not opted in to mailings, the second was that the material sent did not interest them. More than four out of 10 e-mail users who hit the "spam" button said they had categorized uninteresting mail as junk.
links for 2008-08-19
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The site, called Business Exchange, is one approach to the fast-evolving digital world, where some news sites that experiment have rapidly expanded their audiences while those that do little more than post articles online have been left in the dust.
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In the last column, we explored how navigation can become a habit. Ann Graybiel’s work shows how regular paths become etched in our basal ganglia, limiting the need for conscious interaction.
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eMarketer has revised its online video ad spending projections, forecasting that advertisers will spend $505 million online this year in the US. That estimate is due to changes in methodology, based on historical data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), eMarketer’s benchmark source. While this year’s online video ad projection is quite a drop from the one eMarketer put out in February 2008, which said that advertisers would spend $1.4 billion in 2008, it is important to note that the lowered estimate still represents an increase of 55.9% over 2007 spending.
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Entertainment sites have the greatest affinity with under 12s; for 12-17 year-olds it’s games sites and for 18-22 year-olds it’s student and video sites
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On a not adjusted basis, the estimate of U.S. retail e-commerce sales for the second quarter of 2008 totaled $32.5 billion, an increase of 0.5 percent (±1.0%)* from the first quarter of 2008. The second quarter 2008 e-commerce estimate increased 8.9 percent (±1.2%) from the second quarter of 2007 while total retail sales increased 2.3 (±0.5%) in the same period. E-commerce sales in the second quarter of 2008 accounted for 3.1 percent of total sales.
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Big men can social network about topics including fashion and what it’s like to be ‘big and tallâ? with a new network from Casual Male Retail Group, parent company of brands like Casual Male XL and LivingXL.
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AOL confirmed on Friday that it has entered into an agreement to acquire social feed aggregation platform Socialthing.
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MobileMe woes continue and so Apple is giving a free 60-day extension of the service users love to hate — well, dislike. That brings the free extensions to a total of three months since the service launched a little more than a month ago.
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PIXSTA, a United Kingdom-based search firm that lets users search for images with other images, then purchase items they like without excess verbage, added eight media brands to its content network.
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You don’t need suggestive imagery to tap into the true power of online campaigns. But there is a vital emotional component that will likely get a rise out of your audience.
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Ignorant and offensive tactics continue to persist in the email marketing space. Learn what they are and why you should avoid them.
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VideoEgg’s CEO laments the loss of joy in the world of online marketing and offers suggestions to help create the happiest place online.
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I was recently asked to put together a workshop session on data-driven marketing for a class of digital marketing students. While pulling the material together for the workshop, I came to the conclusion that there are four key components for successful data-driven marketing, some of which are obvious, some perhaps less so.
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OK, I’ve previously examined the different ways you could advertise on Google. To be fair I asked Bianca Garcia, one of our media planners who specializes in social media, to help me compile a list of the advertising opportunities on Facebook.
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Investors await HP’s quarterly-earnings report, Electronic Arts allows its unsolicited bid for rival Take-Two to expire, and TV news continues to hold an edge over online news sources. Jim Chesko reports.
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For the past three columns, I’ve been describing the best practices for creating comprehensive keyword lists. Our ongoing exercise assumed we were setting up a PPC campaign for the legendary mythical guitar manufacturer, Krisp Guitars. We defined Personas — identities of typical buyer types – and then generated a list of 540 keywords for the Roger persona, a serious buyer of high-end guitars.
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As small business owners, we must always prioritize our goals and tasks. Here are 10 tasks you can complete in about 10 minutes or less that can deliver results worth many times that level of effort.
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After a summer of high gas prices, Carmax.com is helping consumers find used cars that are easier on the wallet. They’ve launched a new search feature that allows car shoppers to search their inventory by MPG or miles per gallon.
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WebTrends estimates that $4.5 million will be wasted in search advertising this year. That’s why they’re launching a new service: Ad Director. Debuting at SES San Jose, Ad Director uses self-learning technology to optimize millions of combinations of keywords, landing pages and ads across the major search networks. WebTrends says that companies using the solution have seen their return on ad spend increase an average of 44 percent.
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Because I haven’t covered the SEO basics in a while, let’s look at a few things that will help your site rank well organically.
