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Seth Godin has an interesting take on Google and Adwords marketing:
“Every day, hundreds of millions of people do hundreds of millions of searches on Google. Each search is its own “channel.” Each search represents a distinct marketing vehicle, a chance for an individual to directly connect with a marketer.”
Remember the pages-and-pages of classified advertising in your local rag? At a fundamental level, it’s very much the same thing.
Most folks are selective readers by default. We seldom read every single word of every single page in a magazine or paper. Rather, we’ll skim over less self-relevant information and focus on that which actually interests us. One wouldn’t necessarily read all job placements if one is after a motor vehicle, for example.
Google has simply added contextual search to help facilitate and speed the ’selective read’ tendency. Multiply that over millions of searches a day and you have a wining formula that pits one advertiser against the next for front-page billing.
".. there are no “new” privacy issues raised by Google’s acquisition of Jaiku; it’s simply the same old ones over and over again that we seem unable to deal with in any kind of open dialogue in the mainstream press." — why the NY Times got it wrong.
"In a "Where’s Wally?" five minute run-down, lets break out the changes that I’ve discovered so far." — Google has applied some fresh new looks and updated navigational features in it’s web based reader app.
"All that’s changed, because searching this site is now powered by the brute, irrepressible and undeniable force of Google." — after noticing how useful this was, I have done the same thing here, results are retrieved in very quick order indeed, do give it a spin.
"The one gigantic failing of Google Reader is that you cannot receive password-protected feeds that request user authentication.. so I created a Yahoo Pipe to work around this failing." — google reader + pipes - great for anyone accessing secured feeds.
"I reread the post again today, with the intent of grasping its meaning. I also visited Megite and TechMeme and read various views on Dave’s post. I still don’t understand why Feedburner is trouble." — Munir Umrani on Dave’s feedburner prophesy.
"I was subscribing to a few new blogs this evening when I noticed something strange with the way FireFox together with Google handled the subscription options." — Ed asks if Google is pushing Atom as a syndication format, buying in to Winer’s latest FUD.
"Google announced the launch of Version 2 of Google Analytics today. Over the next few weeks Google will upgrade current GA users to the new version." — fantastic article on the latest version of analytics, that boosts some *very* cool features.
Is it me, or has google’s reader just had a [so far] unannounced, subtle yet highly user friendly UI change to both the subscription pane and articles list?
It’s happened in the last few hours and the enhancements really, do, honestly, make a massive difference - particularly when you compare to the older UI design:
The changes aren’t exactly ground-breaking.. but they have improved work-flow as I go through the feeds - the changes to where ‘refresh’ buttons are placed (including it’s addition into the feeds list) in particularly are well received by this author.
This is also a slight navigational improvement that really shows the reader is still being fine tuned by the development crew. Here’s a view of the older design:
This is one of the reasons I continue to use google reader over and above pretty much any other web based option. It’s the little changes, the tweaks and the UI enhancements, even on a tiny scale, that just keep causing the product to improve.
Anyone else noticed this so far? Thoughts? It’s seriously working out for me - as I am forever rolling between the “all” and “new” items lists and it’s just a little more of a seamless process.
You have to be kidding me.. before I begin, this post may contain content that might be offensive to advertisers and small children..
Evolutionary theft
So not only is bitacle.org cramming advertising into every spare pixel, they’ve now added ‘digg this’ to their every-evolving quest to squeeze every last cent out of ’stolen’ content.
Now, whilst you might […]
Does this look at all familiar?
If you thought it was only ever the
uber-popular kids on the block that have
content scraped, without permission and then used to make money without the blog author’s knowledge - you would be wrong.
The art of
splogging is nothing new — spam comments and advertising attempting to pretend it’s […]
