Pretty clever.

Thanks for the pointer, Paul.

More about this campaign at:

• Google Blogoscoped
• Internet Marketing Monitor
• Search Engine Land

Thanks, Claudia

It basically pings a lot of services you already knew of, but now in one time. The only thing I find useful about it is that it gives you a sort of overview about the backlinks you have.

The tool is definitely made to make money, because the links to Google’s AdSense and TextLinkAds that are given after the analysis are referrer links. First they measure how much you’re worth, then they tell you how much you can make, and then they offer you to sign up. Clever.

Via: Seth Godin

Other tools previously featured on Marketing Thoughts:

• How Much Is Your Blog Worth?

• Nice review on AdverLab
• Read more on C|Net
• Read more on Clickz
• Hat tip: ‘Cross The Breeze

Next:

Like.com Visual Search. What exactly is it? Like allows users to find products by appearance. That means as much as: if you see a picture with an object in it you fancy, the like engine is able to render ’similar’ things for you. Check out how that works with, for instance, Brad Pitt. Like scores some celeb pics, defines the ‘hot zones’ that feature accessories and then turns those items into shopable content. There seems to be a co-operation with Getty images, because practically all celeb images have a (c) Getty under them. What’s pretty neat is that when you’ve clicked on a celeb pick to start a search, a lot of items are being retrieved which can then be customized by the user. With a color picker you can set the right color, with a slidebar you can set a price range and eventually you can select a brand, a specific site and a few more options to narrow down your search. Pretty clever stuff for online shoppers. It seems that, for now, the search is limited to jewelry, shoes, handbags and watches, but normally that should be extended as soon as Riya upgrades Like to Beta instead of Alpha. If you’re a manufacturer of products, you can add those through the form, so they’ll be included in the search results. Stay tuned for this one.

Check out Like | via Google Blogoscoped

In order to advertise this site, I pay google for certain keywords. One of those keywords used to be “Suicide”. They made up a good percentage of our users. However, I deciced to get rid of the term because they were costing me money to come here, and they were just going to kill themselves anyway. That means they would not be repeat users. No reason to pay to get them here.

Heheheh. Seriously. You can’t make up stuff like this. :)

After Tom’s introduction, David started the presentation. And here’s the twist. To demo just how good things are, David did the entire presentation on a Mac. You read it right. On a bloody Mac. And it didn’t crash or freeze. I was impressed. Not only because it’s not common for Microsoftees to be enthusiastic about Mac, but even more because it’s the ultimate example of compatibility. On a f*cking Mac! Damn. I’m still not over it.

David focused on the upgraded instant search feature, which can be customized for every search engine you like. Then he did a demo of the different options in the file viewer or whatever you call it. We all know about the thumbnail view, which up until now was the largest possible preview of images and various documents in folders (apart from the filmstrip view), but now they’ve added this live preview thing which is pretty great, I think. Yes, I know they already had that on a Mac and yadayada. But I don’t work on a Mac, and now I can have it too. Which is cool. Embrace and hug (or whatever Microsoft’s slogan is).

David also talked about IE7 but I didn’t find anything new there, as far as I can remember. Security is a big issue for Mac users, so Ine (a true Mac-lover) asked if using Vista would make her Mac a haven for viruses. The issue was countered pretty good by Jurgen Van Duvel, stating that IE7 was practically built from zero to what it is, with secured layers, sandbox and a virtual drive to isolate processes that want to write to or alter core Windows files. (I also covered it in the Vista review of the Dev Days). Personally I think all this virus shit is overrated. I’ve been virus-free for over three years. No trojans, no ad or malware. It can all be brought back to 2 issues: a decent scanner and safe surfing behavior. Seriously. If I look around me, to all the people that ask me to take a look at their PC (‘cuz that’s what friends do, right?) I see a lot of things that make me wonder. I have one golden rule for people: ‘if they offer you something you weren’t looking for, just click the red square with the ‘x’. Don’t click ‘Yes’, don’t click ‘No’, just close the offer. Then activate the popup blocker. Add to this rule: scan every 10 days, use AdAware every week. Clean your temp files and you’ll be good.

Here’s the most wonderful part of the evening:
Media Center running on a Mac, as if Vista alone wasn’t enough:

David ran in over-time, so Tom urged him to round it up. He showed some cool features in Powerpoint (the predefined image cropping, easily added effects and text-wrapping) and showed off the ‘blogging from within Word’ option. He also noted the built-in RSS reader for IE7 and the fact you could also read those feeds from within Outlook. OPML can be imported and exported. Which is nice.

Just before dinner, Patrick Viane, the guy with the dirty job at Microsoft, came to tell us some nice stories of things he had encountered. Patrick tracks mainly the bad guys, which means he sends out mystery shoppers to resellers to find out if they’re illegally selling Windows. He explained about the Genuine Advantage features and the logic behind the idea of validating your Windows version. In the BeLux (Belgium/Luxemburg) region, over 1.000.000 users validated their software within weeks after the release of the program. That’s a very good sign.

