Bing Managed Big Gain In October

Doug Caverly — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 20:18:26 -0500

According to new data from Experian Hitwise, October was the month of the underdog with respect to the search market. The two search companies that usually dominate lost a bit of share, while Bing (and to a lesser degree, Ask) gained ground.

Let's start with the success stories. Bing's market share rose from 8.96 percent in September to 9.57 percent in October, which represents an increase of 6.8 percent. That's nothing to sneer at, even if Bing remains solidly in third place.

Fourth-place Ask also made a small amount of progress as its share increased from 2.56 percent to 2.62 percent - a jump of 2.3 percent that's far better than a dip.

Meanwhile, Google came sort of close to losing its grasp on the 70 percent mark, slipping from 71.08 percent to 70.60 percent on a month-to-month basis. And Yahoo fared about the same, moving from a market share of 16.38 percent to 16.14 percent.

As always, it's not smart to read too far into a single month's search report. Still, Experian Hitwise also recorded a Yahoo loss (and Ask gain) in September, so a trend may be starting to emerge.

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YouTube Talks Up Social Side

Doug Caverly — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:27:06 -0500

YouTube wants you to know that it's not just a place for individuals to watch videos. This afternoon, the site released some stats (and used the word "social" about six times) to show that users are interacting with each other and with different sites in all sorts of ways.

As usual, YouTube kept a bunch of numbers to itself; don't go looking for either a whole lot of data or many specific digits (think "1.63 million" as opposed to rounded-off descriptive words). Still, the first fact that a post on the YouTube Blog shared was that "[o]ver one million people are AutoSharing videos to Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader," which is an interesting detail.

Then here's another one: "Each AutoShared Tweet you send out from YouTube turns into an average of seven new sessions on YouTube.com." So it's not like a bunch of people are just spewing out clips into a void.

Finally, "Over a million people have found and subscribed to at least one friend on YouTube based on our Friend Suggest feature."

YouTube's turning into quite the little community, then. And since it plans to keep introducing new social features (and probably reminding us about the existing ones), this aspect of the site is liable to grow.

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Holiday Shoppers Want Deals Even More Than They Did Last Year

Chris Crum — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:23:18 -0500

Google has used its Insights for Search tool to provide some data about consumers' searching behavior when it comes to things like discounts, free shipping for the holidays, coupons, and promotional codes.

Unsurprisingly, there is an uptick in searches for all of these things, indicating that this is the stuff consumers are after for their holiday shopping. Such data serves as a great indicator that e-commerce businesses should be providing this stuff if at all possible. Without such deals, online businesses stand to lose out on sales to competitors that do offer them.

According to Google, 87% of consumers plan to take advantage of price discounts or sales this holiday season and 73% plan to take advantage of free shipping.

"Though not all retailers offer free shipping, discounts, or other rebates, know that these value propositions resonate with consumers so begin thinking about how your company or product is providing value and incorporate that messaging into your online marketing campaigns," says Eric Lopez of Google's Retail team. "Consumers are eagerly looking for a reason to buy from you."

Searches for coupons have been growing this year, even more so than last year when the recession was at its worst level. According to Google, 68% of consumers report that they plan on taking advantage of coupons this season. The same goes for promotional codes, which has increased (as a query) by as much as 55% year-over-year.

"With growing interest, ensure you are advertising your coupons, coupon codes, and promo codes to capture increased search volume," says Lopez.

Google's data reflects that of Deloitte's, which found that about a quarter of consumers will shop primarily online this year and many are using the Internet to find special offers, with 44% expecting to use a coupon they get online.

In fact, that study had a lot of interesting statistics that online retailers may want to consider before it's too late. Read here.

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Fox Launches iPhone DVD Trivia App

Mike Sachoff — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:17:43 -0500

Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment has launched an iPhone and computer application called FoxPop, aimed at offering users a more interactive experience while they watch DVDs or Blu-ray Disc.

The FoxPop app is free and works by "listening" and syncing to an exact moment in a movie, using real-time audio recognition technology. As events happen in the movie, facts and trivia automatically "pop up" on the iPhone or computer offering viewers new information each time they watch a movie. From am actor on the screen, a location, or song, FoxPop provides users with information about the scene.

FoxPop will launch with the DVD release of "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian" on December 1. Other films slated to receive the FoxPop treatment include "500 Days of Summer" and "Jennifer's Body."

Additional application features include the ability for users to share and chat with friends while watching a movie via social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. A collapsible dashboard "Now Playing" feature provides users with a large space to see information about characters, places and trivia related to the film.

"By providing interesting movie-related information and the ability to engage with fellow Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian audiences, the application creates a powerful new connection between the movie and its viewers," said Mary Daily, EVP North America Marketing of Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.

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Google May Change Your Page Titles

Chris Crum — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:43:52 -0500

In case you were not aware, Google "reserves the right" to change the titles of your pages in search results. Google's Matt Cutts has released a video discussing why and how they go about doing this.

Cutts says Google wants to show the titles that it thinks are most useful. "For example, suppose the title of your page is 'Untitled' or if there is no title. If that's the case, we try to show a relevant, useful title."

"We reserve the right to try to figure out what's a better title, what's a more descriptive title or snippet to show the users," he continues.

According to Cutts, if you have a title that's really long, they may still use that in their scoring, but in the snippet, they might try to find a "better title." This is presumably based on what the user is looking for.

As Cutts has said in the past, sometimes Google will use snippets right from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). Sometimes, they'll simply use snippets from the page or the meta description tag. "We do a bunch of different things to find the best description that we can," he says.

"If you have a bad title or a title that we don't think helps users as much, we can try to find a better title, and one we think will be an informative result so that users will know whether that's a good result for them to click on," he says.

Have you noticed Google changing your titles? Did they find better ones? Discuss here.

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Google Integrates World Bank Data

Doug Caverly — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:18:36 -0500

Students and statistics hounds now have even more reason to love Google. Today, the search giant announced that it's made information related to 17 World Development Indicators available through standard search results pages.

The stats come courtesy of the World Bank, and a post on the Official Google Blog explained, "Search should be intuitive, so we've done the work to think through queries where public data will be most relevant to you. To see the new data, try queries like [gdp of indonesia], [children per woman in brazil], [rwanda's population growth], [energy use of iceland], [co2 emissions of iceland] and [gdp growth rate argentina]."

At that point, you'll get something like the screenshot below:

Then, if you click on the graph, Google will take you to an interactive page where you can put together a more informative diagram.

Have fun finding out a little bit more about our world. And here's one last dollop of info so that you don't waste a bunch of time: the available World Development Indicators are CO2 emissions per capita, Electricity consumption per capita, Energy use per capita, Exports as percentage of GDP, Fertility rate, GDP deflator change, GDP growth rate, GNI per capita in PPP dollars, Gross Domestic Product, Gross National Income in PPP dollars, Imports as percentage of GDP, Internet users as percentage of population, Life expectancy, Military expenditure as percentage of GDP, Mortality rate (under 5), Population, and Population growth rate.

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IAB Releases New Guidelines for Email Monetization

Chris Crum — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:05:02 -0500

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has released a list of "best practices" for marketers and publishers who want to monetize their email efforts. The best practices come in a document appropriately titled "Email Monetization Strategies."

The IAB considers this part of its ongoing efforts to establish a "solid foundation" of guidance and tools for the email marketplace. It provides publishers, agencies and marketers with recommendations and best practices for the successful execution of email marketing campaigns.

The document covers:

- The use of email newsletters to reach valuable audiences

- Stand-alone email advertising to drive sales and site registration

- Revenue opportunities and pricing models for email newsletters and stand-alone email advertising

- Descriptions of emerging trends such as video in email campaigns

"The email channel offers a unique opportunity to reach consumers with relevant, differentiated and personalized content and messaging," said Sherrill Mane, SVP, Industry Services, IAB. "Email Monetization Strategies provides an in-depth assessment and guide to maximizing the success of email marketing."

