Nah, focus on what you do best, says Ad Age publisher Scott Donaton. I agree: Consumer insights. Creative ideas. Media strategies. Marketers will still need those. Yes, even when behavioral targeting and advanced technologies make it possible to serve the right ads to the right audience at the right time. It won’t all come down to technology.

Several bloggers have suggested writing about the linkerati as way to draw editorial backlinks. This post is a sort of lens to some great articles elsewhere, plus a bit of value-added on my end. Rand at SEOmoz identified the linkerati, and says that every site is linkbait and linkerati worthy. But that’s provided that you can identify the people most likely to link to you and attract them to your site. Obviously, you want to profile them o

Jeff Barr, who works at Amazon, discusses his go rounds with Google recruiters: They were almost ready to make the “can’t refuse” offer but the process became bogged down when I couldn’t recall my college GPA. Given that I earned my degree in 1985 and have been earning a living by writing code since I was 15 or 16, this didn’t seem all that essential. Funny thing is, I now have several more emails in my inbox from

Bloomberg: Google Inc., owner of the world’s most popular search engine, may be violating the European Union’s privacy laws by storing information on customer queries for as long as two years, advisers to EU regulators told the company. Google’s privacy counsel in Paris, Peter Fleischer, said the company received a letter this month from the EU’s data-protection advisory agency asking it to explain why records of user searches are retained. T

Robert Peck (Bear Stearns) analysis of recent Comscore search share numbers: GOOGLE: SIGNIFICANT SHARE GAIN AT THE EXPENSE OF EVERYONE ELSE. According to comScore data release yesterday, Google once again posted solid domestic market share gains of 140 bps in April 07 to reach domestic market share at 49.7%, up from 48.3% in March 07. Google grew search queries by 27% YoY in March 07. While this growth level almost triples the industry growth

Time for some trivial search engine statistics courtesy of Nielsen/NetRatings published by the Register. Based on the data released by Nielsen, Google searches increased by 42%  in April, with the total searches amounting to nearly 3.8 billion. Yahoo! Search follows with an accounted 1.3 billion searches and MSN live search getting a piece of the pie with 618 million searches. Total Google searches accounted for represent 55% of all searches con

This week marks the beginning of the dog days of summer spikes in gas prices, as today is the official start of Memorial Day weekend, when Americans drop everything they’re doing for a 3 or 4 day weekend of drinking, driving, swimming and working on their sunburn.
Add the tensions in the Persian Gulf into the equation and this weekend gas prices are expected to increase past the current $3 + mark, and while one gas station may offer regular

Inspired by the great Alternative Search Engines list from Read/Write Web, a new weblog dubbed “Two A Day” recently reviewed (listed) 300 search engines, starting with Google and ending with ZapMeta. Lots of offbeat engines and directories on the list, so if you’re interested in hitting almost every searcher in the world who prefer obscure engines and directories as opposed to the big four, may be beneficial to give this list a

Google has just announced the rollout of Google Calendar for mobile devices. Great thing about this Google offering is that as long as you are logged into your Google Account on the mobile, there is no need for synching.
With all of the mobile offerings from Google and Yahoo (yes, Yahoo also offers Yahoo Calendar via OneSearch) is there still any need to use your default Calendar and Mail settings on your cell phone?
More from the Google Blog :
S

Gary found it. Innaresting! Also, climatesaverpc.us is owned by a Google VP.

SearchMob and the queue of stories. Gary is posting like a madman!

Drawing partly on its relationship with Zillow, Yahoo! is launching an improved “HomeValues” section as part of Yahoo! Real Estate. It’s also integrating more community features (as Zillow and Trulia recently have) into the section: Through an expanded partnership with Zillow.com, users can access additional home details, including tax assessments, sale history and neighborhood comparable sales, as well as educational content f

Google News Report USA is a new service which tracks the sites which are featured on the homepage of Google News and then ranked by a popularity score.
If you have ever wondered which news sites get the most play on Google News and are ranked by the Google News algortihm as authority, this service breaks down the top sites by day, month and year.
These results are then ranked by score. The score is determined by a combination of factors: appearan

Today I am traveling, light posting. For your enjoyment, play with Babelplex. It’s a new twist on translation search, which has been around since Alta Vista….using Google’s translation service.

Google Ad honcho Tim Armstrong now owns the Boston lacrosse universe! (thanks PK!)

…or “What Job Should I Take” is the day one of you, please, should put me out of my misery. Some things are simply best left to conversation and that messy thing called human relationships. Hell, once I can have that kind of a conversation with a search engine, it’s entirely arguable if the search engine is anything other than a human being, right? From the FT: Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering more personal data

Sources say it’s done. More at Techcrunch.

RWW and CenterNetworks have tons of advice for Ask, not that Ask asked…but when you plan to spend $100mm in marketing money, folks are going to start talking, that’s for sure!

