Marketing Pilgrim

Google has updated the homepage to Google Blog Search, but it seems more like a knee jerk reaction to other web sites, than true innovation.

Take for example the new “Hot queries” section. It highlights the search terms currently most active on Google Blog Search. It sounds like a good idea, but ends up looking like nothing but a rip-off of Twitter’s “Trending Topics.” Google couldn’t even be bothered to match those hot queries to the topic you’re viewing. Switch to technology news, and you still see “tour de france” and English soccer star “michael owen” in the list.

Earlier in June we talked about how the Google book settlement reached with Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers was drawing the attention of the Department of Justice. The settlement between these two parties was reached in October 2008. There isn’t even final approval on the agreement and the fairness hearing to determine that approval is still months away. Under the settlement, Google’s plan to make available millions of titles copied from various public sources can move forward.

Google would have the right to display the books online and to profit from them by selling access to individual titles and by selling subscriptions to its entire collection to libraries and other institutions. Revenue would be shared among Google, authors and publishers.

Well, looks like Twitter has arrived for real. Companies are considering the service for their marketing and customer efforts. There still appears to be significant hype around every time someone at Twitter has gas. Twitter is looking to protect its trademark and is looking to trademark other sounds from nature like chirps and peeps. So what’s next? Well, since it is the Internet what would talking about Twitter be without now mentioning porn and spam?

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has said recently that the service will be a success when people stop talking about it and just accept it as a utility. With MediaPost talking about the proliferation of porn and spam that chatter isn’t likely to end anytime soon. That is, of course, unless Twitter does something about it.

Last week, we saw that Facebook was taking status updates public for selected test users (a la Twitter). Those selected users were ones that had already set their profiles to a high level of sharing—everyone could see their profiles already.

Now Facebook will make it so that all users will have a very granular control over exactly what gets shared with whom.

These settings can be applied on a message-by-message basis, but there will also be changes to the full privacy settings for every member. As paidContent points out this will eliminate the need to view at least six pages of privacy settings.

And now Facebook announces that they’ll be rolling out this change to the full site very shortly:

FeedBurner, an RSS management utility that was purchased by Google a few years ago, has long offered an RSS-to-email service. One of its major drawbacks, however, was that as an RSS publisher you could only set one subject line. So every email from your feed (generated and sent daily) had the same subject line.

The lowly likes of us regular bloggers complaining in the support forums didn’t have much of an effect. The only solution offered until now was logging in every day and manually changing the subject line to match your post—not fun.

But after Darren Rowse’s open letter to FeedBurner two weeks ago on ProBlogger, things are finally changing. Today, the Google AdSense for Feeds blogs announces that “Happiness is more subject in your subject line.” And it’s true!

An important element (read: selling point) of Internet marketing is the ability to know more about consumers and their behaviors. Everything can be tracked on the Internet, for the most part, and there is obvious value to marketers and their efforts. The flip side of this ability to track people is the privacy issue and lately the US government has been raising it’s regulatory eyebrows at the online world. In the past this may not have been such big news but with the current administration’s bend toward a ‘name it and claim it’ government style, web advertisers are looking to self police before they draw any more attention from the feds.