"Email is one of the most effective direct and brand marketing mediums," said Sean O’Neal, Chief Revenue Officer, Datran Media, and co-chair of the IAB’s Email Committee. "These best practices provide the latest information and strategies to marketers and publishers so that they can maximize their email communications with their customers."

In case you think email is on the way out due to spam or social media, read the reasons why we don't believe that is the case here and here.

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Bing Gets a Bunch of New Search Features

Chris Crum — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:33:57 -0500

Microsoft has announced the addition of a number of new features to its Bing search engine today. The company says it has been examining the trends in search and in feedback, and is working to accommodate these. Microsoft is referring to trends like the demand for faster access to knowledge, offering different user interfaces for different kinds of results, and an increased focus on "getting things done" with search.

Would you use Bing more if it added the right features? Tell us what it's missing.

Bing is rolling out a new "task-focused" version of its home page. It looks relatively the same as before, but when you mouse over different categories, you will get more search options. For example, if you mouse over "Travel," you will get links like "find flights" and "find hotels," and you can conduct your search from there.

"There is also an interactive Instant Answer that allows you to enter your origin, destination, travel dates and…click…you are in Bing travel," says Bing Product Manager Henry Hall. "Within Bing travel you have fast access to flight purchase recommendations via the price predictor that tells you the least expensive times to fly. In addition to money, you’ll save time as well with Bing travel’s comprehensive flight listing results and links to top travel sites and airlines."

Bing is also enhancing local information for hundreds of cities looking for things like local attractions, points of interest, neighborhoods and other local information sources like newspaper web sites. Bing has developed enhanced city results, which include links to key information and high-resolution slide shows.

Bing is making it easier to find the preview feature. "We're doing a better job mining things like contact phone numbers and email addresses from web pages and displaying them clearly under a Contact banner, and generally cleaning up the interface to make it easier to decide if this a site you want to visit," says Hall. "Last, we're also integrating images in some preview results. We believe that all these features will allow for a faster decision about whether a site is right for your needs, which means less clicking on your browser’s back button."

Bing has also added a new Event Search feature, which gives users a summary of events for major cities, which can be filtered by things like performances, food & dining, fairs & festivals, music, etc.

Bing has also made it easy to share results for shopping searches on Facebook, a feature Hall deems ideal for passing on holiday gift ideas. There are also better results for health-related searches, including, conditions, medications, and hospitals. Each type of query will return more info and a more organized set of results.

Perhaps the biggest addition to Bing is that of Wolfram Alpha's algorithms and "expertly curated data". Wolfram Alpha will help power Bing's results for nutritional information and math searches.

When users search Bing for specific food items, they will get a nutrition quick tab that shows more information about it and a nutrition facts label at the bottom of the results page.

"Another helpful tool is the body mass index that tracks your workout progress," the Bing Team says. "We have introduced Wolfram|Alpha’s body mass index interactive form on our results page. If you search for ‘bmi’ you’ll get the option to enter your height and weight. Click ‘Calculate’ and you’ll get a detailed Body Mass Index analysis directly on Bing."

Bing will also rely on Wolfraph Alpha's ability to solve complex math functions.

Bing says there will be more new features highlighted on the Bing Search Blog over the next few days. The features are just starting to roll out in the US, so it could be a while before you actually see them.

More on the newly announced features, read this post. For more on Bing's integration with Wolfram Alpha specifically, read here.

Will the addition of new search capabilities increase Bing's market share? Share your thoughts.

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Research Scientist Heads From Yahoo To Twitter

Doug Caverly — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:04:18 -0500

Today, as is often the case, one tech company's loss became another's gain. Utkarsh Srivastava has left Yahoo after spending more than three years as a senior research scientist there, and Srivastava confirmed (in well under 140 characters) that he'll land at Twitter.

Srivastava's background is quite impressive. On the educational front, he earned degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology and Stanford, and happened to receive the Stanford Graduate Fellowship, too.

Around the same time, he acted as a research intern at Microsoft and then IBM, and was awarded the Microsoft Graduate Fellowship. Not bad.

Next, Srivastava headed to Yahoo, where according to his LinkedIn profile, he became "one of the original designers and developers of Pig, a high-level language for data processing over Hadoop. Pig is open-sourced as a subproject of Hadoop, and is routinely used in production for large data processing both within, and outside of Yahoo!."

Which more or less brings us back to the present day. Louis Gray noticed that Srivastava had been added to a list of Twitter employees, and Srivastava confirmed it on Twitter a little later.

Yahoo hasn't named any sort of replacement or, as far as we can tell, chained its remaining employees to their desks.

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Holiday Shoppers Turning To Social Media And Internet

Mike Sachoff — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:33:30 -0500

Digital technologies continue to drive a new approach to shopping, with social media and mobile phones becoming key influencers this holiday season, according to a new survey of holiday retail spending and trends by Deloitte.

Social media is gaining traction with 17 percent of consumers planning to use social media during their holiday shopping, and 60 percent plan to use it to find discounts, coupons and sales information, More than half (53%) plans to use social media to research gift ideas, while 52 percent plan to check the gift wish lists of friends and family.

Consumers in all age groups plan to embrace social media over the holidays. While more than half (52%) of those who expect to use social media during the shopping process are in the 18-29 years old age group, 33 percent are in the 30-44 years old age group and 12 percent are in the 45-60 years old age group.

The mobile phone is another digital tool for the holidays that is on track to be used by 19 percent of consumers to help with their holiday shopping. Those consumers plan to find store locations (55%), research prices (45%), find product information (40%), get discounts and coupons (32%) and read reviews (31%). A quarter plan to make a holiday purchase with their phone.

The Internet ranks as a top shopping destination and continues to see steady growth. Nearly a quarter (22%) of consumers indicate they will shop primarily online this year and many are using the Internet to find special offers, with 44 percent of shoppers expecting to use a coupon they get online.

Reviews have become another key online source of information, with 39 percent of consumers indicating they often read consumer-generated reviews of stores or products online, and one-quarter (25 percent) saying they will likely purchase a product this holiday season based on an online recommendation. More than a third (34 percent) say that online consumer reviews and ratings influence their buying decisions more than advertising.

"Consumers are turning to mobile, online and social media during their entire holiday shopping experience," said Stacy Janiak, vice chairman and Deloitte's U.S. Retail leader. "Retailers should consider harnessing this activity to turn browsers into buyers with one-click access to coupons, promotions and purchasing tools."

"This year's leaner in-store inventories may also open the door for retailers to lure customers to their online channels where it is easier to access inventory, no matter where it is located."

The Internet is also changing the traditional store-based purchase process. Almost half of consumers (48%) say they like the convenience of shopping with multi-channel retailers, and 78 percent indicate they have purchased an item in a retailer's store after viewing or researching the product online. In addition 65 percent have done the opposite and purchased an item on retailer's website after viewing it in the store or catalog.

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Google Gives Users a Way to Lock SafeSearch

Chris Crum — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 12:03:49 -0500

Google has launched a new way to lock SafeSearch. What this accomplishes is, users will have to enter their password to change the setting, and Google Search results will be visibly different than when SafeSearch is not locked.

Google demonstrates how to to lock SafeSearch with the following short clip:

When SafeSearch is locked, there is a big image in the top right-hand corner of Google that shows colored balls. This makes it easy to tell whether or not SafeSearch is locked. "Even from across the room, the colored balls give parents and teachers a clear visual cue that SafeSearch is still locked," Google says. "And if you don't see them, it's quick and easy to verify and re-lock SafeSearch."

