Archive for August, 2007
Google Reader gets search
August 31st, 2007 • Google, Social
Tags: Google, rss, Search
Silly things please simple minds. I open my browser this evening for my usual trawl through 1001 news stories using Google Reader, and… there’s a search box.
OK, OK, it’s hardly earth-shattering. But I’m a Reader addict, and could never understand why the world’s search giant didn’t have search enabled on its popular newsreader. Daft. Well, today, at long last, it has. And it works - you can either query all results, or drill down by category. Smart, quick, and wonderful.
Mr Web 2.0 on a new form of news breaking
August 30th, 2007 • Internet, Journalism, Media
Tags: blogging, Journalism, newspapers
Or is it so new? Tim O’Reilly (the chap credited with coining the term ‘Web 2.0′) tells of his admiration for one blogger’s handling of a breaking news story…Journalism is Burning Or How Breaking News is Broken: “It wasn’t the subject of Scott’s story that stood out; it was the way he was telling it on his LaughingSquid blog. He reported the story by updating the blog over time. The practice is not unusual for bloggers. Revising or appending an update after the main or original story is fairly common. However, as this particular story grew and grew, Scott decided to keep adding more and more updates to the same blog post instead of creating new and separate posts each day.”He’s right, of course, but I work with an editor who does this every day, and has been for the last two years minimum.Her particular tipple is Formula 1, and I’ve always admired the way she pieces together race coverage as it happens - you can watch the jigsaw assemble as you hit the refresh button.An hour after the race is over, and you have a wonderful, completed picture. I’m not quite sure where I’m headed here: perhaps it’s to say that while O’Reilly’s praise is well placed, I’m unsure where the ground is being broken.
StumbleUpon: better than being Dugg?
August 30th, 2007 • Internet, Search, Social
Spent an hour this evening listening to colleagues discuss free online marketing techniques. In fact, the chat was only meant to last 10 minutes - but once we’d started, it proved hard to stop.
Everyone had a tale of free tools that helped spread their site’s word.So no surprise this evening to spot this story, claiming that StumbleUpon is thoroughly good news when it comes to giving your site a traffic hike. I can verify this: the site you’re reading was Stumbled recently, and I’m still bathing in the glow.
StumbleUpon: Exposure That Lasts: “On the contrary, you only need 3-4 thumbs of approval from Stumblers before a decent number of visitors start coming in to your site. The more ‘likes’ (thumbs up, or votes) you get, the more traffic you will get. Unlike Digg, where you can get 5,000 visitors per hour for a few hours and then next to none from there on, StumbleUpon sends you sustained traffic over long stretches of time.”
The dark side of San Francisco
August 29th, 2007 • Life
First time here, and in a mild state of shock. The streets are strewn with shouters. And not just your average London yaggah-ya-bassa shouters, but proper i-have-a-blade-tucked-into-this-newspaper-and-i-enjoy-using-it shouters.
A couple of cab rides later, and all becomes clear. According to the drivers (and I’m sure this is old news to Americans and SF regulars), Raegan was the culprit. The mentally ill were thrown onto the streets in an aim to save cash. And there they stayed - shouting. One driver added that you see more in San Fran that anywhere else in the US thanks to the state’s liberal laws: benefits are far easier to get by The Bay.
The same driver also explained how the entire scene has become a tidy business. One-room ‘apartments’ are used by the homeless, with landlords charging $800 a week - apparently then claimed back from the State. Tidy. A good number of these homeless, I’m told, are veterans, their brains fried by time spent serving their nation.
We wandered over Market to Dotties yesterday morning for breakfast. In fact, no, we didn’t - we started wandering over Market, spotted the half-mile long queue of humanity waiting outside a food charity, and headed north. There was no snobbery in the diversion, just fear. You can bin your middle-class English image of the quaint down-and-out: these guys (and girls) have the sort of edge you gain when you have nothing to lose.
If I were American, I’d be a Republican - always have, always will be. I grew up in the butt-hole of south London, and watched in anger as school friends decided that there was no point in trying, not when the social would stump the bill for everything. But three days in San Francisco have subtly altered my view of the world: if Raegan’s watching from up there, I hope you’re proud.
Three out of four searches driven by ‘offline’
August 29th, 2007 • Media, Search
Fairly gobsmacking research released yesterday by iProspect / Jupiter, suggesting that a whopping 67% of search queries are prompted by ‘offline channels’ - which in English means television, word of mouth and magazines / newspapers.
Even Jupiter expressed surprise at the findings, with the organisation expecting a 50/50 split between on- and offline influences.
‘Though iProspect (the company that conducted the research with Jupiter) is not surprised at the finding that television and word of mouth are the two most frequent offline drivers of search, we are a bit stunned that both of these channels influence over one-third of online search users to perform a search. But even more surprising is that a full 67% of online search users are driven to search as a result of some offline channel.’Search Engine Marketing Research: iProspect Offline Channel Influence on Online Search Behavior Study
And the future of video advertising is… overlays?
August 28th, 2007 • Advertising, Video
Big buzz today. YouTube has finally decided on its advertising format of choice, and it appears to be transparent overlays.
This is major news. YouTube now accounts for 10% of all internet traffic, and is costing Google the earth. And until today, there was little way to guage how the search company would see a return on its $1.65 billion investment.
The challenge has been made all the greater by apparent public resistance to pre-rolls (ads that run before the video begins), with complaints in research groups that they ruined the experience.
But after much soul-searching, Google has finally gone for a semi-transparent overlay. Read more »
Shame I can’t vote there…
August 25th, 2007 • Life
Wikipedia founder to take on Google
August 25th, 2007 • Google, Search, Social
Arguably, Wales is already half-way down the road to threatening Google’s might - you’ve probably already noticed how dominant Wikipedia is in search results, sewing the seed in your head that you may as well cut out the middle man.
Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, the world’s biggest community-written online encyclopedia, announced Friday that he had taken a small step toward his next big goal: a community-programmed search engine that competes with Google.Wales told a group of computer scientists and programmers gathered at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention in Portland that Wikia, the for-profit Internet publishing company he founded after Wikipedia, had just acquired search technology that will serve as the foundation for the new search engine.
San Jose Mercury News - Wikipedia founder plans open-source search engine
Wired: how to run a corporate blog
August 22nd, 2007 • Business, Internet, Media
I should have read this months ago. Wired has a guide on how to run a corporate blog without being launched into space by your MD. Wriiten by Edelmann PR VP Steve Rubel (who’s own blog, Micro Persuasion, is a personal fave), the guide offers a few gems.
Rubel has obviously walked the hard miles, judging by the tips given. He warns that your words need to be written with your entire peer group in mind (including senior management and advertisers, not just your MD), and that your business has to come first:
It’s important to know what your blog is about and where it can impact your business. Figure out your mission and know where you can and can’t go. In my case, I learned that it’s very difficult for me to blog substantively about our clients, their competitors or individual media outlets. I largely stick to big trends, insights and how-to’s and pepper them with small examples
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