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The Web Analytics Association has announced the addition of Yahoo’s Dennis Mortensen to their board of directors. Mortensen is Director of Data for the Sunnyvale search engine, arriving there from IndexTools, which was acquired by Yahoo earlier this year. He will serve through 2010.
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The "one web" premise of the iPhone generation of connected devices offers a strak contrast to the former mobile standard, in which webmasters create separate a ‘.mobi’ site, specifically targeted for mobile users.
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My job today is to convince you that semantic search is coming closer and closer to reality and that you can participate, and I’m planning on exploring the following:
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Where does search really fit within a marketer’s total digital advertising effort? Big businesses and small businesses alike struggle with how to allocate search marketing, and other online advertising or marketing efforts. This Orion panel will evaluate strategic thought processes and then grind down to tactical execution with thought leaders from the search engine marketing, advertising agency, and advertiser perspectives. We will explore how search can be "carved out" from an overall budget and how it will lead the white whale of online marketing ‘ a truly holistic marketing strategy.
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Is Google your main search engine? Do you realize that there are many other tools that will help you find specific information ‘ sometimes better than Google? Most people are unaware that there are more than just the "big three" of Google, Yahoo, and MSN. The list includes Bit Torrent search engines, image search engines, artificial intelligence systems, clustering engines, recommendation search engines, metasearch, and many more hidden gems of search. Most of these niche search engines have very fun, interesting features, and you’ll discover all sorts of relevant information you might have otherwise missed using the more general, big box-type search engines.
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According to comScore, nearly 139 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 83 videos per viewer in March 2008, viewing a total of 11.5 billion online videos during the month. However, the average YouTube video receives only 100 views a year.
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Google does a link exchange. AdSense forcing users to switch to Google Account. Google confirms font tests. Are you AdWords dependent? Google changes SEO friendly FAQ. Google tests blog links as Sitelinks.
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John McCain says that he’s learning how to use a computer after having sparked off a mini-scandal earlier this year over his admission that he’s computer illiterate: He’s apparently a quick study, because he’s now adept enough to to use Google Reader, Google’s news aggregation service. What’s more, he’s sharing his newfound capabilities with the world through a new website that Google unveiled Monday called Power Reader in Politics.
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Japan will start an aggressive push to market abroad its mobile technology, especially the nation’s popular "wallet phone," a government official said Tuesday.
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New technologies tend to follow different trajectories of hype, hope, and despair as they are discovered by different groups of people and finally adopted (or ignored) by consumers. Gartner actually goes ahead and charts this hype cycle for different technologies. Its
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Friendster, the social network that has seen explosive growth in Asia but continues to lag behind Facebook and MySpace elsewhere, has launched support for OpenSocial apps on its development platform. Friendster initially launched its platform last October, but has restricted available applications to those developed especially for Friendster’s API (much as a developer would have to develop specifically for Facebook).
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Buzz, Yahoo’s Digg-like effort to leverage reader gestures and third party content in determining the most popular news, removes it’s barriers to entry tonight.
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Last week Twitter announced that it had disabled outbound SMS updates for nearly all of its international users because it has been unable to negotiate favorable deals with cellular carriers. Up until this point, Twitter has allowed users to receive incoming SMS messages free of charge, footing a bill that it says amounted to up to $1000 per user, per year. The service will continue operating in the US, India, and Canada (where Twitter has forged deals with carriers), but many international users are being left in the cold.
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The company behind the popular ICanHasCheezburger site has launched a new website, EngrishFunny, which makes fun of grammatically incorrect variations of English (often found in Asia). Users send in photos of poorly translated or written products, signs, instructions, etc. to the site.
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NewsCred, the news aggregator that ranks stories by the credibility of their source, has launched to the public. Instead of relying on popularity as many social news sites do, NewsCred instead allows users to rate each story, author, and publication’s credibility, which is then plugged into an algorithm to determine the site’s prominent headlines.
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In the latest of a barrage of lawsuits against various and sundry operators of "automated and network-automated databases," Web development company GraphOn is now hauling Google into court on allegations of patent infringement.
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A communications strike that could have affected both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions, set to be held within the next two weeks, has been avoided.
