Publishing
Social Media: Technorati Expands its Search Niche, Becoming Mini-Google
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Written By Noah Mallin | August 26, 2008 | Share This
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Technorati has always been a strange beast – neither fish nor fowl. Often mentioned in the same breath as Digg and Delicious it’s used by many passively as an aggregator of blog postings. Here’s how Technorati describes their mission:
Technorati is the recognized authority on what’s happening on the World LiveWeb, right now. The Live Web is the dynamic and always-updating portion of the Web. We search, surface, and organize blogs and the other forms of independent, user-generated content (photos, videos, voting, etc.) increasingly referred to as “citizen media.”
Online Advertising: Grasping an Ad Network’s Reach
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Written By Noah Mallin | August 14, 2008 | Share This
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One of the great things about search advertising is that there is a wealth of hard data out there that can tell you how many people are searching for a particular keyword before you bid on it. When you serve advertising on a search engine results page you reach people who are searching in order to take an action either now or later.
On the other hand, advertising on publishing sites more closely resembles other forms of traditional print and television and share with those mediums a degree of uncertainty over whether the people seeing your ad are actually intereste din your message. The uncertainty grows when dealing with ad networks which can claim, as one former ad network employee tells me, to “reach 90 percent of the Internet” — an astounding and meaningless figure.
SEM: Using Google Insights to Explore Old Media’s Geographic Reach
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Written By Noah Mallin | August 12, 2008 | Share This
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Newspapers by their nature tend to be local. Their location is even part of their name in most cases. Even so, certain newspapers are so influential that their reach extends beyond their location to other parts of the country and even the world. I thought it would be interesting to see how this might be reflected in Google’s dandy new toy, Insights for Search.
I picked four of the best know daily papers in the United States, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the Miami Herald. As a ringer I added USA Today to see if a paper that bills itself as a national one really has national scope online. The timeframe was calendar year 2007.
Weekly Search Roundup: This Week’s Search News Fully Vetted for Counter Governmental Rhetoric – Now Go Watch The Olympics
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Written By Noah Mallin | August 8, 2008 | Share This
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The glorious Olympics games are here! Everybody enjoy the sweet-smelling fog that has enveloped Beijing – it is all natural and not in any way related to industrial activity. Kindly remove the insulting facemask and enjoy the following news. Or else.
Girls Gone Wild Yahoo Style
Forrest Gump once mused that “Life is like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re gonna get…” Less nauseating but still chocolate boxey, automated tagging within articles can produce a similar “Surprise! You just bit into coconut!” effect. Automated tagging is when you drag your mouse over a word in an article online and it opens a box (not of chocolates) that directs you to more information on that topic – often sponsored. This is all well and good until the phrase is “underage girls.”
Search on the Beach: Summer Search, Social Media, and SEO Books, Your Official SearchViews Reading List
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Written By Noah Mallin | July 10, 2008 | Share This
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Ah, Summer. Here in
Either way, books and the beach go together like Amy Winehouse and liver damage, so we thought it would be fun to put together a little search industry reading list for your Summer pleasure. The idea originally came about when Reprise Media Managing Partner Peter Hershberg was on Business Wire’s recent Social Media panel and was asked to recommend a few books.
SEO: Pitfalls of Print Headlines on the Web – Dr. Naveel Shows You How to Say it
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Written By Dr. Naveel | July 9, 2008 | Share This
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The biggest SEO opportunity and challenge for any publishing website is to understand the difference in writing for print and writing for the web. Typically, publishing websites port over print headlines directly to the web unchanged. Sadly, this results in large amounts of great content that will never be clicked on or found through search engines. At the same time, after years of writing in a certain style no publishing organization wants to be told they now have to change to accommodate the web — they often feel that they know their audience better than anyone, and they do — offline. It may be a touchy subject, but publishers should consider the many benefits of using more literal headlines on the web.
Online Advertising: Will Google Prove That Size Does Matter In Measurement Tools? Ad Planner Gives Glimpse at Vast Data Banks
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 24, 2008 | Share This
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Google’s announcement of their new Ad Planner product today sounded innocuous enough:
“To make your life easier, we’re introducing Google Ad Planner, a research and media planning tool that connects advertisers and publishers. When using Google Ad Planner, simply enter demographics and sites associated with your target audience, and the tool will return information about sites (both on and off the Google content network) that your audience is likely to visit. You can drill down further to get more detail like demographics and related searches for a particular site, or you can get aggregate statistics for the sites you’ve added to your media plan.”
Well, gosh! How thoughtful, it’s all about making my life easier. Of course I’m not comScore , a company whose primary business is aggregating data for their clients for much the same purpose.
Universal Search: Clueless! – ISP’s act like AP, Greed for Money Upfront will lead to a Kick in the Rear
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 17, 2008 | Share This
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The recent kerfuffle involving bloggers and the AP fired some interesting connections in my neural net. The attempt to levy a tax on bloggers for the right (nay the privilege!) of linking to the AP’s content smells a lot like the recent attempt of a few internet service providers to charge extra to high-bandwidth users.
The common thread between these two hair-brained schemes is an attempt to force old-school ideas about economics onto the new world of the internet. The irony is that the Internet at its best is probably the closest human beings have come to the perfect marketplace envisioned by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations.
In Smith’s ideal marketplace, all buyers and sellers have access to the same information and equal access to the marketplace, allowing prices to find their natural/optimal level. In a broad way that has been mostly true online whether we are talking about the cost of advertising a product or the product itself. In fact, the auction-based search model is about as close as you’re gonna get.
Reverse Optimization: AP to Bloggers, “Hands Off!” ; Bloggers to AP, ”Don’t Make us Angry – You Wouldn’t Like Us When We’re Angry…” ; SearchViews Officially Joins AP Boycott
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 16, 2008 | Share This
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After hustling, begging, pleading and cajoling for every link we can get, it comes as a shock to find a content provider so out-to-lunch that they actually begrudge the link love. What’s up with that, Associated Press? The old media consortium of umpty-ump newspapers and other dying media types issued a blogger fatwa on Friday that temporarily got drowned out by GooHoo and Tim Russert’s death.
Seems that the AP sent a nasty latter to the operators of Drudge Retort, a user-powered news aggregator (and now aggravator, heh heh) like hundreds of others out there (not to be confused be-hatted muckracker Matt Drudge’s Drudge Report, which Retort was initially set up to combat.) Only this time the AP decided to get tough:
SEM: Spying Scientists Stumble on Site Stickiness Standards
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Written By Noah Mallin | June 5, 2008 | Share This
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