Marketing Pilgrim

Readers of Google’s Health Advertising Blog awoke this morning to a post that has stirred up both confusion and controversy. Lauren Turner, Account Planner for Google Health, has boldly gone where no Google blog has gone before by putting on some movie critic shoes and attacking Michael Moore’s “Sicko.”

Several Google Blogoscoped readers were shocked by Turner’s blog post – to the point that some of them became suspicious that the post was a phony created by a hacker. It didn’t help that the email address in the post - googlehealthadvertisingblog google.com – doesn’t seem to exist. (I tried sending them an email myself and received an error.) Additionally, there is no way for readers to leave comments on the site itself.

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With a nation-wide Federal election coming up this year, we thought we’d track Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s online reputation and find out what’s being said about him online.

We tracked online references of both Howard and the opposition leader, Kevin Rudd, over a three week period, and the results are not looking so good for the PM.

Though most of online references come from news sites, and are mostly neutral, the more freely expressive bloggers sometimes had quite nasty things to say about John Howard, and there were not many on his side at all.

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• Are Google and Wikipedia breaking up? Google Docs to Offer Free Encyclopedia Britannica? - New Google plans discovered
• Google Universal Search and Ask 3D both have video search results; Search Engine Watch helps you get there: Video Search Optimization Tech Tips – Knowing the 4 P’s
• A novelty: Profitable Web 2.0? That’s Probably Worth $5.35 Million
• A little nepotism never hurt anybody. Mrs. Murdoch To Take Over At Chief of Strategy At MySpace China (however, she is native-born Chinese, so it may not be a bad move at all)
• Google Blogoscoped covers Public Launch of Google AdSense Referrals

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Okay, maybe not really, but this week not once but twice I’ve been thinking about a topic and then within minutes come across something Lorelle VanFossen of Lorelle on WordPress has said or written about the topic.

Case One: (Hobby) Blog Monetization
Now, let me say that I totally think business blogs, quality blogs about making money online, and business models based around blogs are valid and can be monetized effectively.

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After four months of work and cryptic blog posting, The Economist Group’s small development team have announced their latest project a socially motivated social networking site.

Now known as “Lughenjo” the group have been working on a project who’s aim is to harness the knowledge and skills of The Economist’s readers to help NGOs, Charities & other organizations.

Lughenjo users will be able to answer questions that are posed by accredited international development organizations. Think Yahoo! Answers for good.

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Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology conducted a study in which they gave participants identical search results, but wrapped in the brands of Google, Yahoo, Windows Live Search and generic in-house search engine. Not surprisingly, participants favored the results that appeared to be from Google and Yahoo.

Then the identical search results were shown to 32 study participants who were asked to evaluate the engines’ performance in returning relevant results.

Despite the results being identical in content and presentation, participants indicated Yahoo! and Google outperformed MSN Live Search and the in-house search engine.

Since there was no difference in the search results, all of the search engines should have received the same score, said Assistant Professor Jim Jansen, who led the study.

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Moniker.com held an auction in New York for more than 218 domain names, selling them for a combined $10.8 million!

Many clocked six-figure price tags, far exceeding the industry average of $2,000 to $3,500, according to Matt Bentley, chief strategy officer for Sedo.com, a domain brokerage firm. Two broke the $1 million mark: Creditcheck.com fetched $3 million and Seniors.com nabbed $1.8 million.

Forbes explains how type-in traffic, Google’s algorithm and a shrinking pool of available names are causing prices to sky-rocket.

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The supposed YouTube challenger being built by NBC and News Corp has yet to be named, it has however named a CEO.  Jason Kilar, a former Amazon.com exec, has been tapped for the role.

Kilar, 36, was key executive at Amazon.com for nearly a decade until leaving the online retailer last year, NBC Universal and News Corp. said in a statement.

“We are very pleased to have an executive of Jason’s caliber take the reins of our groundbreaking joint venture,” NBC Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker said in a statement. NBC Universal is a unit of General Electric Co. (GE).

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CNET recaps a presentation given by blog research Paul Gillin where he shared some interesting blog stats but always suggested that blogging is not always a numbers game.

Despite some very successful blogs…

Phillip Lenssen’s Google Blogoscoped gets 8 million page views per month.

Adrants, a blog by former ad-agency employee Steve Hall that covers bad and good advertising, gets about 30,000 visits per day.

Drew Curtis’s Fark.com, a link blog in which Curtis comments on what other people have written and links to them, gets 40 million page views per month.

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When Google first launched Google Maps I immediately fell in love with the whole “grab and move” concept of navigation - as opposed to the click “north” or “east” to see more approach.

Google’s upped the ante again with a new feature that lets you pick you start and end destination by simply clicking on the map. In addition, once your route is shown, you can drag and drop the “blue line” to switch the roads chosen - handy for when you know a certain road is always busy or is under repair.

Pretty slick! Maybe they’ll add a feature to let you navigate to the exact spot where they took the photo of someone breaking into a house.

Today’s Supreme Court ruling allowing manufacturers to set minimum retail prices is a very big deal, and has huge ramifications for many internet retail businesses.

To understand what could happen as a result of this decision, you must first understand the impact that the Internet has made on retail. In a nutshell, it has created a consumer-friendly environment in which both online and offline retailers engage in suicidal price-cutting wars. The reason for this is simple–instead of consumers having maybe only one or two choices of where to buy specific merchandise, they now have thousands of options, and retailers have to fight furiously for their piece of the pie.

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It’s not what you think: today Forbes wrote about “negative SEO.” While we all know the benefits of “positive SEO,” Forbes interviews Brendon Scott to find out more about changing your competitors’ rankings (because, hey, if you can’t beat them, beat them up).

As Forbes puts it:

But for the most morally flexible, there’s an even shorter path to edging out competitors online: a wide spectrum of sabotage techniques, some of which cross the boundaries of good taste–and the law.

(To Scott’s credit, he specifically says that probably the mildest technique listed below, Google bowling, “tests his ethical limits, he says, and its beneficial competitive effects don’t usually last long.”)

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