Marketing Pilgrim

The newest PEW/Internet and American Life study indicates just how important the Internet is becoming in . . . well, American Life. Of the nearly 2800 Americans surveyed, 58% turn to the Internet first for answers.

Sort of, anyway. The specific questions asked in the phone survey included whether respondents had experienced 10 specific problems recently. All of the problems included need access to the government or government-provided information. Of the respondents who had experienced at least one of those problems, 58% of them turned to the Internet for answers. Only 13% of them turned to the library for help. The ten specific problems:

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As I’ve done for many years, I thought it would be fun to look back on the most popular posts of the year.

1. Exclusive - Yahoo Using Dirty Tactics to Switch Google & Firefox Users? - we questioned Yahoo’s update process including changing the default browser to IE, changing the default homepage to Yahoo and changing the default search engine to Yahoo.
2. Video: Post-It Notes Waterfall by Eepybird - if you loved the Mentos and Diet Coke experiments, you’ll love the Post-It Note one.
3. Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 7.0 Sucks! - even though I first griped about IE7 in 2006, we still get lots of Google visitors agreeing with me.

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Yet another Yahoo executive departs the twelve-year-old company. Steve Souders, Chief Performance Officer at Yahoo, will start at Google next Monday, according to his personal website.

Before you all assume that Souders was in charge of Yahoo’s Mime Troupe, let us clarify that the Chief of Performance was in charge of website performance. Souders is author of the High Performance Web Sites. At Yahoo, he worked on the YSlow Firefox (Firebug) extension, as well as the official Developer Network and the User Interface blogs.

Souders has worked at Yahoo since 2000. You may have seen him speaking at April’s Web 2.0 Expo or October’s Widget Summit or Future of Web Apps.

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As I write this there are 11 hours and 57 minutes until 2008. Entrepreneur Jann Yogman is banking that you are going to celebrate New Year’s Eve this year. He started New Year’s Nation, which is a ticket broker and organizer of New Year’s parties in big cities across the U.S.

Last year he launched with a virtual event that drew 5,000 people in five cities. They were connected by streaming video. Tonight there will be eight cities. If you want to book tickets in say, Los Angeles, it will be $150. Then you can watch partiers in New York, Boston, Seattle, or one of the other cities.

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The web already makes it easier to educate yourself. Now colleges and universities are putting their best classes online and charging nothing for them. Entire lectures are being posted on YouTube (like UC Berekely), iTunes, or on the school’s own web sites.

iTunes U has almost 30 universities participating. The top downloads aren’t lightweights either - #1 is a lecture from MIT physics professor Walter Lewin. He has 37 lectures posted and has become famous for his quirky style.

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A couple weeks ago, Google Reader started sending you shared items from you contacts. But it’s about to get worse. Google Operating System takes a look at the some of the Gmail code for a peek into the future—and if you didn’t like the Google Reader changes, you’re really not going to like this.

One of the reasons why the chat box can no longer be disabled in the new version of Gmail is that it will include some new features: updates from your contacts. Yes, they are the same contacts you barely know, but these updates will help you learn more about them.

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I hope you had a great Christmas and have exciting plans for ringing in the New Year. I know you probably either aren’t working today, or just don’t feel like working–I know how you feel. So here’s the abbreviated version of today’s marketing news.

• Australia has announced compulsory filtering of internet content. Two points of view: are they now like China or are they an example all should follow to protect children?
• Infospace and Yahoo have extended their advertising partnership.
• AOL has announced that it will no longer develop the legendary browser Netscape.

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Travel search engine Kayak.com is paying $196 million to acquire its closest competitor SideStep.com. Both are search engines to help travelers find the best prices on airfare, hotels, and car rentals. Like most search engines, they make money with partnerships and advertising.

The deal was financed from many sources, starting with Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst Partners and Accel Partners. SideStep investors include Norwest Venture Partners and Trident Capital. New investors Oak Investment Partners and Lehman Brothers Venture Partners.

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UPDATE: Less than a year after launching, Walmart shut down their video download service. The reason - poor performance. “Download sales equaled about 1 percent of the $24.5 billion in DVD and home video sales and rentals in 2006, but industry experts expect downloads to grow to 10 percent within a decade.”

Finally - movie rentals are coming to iTunes. Yesterday, Twentieth Century Fox signed a deal with Apple so you’ll be able to download DVD releases on iTunes. In the past you could buy movies from Disney, Paramont, and others. This is the first iTunes rental service.

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I hope you all had a great Christmas and are enjoying that time of year where you don’t work too hard, but it’s OK ‘cos the boss is sunning himself in Hawaii.

News is starting to pick up a little and we’ll have full service starting January 2nd. In the meantime, as promised, here’s what’s happening over the holidays.

• After I voiced my concerns over Google Reader’s new sharing options, TechCrunch also weighed-in, and now Google has responded.
• Tamar Weinberg has used the downtime to compile a pretty cool list of her favorite internet marketing blog posts of 2007. Thanks for including us Tamar!

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I’d like to be among the first to wish you a very Merry Christmas.

I hope you are enjoying time with your loved ones and keep safe today.

Andy

As Janet first reported back at the beginning of December, kids of all ages can track Santa thanks to NORAD and Google.

At the “NORAD Tracks Santa” site, you can view Santa’s progress on Google Maps, and YouTube has videos from inside Santa’s sleigh!

NORAD is updating its Santa tracking every 5 minutes and it’s not too late to send Father Christmas an email.