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Withdrawing from the fierce high definition format war was considered a "losing move" by Toshiba. Now, instead of concentrating on the next generation of hard-copy home media, Toshiba will focus on improving the 13 year-old DVD format.
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Through a design that mimics the look of the popular social network Facebook, Republicans hope to build an image of Barack Obama based on the company he keeps.
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Whether for screening out irate ex-spouses or persistent telemarketers, a new feature announced by Verizon Wireless today enables customers to block communications with specific phone numbers.
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Key to Dell’s comeback as the leading server manufacturer is the repair of its image as a fair corporate citizen. So this week’s public notice that it probably can’t trademark the phrase "cloud computing" won’t help.
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It may be unusual for the SDK for a platform to be finalized on or about the same time as the release of the platform itself, but news from Android’s key developers today indicates they’re quite comfortable with cutting it close.
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Upstart mobile browser Skyfire this weekend rolled out its Beta version 0.6 to select testers in the US, using the Olympic craze to highlight the browser’s native support of Microsoft’s Silverlight.
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With Facebook growing at a far brisker clip than any other major social network, four big news organizations, including Fox News — whose parent company owns rival MySpace — are now expanding their Facebook presences.
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Google had strong financial results for Q2 2008, and online ad revenues for the top four Internet portals (Google, Yahoo!, MSN and AOL) will continue to grow through the US economic downturn. In fact, eMarketer predicts that Google’s online ad revenues will increase by 27.4% in the US in 2008.
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The automotive industry is having a rough year, and the effects are spilling over into its advertising. In Q1 2008, online was the only medium for which automotive ad spending did not fall, according to Bernstein Research. The research firm said that even Internet ad spending by automakers rose only 3.8% over Q4 2007, accounting for 8.6% of total online advertising.
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One sector that we continually monitor here at Hitwise for insight into consumer behavior is traffic to the Shopping & Classifieds category. Given the current economic climate, price sensitivity is driving more visits to the websites of online retailers, coupons, and comparison shopping tools as shoppers increasingly research potential purchases online.
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Facebook has won approval to acquire rival ConnectU despite an appeal against an agreed settlement.
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When you search your bookmarks on del.icio.us, all you are searching is the tags, titles, and descriptions. If you want to search the full text of the underlying bookmarked pages themselves, you have to go to Del.izzy, a site out of Melbourne, Australia that was hacked together in three days. Del.izzy takes each page that you’ve bookmarked and puts it through a Google custom search to bring back results for the search terms you enter.
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MP3 – iTunes On today’s show John Brandon, a Computerworld blogger, recommended five Web 2.0 services. They are: Zendesk Yoowalk Scour Tokbox Lefora…
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People are far more tolerant of ads when they accompany professionally created content than when they come with homemade video, according to a new survey.
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Social networking site for sports fans.
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David Katz believes that his Web site, sportsfanlive.com, will compete well against established sports sites he views as stodgy and too congested for fans to wade through.
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Tool for checking SEO factors on a web page.
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Social media case studies.
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NBC scores lots of gold from its Olympics coverage, Qwest averts a strike – for now, at least, and the videogame industry has another big month. Jim Chesko has details.
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Fewer Americans are reading newspapers and are instead getting their news online, but television remains the leading source of news in the country, according to a survey released Sunday.
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I saw a demo of Workstir earlier this week, a new startup founded by Ryan Merket and Duncan Winter. The site is still in private alpha and is at least a few weeks away from launching, but they have an interesting approach to cracking the local services market. Think Craigslist + Yelp, where people sometimes post listings looking for service providers, and service providers sometimes post listings saying what they do. But listings, profiles, reviews and other data are more structured, and the site works hard to put service providers and customers together.
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Pandora made a bold political statement today, saying they’d likely shut down rather than continue to pay exorbitant fees to play music to listeners of its massively popular service.
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Jitterbit, a service that helps companies bridge and integrate data from different sources, has released a new 2.0 version of its software along with a new pricing model that it hopes will make it more appealing to businesses and consumers alike.
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A survey by the Communications Workers of America indicates that the median download speed for US Internet connections has changed little, and remains far slower than the rates experienced in other developed nations.
