Marketing Pilgrim

It’s no secret Google’s angling for the eBook market. Their book settlement, if ever approved, would give them a library of over two million out-of-print or out-of-copyright works. But a new deal could make those books available for more than just eReaders.

The deal with On Demand Books provides Google’s copies of out of copyright works directly to ODB’s instant book-printing and binding “Espresso” machines. (I’ve heard these things can print and bind a book in four minutes. Talk about hot off the presses.)

While this isn’t exactly a huge leap forward for eBook technology, the deal does show how serious Google is about its library (and, you know, cataloging the world’s information). Currently, there are 16 Espresso machines located in bookstores and libraries around the world (in the US, Canada, UK, Australia and Egypt, especially at university bookstores—including my alma mater), with 18 more coming in the next year.

In the recent past we talked about how job seekers often do themselves more harm than good in the realm of social media. The responses we got mostly spoke of the younger crowd not being fully aware of what kind of digital fingerprints they were leaving all over the Internet. As a subject for another post maybe at another venue I think that we shouldn’t restrict that accusation to the Millennial’s alone based on some of ridiculous stuff I see some of my peers put in their social media musings.

Anyway, this particular gaffe may make the Top Ten List of how not to use social media. As reported by The Journal of Martinsburg, WV

Jonathan G. Parker, 19, of Fort Loudoun, Pa., was arraigned Tuesday one count of felony daytime burglary.

Continuing to make sure that everyone knows that whatever Google does in the online world is for the greater good, the company has announced its DoubleClick Ad Exchange on the Official Google Blog. Neal Mohan, Vice President of Product Management posts the explanation of how Google is going to make the online advertising world better for everyone (how neighborly of them ) and in the process continue to make the world a better place to live and do business.

The post gives a significant run-up to the overview of the new service. By likening the current display ad inventory situation to having planes flying with a lot of empty seats (I used to love that! I’ll take those three seats for sprawl any day) Mohan makes sure we know that the space is crying for a service like the Double Click Ad Exchange. Here’s the gist of it

The Online Publishers Association has released the results of another study—a six year analysis of its Internet Activity Index. Can you guess which of the five areas (Commerce, Communications, Community, Content and Search) has grown the most—and which has shrunk?

The most surprising results actually aren’t in Community and Communications. Yes, email (Communications is down), the only area to fall over those six years. And Community is up, largely because it wasn’t being tracked in 2003. (If only Chuck Norris were here—you know, because he can divide by zero?). But we’ve seen that for six months

No, the big winner here looks to be content sites (the OPA’s pet project) and search. Percentage wise, search has actually grown the most, with a 111% increase in time spent on site over the 2003 numbers—but the raw numbers aren’t nearly so impressive.

There’s nothing we love more than warped words (or random numbers and letters) we have to type in before we’re allowed to comment. These CAPTCHAs cut down on spam (and, sometimes, legitimate comments. grrr.)—and every once in a while, someone comes along with a great idea to make that kind of technology useful, like reCAPTCHA using words scanned from old texts that OCR software can’t recognize.

A great idea, right? It’s so popular more than 100,000 websites have signed up to use the specialized CAPTCHAs, including Facebook and craigslist. I’m sure you can guess how this story ends: Google buys reCAPTCHA.

This is doubly beneficial for Google:

1. They get cooler CAPTCHAs than the random strings of letters they’ve been using on Blogger and other services.

If you’re B2C web site is not displaying McAfee’s SECURE trustmark you may as well pack up the shop and go live off the land. At least, that’s what McAfee would like you to believe.

In its new (somewhat self serving) report Digital Window Shopping: The Long Journey to Buy, McAfee found that in a study of 165 million shoppers–my, what a big number you have–sales conversions were 11% higher on those sites that displayed some kind of security seal. In addition, 65% of shoppers take their sweet time making their final purchase–with an average delay of almost 34 hours from decision to handing over their credit card digits.

McAfee goes on to share some rather vanilla advice to etailers, but here’s my take on the topic.