An interesting “refresh” over at Technorati (I’ve been an advisor in the past) points to where the company is heading: as a social search service that uses blogger’s signals to surface popular and interesting media objects. The clear next step is to package these insights into media products…..congrats, T’rati folk!

The IAB has released its annual PricewaterhouseCooper/IAB online spending report. This report, as I recall, is quite conservative, but it still shows very healthy growth. (Caveat: I am on the IAB Board). Some breakouts: The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC) today released the Internet Advertising Revenue Report which shows record results for the full year and final quarter of 2006. Internet advertising r

From an email sent by Google PR to me today: Today website content is much more than just text – it’s also video. As the importance of online video increases, we think it’s important to deliver users relevant video ads, give advertisers a new way to reach customers online and help publishers earn additional revenue from their video content. Starting today we will begin an in-stream video ads test with a small group of US publishers and ad

Google has invested nearly $4mm in 23andMe, Inc., “an early stage biotech company focused on helping consumers understand and browse their genome”. The company is co-founded by Sergey’s new wife. Details in this SEC filing, thanks to Gary, himself newly married. From the site: Even though your body contains trillions of copies of your genome, you’ve likely never read any of it. Our goal is to connect you to the 23 paired volumes of your own g

Mubin Ahmed has an interesting post with his opinion on the usage of Text Link Ads, Text Link Brokers, and similar link advertising services on niche websites, and how such services can pull in much more than AdSense does for web publishers.
Ahmed’s views on Google AdSense :
Made for Adsense is dead because if you have a site that is specifically made for adsense ads sooner than later you will get smartpriced. The reason being is that : Th

I received yesterday an email for Xing, the openBC (open Business Club). Xing.com is a business networking service like LinkedIn. I wrote during the last 6 months or so two pieces about the two services and compared the offers and features. The email I got from Xing was an invitation to become part of the beta testers for their new non-public feature called “Marketplace”. It is not really something dramatic or revolutionary, but it is a usef

In a move to lessen if not prevent plagiarism among university students, Google is banning advertisements by essay writing companies and services from its advertising fold. The ban on these kinds of advertisements came after numerous complaints have been filed by university authorities who have numerous incidents of students submitting unoriginal or copied essays and other research reports.
This advertisement ban was welcomed by university author

Given Yahoo’s rumored offer of $1 Billion to buy the Bebo social network (and the previous reports of Yahoo wanting to buy Facebook), the success of MySpace and Google’s acquisition of YouTube, it can be said that the online media giants have their sites set on the world of social networks and user generated content.
Pair that interest with the acquisitons of DoubleClick, Right Media, and aQuantive by Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft and

If you know my book, you know I started this whole endeavor with a random link in late 2001 or early 2002 to Google’s first ever Zeitgeist. Well, since then they launched Trends, and now they’ve updated it with Hot Trends. From an email Google sent me (the site is not responding at 10 pm…): On Monday night, Google launched Hot Trends, a new feature on the Google Trends report. Hot Trends enables users to see a list of the current top 100 f

It’s all over the search engine web: Google is cleaning house of Adsense arbitrage sites, which I wrote about in The Search and form a cottage industry that benefits both parties. SEW has more here. I asked Google for a statement on this and got this rather tepid, but telling response: At Google, we are always focused on how we can make the user experience as positive as possible while still providing value to our publishers and advertisers. A

My site was jammed by spammers most of today, I barely got two posts out. But it’s back, and we’ll be back to normal soon. I did have a very interesting talk today with Yusef Mehdi, who ran the aQuantive deal for Microsoft, and Brian McAndrews, the CEO of aQuantive. What struck me most was the commitment to have a solution that counters AdSense, but with a richer suite of services for both publishers and advertisers. Microsoft is really committe

I’ve started to interview interesting online marketing folks over at the FM blog. The first is Casey Jones, the new VP of Marketing at Dell. Check it out! And if you have an appetite for marketing, you might check out the cool stuff going on with FM partners, including avery cool deal with Ask A Ninja, Boing Boing naming a plane, and Intel sponsoring Digg Labs.

I’m talking to some of the key players later today and will post some thoughts afterwards. Meanwhile, some second day stories: Merc News Scoble GigaOm Reuters SEL AdAge NYT B2 Kara Ars

Having been out of the news loop for some weeks (It’s great to be without the Internet sometimes) due to an extended holiday in Yunnan I had to catch up on what has been happening in China. A lot it seems and hence I have made an overview of the interesting tidbits in the Chinese Internet world.
Search Engines, Names, Logos and Verbs
Changing names or rather the word order is what Yahoo plans to do. Yahoo China announced that Yahoo China wi

Shawn Collins, co-Founder of Affiliate Summit was so kind to sponsor three exhibit hall passes ($299 value each) for the Affiliate Summit 2007 East - Affiliate Marketing Expo and Conference so I thought it would be a good idea to give them away to search marketers to get to know the affiliate marketing industry a bit better.
 Here some background information about Affiliate Summit 2007 East.  
The show will be happening from July 8th to 10th, 2

