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Google Soon to Recognize Text in Images?

posted on January 4, 2008

Information Week has reported that in June of 07 Google filed a patent application, which has just become available, outlining a “method of optical character recognition in digital images.” The application seems to cover both static images as well as video. The ability to do this could radically change a number of existing Google services as well as again change the way the Internet marketing world interacts with images and video.

Being able to identify text in images and video would be an extremely large leap in search engine indexing technology. Being able to index the content of videos and other new social media would most likely either force a change in the way search engines have to build their SERPs or provide opportunities to build highly relevant image and video search functions that could generate significant relevancy from the text content within the media.

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Social Media Rules are Meant to be Broken

posted on December 15, 2007

Conformity often creates a feeling of comfort, but it also starts to generate acceptable social norms that soon become the de facto standard for the way things get done. I know I enjoy doing things my own way even when it means I am not always optimizing my team or creating the greatest efficiencies possible. Chip Griffin has written a positive post reminding social media marketers that just because some people say there is a certain way things should be done doesn’t mean it is the best way, the right way, or even the way you should be doing it.

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10 Questions to Ask Before Starting a Social Media Marketing Campaign

posted on December 14, 2007

Andy Beard has posted a thought provoking top 10 list, which will help marketers that are considering launching a social media campaign, focus on making sure that they will get the most out of their efforts.

1. Undefined Goals vs Specific Goals

2. Random Activity vs Planned Method of Attack

3. Random Stats vs Accountable Statistical Measures

4. Random Content vs Planned Content Strategy

5. Random Encounters vs Optimized Role Management

6. Random Pathways vs Defined Traffic Funnel

7. Traffic vs Targeted Traffic

8. Topical Linking vs Strategic Linking

9. Reporter vs News Epicentre

10. Self Orientated vs Customer Orientated

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Your Viral Marketing Message Dissected

posted on December 5, 2007

Sometimes the turn of a phrase or even just the lack of a single word can be all the difference between delivering a powerful and highly proficient viral marketing message or missing the boat entirely. Gord Hotchkiss has recently posted an excellent breakdown of what turns a rumor or message into that successful viral entity all marketers hope for.

Gord begins with “Jumping The Weak Ties”. This is the concept of creating an idea compelling enough that it will have the ability to transcend a social group and leap out to other groups, creating the viral buzz. Gord also addresses “Moral Hazard” at the same time, which is the idea that even a compelling idea, when laden down with conditions, may fail to be able to break the barrier of the initial social group and ultimately fail. Gord does a nice job of covering historical research on these ideas as well as offering up some well thought out and useful examples.

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Big News for Bloggers; LiveJournal Sold to SUP

posted on December 3, 2007

It has been reported by TechCrunch and confirmed in comments by Anil Dash that Six Apart has sold their LiveJournal product to the Moscow based company SUP. This is big news for a number of reasons, other than it allowing Six Apart to focus their efforts on their three remaining products, it also opens lots of questions for LiveJournal users as to what new security issues may quickly develop?

A quote from October probably sums up the situation best in regards to recent attacks by Russian hackers:

“Law enforcement has no incentive and no motivation to prosecute,” said Anton Nossik, a senior executive in Moscow at the company that oversees Livejournal.ru. “They say, ‘We are not receiving complaints,’ or ‘The complaints that we are seeing are not well formed.’ They find pretexts not to prosecute.” Russian Livejournal blogs are regularly hijacked.

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Purchase Links or Build Website Networks?

posted on November 28, 2007

For a long time now Google’s Matt Cutts has made it clear that purchasing links will become a hazardous business both for the link seller and the link purchaser. Recently Google has cracked down on the sale of links for the intention of selling link popularity and to that end has penalized a number of well-known sites and site networks. This penalty has caused those sites to lose much of their PageRank, especially what shows within the Google toolbar. This has reduced the marketable value of the links coming from the penalized websites and in many cases also cost the purchasers a lot of money for links that most likely will not accomplish what they formerly did.

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A Potential Pitfall For Linkbait?

posted on November 17, 2007

Linkbait has been a popular topic lately for all Internet marketers and I have been reading a lot about the downsides of linkbait or at least the potential loss of value a lot of marketers seem to be concerned about. Recently Aaron Wall made a post that I missed called “Link Bait is the New Reciprocal Links Page”.

In his post Aaron discusses the potential pitfalls of outrageous spikes in incoming links and the possibilities that Google and other search engines maybe tracking organic link growth and not passing along the expected value to sites that don’t continuously supply new linkbait to keep their incoming link growth patterns steady. Aaron goes on to suggests that the search engines may actually appreciate the popularity of linkbait because it makes their job easier when it comes to detecting artificial increases in natural links.