Marketing Pilgrim

Just days after Tim Armstrong left his head of sales position to become AOL’s new CEO, Google is doing the executive shuffle.

Leaving his 3 year role as Vice President for the UK, Ireland and Benelux, Dennis Woodside will take over Armstrong’s role–though he won’t get the same "Senior VP and President" title.

Woodside will report to Omid Kordestani who gushes about Woodside in an internal memo:

It’s been a little over 2 years since Australia announced it would move forward with plans to start censoring the internet. Now there’s a mini-uproar down-under because Australian regulators plan to impose AU$11,000-day-fines (about $7,200 US) to anyone that links to banned content.

While most of the banned sites are publishing illegal content new action by the Australian Communications and Media Authority has raised concerns that the regulator could add to the lists sites that it objects to, but are not actually illegal.

For example:

The Australian communications regulator says it will fine people who hyperlink to sites on its blacklist, which has been further expanded to include several pages on the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks.

Wikileaks was added to the blacklist for publishing a leaked document containing Denmark’s list of banned websites.

I’ve never been much of a BitTorrent user–I’d have to pull up Wikipedia to give you a decent explanation–but I do know that the music industry has long hated the practice of downloading music without a single royalty being paid.

Enter Google; the owner of YouTube, the world’s largest BitTorrent host.

I know, I know, YouTube’s not exactly a BitTorrent, but it’s annoying the heck out of the music industry by allowing music to be downloaded for free–with little making it back to the music companies in the form of royalties.

How little? Consider the juvenile web practice of RickRolling. Users post links to what appear to be legitimate web sites but instead the user winds up on YouTube watching Rick Astley croon “Never Gonna Give You Up!” Oh, the fun factor is way up there with wedgies and prank calls that start “Is your refrigerator running?”

SEO’s and Flash just can’t seem to get along. For years there has been the clash of the great looking site with all the cool stuff on it and that stodgy old search engine crawler that acts like it doesn’t exist. Designers and clients have had more than a few ‘conversations’ following the development of a site that looks great when you’re there but the only way to get there is through a link or a direct type in. The search engines have not been able to do anything with Flash in forever but there are active attempts from both sides of the fence to change this.

Adobe has rolled out their Search Engine Optimization Technology Center. The introduction to the site explains its purpose very well

While it is no surprise that mobile Internet access and usage is one the rise here in the US some of the percentage increase numbers start to get eye popping pretty quickly. comScore reports that of the people who access news and information the Internet via mobile devices daily has doubled in size from January of 2008 to January of 2009. As with the early days of Internet adoption rates the percentage increases are large because of the smaller sets of users but it’s hard to ignore that kind of growth regardless of where we are on the growth curve.

The shift that is most apparent is the frequency of use. It appears that what was once a more infrequent use of mobile devices to access the web is turning into a daily activity. So what’s driving this? You guessed it; social media. Take a look at the chart below and you’ll see where this is most prevalent.

We’re all waiting to see the business model Twitter will roll out and, putting 2 and 2 together, it looks like sidebar ads will be the first to arrive.

Sneaking into the sidebar of Twitter’s homepage are what appear to be small text ads like this:

Right now the "ads" point back to various Twitter pages, but I suspect the micro-blogging service is softening us up for the launch of targeted advertising.

Have you seen the ads? What are you thoughts on Twitter adding text ads to your homepage?