Marketing Pilgrim

Are you worried about all of the data Google is collecting on you? Do you wish you could opt-out of Google entirely?

My friend, your day has come. Watch this video for details of Google’s new opt out feature.

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy By Moving To Remote Village

So, will you be opting out?

While Google’s Caffeine testing ground might contain few changes to the user interface, that’s not stopping the search engine from testing new layouts.

As spotted by Erick Schonfeld, Google really wants you to pay attention to its AdWords ads. So much so, that if you’re viewing Google with a wide screen, the ads no longer remain aligned to the right-hand side.

Clearly Google feels this will increase the number of clicks on the ads.

What’s next? Maybe this will help give Google some ideas:

OK, you know the normal drill. A quick book review and you leave a comment for a chance to win one of three copies.

Well, scrap that! We can do better!

I spoke to Victor Cheng about giving away three copies of The Recession-Proof Business and he had a better idea. How about giving away 1 million copies of the book via a free PDF download? Nah, let’s just stick with……heck yeah!

So, the book. I loved it. If you’re a seasoned CEO or business owner, you’ll find the book a great refresher on all the things your business should be doing during tough economic times. If you’ve not yet faced a recession, or perhaps you’re working on your first start-up, The Recession-Proof Business will help you avoid a lot of mistakes.

UPDATE: Twitter’s back online–just a 25 minute outage. Phew!

No, it’s not just your internet connection, Twitter is down again (as of 3:00pm ET).

Let’s hope it’s not another DDoS attack.

Econsultancy has the results of a survey by Channel Advisor (PDF) on online shopping in the US. The semi-annual survey shows that online shopping is down overall—but there is some good news for the Internet.

Spending online shopping is down overall, with fewer people reporting monthly purchases of over $76 (down by 9% to 25%), and more people reporting monthly spending of $0-$20 (up by 11%, now at 27%). However, they’re devoting more of their time online to product research—with growth in shopping search queries and time spent on retail sites. 51% were influenced by product reviews or ratings, but free shipping was most influential in purchase decisions.

If you’re a visual learner, I have great news: the technology equivalent of Hot or Not is available in graph form. Research firm Gartner Inc has published the 2009 Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies, with a handy graphic detailing the hype cycle and 79 technology trends and topics on the curve.

The “Hype Cycle” illustrates the growth, maturity and adoption of technologies—but most of all, it looks at how much hype and media coverage these topics get. It can also be used to determine whether to invest in types of tech, according to Gartner—technologies with high user benefit and low time to mainstream acceptance are ripe for investment and implementation, while technologies with minimal user benefit and a long time until mainstream acceptance should be approached with “extreme caution.”