The blog is quite messy right now. I’m working on it. (nobody cares but hey… you never know who might come by…)

The second one to help existing Gmail users launch an email intervention to make their friends switch to GMail.

Today, a Microsoft sales video from the Microsoft Global Exchange Sales Conference leaked.
In the video, Microsoft presents the GMail Man, reading everyone’s email to serve them irrelevant ads based on keywords found in their correspondance.

Did the Microsoft video really “leak” or is this some kind of undercover viral campaign?
In any case, the war is not over.

Twitter app permissions
ReadWriteWeb has a story about the new, more detailed login screen for Twitter apps that gives more details about what the app can do with your account but also explains that “a few key permissions are omitted from this screen”

Serious game
James Fallows writes about the return of Clippy for The Atlantic. Microsoft’s annoying paperclip is back to teach you how to use Microsoft Office through a game called Ribbon Hero 2. I haven’t been able to test it yet since we’re still using Office 2003 at work =) Anyway, this might be a good example of a “serious game” that I might try if I can find some time at home.

Creating content for SEO
Search Engine Land tells us more about creating true great and unique content to improve ranking in SERPs. It’s always been difficult for most companies to understand that what web users find interesting is not exactly what their marketing or communication teams find interesting.
The related entries at the end of the article are well worth a look too.

F-Commerce
Social Commerce Today confronts two articles about F-Commerce. The articles are from Econsultancy and Computing Magazine and have a different point of view on Facebook ‘s possibilities for e-commerce.

SEO & Social Media
And finally, a video you could watch, SEOMoz’s Whiteboard friday about Correlation Data for SEO and Social Media Analysis. Rand Fishkin explains the correlation between high rankings in SERPs and the number of incoming links and Facebook shares your pages get.

I don’t see the point in charging for GA.
As a potential european customer, I think that fees, even as low as $100/year, would require Google to make 2 important (and probably costly) changes:
– sales team: In France, nobody’s in charge of “selling” GA. When you ask Google about GA, they tell you to call partner agencies.
– support: If I’m paying, I need some help when something goes wrong. Every tool I’ve been paying for on the Internet, even low price tools, offer some support. Why wouldn’t Google do the same?

Another point was talked about in one of the comments of Eric’s post: big European companies want their data to be in Europe or have some strong proofs that the Safe Harbor certification & secrutiy of their data is ensured.
Google would need to have security & legal teams ready to talk to customers to prove them everything will be fine.

One last thing: Don’t forget that the data they gather through GA (which they probably use, at least, to study user habits & behaviors) is of high value for Google to keep on improving their offers.

In the end, the cost vs. revenue might not be good enough for Google to begin charging for GA.
But I might be wrong.

Everyone talk about it like it’s a good thing. Maybe it is. Maybe not.

My concern, from an SEO perspective, is that companies tend to buy domain names for every possible occasion and that is definitely a bad thing.
When advertisers launch a new campaign, a new product, an iPhone app or anything that could have its own web page, a large number of them tends to buy a new domain name (.fr, .com, doesn’t matter) and create a brand new website.
Most of the time, SEO is not considered relevant for the website since it’s a website that will either have a limited lifetime or is a full-flash presentation of the product that will never be able to compete for any keyword in search results.

Instead of seeing this type of website like a standalone thing, it should be considered as part of the entire SEO eco-system of the advertiser.
If the website was just part of the main website, accessible via a folder of the main TLD (a simple one of course), every link it would gain in news articles, blog posts, press releases, and so on would be adding value to the overall external linking factor, helping out the main website in SERPs.

I think it would be a good thing to reduce the number of TLDs instead of seeing the increase as a goog thing.
There are more than 85 million .com TLDs…
The multiplication of domain names polutes the web just like product packages polute the environment (ok, maybe that one is a little too hard but you get the idea ^^).

Source: silicon.fr

That’s why we see more and more QR Codes everywhere in France. On billboards, in magazines, on book covers, in bus stops…
It is easy to use for advertisers and makes them feel like they are doing something new, something mobile, something trendy. There’s a “WOW effect” involved there.

But there are 2 problems.
First, the cost of QR Codes for users is too high. When facing a QR Code in a magazine, the user:

• does not know what this is and needs to read the “how to” next to the QR Code, if there’s one (some advertisers think everybody knows what it is)
• If he knows or understand how it works, he must know install an app on its phone if he doesn’t have one. Some Android, Nokia and Blackberry phones now come with a built-in reader but I guess the share of those is still small
• Once he has the app installed, he must launch it, stay in front of the ad (easy if it’s in a magazine but different if you’re in the street facing a billboard), scan it… without knowing what will happen next! Will it download something? Try to make a call? Open a web page? Send private information like my contact details to the advertiser?
• Last and not least, he needs to have access to the internet when he scans a QR Code, which is most of the time not the case if he’s in the subway, where there’s a lot of QR Codes to scan (yes, this is stupid).

The second problem is that QR Codes exist since the mid-90’s. It made sense then because mobile phones had 12 keys and it was difficult to tap a complete URL on such a thing.
But now, most of the mobile phones come with a complete AZERTY/QWERTY keyboard and URL shorteners make it easy to display short, fast to enter URLs on ads.

In my opinion, QR Codes are obsolete.

The app looks great so far.
You can only access websites with an Analyzer NX subscription but if you don’t have one, I guess you don’t need to access your stats on your mobile.

An iPhone app was definitely a feature that was missing. I’ve used apps for Webtrends (official) & Google analytics (not official).
I’ve checked and there’s also one for SiteCatalyst and one for coremetrics.
It seems most of the web analytics platform have an iPhone app now.

As far as the iPad is concerned, the Analyzer NX app does not have a specific iPad version but you can use the normal version in Safari on your iPad, I’ve never encountered any problems.

But, you still need people who are experts in both area to work on the overall search strategy.
The power of SEO & Paid Search together in a single strategy is far more efficient than tactics applied by experts in each domain.

There’s a need for specialists and all-around search marketers.

Maybe I’ll manage to blog for more than 2 months this time.