You can lock SafeSearch by simply going to Search Settings from the Google home page. There is a "SafeSearch filtering" section there, where you can adjust the settings and lock them if you choose. When you lock SafeSearch, you are automatically choosing the "strict" setting (as opposed to moderate).

Can Certain Words Get My Content Blocked?

People have often wondered if their content is being blocked in SafeSearch if they have certain words on an otherwise family-friendly site. In fact, Google's Matt Cutts recently addressed such concerns in a video at Google's Webmaster Central YouTube channel.

"We try to write our algorithm such that just having a single word mentioned here or there really won't have that much of an impact," says Cutts. "Now, of course some words are worse than others. If you've got some slang or something that's misspelled and really is not a word that you can repeat in polite company, that makes it more likely that that page will get flagged. But in most cases you should be in relatively good shape as long as most of your content or most of the words on your page are family-friendly."

It stands to reason that if you are producing content that you are hoping that families and children will view, it's in your best interest to keep your language family-friendly. That's pretty much common sense, but Google has put it into a search engine visibility light as well.

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More on Google's Caffeine Update

Chris Crum — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:26:32 -0500

Update: Out at PubCon in Las Vegas, Mike McDonald of WebProNews discussed the rolling out of the Caffeine update further with popular search enthusiast Barry Schwartz:

Original Article: It appears that the effects of Google's Caffeine update may be felt sooner rather than later. That is if you really do feel the effects at all.

What are your thoughts on Google's Caffeine update? Discuss here.

If you are unfamiliar with Caffeine, it is an algorithm update that Google announced in the summer. Upon the announcement, Google's Matt Cutts said, "The Caffeine update isn't about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even power users won't notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we're rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure." Cutts told WebProNews about Caffeine in the following interview:

When Caffeine was introduced, so was a sandbox, where people could play around with Caffeine based search results, and get a look at how rankings were altered (if at all), and try to get a feel for how it was going to go. Now that sandbox has closed up shop, it looks like the Caffeine update will be live in Google search before too long. It will start after the holidays at least though.

"I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays," says Cutts on his blog. "Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over. Most searchers wouldn’t immediately notice any changes with Caffeine, but going slowly not only gives us time to collect feedback and improve, but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays."

The announcement at what used to be the Caffeine sandbox reads:

We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.

Based on the success we've seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.

Of course as people tested Caffeine via the sandbox, many of them blogged about their results and findings. The general consensus seemed to be that Caffeine is fast and utilizes real-time search a great deal. Given Google's frequent announcements related to speed, and a recently announced deal with Twitter, speed and real-time search seem like logical updates to Google search results.

When SEOBook's Aaron Wall tested Caffeine, he said he thought there was:

- an increased weighting on domain authority & some authoritative tag type pages ranking (like Technorati tag pages + Facebook tag pages), as well as pages on sites like Scribd ranking for some long tail queries based mostly on domain authority and sorta spammy on page text

- perhaps slightly more weight on exact match domain names

- perhaps a bit better understanding of related words / synonyms

- tuning down some of the exposure for video & some universal search results

This stuff should not necessarily be taken as gospel. These are just the results and speculations of individuals from tests of a product that was only introduced (for testing purposes), let alone finalized. It is what it is.

As the Caffeine update rolls out, there will no doubt be more and more mystery unraveled as search industry professionals scramble to stay ahead of the game, and Google drops subtle hints from time to time. It's going to be interesting to see where Caffeine takes the world's most popular search engine.

Have you tested Caffeine? What do you think about the update? Share your findings here.

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Has YouTube Found the Right Ad Solution?

Chris Crum — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:07:25 -0500

YouTube has begun testing a new kind of ad format on some of its videos - skippable pre-rolls. These ads let users choose whether or not they want to watch the ad as it appears at the beginning of a video.

YouTube says that when it first began testing in-stream ads a couple years ago, abandonment rates on videos were as high as 70%. They found that users were much more likely to view and engage with overlay ads.

"But over time we found that different kinds of content provide different experiences for viewers, and that in-stream ads work pretty well on certain videos, like clips from TV shows or full-length movies," says YouTube. "We first launched in-stream ads last year, and we've continued to innovate and test different in-stream formats on YouTube (like user-choice pre-rolls)."

Users may find the skippable pre-rolls slightly annoying but tolerable, since they are still in control of whether they have to watch it or not. They may come off as a bit intrusive, similar to pop-up ads, but if they are easy to skip, people will probably be willing to continue on with the video.

Chances are, they will see enough of the ad to begin with to at least gain some kind of brand awareness. That's really going to be all up to the ad though. Advertisers looking at this kind of spot may want to strongly consider getting the meat of the message in as early as possible.

"We know what you're thinking: who would choose to watch an ad when they can skip it?" says YouTube. "Well, that's what we're trying to find out. In our previous research, we've actually seen that lots of users will watch pre-rolls. Abandonment rates are affected by several factors, notably length and creative. When a pre-roll is only 15 seconds, we see completion rates as high as 85%. Also, creative matters a lot: the quality and relevance of the ad itself seems to have 3x the influence on abandonment online as it does on TV. Viewers online tend to be much more active in making choices about what they watch."

Remember that these new ads are only being tested at this point, but YouTube seems quite optimistic that it may have found its best advertising solution yet. We'll see if the tests confirm this, and if this becomes a normal ad-type for the world's most popular video site (and 2nd largest search engine).

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Twitter Continues Retweet Roll-Out

Chris Crum — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:29:05 -0500

Update: There is an interesting post here from Twitter CEO Evan Williams, which talks about how the retweet button works, and why Twitter is doing it the way it is.

Original Article: Back in the summer time, Twitter announced that it intended to add a retweet option to its service and the API. Twitter is now rolling out the feature to a small percentage of Twitter users.

"You may remember that we shared the mechanics of this feature with developers a while back so they could think about how to work it into Twitter apps," says Twitter Co-founder Biz Stone on the company blog. "Now we're ready to start trying it on Twitter. The plan is to see how it goes first with this small release. If it needs more work, then we'll know right away. If things look good, we'll proceed with releasing the feature in stages eventually arriving at 100%."

If you are a regular Twitter user, it's pretty much a given that you know what retweeting is, but Stone describes what the button does to those in the dark. "Retweet is a button that makes forwarding a particularly interesting tweet to all your followers very easy," he says. "In turn, we hope interesting, newsworthy, or even just plain funny information will spread quickly through the network making its way efficiently to the people who want or need to know."

The Impact of Retweets

Retweets have already been a great way for content and updates to go viral. Now as the actual feature rolls out, that should only increase. Read this article for a look at the pros and cons of retweets (there are more pros).

Now that retweeting is becoming an actual feature of Twitter, you're going to want to keep in mind the tweetability of your content. Shéa Bennett, who writes the blog Twittercism, came up with a helpful equation for maximizing retweet potential. We talked about that here, but basically what it boils down to is leaving enough room in a tweet to accommodate what others will add to it as they retweet it.

This means keep titles short (at least in the tweet). For example, if you use some form of "tweet this" button on an article that automatically fills out the Twitter form with the article info, make sure there are not too many characters taken up. As you're probably aware, Twitter only allows for 140, and that's not very many. Keep in mind the "RT," hashtags, usernames, etc.

Tweaking Twitter Trends

In another piece of Twitter-related news, the company also announced that it is experimenting with improvements to trends that will help users find more relevant tweets. They say they're working to show higher quality results for trend queries by returning tweets that are more useful.

"The improvement won't be very noticeable at first, but this is a small step toward unearthing more value in search and getting you more relevant results," says @JennaDawn.

This means you will probably see less spammy trending topics popping up, which should benefit anyone who follows the trends.

