Ad Revenues Up 33 Percent In 2004

From the ClickZ story the new metrics for online ad is going a lot better than the data predicted a few months ago.

Google's Robots.txt is not valid

Why Google add this Allow command to Search History ? This is going against the standard.

Ads soon in your RSS reader

Google is testing his AdSense ads in RSS and Atom feed.

FireFox will hit the 50 million download mark tomorrow

Congratulation.

Yahoo Counterattack to Google My Web History

Here it is. More on SEW.

Finding Whom Use Wich AdSense Keywords

Googspy is a scrapping site to find out which AdSense keywords are use by who.

Google Maps Inspiration ?

Here a really nice mapping service of Switzerland. I'd love the road layer over satellite image and the zoom level in and out with the left or right mouse click on the maps. There are a huge chance this site have been seen the inspiration for the Google Maps.

Funny Coincidence on CPM Marketing

The day where the old king of Internet advertisement, DoubleClick been sold, Google will start beta testing CPM ads !

Following the trends

Nice little service to monitor month by month your site.

Google have been the winner of the day on Nasdaq

After deposit of the Q4 data, Google have made the better performance on dollars variation on Nasdaq. The after market trading skyrocket the Goog action to $223.69 at 8hpm ET !

RSS Causing the Decline of Mailing Lists and Email Marketing ?

Theses metrics come from one of the majors of the email marketing industry, in the DoubleClick report of december 2004:

The Q3 2004 average open rate (average of 34.3 percent) declined 7.5 percent from Q3 2003 (37.1%), while the average click-through rate (8.2%) decreased 10.9 percent during the same period (9.2%).

I'm not sure RSS have so much influence on thoses metrics, -I personnaly think it's more spam gates who are more and more used by access providers-, but RSS will be for sure, the next big channel of communication. I'm a bit surprise to not find RSS/XML links in a lot of place where they should be use.

RSS is not only for Blogs and News

Where do you find now RSS links :

• Blog sites
• News sites

Where you should find RSS links to bring a better communication between you and your clients :

• Corporate Press releases page
• Human Resources Jobs posting sections
• Whitepapers section
• New products section
• Bestsellers list page
• Inventory sale section
• Calendar of events section
• Discount Coupons page
• Contests & Sweepstakes pages
• Downloads of softwares and patches pages
• Portfolio section
• Classified ads sections (a must)

In a limited-access (log-in) zone you can also use RSS to :

• Make awareness messaging with yours; affiliates, employees, team members or investors
• Podcasting (links to a audio content like a radio shows)
• VideoCasting (links to Video comments, interviews or statements)
• AppCasting (Alpha & Beta software releasing)
• Consulting & billing awareness tool
• Agenda feeds
• A emergency warning channel
• ...
  

A another good example of the tendancy of RSS supplanting mailing list.

Update 13h22 EDT : Funny coincidence, an hour after this post I learn that DoubleClick is close to sale!

Google launch My Web History : A new step in personalization ?

Here the place to register. Here a SEW paper on it. More details later...

Snap Suggest

Snap add a suggest box when you type in your search. It work a bit better than Google Suggest because he does substring and not showing only words by the leading character you type in.

Also at the place to display the number of results, Snap display the number of searches performed by users, like the Overture tool who sometimes give you really bad measurement influenced by their own PPC campaigns.

With WordTracker, the Snap Suggest give us a third source to see how a word is popular in search. The drawback is it's not working with foreign language when you got diacritic in the character.

Google Maps make the jump to Britain

No satellite images, but all the maps and vital local information are there.

MSN going in the Search Engine Clustering ?

A team at Microsoft Research Asia have released SRC (Search Result Clustering) in a Beta version. The engine who give you cluster results in the way Clusty or Northern Light does it a few years ago.

It's pretty slow for now, seem to dig pretty deep (even found some of my Flickr pictures) but need a lot of polish in the resulting clusters and results. I found a lot of duplicate links and a big problem with foreign characters.

How to make a Web Designer AND a SEO guy happy ?

Just with three little letters : DTR. Thoses stand for Dynamic Text Replacement.