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Two trends continue, as evidenced by this month’s comScore Top 50 report, released this afternoon: One, Google’s going nowhere but up. Two, it can still go up when overall Internet use in the US is actually going down.
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Beginning August 16, the US Transportation Safety Administration will no longer expressly require laptops to be removed from luggage at airport security checkpoints if they are kept in appropriate bags.
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This week Rand gets a bit technical with a whirlwind walkthrough of how the search engine link graph works. Fully-qualified domains, pay-level domains, internal juice, external juice, domain trust, etc. It’s all explained in this fast and furious installment of Whiteboard Friday…enjoy!
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Google is now offering AdSense for Feeds, after announcing that Feedburner would not be accepting any more applications to the Feedburner Ad Network.
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VeriSign has announced that their SSL certificates will now support International Domain Names (IDN). These domain names display website addresses in local language characters such as Kanji symbols in Japan. This will come as welcome news to those who are looking to globalization marketing efforts or developing a multi-lingual site.
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If you want to go global or develop your content in other languages, you’re likely in need of a good translator. But just copying and pasting text into an online translation page isn’t going to do the job. You need human intelligence that knows the culture of the audience you’re aiming to reach.
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Google’s search share surpasses 70%. Take our Google penalty poll. What is the deal with Google and ranking software? Google get personal on personalizes results. Google shuts down FeedBurner ads and opens up AdSense for feeds. Google Reader improves sharing feature. Google fixes bugs with 404 reporting and sitemaps pending in webmaster tools. They also fixed bolding of search results for keyword matches. The Gmail outage was painful. Are you the most dependable SEO? SES San Jose is next week, we got you covered. More news at SERoundtable.com.
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In his findings, Beu believes that Google is now able to "advance" in terms of how it is able to spider content. It seems, from the removal of that paragraph, that Google is actually able to understand the text on the multitude of dynamic pages.
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As the economy has weakened, traffic at club stores targeting budget-conscious shoppers has increased at a rate faster than US population growth ‘ with upscale consumers driving the increase, according to new data from Mediamark Research & Intelligence (MRI).
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WebTrends’ new Ad Director tool will improve search ad results by 44 percent on average, the web analytics firm claims.
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Though the US lags behind the UK and India in many mobile phone usage categories, the number of US mobile phone users has grown from 251 million in 4Q07 to over 263 million in 2Q08 – up nearly 10% – according to a Limbo and GfK Technology Mobile Advertising Report.
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comScore, Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR), a leader in measuring the digital world, today released its monthly analysis of U.S. consumer activity at the top online properties for July 2008 based on data from the comScore Media Metrix service. Continuing the summer trends in Web usage observed last month, leisure-oriented categories demonstrated gains in July, including travel, retail, tickets and entertainment news.
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I just discovered the Blog Neworks Facebook application. You can see the badge in the sidebar to your right.
Since I just installed it, I can’t tell you how effective it is but it looks like such a useful app for promoting your blog, I thought I’d share. -
That’s the word cloud created by Wordle for the front page of this blog (click on the graphic to see a larger version). Pretty cool. You just paste in a URL or an RSS feed, and the Java app creates the word cloud for you. You can also just paste in text. I love it but I’d love it a lot better if it made a tag cloud out of an entire site. I could see charging for something like that.
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links for 2008-08-16
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Many brands are eager to jump into social networking. After all, it’s relatively cheap, and it can be insanely successful. But there are many more failures than successes in the medium, and it’s important that brand managers pragmatically consider the risks and rewards for the business.
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Following his recent career move, Goodmail’s new CEO chats with iMedia about why he left IAC, the opportunities he sees at his new company and the vital importance of restoring trust in email marketing.
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Yahoo has been a frustrating place to buy keywords. But amid massive turmoil at the company, a major change to SEM went largely unnoticed. Find out what it was and how it affects you.
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Facebook and at least seven advertisers are being sued for an unpopular ad targeting program. Advertisers named in the federal lawsuit include Blockbuster, Fandango, and Zappos.
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As mobile advertising moves from an experimental buy to a dedicated budget line item, ad networks serving the space have also matured. Third Screen Media, Ringleader Digital, Ad Mob, Millennial Media, and others have jockeyed to meet the needs of advertisers and publishers.
