Marketing Pilgrim

Let’s climb aboard the way-back-machine and take a trip to 2005. Carrie Underwood was rocking American Idol, Batman Begins made us believe in prequels again, and Google was buying a 1 billion dollar 5% stake in AOL.

According to a Washington Post article on December 17, 2005, Google purchased the 5% stake in AOL “as part of a far-reaching business and advertising partnership aimed at boosting AOL’s financial prospects as the Internet service struggles with the loss of millions of subscribers.”

The AOL partnership was an important win for Google at the time. Rival MSN was deep in the bidding process to replace Google as the search engine for AOL users when Google waltzed in with the $1 billion trump card.

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Data center and hosting provider The Planet is in the process of trying to recover from a fire which has crippled their H1 data center in Houston, TX.

According to an Intology article, nearly 9,000 servers at the facility are currently off line. The Planet engineers are working with the Houston fire department to get clearance to restore emergency backup power and get servers back online.

Since The Planet is a provider of a variety of shared hosting and dedicated server products, I can only imagine the number of websites that may be affected by this outage.

The Planet customers seeking information about this outage can read more at The Planet’s forums.

If you’re not a customer, count your blessings and back up your websites. Experiencing a major outage with your hosting provider is not a question of if, but when.

Ahhh. The time killing game of beer pong. For those of you who have never played beer pong (or have so severely lost that you no longer remember playing), this is truly a game of wit and fortitude.

All you need to play is a ping pong ball, plenty of beer, and a few cups. Team up, take turns throwing the ping pong ball at your opponents cups (filled with beer of course), and every time you land in the cup the opposing team drinks the beer.

As a favorite game among techies, it was no surprise to hear that the staff from CollegeHumor would be challenging the staff from Facebook to a little beer pong.

What was a surprise is that according to a recent Valleywag article, Facebook was quick to put the breaks on because according to a tipster “Facebook’s PR and Legal dept said they can’t participate. I guess that’s what its like working in corporate America as opposed to a fun Internet company.”

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In a May 6th article published by the Associated Press, Bill Gates was quoted as saying “The Internet has been operating now for 10 years,”… “The second 10 years will be very different.”

Being a bit of an Internet history buff, I cringed to read such a powerful figure in the world of computing being quoted as effectively saying that the Internet has been operating since 1998.

Since I started my first Internet job in 1996, I was pretty sure Bill was wrong.

The word Internet was first coined in 1974, the first respectable network which could be called “the Internet” was created in 1983, and the opening of the Internet to the commercial world occurred in 1988. Of course, all these dates push the history of the Internet well beyond Bill’s 10 year time line.

I really don’t think that Bill Gates thinks the Internet has been operating since 1998.

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Google’s recent post about “Adsense for Conversations” is my favorite April Fools antic this year.

The fictitious Adsense for Conversations is powered by an “unobtrusive screen above your head” where “Anyone taking part in the conversation can hit the ad with their hand to immediately take advantage of the product or service being offered.”

While the thought of monetizing conversations about dinner plans, appointments, and general office banter is awesome, it got me thinking “could Google really monetize conversations with contextual advertising?”

Google needs only two elements to serve contextual advertising; a screen to display ever changing ads and data to match contextually with ads. The most logical place to find both of these things in the world of conversation is the phone.

In 2006, Reuters reported that Eric Schmidt “sees a future where mobile phones are free to consumers who accept watching targeted forms of advertising.”

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You might have noticed Google’s recent announcement regarding support for category exclusions within content campaigns.

This announcement basically said that you have two new ways to exclude sites from your content campaign, the “Topics” and “Page Types” tools.

The Topics exclusion tool provides you the ability to exclude your ads from pages displaying information on certain types of topics like Death & tragedy and Juvenile, gross & bizarre content.

The Page Types exclusion tool provides you the ability to exclude your ads from certain types of pages like parked pages, error pages, and forums.

If you find these categories limited in scope, you might also be interested in a whole host of other categories available for exclusion.

Locating Additional Categories

You can use category exclusions based on the categories available in Google’s “Placement Tool”.