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Google Latitude Introduces Location History, Smart Alerts

Doug Caverly — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:00:57 -0500

A quick, but important, note: the stuff we're about to discuss is only available on an opt-in basis. So there's no need to stop halfway through this article and drown your phone or tape it to a neighbor's car. Now, with that out of the way, let's move on to the news that Google Latitude's gained two features called Google Location History and Google Location Alerts (which is in beta).

Google Location History may be either the less cool or the less creepy offering, depending on one's point of view. A post on the Google Mobile Blog explained that, with it, you can "store, view, and manage your past Latitude locations." Then, "You can visualize your history on Google Maps and Earth or play back a recent trip in order."

In another nod to personal privacy, it's possible to delete part or all of your location history, too.

As for the second feature, it builds on the first and tries to intelligently connect you with acquaintances. According to the post, "Location Alerts can recognize your regular, routine locations and not create alerts when you're at places like home or work. Alerts will only be sent to you and any nearby friends when you're either at an unusual place or at a routine place at an unusual time."

You can enable these offerings here if they suit your style. And should you later change your mind, Google promises that you can disable them rather than head for the nearest sink or roll of duct tape.

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Google Programming Language on the "Go"

Chris Crum — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:53:26 -0500

Update: Philipp Lenssen notes that someone has already developed a language called Go! (with an exclamation point). There is a book on it here. The author wants Google to change the name. This could get confusing for developers looking to use Go, although, it could also help sales of the Go! book. It wouldn't make for very happy customers, however.

Original Article: Google has open sourced its own programming language, which it simply calls "Go." The company still calls Go experimental. Google's Go Team describes the language:

Go combines the development speed of working in a dynamic language like Python with the performance and safety of a compiled language like C or C++. Typical builds feel instantaneous; even large binaries compile in just a few seconds. And the compiled code runs close to the speed of C. Go lets you move fast.

Go is a great language for systems programming with support for multi-processing, a fresh and lightweight take on object-oriented design, plus some cool features like true closures and reflection.

Go comes with built-in support for concurrency, what Google calls a "novel" type system, and as mentioned above, it is apparently really fast. Google says most builds take well under a second.

The following clip provides some more info about the language:

The Go site offers a number of documents, such as a tutorial, a FAQ page, a tech talk, language specification, memory model, and more. There are how-tos for installing Go and contributing code. There is command documentation, package documentation, and source files. If you're a developer itching to mess around with a new language, go dig in.

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> Google Developers Produce New Programming Language

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Buy A Blackberry From Walmart Get A $100 Gift Card

Mike Sachoff — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:37:33 -0500

Walmart has introduced yet another holiday promotion, this time the retailer is offering a $100 gift card with the purchase of any Blackberry device, both in stores and online.

Staring Saturday, November 14 at 8 am through November 20, shoppers will receive a $100 Walmart Gift Card with the purchase of Blackberry devices with a two-year contract.

Walmart’s one-week promotion includes the following Blackberry devices:

AT&T Curve 8310
AT&T Bold 9000
Sprint Curve 8330 (Red & Titanium colors)
T-Mobile 8520 (Black, White, and Frost)
T-Mobile Pearl 8120 (Emerald)
Verizon Storm
Verizon Storm II

“We know customers are very focused on value, and we have promised each week to deliver new savings to help them stretch their dollars this holiday season,” said Greg Hall, vice president Media Services, Walmart U.S.

Shoppers who order a Blackberry online will have their $100 gift card emailed to them in four to six weeks.

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Google Makes the Cloud Cheaper

Chris Crum — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 09:11:03 -0500

Gmail used to offer a gigabyte of storage to new users, but now it offers at least seven gigs. Picasa comes with a gig. Sometimes that's not enough. While Google has offered the ability to pay for additional storage, the company has now reduced the prices for it.

"You can now buy 20 GB for only $5 a year — that's twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price, and enough space for more than 10,000 full resolution pictures taken with a five megapixel camera," says Google Software Engineer Elvin Lee. "Since most people have less than 10 GB of photos, chances are you can now save all your memories online for a year for the cost of a triple mocha. If you need more than 20 GB, plans range all the way up to 16 TB, which is enough room for 8 million full resolution photos! And Google paid storage offers an extra level of security, protection and accessibility that you can't get with an external drive — at a similar cost per gigabyte."

The entire price list is as follows:

20 GB ($5.00 USD per year)

80 GB ($20.00 USD per year)

200 GB ($50.00 USD per year)

400 GB ($100.00 USD per year)

1 TB ($256.00 USD per year)

2 TB ($512.00 USD per year)

4 TB ($1,024.00 USD per year)

8 TB ($2,048.00 USD per year)

16 TB ($4,096.00 USD per year)

"While today's announcement is exciting from a practical standpoint, it's also indicative of one of the strongest computing trends of the year: cloud computing going mainstream," a Google representative tells WebProNews. "A number of factors are helping the average user move to 'the cloud.' First, the technology continually increases in efficiency, so that, as in this case, we can store data ever more cheaply and pass on those savings to our users. Second, a new breed of net-centric hardware is giving consumers faster, easier, more comprehensive access to the cloud --netbooks and smartphones are among the hottest gadgets this holiday season."

When a user purchases an additional storage plan, that plan will be automatically renewed each year. However, if a user wants to, they can disable auto-renewal by going to the purchase page and choosing the free plan. Google will contact users 30 days before renewal. It takes about 24 hours for new storage to appear.

Related Articles:

> Gmail Users Experience Another Hiccup

> Gmail Messages Get Richer

> Gmail Storage Ticks Upward, Lags Yahoo, AOL

> Google: IT Departments Moving Toward the Cloud

Consumers Are Looking for Offers on Social Networks

Chris Crum — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:59:50 -0500

Razorfish has released a wealth of interesting data about consumer online behavior, and a good deal has to do with social media and brand interaction. For those struggling to find the right use of social networks for their business, the data is worth paying attention to.

The data is based on a survey of 1,000 consumers in the US, about half male and half female. They cover four major age groups and 10 major cities.

"To avoid duplicating the more broad-based work of Pew, Forrester, and other research firms, our goal was to survey what we call "connected consumers,'" Razorfish explains. These connected consumers have broadband access, have spent at least $150 online in the past six months, have visited a "community site" (MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Yelp, etc.), and have consumed or created some form of digital media like photos, videos, music, or news.

"Based on previous Razorfish consumer research, we have found that these 'connected consumers' roughly mirror the U.S. population with broadband access. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, about 63% of all Americans today have a high-speed Internet connection, up from only 55% in 2008. This translates to roughly 200 million people, based on a July 2009 population estimate from the CIA World Factbook (total population 307,212,123, July 2009 estimate)."

In other words, pay attention to the results. You can find them all here. I wanted to highlight a few of the particularly interesting ones here, which pertain to social media use. They paint a pretty good picture of what consumers are looking for from brands on social networks (although these are certainly not the limits of what companies can do with them).

Beyond the data in the above graphs, another point worth mentioning derived from the research is that for Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, those who follow brands are mostly looking for exclusive deals or offers. This mentality will likely increase moving forward as deals get more personalized as well.

Like Jeremiah Owyang recently discussed with WebProNews, sites can connect with existing networks like Facebook, Twitter, etc. (think Facebook Connect and similar services), and in the future, people may be able to log-in to corporate sites with their Facebook (or whatever) account, which will bring up their profile information for companies to serve personalized content (or perhaps personalized deals).

The point is, consumers are clearly more than willing to interact with brands through social media, and this will likely become increasingly true as social networks themselves gain more users. It's not only about pushing your offers out there and hoping people bite. People are becoming friends/fans of brands hoping you do give them special offers.

Interesting new marketing opportunities are going to continue to present themselves moving forward as networks get more advanced and more brands figure out new ways to use them.

