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Track Your RSS Reading Trends With Google Reader

posted on January 4, 2007

Google’s added a nifty little tool to Google Reader that allows you to view stats on your RSS reading trends. I’m not quite sure how this information is going to help me – other than prove I am addicted to blog reading – but it’s somewhat fun to examine.

What would be cool is to see this data across the entire Google Reader user base (anonymous of course). It would be interesting to see when others do their reading.

Anyway, seeing as Darren and Matt have both shared details of their reading habits, here are some of mine.

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Traditional Media Struggles to Monetize User-Generated Content

posted on January 3, 2007

Reuters has details of a new report from Deloitte that looks at media trends for 2007. Part of the report focuses on how successful mainstream media will be at integrating user-generated content. The biggest problem appears to be how they’ll make money from user  content.

Howard Davies, a director of media strategy at Deloitte explains why it’s tough to make money from social media.

“There’s something about the social user … community that is absolutely not professional and so the community doesn’t want it to be commercialised,” he said about advertising around Web sites dedicated to the content.

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Michael Arrington’s Tech Companies to Watch in 2007

posted on January 2, 2007

TechCrunch’s infamous Michael Arrington has listed the “Web 2.0″ companies he couldn’t live without in 2007, but we may as well call it “the top tech companies to watch in 2007″.

It’s a list most marketers should consider reviewing. While it has some tech companies that don’t quite cross into marketing, Arrington’s list is full of social media and search companies, including Ask City, BlueDot, Digg, Flickr, YouTube and more.

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100 Billion Reasons to Celebrate this Year

posted on December 29, 2006

comScore Networks reports that online retail spending reached $100 billion for the year as of Saturday, December 23. It looks like procrastinators placed their faith in expedited shipping, as the last business week before Christmas saw $2.25 billion in eCommerce.

2006 year-to-date spending was up by 26% over 2005, but the last week before Christmas increased 38% over the same period in 2005.

Gian Fulgoni, chairman of comScore Networks, stated in a press release:

Retail e-commerce now accounts for approximately 7 percent of consumers’ U.S. retail spending (excluding gas, autos and food), making it an important component of the total U.S. economy.

From Nov. 1 to Dec. 26, Amazon.com had the highest online retail sales, followed by Dell, Yahoo, Walmart and Ticketmaster. The etailers with the highest percentage increase over last year were Best Buy, Walmart, Ticketmaster, Circuit City and Yahoo.

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The Ultimate Secret to Getting Your Website to Dominate Its Industry

posted on December 28, 2006

Want to know the best way to push any website to the #1 popularity spot for its industry? It’s quite simple, you leverage the traffic from one of Google’s existing properties.

Need proof?

Google’s Blog Search has taken over the #1 spot from Technorati, thanks to a link placed on the homepage of Google News. Hitwise explains how that helped the Google service leapfrog Technorati in just a few weeks.

Google Blog Search began catching up to Technorati in October, when Google placed a link to Blog Search on the Google News home page, causing a 168% surge in market share for Google Blog Search over a two week period (week ending 10/14/06 vs. week ending 10/28/06). Since then, approximately 60% of Google Blog Search’s traffic has been coming directly from Google News, compared to less than 1% before the change.

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Outlook for Mobile Marketing: Billions or bupkis?

posted on December 28, 2006

Today eMarketer Daily compiled conflicting reports on the future of mobile marketing. According to “Mobile Entertainment’s Potential Sharply Debated” by John du Pre Gauntt (free & live on a limited basis), the predictions for mobile revenues vary wildly:

In November 2006, Juniper Research forecast that total revenues for wireless providers from mobile entertainment in the mobile music, video, TV, gambling, gaming and adult categories would exceed $77 billion by 2011.

One month later, Informa Telecoms & Media followed with a mobile entertainment forecast that stated the total market in 2011 would be $38.1 billion.

eMarketer attributes the $40 billion difference to “wildcards” such as WiFi in the US and international wireless markets, especially China and India which are set to grow exponentially in the immediate future.

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Safe search is ON

posted on December 19, 2006

Following up on their May study, McAfee reports that search results have become safer on Google, Ask and AOL. Yahoo and MSN now return riskier results than they did in May.

How does McAfee define “risk”? They have three levels:

Red ratings are given to risky sites that fail one or more of McAfee’s tests for adware, spyware, viruses, exploits, spammy e- mail, excessive pop-ups or strong affiliations with other red rated sites. Green rated sites passed each of these tests. Yellow ratings are given to sites which pass McAfee’s safety tests but which still have nuisances warranting a user advisory.

Overall, “riskiness” declined 12%, with a 6% decline in sponsored search. McAfee considered 8% of sponsored results red or yellow, while only 3% of organic results are classified as red or yellow.