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If you’ve been following Matt Cutts’ blog over the last few days you may have seen his March 3rd post “My 2008 Predictions“. In this post Matt claims…

2008 will be the year that hacking and search engine optimization (SEO) collide in a major way. By the end of the year, a nontrivial fraction of blackhat SEO will involve illegally hacking sites for links or landing pages. One webhost will get a significant black eye as hundreds or thousands of customers’ websites are hacked. The growth of illegal-blackhat SEO will leave traditional blackhats with a difficult choice: risk doing something illegal or sit out.

Ironically, on the very same day the Earth Liberation Front’s (ELF) website was hacked by Viagra spammers.

The hackers changed the title tag to “Viagra Sample Pack – Free Viagra Sample,” and changed all the navigation links to point to Viagra advertising. I gleaned all of this information from an article by TheDailyGreen about the incident.

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Framed redirects are one of my biggest pet peeves on the web. You click on a link to visit a site, the site loads, and the URL in your address bar is different than what it should be.

Technically, a framed redirect works by loading a hidden framed page on top of a second framed page which displays the target content.

Imagine clicking on a link for Amazon, pulling up the Amazon website, but seeing the URL amazonblackhataffiliate.com in your address bar. You would be able to browse the entire Amazon site, make purchases, etc. but the URL in the browser bar would always display amazonblackhataffiliate.com. This is the experience of surfing a site through a framed redirect.

As a publisher this can be very frustrating. For starters, while your website is being viewed, some other URL is displayed in the address bar. Not only can this confuse visitors, but it can also rob you of valuable links.

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Could Microsoft’s push toward speech based data entry bring natural language search to the forefront? According to an AP article:

People will increasingly interact with computers using speech or touch screens rather than keyboards, Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates said.

“It’s one of the big bets we’re making,” he said during the final stop of a farewell tour before he withdraws from the company’s daily operations in July.

In five years, Microsoft expects more Internet searches to be done through speech than through typing on a keyboard, Gates told about 1,200 students and faculty members Thursday at Carnegie Mellon University.

Speech based searches may not necessarily mean natural language searches. For example, I could speak the phrase “search: hd tv” into my computer and fulfill the requirements of speech data entry without fulfilling the requirements for a natural language search.

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According to an Associated Press article, top Chinese search engine Baidu has landed afoul of the Beijing Association of Online Media over sexually explicit photos available through their search engine.

The photos featuring Edison Chen and several other stars, seem to have originated in Hong Kong.

Formerly a British colony and subsequently transfered to Chinese rule in 1997, Hong Kong enjoys a slightly-less-aggressive brand of Internet censorship than the rest of China. It was this bastion of slightly-less-aggressive Internet restrictions where the photos started their viral march across China.

The article reports that the Beijing Association of Online Media accuses…

While other Beijing internet companies have boycotted the spread of the racy photos, Baidu still hasn’t implemented effective blocking and obscuring of the photos and has become defensive and procrastinated, leading to the stagnation of a large amount of pornographic, filthy pictures. . . .

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Abbie Hoffman he isn’t, but eBay user “class-it” seems to have had enough of overly seller friendly policies at eBay. In class-it’s recent auction for a “SONY VAIO VGN-NR21J/S LAPTOP BNIB” he listed an extensive collection of methods you can use to steal the laptop from the seller.

With this humorous jab, class-it has compiled a fairly good summary of the perils of selling items on eBay. I’ve quoted most of the section covering the nefarious techniques as I’m sure this auction will have a very short lifespan…

DIFFERENT WAYS YOU CAN STEAL THIS LAPTOP OFF ME:

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Every branding professional you’ll meet will tell you that you never ever refer to your brand as a verb. Phrases like “I Googled that” or “I Xeroxed this” are poison to the ears of those who understand trademark law.

Without getting into the intricacies of trademark law (which I don’t fully understand anyways), the short explanation is that you should only reference your trademark as an adjective. An example of a properly used trademark would be “Google™ Search Engine”.

With this in mind, I was a little surprised recently when going through my iPhone to find Google business partner Apple using Google as a verb.

Let me explain. The iPhone has a keyboard which pops up every time you position your cursor in a field which allows you to enter text. This includes your browser address bar, web forms, search fields, emails, etc.

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