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The four top-performing IAB standard video ad units have generated click-through rates above 10 percent, according to a study conducted by Break Media and its advertising partner Panache.
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I’m referring to the news last week that both the Amazon Kindle and Apple’s iPhone may be on their way to being billion-dollar products. The first big projection came from Steve Jobs. Based on the new iPhone App Store’s selling $1 million a day over 30 days, he told "The Wall Street Journal" that "maybe [the iPhone app store] will be a $1 billion marketplace at some point in time."
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Remember when you were in grade school and your class made a time capsule? I’ve heard many versions of how schools do this. Some schools make the time capsule to be opened 30 to 50 years later, while others make a capsule in first grade and open it at the end of eighth grade. And in some cases, students make a time capsule for the future and open one from the past. Regardless of the different approaches, people think making a time capsule is a fun and exciting idea.
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If you’re relatively new to SEO or just about to undertake SEO on your Web site for the first time, you’re likely looking for some key resources. For the benefit of SEO newbies, here’s a short list of some top online resources for SEO — in no particular order.
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A new mobile phone powered by Google’s Android software might be out as early as October, the New York Times reports.
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A one year follow up on a study of social media adoption at 500 of the fastest growing companies in the US has found that familiarity with and use of blogs, podcasting, wikis, online video and social networking has skyrocketed in 2008 to nearly double what it was in 2007. 77% of respondents now report at least some use of a social media tool in their business.
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A couple of weeks ago Intel launched a new education-focused online community called Inspire. The site is now live at Inspiredbyeducation.com . The goal of the new site and community is to highlight the educational experiences that inspire people, allowing consumers and influencers alike to engage in improving the quality of education.
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This American Life’s great mortgage crisis explainer, The Giant Pool of Money, suggests that "information" and "explanation" ought to be reversed in our order of thought. Especially as we contemplate new news systems.
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One of the announcements coming out of the New Media Expo in Las Vegas that pricked my attention was the news that Personal Life Media just released an audio player widget that distributes multiple podcast RSS feeds.
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In this space I’ve talked about the Social Media Release (SMR) a fair bit. I’ve talked (half-jokingly) about the ‘TwitRelease.â? I’ve talked (very seriously) about the need to atomize content. I’ve made dramatic turnarounds in my thinking re: SMR distribution.
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The top Internet advertisers by media value. The data are provided by TNS Media Intelligence.
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Below, the top 10 search terms by search volume. Data are provided by Hitwise.
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A recent forecast from Informa Telecoms & Media projected that mobile video and television will reach $4.8 billion by 2012, up from $750 million in 2007. The extent of ad-supported versus paid content is not clear from this research.
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In the US this year, advertisers will spend $40 million to reach a business audience on online social networks, and that is just the beginning. According to eMarketer projections, that ad spending will reach $210 million in 2012.
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The 10 fastest moving search terms in the UK last week were:
links for 2008-08-16
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I noticed a few weeks ago that sites using Google Knol or Google pages were getting great positions in the Google SERPs. This didn’t seem like a big deal to me at the time, as it was in less-trafficked areas and nothing that was competing with me.
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Zillow, a vertical search engine aimed at the real estate market, has announced the launch of Showcase Ads, geo-targeted ads for realtors and other real estate advertisers. Within a given zip code, advertisers can buy 25, 50, 75, or 100 percent of the ads, giving them the ability to target just the local areas they are interested in selling to. Showcase Ads will have a different pricing structure than Zillow’s other local ad offering – EZ Ads.
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As people returned to work on Monday after the first weekend of the Beijing Olympic games, many went online to keep track of events as they unfold, according to Nielsen Online. Traffic to NBC’s Olympics video site jumped a whopping 85% on the first day of the work week, while other sites enjoyed a nice boost as well.
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We’ve seen a natural progression from back rooms to boardrooms — from the basement to the mainstream. SEO has not simply shed its dubious roots; it has become a legitimate, reputable component of a proper client marketing mix.
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January’s JPMorgan estimate that placed global search advertising spending in excess of $30 billion for this year (growing to $60 billion by 2011) got more than a few people thinking about what percentage of search advertising dollars are being spent effectively.