Related Articles:

> How Big Brands Use Social Media

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Spam Will Not Keep You Away from Email

Chris Crum — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:29:35 -0500

With all of the spam out there and the increasing amount of malice that comes with it, it's easy to look at the situation and think that email must be dying. Combine the overwhelming amounts of inbox spam and the ever-increasing popularity of communication tools like Twitter and Facebook, and you may ask yourself why you even need email.

Well, I've got ten answers for you here.

Don't get me wrong. Email will evolve. In fact, it's already begun to. But email as a utility is currently in no danger of going away. This is a view that Pro Blogger Darren Rowse appears to have in common with me, as he implied in a recent interview with WebProNews.

Rowse notes that email is simply a familiar way to get information, and it's still one of the most popular ways. He offers his blog content via email as a weekly newsletter, and it gets twice as many subscribers as his RSS feeds do. Furthermore, the people getting those email newsletters are even clicking on the ads.

As Rowse says, people rely on email. That's not just the old folk either. A recent study found that people between 18 and 24 years of age would rather give up social networks than email. In fact, according to that study, they'd be more likely to give up television.

For all of the unwanted marketing messages and spam out there flooding inboxes, email is still the preferred channel of communication by consumers for receiving marketing messages, according to a different survey.

Spam is going to flood every channel that achieves the usage of the masses. It's been going on longer than we've had a name for it. As long as I've been alive, I've been forced to sit through commercials I had no interest in seeing, while trying to watch television. Granted, they couldn't give my television a virus, but they have always been intrusive to some extent.

Now that social networks are rising to popularity, the spam is sure following there. It's unavoidable. People will spam you no matter what you're using. But you'll still use it.

Related Articles:

> Spam is Getting More Malicious

> 10 Reasons Social Media isn't Replacing Email

> People 18-24 Would Rather Give Up Social Networks Than Email

MySpace To Host Exclusive Stream Of "New Moon" Red Carpet

Doug Caverly — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:38:12 -0500

Don't be surprised if MySpace experiences a big traffic spike on Monday, November 16th. The social network intends to host a live stream of red carpet arrivals at the world premiere of The Twilight Saga: New Moon.

In one sense, this could have been something of a cheap trick; it's a good bet that boatloads of young girls would tune in even if they could only catch a glimpse of Robert Pattinson and listen to a random correspondent babble. MySpace is demonstrating its influence and taking things quite a bit further, though, offering fans an exclusive experience.

According to an official statement emailed to WebProNews, "Viewers will . . . be able to take part by posting comments or questions to The Twilight Saga: New Moon Premiere MySpace page that may then be presented to the celebrities during the broadcast."

What's more, "Anya Marina, writer and performer of 'Satellite Heart' on The Twilight Saga: New Moon Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, will co-host the broadcast."

The Twilight Saga: New Moon Trailer and Premiere Announcement

New Moon Premiere | MySpace Video

So consider passing word of the event along to any relatives or friends who are Twilight fans. And with respect to what sort of traffic numbers MySpace might see, it should interest even the franchise's biggest detractors to know that the New Moon trailer received a whopping 4.2 million views within 24 hours of its debut on MySpace.

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Google Tries To Save You From Swine Flu

Doug Caverly — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:27:45 -0500

The media frenzy over swine flu may have died down a little since earlier this year; it's no longer a top headline on every other news site, at least. But people remain extremely concerned about it (anyone care to guess how many tons of hand sanitizer have been sold?), and Google's trying to help out by pointing them towards flu shots.

A post on the Official Google Blog announced this afternoon, "We've been working with [the U.S. Department for Health and Human Services], the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and state and local health agencies to gather information on flu vaccine locations across the country, particularly for the H1N1 flu vaccine . . . . At the moment we have data for locations of flu vaccine directly from 20 states and counting."

The post then added, "We are also continuing to add information from chain pharmacies and other providers in all 50 states; today, you'll find results from chains such as Walgreens, CVS and PDX participants, such as Kmart, Duane Reade, WinnDixie and Giant Eagle."

The new feature seems to work quite well. If you intend to follow through on its suggestions and receive a shot, just call ahead to play it safe. Unless you need to buy some more hand sanitizer, anyway, that is, or perhaps want to pick up a few surgical masks from the corner market.

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Hacking Ring Indicted For $9 Million Fraud

Mike Sachoff — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:10:14 -0500

A federal grand jury in Atlanta has indicted eight East Europeans on charges of hacking into a computer network operated by the credit card processing company RBS WorldPay, the U.S. Department of Justice said today.

The 16-count indictment alleges the group used sophisticated hacking techniques to compromise data encryption used by RBS WorldPay to protect customer data on payroll debit cards. Payroll debit cards are used by some companies to pay their employees.

The hacking ring allegedly raised the account limits on compromised accounts, and then provided a network of "cashers" with 44 counterfeit payroll debit cards, which were used to withdraw more than $9 million from more than 2,100 ATMs in at least 289 cites worldwide, including cities in the U.S., Russia, Ukraine, Estonia, Italy, Hong Kong, Japan and Canada. The $9 million loss occurred within less than 12 hours.

The hackers then attempted to destroy data on the card processing network to hide their hacking activity. The indictment alleges that the "cashers" were allowed to keep 30 to 50 percent of the money, but sent the rest back to the leaders of the hacking ring.

"The charges brought against this highly sophisticated international hacking ring were possible only because of unprecedented international cooperation with our law enforcement partners, particularly between the United States and Estonia," said Assistant Attorney General of the Criminal Division Lanny A. Breuer.

"Through our close cooperation, both nations have demonstrated our commitment to identifying sophisticated attacks on U.S. financial networks that are directed and operated from overseas and our commitment to bringing the perpetrators to justice."

Some of the hackers if convicted in the U.S. could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison.

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Spam is Getting More Malicious

Chris Crum — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:27:17 -0500

Symantec has released two new reports for the month of November - the State of Spam, and the State of Phishing (both PDFs). The reports highlight a dramatic increase in spam that contains malware. On top of that, junk and malicious email now accounts for close to 9 out of 10 email messages.

The security firm says that a new generation of "Spam Princes" are rising, and that the Asia Pacific region, Japan, and South America have surpassed North America, with regards to where spam is originating from.

"Rising spam levels originating from South America, Asia Pacific and Japan are not altogether surprising when you consider the massive growth of internet connections in these regions," says Amanda Grady, Principal Analyst, Symantec. "Meanwhile, the increased threats to social networking websites is interesting because it shows spammers are hiding behind the reputation and brand trust built by legitimate companies. Social networking sites that have a large user base will continue to be targets of malicious and phishing emails."

Symantec shares the following findings:

- In October, an average of 1.9% of all spam messages contained malware. This equates to a 0.6% increase from September, when the number of messages containing malware hit a maximum of 4.5% of all spam

- Symantec observed a 17% increase from the previous month in all phishing attacks

- 30% of phishing URLs were generated using phishing toolkits; an increase of 24% from the previous month

- Symantec observed a 45% increase from September in non-English phishing sites

- More than 97 Web hosting services were used, which accounted for 8% of all phishing attacks; a decrease of 19% in total Web host URLs when compared to the previous month

Symantec's report of an increase of malware-infected spam is made even more unsettling as news reports surface of computer viruses infecting unknowing victims' machines with child porn.

Related Articles:

> Stealth Phishing Attack Looks Like Internal Email

> Symantec Urges Windows Users to Patch Systems

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Google Street View Hits Hawaii, Mexico

Doug Caverly — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:21:32 -0500

Attention all Street View fans: another update's been announced, and this one could be considered especially significant. Images of Hawaii were released, meaning Street View now has coverage of all 50 U.S. states.

Street View's come a long way since its early days of functioning as a fun little distraction/curiosity. It's now a useful resource for travelers, an advertising aid for businesses, and even a friend of some tourist agencies (the Hawaii Visitors and Conventions Bureau worked with Google on this latest update).