Capping off a busy week of acquisitions and search engine upgrades comes the ‘news’ that Google will be acquiring Feedburner for $100 Million. If the rumor is correct, then Feedburner will enhance not only Google Analytics & Google Reader, but also Google’s relationship with bloggers.
Yahoo made a smart move with its purchase of MyBlogLog, a social network for bloggers built on the back of a simple analyitcs platform, but

Microsoft is acquiring the online advertising powerhouse aQuantive, parent company of Internet & Search Marketing firm Avenue A/Razorfish, for somewhere around $6 billion in cash (largest transaction in the history of Microsoft) in an effort to expand Microsoft’s role in the Internet advertising market and keep up with recent moves by Google and Yahoo.
Google was the first to make its move in the recent online advertising landgrab game

OK. I gotta think about this one. Give me some time…

Hypothesis: PR5 and up sites retain PR better than PR4 and below. Fact: Not true, especially if you have paid links, as Loren pointed out earlier today. With the recent Google PR rollout, I’ve seen PR5 sites go down when they had no Google ads and PR5 sites stay level when they had AdSense. That in itself is no proof, merely an observation. What’s apparent, however, is that Google is discounting all sorts of links they don’t lik

Google has taken up so much “shelf space” with coverage recently it’s hard to get to much else with any depth. But there are lots of other interesting things going on. One of those things is Local Matters’ new consumer destination LocalGuides.
Launched yesterday, LocalGuides combines local information with recommendations and lists around specific tasks or ambitions. Here are “Berkeley Furniture Shopping” and &

According to CMS Watch, a content management and web analytics analyst firm, Google Analytics is not ready for for Enterprise users; despite its recent upgrade.
“Google can rightly boast that its Google Analytics service can process enterprise-level web metrics loads,” said Phil Kemelor, lead analyst for CMS Watch’s Web Analytics Report. “But there’s more to analytics than processing: integration, support, and docume

A very clever morale booster and job baiting document from Meetup CEO Scott Heiferman. At Google, you take the Google Bus with people as smart as you. Your fellow Googlers will probably be listening to Tech Talk Podcasts while coding. At Meetup, you take the NYC subway to work. You’re part of the greatest melting pot on Earth. WARNING: Some of your fellow riders aren’t naturally excited about Google Apps.

From Threadwatch, Google has won a key battle in the Perfect Ten case. Now we can have porn thumbnails in our universal search results….

More on this as I get better connectivity and figure out my flight options. I’m stuck in La Guardia in thunderstorm hell. Here’s SEL: Google is undertaking the most radical change to its search results ever, introducing a “Universal Search” system that will blend listings from its news, video, images, local and book search engines among those it gathers from crawling web pages. The new system officially rolls out today for anyone using Google.

I was invited to this search-a-palooza, but I’m in NYC and then SD tending to some business and family issues. I won’t be covering it, but you can follow it here.

Via SEL, check out Pipl. Not a bad first impression….

I’ve interviewed Jeff Weiner plenty of times (including this onstage interview in April at Web 2 Expo), and had enough off the record chats as well, to know that this post outlining Yahoo’s mission is a milestone of sorts for both Yahoo and Jeff. That mission: “To connect people to their passions, communities, and the world’s knowledge.” Recall my earlier post on Jeff’s mission for his search group, before he was elevated to EV

Where there might be an ad market, Google has a possible patent (ars)…This one in games. Imagine a small bit of code that runs on either a PC or a console and monitors user behavior in video games—everything from the sort of car that people drive in racing sims to the conversations that they have in WoW. Imagine that this code examines saved game files to see what titles are currently being played, and imagine that it could look inside

What would Google do…if it had tons more assets? Tim asks….

From Fortune’s blogs: The writing was on the wall for this one since the moment last October that Google (GOOG) agreed to buy YouTube. Jennifer Feikin, the director and chief businesswoman of Google Video, is leaving the company. I’ve wondered ever since the deal was announced how Google Video and YouTube would co-exist inside the same company. YouTube so thoroughly vanquished Google Video, an also-ran product in terms of traffic, that Go

When it comes to leveraging social media marketing for your link building campaigns, it seems that most of us focus on Digg and Digg alone. The problem with this is that you’re putting all your eggs in one basket. If for some reason the content doesn’t get popular on Digg, then you’re out of luck, and your campaign is a flop. Add to the fact that Digg is getting harder by the day for us as marketers to leverage. The reason for this

Tomorrow is "Searchology" at Google, a day devoted for Google to discuss future plans in search. We’ll be covering news here on
Search Engine Land as it comes out. But can’t wait for our write-up? Just tune-in to the webcast. It begins at 9:30 Pacific time tomorrow, May 16. The webcast is here. From the
press release about Searchology:
Click to continue reading…