Month: May 2005

Over the weekend, Chris Gaither wrote an interesting and entertaining piece in the LA Times about the role of the Google Maximizers. These are the folks who help (mostly large) advertisers improve their campaigns and CTRs on Google. At the SME end of the spectrum is Google's Jumpstart (beta) program, which hasn't really been promoted.…

The social networking arena is poised for a shakeout. Consider the fortunes of two sites: The Facebook and Friendster. The Facebook, a popular college social networking site, just raised $13 million for expansion from 800 to all 1,400 four-year colleges in the U.S. Friendster, the site that arguably defined the space, just fired its CEO…

In something of a coup for small business portal AllBusiness.com, the company landed Peter Horan as its new CEO. Horan was the CEO of About.com until it was acquired for US$410 million by the NY Times. Horan will bring instant credibility to the site, which has been around, and through various owners since 1999. I…

Earlier this afternoon I was on a panel at the iMedia Connection Summit about the "future of search." Moderated by the humorous and ever-insightful Kevin Ryan, the panel ran the gamut of topics from search-ad agency relations to adjunct targeting mechanisms and likely search product developments. Also on the panel with me were Bob Visse,…

In yet another in a series of dizzying announcements in the search world, Yahoo! introduced a "contextual search" tool, Y!Q, that allows users to conduct a secondary/search within results by highlighting text on a page. The current offering (in beta, of course) is arguably not set up for widespread consumer adoption. But the concept is…

Let's start with sports. As any golfer knows, Tiger Woods' streak of making 142 consecutive cuts stretching back to February 1998 was broken last week at the Byron Nelson Championship. (Mr. Nelson's 11 consecutive wins on the tour is similar to Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hit streak in that neither will ever be broken.) And how…

Big news, harbinger of more to come across the industry.

Barry Diller more than hints that Ask Jeeves will be rebranded (a good move as part of a global strategy). Ask.com (the company's URL anyway) will likely be the new name. Would Barry Diller rather put an Ask search box on every IAC site or the butler? I think the choice is all but self-evident.…

The deal was announced today. YellowPages.com, SBC SMARTpages.com and BellSouth RealPages.com advertisers will be featured and recieve "priority placement" on InfoSpace-owed Switchboard, which has consistently been one of the most-visited IYP sites. More on this in our Local Media Journal next week.

Google confirms its local Kansas City-area advertising on behalf of Google Local. Thanks to Blogdigger's Greg Gershman for pointing out the post on, of all places, Google's own blog!

This week both the WSJ and NY Times ran articles on the dynamics of "traditional media" competing with "new media" (the Internet) and the likely impact of the latter on the former (Neal Polachek blogged about it below). I'm usually the guy in the Chicken Little suit warning people that the sky is falling —…

Danny Sullivan pointed to a very interesting thread on the Webmaster World forum about Google advertising in the Kansas City market for Google Local. I had heard a rumor about this from an Advertising Age reporter a few weeks ago. I've requested a Google briefing. We'll see if they want to comment about it. Google…

In the New York Times today, an article titled No More Same-Old lays out the challenges facing advertisers and advertising agencies in today€™s €œconnected€ and ever changing world. According to Universal-McCann during the last 5 years, only three media categories have increased their overall ad budget share €" direct mail, cable TV and the Internet.…

I missed Blogdigger's announcement about the addition of local a few days ago. Local.blogdigger.com appears to be a mix of local search, blog/news search and community. The results of my few quick searches weren't very impressive. But the concept is pretty interesting. From the press release: €œIt is well known that Weblogs have created a…

Always one to read just about anything that has Yellow Pages in it, I stumbled upon this article Get More Green from Your Yellow Pages Ad in contractor magazine. Written by a one Adams Hudson, a self-proclaimed marketing consultant, the article offers the contractor community a different view of Yellow Pages advertising. Overall his suggestions…

As if newspapers have not had enough bad news in recent months €" declining readership, circulation audits, classified erosion. Now comes another challenge €" this time from Hollywood. A decade ago movie advertising accounted for about 8 percent of national newspaper advertising. This share rose 73 percent to over 14 percent in 2004 and amounted…

My Google is here. Though that's not the official name, that's what the new home page personalization features seem to amount to. While the move is not a tremendous surprise — we speculated about My Google when Google News personalization was released — it does appear to be something of a directional change for the…

Nothing radical in one sense, but the development is very interesting and another harbinger of — dare I say it — TV-Internet convergence. (Actually there won't be true convergence, but some mixing of TV and Internet on both mediums). Separately, eBay bought two classified sites that it will fold into Kijiji.com (outside the U.S.): Gumtree.com…

Everybody involved in hockey — not just players and management, but people who sell beer or jerseys — loses. No one who was not intimately involved in the negotiations can understand what went on between the two sides, but the end result is that this was the first cancellation of a major league sport in…