For a graphic designer the web is a nightmare mainly because the limited text styling he can use on a web page to attract his audience. Specially with the titles, the designer have only a choice of a few fonts because the end-user of the page got to have the same font in his computer to have the same rendering on the page. Specially with all the different operating systems (pc, mac, linux) this narrowed a lot the choice of the designer.

The easy way to solve the problem was to convert the text in a image to get back a lot of choice in the text styling. It will give headaches to webmaster on a site that is updated several times per day. This is also a very bad thing for the search engine robots and text analyzing softwares, who can't understand text embed in images. Also it is a huge problem for the search engine optimizer peoples who count on text titles to improve ranking in the search engine result pages.

The solution for those problems are here in this demo page. You got all the files and the recipe here in english, french and german.

Adobe buy Macromedia

A big move on the graphic and Web design software business.

Copernic won't be buy by Mamma.com

The Mamma plan to acquire Copernic is over. On the press release they just publish on their site, they announced that Copernic Technologies Inc. has decided it no longer wishes to pursue a sale transaction with them.

Guide to the Blogosphere for Marketers & Company Stakeholders

Nice reading (Pdf 22 pages) offer to us by Intelliseek, owner of BlogPulse. Here a few points who define the blogger profile :

• 57% of bloggers are male, 43% are female
• 48% of bloggers are age 30 or under, but 52% are over 30
• 70% of bloggers have broadband/high-speed Internet access at home
• 82% of bloggers have been Internet users for six or more years
• 42% of bloggers live in households earning more than $50,000 a year
• 39% of bloggers have college or graduate degrees
• 12% of Internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs—representing 14 million people and a three-fold increase since April 2004
• 5% of Internet users use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get news and other information from blogs and content-rich Web sites as soon as it’s posted online
• Blog readership is growing among all demographics

Here is the TOC of that very good paper :

1. The blogging boom: what blogs are…and how they’ve grown
2. The impact of blogs: challenges, opportunities and changes
3. What others said about blogs: praise...and drawbacks
4. Blogs that work...and blogs gone wrong
5. Blog segmentation: the edelman & intelliseek trust media blog directory
6. How to contact bloggers: new rules of engagement for the blogosphere
7. To blog or not to blog: key questions for marketers and communications professionals
8. The do’s and don’ts of blogging in general
9. Blogging terms you absolutely need to know

Google Video : Upload Program is there

You'll want to share video with everybody ? You want to start VideoBlogging ? Here is the place to put your movies of any lenght, for free or by charging, and show them to the rest of the world for free. But it's seem VideoCasting will not work because it's gonna be a streming media. If you want Google to charge to see your video, they will keep 30% of the gross recipe, but in special case it can be more.
More details on SEW.

May be it is a historic date to another step in the World Wild Web?
Update 8pm EST : Two first views by Loren Baker

The last point of Raymond M. Kristiansen of Ourmedia.org bring out is the first step in my mind :

I am personally very interested to see where Google will take Blogger with this. Maybe in the future Blogger will be ‘made for videoblogging’. If so, this will make it Very easy for videobloggers to choose Blogger as their favourite blogging tool.

I use Hello and Blogger for a "unlimited free storage pictures server" for one my blog and I loved it. It will rock acquisition of new peoples and give them a huge collection of data and information.

The first comment from Steve Garfield in this same interview :

We already go to Google to find everything else. Why not video too? For viewers, it’ll give the average internet user who is familiar with searching using the Google interface, a comfortable way to explore finding video on the web. For producers, it gives them a huge audience that could possible find their videos more easily.

Update 12pm EST :
The Google site experiment this feature since a few month but undercover. If you search for olympic stadium you will see normal results but if you add olympic stadium pictures or images (with a s give you sometimes picture you can't see without) you'll see picture of the stadium before the normal results. This can be done for videos to easily.

Update thurday 00:45 pm EST :
Other points in Inside Google

I'd love to have a cristal ball to see where it will be... in december !