Street View remains a nifty way to glimpse cool locations, too, of course. Waimea Bay, which you can see below, is one such spot. On the Official Google Blog, Laura Melahn also recommended Iolani Palace.

And the new Street View update actually includes images originating from a place other than Hawaii; Mexico, our neighbor to the south, was covered for the first time. Shots of Cancun, Cozumel, Guadalajara, Mexico City, Monterrey, Playa del Carmen, Puebla, and Puerto Vallarta are all available now.

So if you're more a fan of warm temperatures and sea breezes than snow-covered pine trees, this is definitely the update for you. Have fun exploring from your office chair.

Related Articles:

> Street View Coverage Of Two More Countries Goes Live

> Street View: Soon With More Blurriness

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Bing Maps Gets an Upgrade

Chris Crum — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:37:43 -0500

Microsoft announced that it has made some changes to Bing Maps. Changes include the color of the navigation bar, draggble routes, zoom bar changes, command parsing, embedding, dynamic computing, new navigation, speed, and Bing Maps will no longer stop at the international date line, but will wrap around the world continuously.

Draggable routes is arguably the most significant change to Bing Maps. "This is a great (and much requested) feature added to Bing Maps allowing you to generate a route, then in the case that you need to change the route, you can simply grab any part of it and drag it to where you want the route to actually go," says Microsoft's Chris Pendleton. "To use draggable routes, click the directions link in the welcome pane or the car icon near the bottom of the welcome pane. Enter a start and end, generate a route, then grab anywhere on the route to move the route line. The route will regenerate for you."

With the zoom bar, you can now jump to specific zoom levels rather than just zooming in and out, and if you want driving directions or traffic info, you can enter specific commands in the search box like "Bellevue, WA to Space Needle" or "Seattle Traffic."

You can now embed maps onto blogs or sites by clicking the share button when the map is where you want it to be. You can then copy the code or click the "customize view" link to bring up the embeddable map customizer.

As far as navigation, there is a new selection of features on the button bar with the following:

- "Welcome" loads the welcome pane

- "Car" loads driving directions

- "Star" loads My Places, formerly called Collections

- "Envelop" loads the ability to share the map with someone via email, copy a URL or embed the map into a web page

- "Printer" is for printing

- "Traffic light" will load the traffic overlay

"We've moved the processing power closer to the user," says Pendleton. "Using Microsoft’s ECN, we now have Bing Maps running in data centers in 7 locations around the world. This means wherever you are around the world, you will access Bing Maps from the closest geographic node to where you are physically located."

In addition to that, the default Bing Maps home page dropped from 678kb to 484kb and Pendleton says it "zips through the pipes" much faster now.

Related Articles:

> National Geographic, Weather.com Befriend Bing

> Google Makes Biggest Design Changes to Maps Yet

> Google Updates Maps with New Dataset

Google Seeking Not To Cross The Creepy Line

Rich Ord — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:26:05 -0500

Google CEO Eric Schmidt while appearing on Fox Business made some interesting comments about Google's emergence as a huge Microsoft-like business power. I thought most interesting was Schmidt's statement about Google becoming like Microsoft, "Hopefully, we won't repeat the mistakes that Microsot made ten years ago that ultimately led to all these things that happened with them".

Schmidt elaborated:

"In our case we see ourselves as a disruptor, and a disruptor because we are using new technology to solve real consumer problems, that in some cases people didn't even realize could be solved. We are also a company that operates at scale using computers globally. And of course, we are in the information business and people have a lot of opinions on how information should be organized."

Fox Business' Neil Cavuto asked Schmidt in reference to Google's new Dashboard product how we really knew if Google deleted our personal data when we pressed delete via Dashboard. Schmidt's response:

"Because we say so and we would be sued (if we didn't)."

Cavuto joked: "It's like ... come in peace to serve man."

Watch the whole interview below:

"Time Spent Online" Report Puts Microsoft Way Ahead

Doug Caverly — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 13:20:22 -0500

Despite all the gains other companies (Google, Facebook) have made, it's still Microsoft's world, according to new statistics from comScore. comScore found that, in terms of time spent on sites, the Redmond-based corporation continues to maintain a huge lead over its competitors.

People spent about 3.920 billion hours on Microsoft's sites in September, which equates to about 14.5 percent of the total time spent online. Meanwhile, people only spent about 2.512 hours on Google-owned sites, which works out to 9.3 percent of the total. And Google barely logged more growth than Microsoft (48 percent versus 44 percent).

Things looked even more depressing for Yahoo, as the chart below shows. The real surprise, though, relates to Facebook, the social network that doesn't "do" much of anything compared to three companies that offer search engines, email, maps, and all other sorts of stuff.

comScore determined that individuals spent about 5.1 percent of their online time on Facebook in September, and that represents an impressive 2.9 percent year-over-year increase. If Facebook can sustain this rate of growth, it might not be long before Yahoo's forced to eat its dust.

Oddly, Lycos sites experienced a lot of growth in the last year, too, so they may bear watching.

Related Articles:

> Google Top Search Engine In The Asia-Pacific Region

> U.K. Social Networking Accounts For 25% Of Display Ads

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Murdoch On Blocking Search Engines: "I Think We Will"

Doug Caverly — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:47:26 -0500

There's a chance that the content produced by the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, and a number of other important organizations will soon become impossible to find using Google. Rupert Murdoch indicated in a recent interview that News Corp. may block search engines.

News Corp. is the world's second largest media group. It owns enough stuff that even hitting the highlights would take far too much time. (Wikipedia has an 861-word entry titled "List of assets owned by News Corporation" if you're feeling adventurous.)

Murdoch's interview with Sky News editor David Speers could be of huge significance, then. In it (the relevant part of the conversation starts around the 3:10 mark), Murdoch said, "We'd rather have fewer people coming to our website, but paying." In reference to "search people," he next added, "They don't suddenly become loyal readers of our content."

Finally, in response to a question regarding why News Corp. doesn't just block search engines, Murdoch said, "Well, I think we will . . ."

But here's the tricky part: Murdoch cited the Wall Street Journal's current approach to pay walls and subscriptions as an example of what he'd like to implement on a larger scale, and it's actually possible to access WSJ stories using Google. It's only when clicking around within the WSJ that you run into truncated articles.

So we - and a lot of industry decision-makers - will see what happens. Whichever way Murdoch leans, he definitely has the power to start a trend.

Related Articles:

> MySpace To Miss $100 Million From Google Search Deal

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Amazon Kindle For PC Now Available

Mike Sachoff — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:22:01 -0500

Amazon.com has released its free Kindle for PC application that allows users to read books on their personal computer without having to own the e-reader device.

The move comes as Amazon aims to make it s Kindle content available on a broader range of devices. Kindle books can now be read on the iPhone, iPod touch, Kindle DX and now a PC.

Amazon has made its Kindle for PC available for free download to users in over 100 countries. The U.S. Kindle store offers access to more than 360,000 books, including new releases, which are usually priced at $9.99 or less.

Kindle for PC features include Amazon's Whispersync technology that automatically saves and synchronizes bookmarks and last page read across devices. The Kindle for PC allows users to read some on their PC and some on a Kindle, while saving their place.

"Kindle for PC is the perfect companion application for customers who own a Kindle or Kindle DX," said Ian Freed, vice president, Amazon Kindle.

"Kindle for PC is also a great way for people around the world to access a huge selection from the Kindle Store and read the most popular books of today even if they don't yet have a Kindle."

Sony's eBook Store and BarnesandNoble.com are compatible with a Mac or a PC, while Kindle for PC is compatible with Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7.