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Google was the recipient of 70.77% of U.S. searches in July 2008, up from 69.17% in June, according to Hitwise. Yahoo and Microsoft continued to drop, at 18.65% and 5.36% respectively. Ask.com dropped month-over-month but gained year-over-year, coming in at 3.53%.
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A couple weeks ago, Google slightly changed how they show the Google search results, which resulted in several search ranking software packages to not function properly anymore. I reported this under the title of WebPosition Ranking Software Being Blocked by Google? early on and Scott Goodyear from WebPosition commented here and also at WebmasterWorld with his two cents.
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When Google Ad Planner came out back in June, I immediately thought of Comscore – and I was not alone. Many in the marketing industry thought that Google’s product would be a "Comscore killer," and when I noted as much in my coverage, Gian Fulgoni, Comscore’s chair, shot back in a comment to my post:
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Please don’t fall prey to scams. Should you 404 or 301? Google fixed the sitemaps bug. Do penalties scare you? Google Reader shares friends. PageRank and link building, what a pair. Live Search Maps does ads. India sues Google and others. YouTube won’t be streaming video.
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Major technical problems continue at Netflix and a hedge fund sets its sights on Cablevision. Tom Ortuso has those stories and more
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Russian-controlled computers are said to have launched Internet attacks against Georgian government Web sites as early as July 20th, well before fighting on the ground began. The denial of service attacks – which flood targets with malicious data – curtailed Georgia’s ability to spread its message and communicate with the outside world.
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There are 3 advisement types that you’ll find on the Live Search Maps site, but only one of which we’re taking orders for via the Virtual Earth platform licensing group – Highlighted Listings (the other two being Sponsored Listings and Brand Finder are described below, but just for informational purposes). To advertise on Live Search Maps via the Highlighted Listings program send mail to the Virtual Earth Licensing alias (or, yes, you can always email me).
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MySpace had a record 75.2 million unique US visitors in July 2008, the highest number since its launch in 2004 – and an increase of 2.5 million from the previous month – according to data from comScore released by MySpace.
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According to SNL Kagan, 2007 was a banner year for cable networks. Industry revenue increased by 12.6% in 2007 to $38 billion. Ad revenue jumped 10.5% to $19 billion, while license fees (affiliate revenues) soared almost 15% to more than $20 billion.
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Shared consumer experiences can make or break your brand when it comes to WOM. See how to increase your chances of getting on your customers’ good sides.
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Who is to blame for falling CPMs, and which ad network gives marketers the reach they crave? Those questions and a stunning hiccup from Google dominated the top stories this week.
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This week Yahoo took Fire Eagle out of beta. Fire Eagle is a geo-location platform with social, business — and advertising — implications.
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Online ad spend in the U.K. overtook advertising on mainstream commercial TV last year, according to Britain’s Office of Communications. Paid search grabbed over half of online ad dollars spent in the U.K. in 2007.
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Several of my recent columns have dealt with testing and optimization. Today, I’ll focus on the other half of the online marketing world, those who must drive leads through their site.
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In the column "How to Work Effectively With Your Tech Team", I emphasized the importance of marketers gaining a better understanding of technology. Here, I’d like to dive into some additional technology principles for you to understand to reduce some of the "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" confusion that exists anytime that marketers and technologists sit together at the same table.
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When Google added its sharing feature to Reader last year, there were no options to control which people you shared news with. Couple that with the fact that Gmail added anyone who ever e-mailed you to your list of contacts and you had a recipe for sharing disaster.
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That vision of the future is laid out in "Automotive 2020: Clarity Beyond the Chaos," (.pdf) by the IBM Institute for Business Value. The report, based on interviews with 125 auto industry executives in 15 countries, says the industry is on the cusp of revolutionary changes that will see environmental sustainability and technological innovation become top priorities as automakers respond to consumer demands for more efficient cars that don’t sacrifice performance, comfort or reliability.
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Thus far in our introductory Django tutorial, we’ve installed the open-source Django framework, set up a blog and beefed it up by adding some extras like semantic content tags, some handy template tags and a list of our bookmarks from delicious.com. If you haven’t been following along, now would be a good time to go back to Lesson 1 and catch up.
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In a crucial win for the free software movement, a federal appeals court has ruled that even software developers who give away the programming code for their works can sue for copyright infringement if someone misappropriates that material.