Google new cellphone services for US & Canada

XHTML-enabled browsers on their phones and PDA can search for a local business, figure out how to get there and provide a zoomable map of the area.

Mamma.com in hot water

The SEC probe become formal. Preceding coverages of that story.

Highest price keywords list of AdSense

Seem peoples of Washington will be hairless this summer ;-)

Hot spot of the world

Interesting to see where are the hot spots of the day in the world. And very nice to got all the archive day by day of the news from 2004.

Finding Information by Phil Bradley

Nice little page to find the good search engine depending on your needs. It's like a Finding the good search engine for dummies. He should add Gigablast in certains categories.

The next step of Web is here

A amazing recipe :

1. 1- You take the most popular local communities classifieds ad directory with an ugly old layout
2. 2- You take the new amazing maps system with a convivial GUI (graphic user interface)
3. 3- You choose a niche market and show them nicely with six easy sorting elements on category of the data with geolocation of the city and the two main market of your field
   
4. 4- You merge the three first steps
5. 5- You got a site to upset all the real estate agencies

I think will see more and more real estate agent on Craiglist ;-)

It have also a great chance to grab a huge part of the search engine market in US (not just local), even more than the old Google search !

Why is it important to keep outdated information in archive

I was try to know when Google Maps Satellite photos was taken in Montreal. I knew it was somewhere in 2003 by spotting some new construction nearby my home but was not sure when in the spring it was taken. I spot the old port of Montreal and we clearly saw the Cirque du Soleil big top on the picture. Where do you think I can find information on that ? On the Cirque du Soleil web site you'll think. Nah.

Like all the big events on the major entertainment shows or festivals in Quebec (Jazz Festival, Francofolie, Just for Laughs -the only one to got a tiny history-, World Film Festival) all those sites have no archive of the marvelous shows they made and the majors artists they bring here.

Theses sites have spend a lot of money (with our taxes and/or contributions)to make the bio of artists and calendar of their shows, and many many more information, to the Web and they flushed all that goodies for ? Because the majority of thoses sites are made by Ad or Web agencies who don't know nothing about search engine and archive history.

That's really stupid. If the Jazz Festival have keep up his archive online, on a BB King, Ella, Urban Sax, Eric Clapton (and hundreds of other big's name who goes there often) query, they are a lot of chance to find it in thoses archives of thoses big events name. That's a huge trafic they miss.

BTW: Where to you think I found the date (between may 15 and june 15) of the Google satellite picture ? In a small Auberge of Old Montreal where the data is no longer available in their new site but still on their server ! Funny no ?

Viral & Buzz Marketing Campaign : Going a bit to far ?

I was a bit shocked when I start to read this New York Times Magazine article (PDF) about viral and buzz marketing campaign. Here are some part of the document who afraid me a bit :

Tremor, a word-of-mouth operation that is a division of Procter & Gamble (maker of Crest, Tide and Pampers) has an astonishing 240,000 volunteer teenagers spreading the word about everything from toothbrushes to TV shows. A spinoff, Tremor Moms, is in the works. Other marketers, particularly youth-oriented firms, have put up Web sites recruiting teenagers to serve as ''secret agents.''

Knox said that Tremor's approach to finding the Magic People is intensively researched. The company tries to isolate the psychological characteristics of the subset of influential teenagers, and has developed a screening process to identify them. The details of this are a secret, but as an example, Knox noted that most teenagers have 25 or 30 names on their instant-messaging ''buddy list,'' whereas a Tremor member might have 150. Tremor recruits volunteers mostly through online advertisements and accepts only 10 or 15 percent of those who apply. The important thing, Knox said, is they are the right kind of kids -- the connected, influential trend-spreading kind. Knox mentioned a focus group of Tremor kids in Los Angeles, where several teenagers showed up with business cards. Magic.

Ouf. I hope this bill will be adopted!

Google Maps Sightseeing Blog

Nice idea

Google Q&A à la Encarta style

Google start to respond to query like canada prime minister (probably not for long) directly at top of the results.
It's not working on all queries like vicente fox age, but George Bush age work fine. Try it, sometime it's useful like to remember who directed the movie shining shining director or what's the moon size! Thoses last two exemple come from Jean Veronis

He really have a lot of good answer!