Key features of the Kindle For PC include:

Access their library of previously purchased Kindle books stored on Amazon's servers for free
Choose from more than 10 different font sizes and adjust words per line
View notes and highlights marked on Kindle, Kindle DX, iPhone, and iPod touch
Zoom in and out of text with a pinch of the fingers (Windows 7 users only)

Related Articles:

>Amazon Rolls Out Kindle For PC

>Electronic Books May Become Really Popular

>Consumer Interest In E-Readers Mixed

The Traffic News Corp. Would Lose Without Google

Chris Crum — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 12:03:51 -0500

As you may know, Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corp., is saying he may block search engines from accessing the organization's content. He expressed this notion in a recent interview.

If Murdoch were to act upon this, it would mean theoretically that you would no longer be able to find Wall Street Journal, New York Post, etc. content on Google. Of course that would be in a world where scraped content isn't frequently crawled by search engines.

If Murdoch were to pull all of the original content, he would risk all of his content just being found on other sites through Google (or Yahoo or Bing or wherever). The reality is that illegal scraping will continue to exist, and search engines aren't perfect. There is a great chance that they will still crawl the content, without even knowing it was originally produced by News Corp. properties. With News Corp.'s content in the search engines, at least the engines will be able to place that content higher in results where it would be more likley to drown out the scraped versions.

This week, a Google spokesman told Emma Barnett at the Telegraph, "Google News and web search are a tremendous source of promotion for news organisations, sending them about 100,000 clicks every minute."

and...

"If publishers want their content to be removed from Google News specifically all they need to do is tell us."

So in other words, Google is fine with Murdoch pulling out. News Corp.'s the one that stands to lose more from that. Experian Hitwise shared some rather interesting data with WebProNews:

- On a weekly basis Google and Google news are the top traffic providers for WSJ.com account for over 25% of WSJ.com's traffic.

- According to Experian Hitwise data, over 44% of WSJ.com visitors coming from Google are "new" users who haven't visited the domain in the last 30 days.

- Twitter and Facebook sent 4% of US visits to News and Media sites in October 2009. (via @Hitwise_US)

It's interesting to look at the above graphs and note that WSJ.com is getting considerably more traffic from Google and Google news than in years past. It will also be interesting to see if Murdoch goes through with pulling content from Google.

As it stands right now, it is still easy to go to Google News and find content from the Wall Street Journal. If that and other News Corp.- owned publications are removed, that can only mean increased traffic for similar sites.

Related Articles:

> Murdoch On Blocking Search Engines: "I Think We Will"

> Google Okay With Blocking News Corp.

> Murdoch Says Newspapers Must Charge For Online Content

> Obvious: People Don't Want to Pay for Online News

> Google Trying to Differentiate Between Blogs and News?

> Can SEO Help Save the Publishing Industry?

> Reuters Happy to Take Traffic the AP Doesn't Want

Google Gives AdWords Users New Alert Options

Chris Crum — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:32:18 -0500

Google has introduced a couple of new alert options for AdWords advertisers. Users can of course use account alerts, and can also use custom alerts. Now Google has added new alerts for keyword and budget ideas, which are personalized tips to help users improve their campaigns' effectiveness. These are in the "opportunities" tab.

"New ideas are usually generated for campaigns and ad groups every few weeks, but you may miss ideas that can expand your coverage and boost your traffic if you don't check the Opportunities tab regularly," explains Google's Dan Friedman. "Now, when there are new ideas available for your review, you'll see them highlighted along with the rest of your campaign alerts."

Google has also added the ability to create custom alerts for changes in conversion volume, conversion rate, and cost per conversion for users using AdWords conversion tracking.

"By setting alerts for your conversion data, you can make sure that you're quickly notified about fluctuations in your key metrics," says Friedman.

Google says it is still working on bringing custom alerts to all linked accounts for My Client Center (MCC) users, but until then, you can just set custom alerts for individual accounts if you can log into them directly.

Related Articles:

> Google Gives AdWords Advertisers New Comparison Option

> Google Launches Latest Version of AdWords API

> More "Ads by Google" Across the Web

Google Offering Free Wi-Fi In Airports During The Holidays

Mike Sachoff — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:43:59 -0500

Google said Tuesday it is working with airports in the U.S. as well as Boingo Wireless, Advanced Wireless Group, Airport Marketing Income and others to provide free Wi-Fi as a "holiday gift" through January 15, 2010.

The free Wi-Fi is available in 47 airports, including Las Vegas, San Jose, Boston, Baltimore, Burbank, Houston Indianapolis, Seattle, Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando, St. Louis and Charlotte. As a result of this project, Burbank and Seattle airports will begin offering airport-wide free Wi-Fi indefinitely.

"We're very happy to extend our Holiday Wi-Fi gift to the millions of people who will spend time in airports over the next few months," said Marissa Mayer, Vice President of Search Products and User Experience at Google.

"We know that this is a very hectic travel season for people, and we hope that free Wi-Fi will make both traveling and connecting with friends and family a little bit easier."

According to the Federal Aviation Administration, over 100 million people will pass through the participating airports between now and January 15, 2010. Travelers often have extra time on their hands after they pass through security for a variety of reasons, including bad weather.

A recent study by the Wi-Fi Alliance found 50 percent of business travelers take red-eye flights in order to be "reachable" during business hours, and the majority (82%) said that being connected via Wi-Fi would help solve that problem.

"Google gets this year's Wi-Fi Santa award for sponsoring complimentary access in dozens of airports, both to the traveler's and airport's benefit," said Dave Hagan, president and CEO of Boingo Wireless.

"In addition to the obvious bonus holiday travelers will enjoy, sponsored access will increase overall Wi-Fi usage in the participating airports and help supplement the airport's increasingly important non-airline incremental revenue."

In keeping with the spirit of the season, travelers who log on to networks of the participating airports will have the option to make a donation to Engineers Without Borders, the One Economy Corporation or the Climate Savers Computing Initiative. Google said it will match the donations made across all the networks up to $250,000, and the airport network that generates the highest amount per passenger by January 1 will receive $15,000 to donate to a local nonprofit of their choice.

In October, Google partnered with Virgin America to offer free in-flight WiFi to all passengers flying with the airline. Five of the airports participating in the program are also Virgin America destinations: Boston, Seattle, Las Vegas, San Diego and Virgin America's newest destination launching November 18, Fort Lauderdale.

Related Articles:

>Google And Virgin America To Offer Free WiFi During The Holidays

>American Expands In-Flight Internet Service

>The American In-Flight Internet Revolution

LinkedIn, Twitter Connect Through Status Updates

Doug Caverly — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:42:01 -0500

LinkedIn has developed a reputation for being a rather sedate, professional site. Twitter, on the other hand, is at the anything-goes, trend-of-the-minute end of the social networking spectrum. But last night, the two companies announced a partnership that should see a bit of back-and-forth result.

A post on the LinkedIn Blog explained, "When you set your status on LinkedIn you can now tweet it as well, amplifying it to your followers and real-time search services like Twitter Search and Bing. And when you tweet, you can send that message to your LinkedIn connections as well, from any Twitter service or tool."

The integration makes a fair amount of sense since so many people use Twitter for self-promotion. Job hunters will now be able to more easily enlist their entire Twitter networks in the search. And at the same time, potential employers will be able to more easily see how individuals operate on a day-to-day basis.

Folks who alternate work-related tweets with "this is what I had for lunch" material are covered, too, though, since the new feature will allow users to just select certain tweets to be shared.

As you can see in the above video, LinkedIn's Reid Hoffman and Twitter's Biz Stone seem rather pleased with the arrangement. Bonus points may go to Hoffman for giving Twitter the first and largest part of the nickname "TwitterIn."

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20 Goals for Business Social Media Use

Chris Crum — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:30:18 -0500

I probably don't have to tell you that many businesses are still struggling with the concept of using social media. Many simply can't find a good reason to use it at all, and many more find themselves using it but struggling to validate that use. They can't find the ROI. They feel that too much time is being wasted. Basically, they're just using social networks because they feel like they're supposed to. They just want to keep up.

