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Going Eight Days Without Blogging?

posted on March 3, 2007

Australia’s Search Summit has wrapped up – you can see some photos here – and overall I think it was a success.

Barry Smyth did a fantastic job in putting the event together and, apart from a few hiccups, the show went very well. It was certainly interesting to see the state of Australian SEM, and the enthusiasm of those practicing SEM in Australia.

The final session of the day involved Google’s Adam Lasnik talking about ways to disconnect from the “always on” life (email, cell phones, blackberries etc) and the importance of making time of the real world.

His message come at a great time as I’m about to disconnect from the modern world until March 13th – no cell, no email and, gasp, no blogging!

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The rest of the story

posted on March 2, 2007

Here’s some of the news also going on in the search world now:

  • Google Blogoscoped features an FAQ of Google censorship, including a pretty comprehensive history of censorship by Google—and not just on Google.cn. Says Phillip Lenssen: “For the scope of this FAQ I’ll define censorship as missing results which are filtered for reasons of politics or regulations, not because they’re spam, non-family friendly, or copyright-infringements (though your mileage may vary).”
  • Today is Yahoo’s 12th birthday, according to Wired. That explains why they’re having such a hard time lately—they’re in the ‘awkward’ stage.
  • eMarketer reports that Facebook is tops with the 17-25 demographic (free on a limited basis). As a member of that demographic, I say, “Duh. MySpace is for my 15-year-old sister and child predators.” Females in the demographic name MySpace and YouTube as numbers 2 and 3, respectively. Males pick YouTube and Yahoo! as 2 and 3 (MySpace is #6—ight above Wikipedia).

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The SMO Debate Begins

posted on March 2, 2007

The newly announced Social Media and Tagging Forum at Cre8asite Forums is up and running. They’ve already announced three moderators: Liana Evans (SearchMarketingGurus), Chris Winfield (10e20) and Pierre Far (aka eKstreme). If you’re looking to debate how long YouTube will last or whether the traffic from SMO is any good, hop in.

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Beer Gets Social

posted on March 2, 2007

Anheuser-Busch has announced a partnership with MingleNow.com, a relatively new social network for their “Here’s to Beer” campaign.

MingleNow.com appears to be particularly well-suited to Anheuser-Busch’s campaign. Unlike a network focusing on building online relationships, this social network is set up around real-life meetings in bars, clubs and other gathering places:

The places you like to go define you. MingleNow enables you to meet other people who are attracted to the same places. . . . Most importantly, MingleNow has a built in calendar to organize your weekend without having to wade through calls, emails and IMs.

Also, by utilizing a startup, Anheuser-Busch can take advantage of its newness and help to shape the network around their campaign and brand. As MediaPost puts it:

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YouTube’s Latest Wins and Losses

posted on March 2, 2007

Loss: After Viacom got YouTube to remove its videos and signed a deal with Joost.com, Viacom announced yesterday that its video views and profits were up:

“Video streaming traffic on our sites has increased dramatically, an important validation of our strategy,” said Philippe Dauman, president and chief executive of Viacom, owned by media mogul Sumner Redstone.

Traffic to Comedy Central’s website was up more than 90 per cent, MTV.com had increased by more than 50 per cent and Nickelodeon had seen more than 30 per cent more traffic in the past month, Viacom said.

The media group, which released fourth-quarter results on Thursday, said quarterly profit nearly quadrupled to $480m, partly reflecting the acquisition of the DreamWorks film studio.

(From the Financial Times.)

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Google Listing Duplicate URLs in Site Search

posted on March 2, 2007

There have been some funky things going on with the site: command at Google lately. Last month the “Results 1 – 1 of about 260 from domain.com” started popping up for many sites across the web. Some speculated this was due to increased duplicate content filter settings but I personally believe it’s a bug. Now I just noticed something new.

Doing a site command search for Snowboarding Land returns the exact same URL twice. See the screenshot below.

ScreenHunter_07 Mar. 02 11.17

With most sites I would have never noticed such an occurrence because they are too large but since this site is has only a handful pages these listings jumped off the page at me. Doing an allintitle search for that page title returns only one result. That is what leads me to believe this is a site command bug.

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Google’s Lasnik Wishes "NoFollow Didn’t Exist"

posted on March 1, 2007

I had a chance to chat with Matt Cutts’ right-hand man, Adam Lasnik (yep, that aspirin guy), about Google’s stance on paid links, before he took the stage for Australia’s Search Summit today.

After telling today’s audience that Google is “perfectly fine with people buying and selling links” (which he later qualified with a “we prefer them to use nofollow”), I managed to grab some time with him to discuss what many feel is Google’s backdoor abuse of the “nofollow” tag.