But others time, really, really bad one even if you take the French version of it.

Pertinence Summarizer for Google

Here a nice tool who embed the Google Serps and add a Summary link after the "Cached - Similar pages".
After clicking on the link, the first time you'll be there, they will ask for ID and password. Use the search engine name for both. It's really fast.
After that you can choose the amount of automatic text summarization you want. Enjoy !

ICC Guidelines on Marketing and Advertising using Electronic Media

International Chamber of Commerce have provide principles on marketing including advertising, which use the Internet, online and interactive services, and electronic communication networks including the telephone.

A few point of that guidelines still have to be implement in the Web marketing industry.

Search Engines Market Share Tendency

I monitored the metrics of search engine referals since 97. I collect data of a hundred sites since 2000 from small sites who got only 1,000 unique visitors a month to mid-big's one who are in the range of 600,000/month.

Since that, I choose to follow up closely one e-commerce who get a audience wide open of about 50% north american and the rest from european ans asian countries who get a average of 135,000/month and representing the middle range of all sites I monitored.

Whow are GYM (Google/Yahoo/Msn) and others doing since the last 27 months ?

• Google seem to finally have stabilized in the last months after huge growing in 2003 but a big drop after the Florida update in late 2003 and first months of 2004 top of his market and take around 67.5% of the market.
• Yahoo get a very short momentum after the Google Florida Update, but since that, he is loosing part of the market month after month.
• MSN also got gains after the FU, but loosing it on 2004, but in the last month marketing campaign in America seem to give him a boost in 2005.
• Aol, AltaVista and Lycos are dying, but a old player Excite seem to revive from limb.

Since the apparition of a lot of vertical engines, I think it will stay about the same market share of GYM on 2005. Google with the recent addition of satellite on Google Maps and with the video coming, will still keep it's market over Yahoo. MSN may be gain a extra few % with it's AdCenter and upcoming new developments.

The 27 months data

Keyhole now integrated in Google maps

Cool, even part of some (click on satellite on the upper-right orange bar) big cities in Canada are integrated in a zoom level not so bad in Google maps has I posted earlier today. The photos was taken at least one year ago :

Olympic Stadium of Montreal


Lafontaine Park nearby


My panorama of the pond in the south part of the picture.

MSN Search Marketing Campaign : A Flop (in France) !

Xiti a leader of the Web monitoring market release some metrics on the MSN campaign to promote his new search engine. Here's the automatic translation of it.
Also note the big lost peeks of the week-end in the graphic who confirm the fact of many users use it at work.

Keyhole will be in Google Local & Maps soon

In next week issue of NewsWeek Business, already online here, you see that in the third page :

While the discrete new products outside the core get attention, Mayer says that the bulk of Google's work is quietly improving the bread-and-butter of search. "We don't put out a press release saying that we got rid of 5 percent of search spam, but that stuff happens all the time. We definitely have a grand plan," she says. Indeed, just this week Google is integrating the Keyhole service into its local search product.

Wow! that's gonna be a real plus in the Local market, Yahoo have already their traffic information, I'd love to see the real picture of it.

Browser Share : A new metric to consider

The rise of Firefox in the browser share give a good clue to marketers and webmasters. It's a fact the people using Firefox have a better chance to be a bit more techies than people who use Internet Explorer, specially if you tracking your data by geolocation and time of the day. Here the browser share of this blog :



Last november data

Mamma.com delayed its financial results and still hope for the Copernic acquisition

Here are the automatic translation of the Journal Les Affaires story. I'm not sure the Copernic deal will conclude !

Gmail increasing the 1Gb limit

Looking at my mail today I saw :

You are currently using 119 MB (9%) of your 1346, 1386, 1393 MB.

I was thinking a bug, but no it's seem to be the first step to this.
It fun, but it bring me a question.

Why Google want to be the mail wharehouse of the planet ?

Update 2 april :

You are currently using 119 MB (6%) of your 2050 MB.