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One of the biggest problems with Apple’s still-fledgling App Store is that there’s no efficient way to sift through new applications. While users can view a list of the most recently uploaded apps, the list can be overwhelming and unorganized. Most users rely on the “Top Apps†lists, which do seem to change often, but these tend to consist mainly of games and “fun†apps that aren’t particularly useful.
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With the appointment of Frank Biondi, Jr. and John Chapple to Yahoo’s board of directors today, the last two slots on the board are now filled. Biondi, the former CEO of Viacom, and Chapple, the former CEO of Nextel, were both on Carl Icahn’s original alternate slate when he was still trying to replace the entire board. As part of his compromise with Yahoo, Icahn backed down from his proxy battle in return for three seats on the board.
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We’ve received confirmation from AOL that the company has acquired Socialthing!, a lifestreaming service that competes with FriendFeed. We originally reported the deal on August 1.
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The long wait for the first Android phone should be over this fall, when T-Mobile is expected to release an HTC phone based on the Google-backed mobile operating system called the Dream. Following up on growing rumors online, the New York Times has confirmed that T-Mobile is hoping for a pre-holiday launch.
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In another apparent effort to streamline its services to focus on revenue, wireless carrier Sprint will stop providing the servers for e-mail service for its PCS phone customers, although it will let customers pick their own providers.
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If a bill now being considered by the California State Senate and Assembly becomes law, schoolyard bullies who use the Internet and text messaging to intimidate others may be expelled from school.
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Intel this morning made available the updated Extended Host Controller Interface (xHCI) specification that will allow manufacturers to start work on USB 3.0 devices.
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New independent data shows Facebook enjoyed 153 percent growth year over year, while MySpace remains essentially flat. The site’s growth is biggest overall outside of the US.
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The official marketing channel for the next edition of Windows was opened this afternoon, as Microsoft quietly raised the curtains on what it’s positioning as an open channel for ideas regarding what the company should add to its next OS.
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The biggest and most significant legal action against now-leading social network Facebook was filed on Tuesday, and will actually test the theory of whether its Beacon behavior sharing program constituted a criminal conspiracy.
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The maker of a popular pre-paid cell phone today announced a program that will give low income Tennessee residents free cell phones and mobile service on a year-to-year basis.
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According to the Torrent tracking site, TorrentFreak, the opening ceremony for the Beijing Olympics was the most-downloaded television show for the week of August 3-10th.
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Remember back when Al Gore allegedly said he "invented the Internet?" Well, he didn’t, it was Google. Alright, I’m kidding, but sometimes it does appear that way. Google has consistently launched one killer application after another, and they weren’t playing around when they entered into the pay-per-click arena with their "Adwords" program. Adwords is one of the largest online advertising networks, reaching more than 80% of all Internet users.
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Lately, I have been getting a lot of questions about how the comments section in this blog works — specifically, how I decide which comments to post and which to delete.
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Despite all of its recent up-time troubles, Twitter’s growth has been on a tear lately. According to Google Ad Planner data, time spent is off the charts at a staggering 550 seconds per user in the US and 560 seconds globally. Compare those figures to 480 seconds per user for CNN – a site that’s at least 10 years older. In addition, as you can see from the chart below, daily unique users are skyrocketing as well.
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Young US consumers surveyed spent more time on the Internet than with any other type of media in May 2008, according to a study conducted by DoubleClick Performics and ROI Research.
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Advertising agencies surveyed worldwide planned to increase their search engine marketing (SEM) spending more in 2008 than did advertisers themselves, according to the recently released "State of Search Engine Marketing 2007" report sponsored by the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO) and conducted by Radar Research.
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The chart below which compares a custom category of Online Retailers with a custom category of the top 100 Bricks and Mortar Retailers in Australia (ranked by online market share) including Coles, Dick Smith Electronics and Harvey Norman, suggests that the margin between the two categories has closed substantially during July, after an Australian traffic difference of 28.7% at week ending June 21.
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Therefore any organization rebranding itself should monitor internet searches for its brand in order to measure the relative success or failure of its campaign.
links for 2008-05-19
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Mobile banner ads also produce click-through rates that are "exponentially higher than online" banner ads, where CTR has fallen to about 0.3%; mobile banners produce an overall click-through rate of 2%, even "slightly higher for entertainment brands."
