Marketing Pilgrim

Just been sent news that Zunch COO, Johnny Thompson, has left the company and resurrected popdensity.com, a full service interactive agency.

Online shopping search engine, Smarter.com, has announced a cool new feature: Visual Search Beta. Aimed at those shopping for clothing, Visual Search allows shoppers to select a type of clothing, then search by color using a color-wheel. It’s hard to explain, but easier to demonstrate.

Image courtesy of Comparion Engines, where you’ll also find a more detailed review.

Jeremy Luebke emailed me to ask if I would care to share the plugins used on MP. The site was fully custom built, so there may be some modified things, but here’s the list…

Akismet - Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web serivce to see if they look like spam or not.

Gravatars - for those cool photos next to comments.

intouch - for the contact form.

No Self Pings - prevents Wordpress from sending pings for stuff I link to from my own site.

Social Bookmark Links - the drop down menu for bookmarking a post.

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Another acquisition for your reading pleasure. This time, TechCrunch is reporting Conde Nast, owner of Wired magazine among others, has acquired social bookmarking site Reddit.

All four reddit employees will relocate from Boston to Wired’s San Francisco office and become part of Wired Digital. Reddit, founded and funded in 2005, is a YCombinator company (see our interview with YCombinator founder Paul Graham here). The two original founders are Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, and they were later joined by Christopher Slowe and Aaron Swartz.

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Google’s just announced their acquisition of wiki company Jotspot, finally putting to rest that Yahoo was close to acquiring the company.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but there’s plenty of other information out there. According to Jotspot’s Joe Kraus…

As we built the business over the past three years Google consistently attracted our attention. We watched them acquire Writely, and launch Google Groups, Google Spreadsheets and Google Apps for Your Domain. It was pretty apparent that Google shared our vision for how groups of people can create, manage and share information online. Then when we had conversations with people at Google we found ourselves completing each other’s sentences. Joining Google allows us to plug into the resources that only a company of Google’s scale can offer, like a huge audience, access to world-class data centers and a team of incredibly smart people.

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Nothing like some conspiracy to start off your working day. Nate Anderson has a juicy rumor that Google is secretly working the US government, including the CIA. While, there’s no official confirmation or denial from either the government or Google, former intelligence officer Robert David Steele has made the claim…

“Google has made a very important strategic mistake in dealing with the secret elements of the U.S. government—that is a huge mistake and I’m hoping they’ll work their way out of it and basically cut that relationship off.” In his view, Google’s attempt earlier this year to avoid turning over information to the Department of Justice was little more than a hypocritical charade.

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ClickZ has details of some new funding for low-cost television commercial provider, Spot Runner. Spot Runner is an interesting concept, allowing companies to create and place TV ads for as little as $500, using an online interface.

The $40 million raised, is impressive in its own right, but companies financing the round are even more intriguing…

The addition of CBS, Interpublic and WPP as investors is also significant. The three companies are major players in the online/television ad market, controlling billions of dollars in advertising budgets for some of the biggest buyers. On the ad buying side, WPP says it manages about $50 billion of clients’ budgets worldwide and Interpublic Group agencies serve more than 4,000 multinational, regional and local clients around the world.

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I’m not sure how I feel about new search engine  plan to share revenue with those that use the search engine.

“To give you a sense of the earning potential, we estimate that each referral who uses Zotspot as their primary search engine will generate between 10 cents and 50 cents for you per year. (We can’t guarantee those estimates, but we hope to continue to increase member earnings and even pass those numbers in the future!)” the Web site says. “If you refer 10 people, they each refer 10 people and so on, you could earn over $250 per year.”

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 I’ve been doing a lot of research in the hotel space just recently - and I’m not just talking about planning my next vacation either! So, I’ve learned a lot about TripAdvisor wannabe, TravelPost, and their efforts to grow their user numbers to more than 700,000 monthly visitors.

Not surprisingly, travel search site SideStep has decided they’d like to take advantage of that great community, acquire TravelPost and add it to their 5 million monthly users.

The deal, for undisclosed financial terms, is aimed at offering an independent alternative to travel industry-backed sites. SideStep plans to combine TravelPost’s reviews with its own site in the coming months, matching travelers with hotels based on advice from people with similar interests.

The soon to be acquired, YouTube, has received a request from Viacom to remove videos of some Comedy Central shows.

The source said Viacom, owner of the Comedy Central cable network, had sent a letter last Friday requesting that some of its shows — including the popular “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” “The Colbert Report” and those from MTV Networks and BET — be purged from the site.

While some might start questioning the viability of YouTube - if they’ll continue to receive such requests - I tend to look at this as a positive for the company.

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Update: Ok, so all of a sudden it stops working and keeps asking me for a password. It appears to be a bug for those using the FF master password. Next stop, Qumana.

Update 2: And the winner is, brace yourself, Microsoft! Yep, their Windows Live Writer is an awesome tool with lots of functionality and a nifty Firefox plugin. I know it’s hard to think of Microsoft as being cutting-edge in the world of blogging, but hat’s off to them! If I break it, I’ll update here.

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Switching blogging platforms has introduced me to some unique problems and some cool tools. One of the problems I had to find a solution for was tracking 404 errors using Google Analytics. As GA is a script based analytics tool, I figured I would need to find a new solution that used the site logs instead.

A quick “google” later and I discover Google Analytics has already thought of this problem and created a solution.

So, for all of GA users, here’s your solution for tracking 404 errors, whether you’re switching blog interfaces, or not.