In case you haven’t noticed, I am not a big fan of politics or politicians. It doesn’t matter which side of the aisle they come from or claim to have allegiance to, to me a politician is a politician is a politician.
So what is happening in Florida Democratic primaries today doesn’t help me feel any better about these folks. According to ClickZ, some folks running are using mobile ads to help them get the vote during the ‘last mile’ to the ballot box (or whatever it is in Florida these days).
* maybe 
Google has announced a change to the way it handles “branded” keyword searches. What are branded keyword searches, I hear you ask? Well, “apple” would be a great example of such a search. If you search “apple” you are–for the most part–looking for information on the electronics company.
Well, Google is making changes to the old rule that prevented more than 2 pages from showing in its results pages from the same domain. In fact, Google is giving some branded keywords a whole lot of real estate. A search for “apple” reveals 6 pages from the apple.com site:
So, why is Google making this change?
…today’s improvement will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page
Have you ever played hide-and-seek at IKEA? I have, though not intentionally. The stores are set up in these funky little mazes that make it very easy to lose a husband or a child while shopping, so it’s no wonder that people have taken to playing the game there on purpose. This week, the idea rose to new heights when a person in Australia set up a Facebook event announcing a “massive” game at their local store. Since then, almost 4,000 people have signed up and the news has gone viral.
Smart Company Australia quoted the local IKEA spokesperson as saying that they weren’t behind anything that might endanger shoppers, but they weren’t going to go so far as to ban the game.
Tim Ash, CEO of SiteTuners and bestselling author of Landing Page Optimization says there are “Four Pillars Of Trust” that you need in order to make your landing pages convert. At a recent marketing conference covered by Top Rank, Ash emphasized the fact that the winner is not always the guy with the zippiest website. Trust is about people and that’s the link that binds together his four pillars.
Let’s take a look:
1. Appearance
Imagine you live in Philadelphia and you have a blog. You are like about 99.9 percent of the world’s bloggers so you make no money and the blog is a labor of love.
Now imagine that you are going to be charged $300 for the privilege of having your blog start from the City of Brotherly Love. Yup, that’s right, Philly is hitting bloggers with this and other measures. If you haven’t had enough of the government on every level getting into everyone’s business this may put you over the top.
This comes from NBC Philadelphia’s web site:
Taking a step closer to an eerie Orwellian state where creativity is crushed in the name of “the greater good,” the city of Philadelphia is demanding that bloggers pay $300 for the privilege of writing on the Internet.
You may or may not have heard about Google’s latest test with search results. If you did, you have likely already formed your opinion on this experiment. If you haven’t check out the video below from Rob Ousbey. In the interest of not trying to influence your take on this particular Google experiment I won’t tell you my opinion just yet.
So Pilgrim readers, is this something you would like to see as part of the Google search results?
Let’s take a look at what is being said here just from the headline. The advertising community with its publishers and advertisers loves the idea of being able to target ads more directly to users with the right ‘profiles’ for products. That makes sense. A survey reported on by emarketer from DM2PRO and AudienceScience conducted recently shows just how much publishers love it.
Here’s the rub. The people being targeted really don’t like the idea of giving up what is needed to be targeted. In other words, people don’t like having a lot of data collected about them. Take a look at the numbers below that say that nearly ¾ of those surveyed have concerns about too much data being collected on theme.
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