Marketing Pilgrim

The Pew Research Center has released a report that gives some form to what many of us already know through experience; mobile web use takes web users deeper into their digital existence. As noted over at MediaPost the study takes a stab at coining some new phrases to describe the various types of people using the mobile web as part of their lives including “digital collaborator”, “ambivalent networker” and “drifting surfer”. While creating names for groups of people can be fun that particular set of names isn’t very flattering aside from the collaboration concept. Let’s look a little closer.

Google continues to make itself leaner and meaner as we trudge through this economic mess. In only the second large layoff in its history (the first coming back in January of this year when they let 100 recruiters go) the target this time is sales and marketing.

As reported by ClickZ about 200 Googlers from these areas will be let go. Most of this is coming from internal auditing that has shown some significant redundancy in positions and functions. SVP of Global Sales and Business Development Omid Kordestani wrote in a blog post today

“In some areas we’ve created overlapping organizations which not only duplicate effort but also complicate the decision-making process,” Kordestani said. “That makes our teams less effective and efficient than they should be. In addition, we over-invested in some areas in preparation for the growth trends we were experiencing at the time.”

Google is getting really adamant about the whole “not not not building a social network” thing. So adamant that they’re letting you take all that shared information among your peer group—including your list of contacts—all over the web now.

That’s right, folks—Google has enough social network-like information on your friends and contacts to roll out the data portability, or at least for just your friend list.

The reasoning behind the new open standard, Portable Contacts, is that many websites like to invite your friends to come participate. (Hey, it’s a party!) But when you give them your Gmail login and password (WHY?), they can scrape your whole contacts list (and, um, lots of other stuff).

Remember all the discussion of China and its approach to the Internet that was heard around the Beijing Olympics? It seems that a lot of that type of coverage has slid into the background until recently. Apparently once Google gets involved these items become news again.

At this moment China’s Internet users cannot view YouTube. The Chinese government claims that it had nothing to do with the outage but its timing with the airing of footage on YouTube of detained Tibetan protesters being beaten seems a bit more than a coincidence to the rest of the thinking world.

Google’s take on this is

Google spokesman Scott Rubin told InternetNews.com that it is still working to bring its video-sharing site back online and identify the cause of the outage.

There has been a lot of talk recently about browsers and the maneuvering that is occurring in that space due to new releases and expiring agreements and more. While most of us would like to just talk about social media and search marketing all day it’s hard to ignore problems when they are browser related because they can affect literally everything we do as Internet marketers.

So the latest security bug in Firefox as reported by PC World seems more urgent than most. We all understand that nothing is truly secure on the Internet but we also like to think that there are not glaring vulnerabilities in the tools we use on a daily basis. As the PC World article states:

AIG bonuses are paid with taxpayer money from government bailout funds. Much is “recovered” but the damage has been done for the image of big business. Questions are raised about Merrill Lynch bonuses and pay while the embattled investment giant crumbles before the world’s eyes. Needless to say big business and executive pay get a lot of attention these days.

Tired of the bad news? How about a little corporate restraint and responsibility for a change? While not in the investment business Google still deals with a lot of money. In fine American fashion you would expect that the rich simply get richer but at Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt aren’t like most corporate gluttons. As reported in the Courier Mail from Down Under, a proxy statement filed with the SEC shows the three are taking just $1 each per year as their compensation.