Many businesses are even banning social media from the workplace entirely. In fact, a great deal of our readers have expressed that they feel that social media doesn't belong in the workplace because employees are there to "work," not "goof off."

Well, that may be the case, and perhaps social media doesn't fit into your business at all, but considering your general business goals can help you decide whether or not there is a place for social media, and whether or not your employees can fit into that puzzle.

As social media enthusiast Chris Brogan told WebProNews in a recent interview, it's time to get over the touristy part of social media and start getting down to business.

He says it's not "Gee whiz, it's cool" anymore. It's "What are we gonna do with it?"

"Great you can type. Now what?" he says.

Here are some sample goals a business owner or manager might set for social media use. Once the goal is considered, then you can look at the tools that are out there and evaluate which ones will give you the best shot of achieving those goals.

20 Possible Goals

1. I'm a content provider, and I want to expand my reach.

2. I want my customers to be able to stay updated with news about my company.

3. I want to get to know my customers.

4. I want to promote my product.

5. I want to stay abreast of current news and trends.

6. I want to share my ideas with likeminded individuals.

7. I want to increase brand awareness.

8. I want to provide customer service and support easily.

9. I want to find a job.

10. I want to recruit.

11. I want people to like my brand.

12. I want to collaborate on business projects.

13. I want to directly sell a product.

14. I want to earn respect within my industry.

15. I am getting information overload, and I want to get organized.

16. I want to drive traffic to my site.

17. I want to attract advertisers and make money.

18. I want to get more involved with local prospects.

19. I want to get more involved with people on an international and global level.

20. I want to keep up with my competitors.

There are certainly more possible goals for business social media use out there. I've probably not even scratched the surface. What goals do you set for your social media efforts? Discuss here.

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Google Okay With Blocking News Corp.

Doug Caverly — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:26:35 -0500

In a recent interview we wrote about this morning, Rupert Murdoch indicated that News Corp. may block search engines from indexing its sites. Now, it doesn't exactly look like Google's going to offer money to him (or throw a fit) in response, as the search giant's more or less replied by saying "fine."

Actually, depending on what sort of tone you attribute to them, some of the comments made to Emma Barnett came closer to "it's your funeral." A spokesman told her, "Google News and web search are a tremendous source of promotion for news organisations, sending them about 100,000 clicks every minute."

And later, there was something approaching "make my day." The spokesman said, "If publishers want their content to be removed from Google News specifically all they need to do is tell us."

So it should be interesting to see what happens. Judging solely by the comments on our earlier piece and Barnett's article, it seems that Murdoch might wind up missing "search people" (as he referred to them) a lot more than searchers would miss News Corp.'s content.

Pay walls have worked in some specific instances, though, and since any disappearing act News Corp. pulled would almost certainly receive tons of mainstream media coverage, the publicity-generating value of the unprecedented move is interesting to consider.

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Amazon.com Launches Denim Shop

Mike Sachoff — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:09:14 -0500

Amazon.com has just launched an online store for jeans it calls the Denim Shop.

To attract shoppers to its Denim Shop, Amazon is offering free shipping on some men and women's jeans. It is also offering shoppers free returns for purchases that for whatever reason don't work out. Customers will have up to 30 days to return their jeans for a full refund.

In the terms and conditions part of the site Amazon says the free shipping and free returns will be available for a limited time only. The company does not say when that offer will expire but most likely sometime after the holiday season.

The Denim Shop features over 40 brands of jeans including both traditional brands such as Levi's and designer names such as Rock & Republic and 7 For All Mankind.

Jeans on the Denim Shop range in price from $18 to $280. Visitors to the site can search by fit, price, brand, color and size.

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(Another) New Google Books Deadline Set

Doug Caverly — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:10:46 -0500

It could be said that the Google Books case is becoming the new Microsoft-Yahoo deal, having created all sorts of controversy and dragged on and on. And on some more, as it turns out, since the involved parties are pushing a target date back again.

A revised proposal concerning how Google and its critics could settle their differences was originally supposed to be submitted to Judge Denny Chin in Manhattan federal court a little more than a month ago. Obviously, that didn't happen, and Chin picked today (Monday, November 9th) as an alternate goal.

Now, Motoko Rich has reported, "The parties to the Google book settlement, which would legalize the creation of a vast library of digital books, have asked the judge overseeing a revision of the agreement for an extension to this Friday, Nov. 13."

It sounds like the lines of communication are still very much open, though, as Rich also wrote, "[T]he group indicated that it had met with the Justice Department before and after the October status hearing and had met as recently as Friday, Nov. 6." And (hopefully) Friday the 13th isn't far enough away for this delay to signal serious trouble.

So as before, stay tuned, and maybe this whole thing will be resolved before the "early 2010" deadline Microsoft and Yahoo have set for their partnership.

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Internet Most Popular Source For Sports News And Information

Mike Sachoff — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:46:27 -0500

While TV is the most common way for people to watch sports, the Internet is the most popular way for both men and women (36.1% and 32.7% respectively) to get sports news and information, according to a new report by Burst Media.

The Internet is trailed by local TV programming (23.7%), national TV networks (15.1%), local newspaper (6.7%), national newspaper (3.6%), and sports radio (2.9%).

Among the key age segments, 18-24 years and 25-34 years, the Internet far outweighs both local and national TV coverage as the main source of sports and news information. Adults 55 years and over still turn to local TV news over the Internet.

Among all respondents sports content is in demand regardless of which media is cited as their primary source. Nearly one-half (49.2%) of respondents use the Internet to check sports scores and 41.3 percent read sports-related news stories online.

Interestingly, nearly as many women as men use the Internet to check sports scores (47.3% vs.50.5%), read sports stories (39% vs. 42.8%) and visit professional team sports sites (25.2% vs. 26.2%). The Burst survey also found over half (55%) of all respondents indicated they have never watched live streaming game coverage on the Internet.

"It's abundantly clear that men and women of all ages are active consumers of sports content online," said Chuck Moran, Chief Marketing Officer for Burst Media. "This provides marketers an opportunity to expand the reach of their campaigns targeted to sports enthusiasts by adding an online component".

"Also, by utilizing a multichannel strategy of combining Internet and TV, advertisers can surround their target audience with coordinated messaging for greater impact."

The survey also found that although the Internet is the most popular media source for sports content, it is not seen as the best source. Overall, national TV sports networks, such as ESPN, are viewed by respondents as the best place to get sports and information news. However, men believe national TV sports networks and Internet sports content sites offer equivalent sports content (30.1% and 28.7% of men, respectively).

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Report Indicates Google Bought Gizmo5

Doug Caverly — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:19:56 -0500

Not long ago, Eric Schmidt estimated that Google would start making monthly acquisitions. Today, it's almost looking like the dial got bumped up to hourly, since following this morning's confirmed acquisition of AdMob, a report has indicated that Google's bought Gizmo5, too.

Gizmo5 is a VoIP firm. Two recent company blog posts are titled "Introducing GizmoVoice - A Free Phone Line Using Google & Gizmo5" and "Add Gizmo5 Calling Directly To Gmail!" so it's clear that there are some strong links between it and Google.

Two less obvious details also make them a good match, since the Gizmo5 homepage is dotted with the word "free" (as we all know, Google rarely charges for things) and the Gizmo5 site is available in nine languages (Google loves to serve lots of countries).

Anyway, Michael Arrington, who was the first to write about the rumored acquisition, predicted that Gizmo5 will fill a vital role. "Gizmo5 will be the glue that puts Google Voice and Google Talk together into a single product," he stated. "And that product looks a lot like a Skype competitor."

Arrington put Gizmo5's price at $30 million (in cash). Gizmo5's site has since become quite slow, but we'll keep an eye out for official confirmation.

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