B2B Marketing views, news and interviews.
Google is one of several companies including Earthlink that have responded to a RFP asking for free Wi Fi access in San Francisco. Google has been testing Wi Fi in certain spots in San Francisco and New York this year. If accepted, the program would be supported by Google ads. Despite the attraction of free 300 kilobits per second, there have been some concerns regarding privacy. Lots of buzz on this over the weekend.
Tags: Google, Wi Fi, San Francisco
Happy news from Search Engine Roundtable: Barry proposes to his girlfriend Yisha using Ask Jeeves.
“I proposed via Ask Jeeves. I brought Yisha to my office, ask her to search on her name. While she was doing that I kneeled behind her with the ring and flowers. She typed in her name into Ask Jeeves, full name, and up came a special Smart Answer (thanks to Jim Lanzone and team) with the proposal.”
You know you’re a search geek when you propose using a search engine! Congratulations Barry and Yisha.
Google to build monster office on NASA property -“Google Inc. confirmed Wednesday that it will build up to 1 million square feet of offices at NASA Ames Research Center and collaborate with the space agency on research surrounding topics such as supercomputing that could benefit everything from moon launches to online searches.” – SFGate
Yahoo Desktop Search Out of Beta and adds contextual web search – Yahoo Search Blog
Many marketers are still clueless on search engine optimization via OMMA East conference. A bit of an understatement I’d say. At the same time, that also means huge opportunity for search engine marketing firms. – MediaPost
For those of you still gaga over PageRank, SEO Chat has a “search by PageRank” tool. The search results are ordered by PageRank, but what’s really useful are the links to view META Data, Inbound Links, Analyze Links, Cached Version and Similar Web Sites.
A bit late on this I know, but better late than never! Andy Beal who was previously VP at Websourced – KeywordRanking has started Fortune Interactive.
“an interactive marketing agency that focuses on search engine marketing – and have joined forces with an expert in linguistics, LSI and artificial intelligence, Michael Marshall.”
From the looks of the content on the site, they’ve focused on solving what most dissatisfied SEO clients complain about – proactive, ongoing communication. That, in addition to something called SEMLogic – which uses clustering and latent semantic indexing to examine a client?Ǭís industry, competition and key phrase selections.
Andy also writes a blog called Marketing Pilgrim. You can see Andy in action at the upcoming Pubcon 10 conference in Las Vegas.
The Times Online reported today the results of a recent survey of PR consultants on blogs and brand reputation:
“Nearly 60 per cent of respondents said that companies have not yet woken up to the risks, and 64 per cent said that a disgruntled employee or customer could cause significant damage to a firm‚Äôs reputation by posting damaging remarks on blogs”
For companies evaluating whether they should start a business blog or not, consider:
No blog – means not engaging in the dialogue that is happening with or without you. Unaddressed or poor response to negative commentary on blogs about your brand can be disasterous. Land Rover, Dell and Kryptonite Locks are perfect examples. There are others, but they are my clients 🙂
Google decides today is it’s birthday. I had previously posted that Online Marketing Blog/2005/09/search-engine-and-blog-news-bits.html”>Google was 7 on Sept 7th, but they’ve removed that info from their site and decided today is the day.
Happy 7th Google!
If you have the time, there are some interesting things you can find in your blog’s referrer logs on a Saturday morning. For example, I noticed traffic coming from a place called Netvibes so I checked it out.
Wow.
Netvibes is a very customizable content aggregator, rss reader that was just launched a week ago. It’s very much like Google’s personalized search and MSN’s start.com functionally because of the use of Ajax. With Google, you have to login to drag and drop content. With Start and Netvibes you don’t. All three offer preset news feeds, weather, etc.
Netvibes offers some additional features such as the ability to import, download and listen to podcasts and also check your e-mail on one or many Gmail accounts.
Om Malik points out that the recent offering of the Opera browser for free is due to a referral deal with Google. Opera has also signed referral deals with eBay and Amazon.
In comparison, he notes that the Mozilla Foundation, makers of the FireFox browser, bring in about $30 million a year from such deals. Seems like a pretty good incentive to me.
Now what are those folks building the Flock browser up to?
Tags: Online Marketing, Opera, FireFox, Flock
Google sent out another survey to some AdWords advertisers recently. Most of the questions centered around satisfaction with AdWords along with solicitation for feedback and improvements.
There were also several questions that allude to possible enhancements that Google is considering for the Google Advertising Professionals program. These include:
Flock is a new Web 2.0 browser based on Firefox that is stirring up some attention: Om Malik, TechCrunch, Wired and Scoble. Nice job, Voce.
I first read about Flock on SearchViews last week. Comments about Flock from their web site:
“We started Flock to build tools that empower people and smooth out some of the more hairy parts of living and working online. As it is, we live and breathe this stuff everyday and wanted better tools to do the things that we love doing online.”
According to the TechCrunch review, social bookmarking and a wysiwyg blog writing tool are two features that make this a super social browser.
The company initially started as Round Two, developing extensions for the Firefox browser. Ideas started popping and investors came along, and walla, Flock was born. Lots of fun Flock photos here.
Threadwatch has keenly pointed out that it looks like Google is now sending out “You’re Banned for 30 Days” notices to sites that are deemed to have certain levels of quality content, but that violate aspects of Google’s guidelines. Via Search Engine Forums
Example slightly edited of specific names:
From: Google Search Quality DO NOT REPLY
Date: 8 September 2005 23:10:04 BDT
To: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected]
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Removal from Google’s Index
Dear site owner or webmaster of [url removed],
While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that were outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: [link] In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, we have temporarily removed some webpages from our search results. Currently pages from [url removed] are scheduled to be removed for at least 30 days.
I was perusing Technorati backlinks as I am prone to due while the mind is still numb on an early Saturday morning, and noticed that Jim Boykin, CEO of WeBuildPages has started a SEO blog. Jim runs a top notch SEO company and is very talented at search engine optimization himself.
I finally got the chance to meet Jim at Search Engine Strategies in San Jose and it was great chatting about SEO with someone who has been at it as long as he has.
I wonder of the Seth Godin ebook, “Who’s Where РSeth Godwin’s guide to blogs and the new web” he mentions on his second post had anything to do with starting a blog? It might have helped that one of his key people, Todd Mailcoat (Stuntdubl) has created an excellent blog himself.