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Google has long been the Internet’s leader in search, but its audience has trailed Yahoo Inc.’s when counting other services such as e-mail and photo sharing.
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An index that tracks online ad prices for publishers shows that rates dropped 23 percent, from 49 cents in March to 38 percent in April, based on the effective cost-per-thousand impressions (eCPM).
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Social content and address book service Plaxo on Wednesday said that it had signed an agreement to be acquired by cable giant Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA), a deal that reflects the inexorable merger of socially-oriented Internet services and traditional content
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Although Google’s Street View service was not the first to augment online maps with photos, the detail and breadth of images on the site surprised and unsettled many users when it launched last year.
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Search site Ask.com will announce on Thursday a deal to buy Lexico, home to popular reference Web sites Dictionary.com and Thesaurus.com, a move that will expand its audience by 11 percent.
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The Palo Alto (Calif.) social networking site is readying an extensive overhaul of its core profile pages in an attempt to bring back the sleek aesthetic that helped fuel its early popularity. Executives say the redesign should hit the Web browsers of Fac
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Spending will reach $1.4 billion in 2008, according to eMarketer’s latest report, down from the more bullish $1.6 billion estimate the researcher had previously issued in December. That new spending benchmark would represent growth of 55 percent — still
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Democratic US Representative Ed Markey of Malden is backing a bill that would require major producers of Internet videos to add captions as well as "video description" soundtracks that describe the on-screen action for blind people.
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The social network is adding more language capability, further proof that growth outside the U.S. is vital for Facebook and MySpace
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YouTube makes that determination by looking at factors such as the early acceleration of views on a given clip, along with the number of times it is "favorited" and the number of ratings it receives.
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eMarketer forecasts that over 800 million people worldwide will be participating in a social network via their mobile phones by 2012, up from 82 million in 2007.
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FriendFeedLinks is a memetracker that tracks most shared stories on FriendFeed
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Follow Twitter conversations between two Twitter users.
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RSSmeme gets its data from Google Reader shared RSS feeds. Wikipedia describes a meme as "a unit of cultural evolution". So RSSmeme is the current state of culture defined by RSS feeds.
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Google’s John Hanke keynoted the Where 2.0 conference this morning and discussed the development and evolution of the "geoweb."
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Yahoo! is now offering a developer preview of this Yahoo! Internet Location Platform.
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Yahoo was found to have the highest number of partners generating clicks — 1,196 of them beyond Yahoo Search itself. These partners generated 55% of all of Yahoo’s paid search clicks. Yahoo itself generated 45%.
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Intended for science education, "Worldwide Telescope stitches together terabytes of high-resolution images of celestial bodies, and displays them in a way that relates to their actual position in the sky."
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This week’s infographic shows how search engines make distinctions between original and duplicate content
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By this time next year, Google’s search business will be larger and more profitable than the most profitable and legendary monopoly in history–Microsoft Windows. (Just Google’s search business–that doesn’t even include AdSense).
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Yelp has thrived. In March, it had 3.3 million users, according to Comscore, up 87 percent from a year ago. Citysearch still towers above it with 16.2 million users.
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It’s not all about links, good vertical sites also provide opportunity for marketers, who can generate highly qualified leads and click-through due to the focused demographics of many B2B vertical sites.
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The platform, featuring a new profile-matching paradigm with a comprehensive taxonomy and proprietary algorithm, also offers no-cost job posting with real-time updating of result pages that grade, filter and rank candidates according to how well they qual
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Displays a keyword tag cloud and demonstrates the usage of this keyword and its synonyms in short context.
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Will show you keyword variations either in alphabetical order or on a map:
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Google Sites Extends Online Video Market Share Lead to 38 Percent on Surge in Viewing at YouTube.com
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YouTube for children.
links for 2008-05-10
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Google and Microsoft may eventually become the envy of medical researchers, as the technology behemoths take on the role of hosting health care databases for consumers’ own personally controlled health records (PCHRs).
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We are seeing users spend a bit more more time with the video websites, spending an average of 16 minutes and 12 seconds for the week ending April 12, 2008 as compared to 15 minutes and 14 seconds during the same week last y