So far for the ‘official blabla’. It was time to have more beers and enjoy dinner. And what a dinner it was:

Picture by Pietel

After dinner we were invited to play around with the cool Acer -which had a Media Center on it- and the Microsoftees helped us explore the laptops (and the Mac) with the Vista and Office 2007 experience on them. Seriously. Microsoft made a 180° turn in the approach towards bloggers and consumers. I had a great time, once again. Thanks guys!

The full .pdf of Philipp’s book, 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google, is now available on 55fun.com. As the book is Creative Commons licensed, you are encouraged to copy, read, share, remix, convert, quote, browse, and print the .pdf to your liking. If you do create conversions, e.g. an HTML version, please send the URL so Philipp can link to it from 55fun.com.

If you’re a true booklover or papersniffer, you can also buy the book, which contains over 220 pages and is available at Lulu.com for $16.50 or at Amazon for $19.66.

Download the .pdf (7.88 Mb)
There’s also a .zip file with the Word document (7.5 MB)

Read the review I did after proof-reading the book.

55ways costs only $16.50 on Lulu | 55Fun.com

• custom range histogram;
• sphere it bookmarklet that makes it easy to find blog posts that relate to what you’re reading on the Web;
• top queries this hour/ this week;
• RSS for search results;
• community feedback buttons throughout the site;
• expanded related media verticals including podcasts (Yahoo! API), books (Amazon API), and photos (CNET Webshots API);
• expanded related news articles coverage (over 50 mainstream news sites such as CNN, NYT, ESPN, Fox, USA Today to name a few);
• expanded profiles;
• featured blogs for 12,000+ keyword search terms covering over 500 broad topics including baseball, anime, food, web 2.0, tech news, knitting, culture, etc.;
• a brand new back end that scales.

I’ve had my beta invite since somewhere in November and I must say, it grew fast and I’m quite impressed with the end result. I think I’m going to use Sphere a lot more often. Sure there were some small problems in the beginning, but those are all gone now. You really should check this out !

Most important are the featured blogs for over 12K keywords. That’s really impressive. The other thing I like a lot is the fact you can subscribe to RSS feeds of any search result and that podcasts and other media are immediately included and linked to your search query. This is about the most complete niche search ever. If they should start a ranking system, I bet they could easily leave Technorati behind.

Try Sphere

From the Unofficial Yahoo Blog:

Instead of huddling around your 17″ monitor and cluttered desk to view your Y! Photo album of the latest family gathering, you can show them from the comfort of your TV viewing room. You can also see pictures from on-the-fly Flickr searches. You can also play DVD’s or saved video files on your computer and watch them on your TV! Kind of eliminates the need for the ol’ DVD-player don’t it? And there’s a lot of Yahoo! Premium content in audio and video form that is easily accessible through Yahoo! Go – TV.
There’s more features to discover at the Y! Go – TV site.

• Have text on your home page
• Pick your keywords
• Have links to inside pages
• Forget Spamming
• Network
• Relax

In this post, Danny also looks back and lists the most remarkable moments in search. Starting in 1997, he lines up what happened and describes the turning points in the evolution of search engines. And interesting historical review.

Read it on SearchEngineWatch

Try MSN Spoof | Thanx, Kris

Created by modified_dangler | via ObnoxiousFumes

Warning: Riya will only work if you

• Have high resolution JPEG’s with date and time from your camera
• Use digital photos of your family and friends not celebrity or web images
• Have many photos of the most common people in your photoset
• Don’t give it scanned photos, photos with bad lighting, or profile shots of faces
• They recommend you upload at least 1000 photos w/ full albums

Riya will take about a day to upload 4000 photos.

Requirements:

• 512 MB RAM
• Windows XP (Home/Professional/Media Center)
• Administrator Privileges
• Broadband Connection
• Pentium 4/Athlon/Centrino
• Internet Explorer 6 or Firefox 1.0.5+

Learn more about Riya
Read the Riya Blog

Use the backdoor signup and skip the invite-only. | also on InsideGoogle

Thanx, PJ

UPDATE: it was only temporarily, so it seems. The problem only lasted a few hours.

We present an analysis of a large blog search engine query log, exploring a number of angles such as query intent, query topics, and user sessions. Our results show that blog searches have different intents than general web searches, suggesting that the primary targets of blog searchers are tracking references to named entities, and locating blogs by theme. In terms of interest areas, blog searchers are, on average, more engaged in technology, entertainment, and politics than web searchers, with a particular interest in current events. The user behavior observed is similar to that in general web search: short sessions with an interest in the first few results only.

Download this paper – via [SearchEngineWatch]

That looks like this:

You can choose for a ‘narrow’ version too, to fit it in the sidebar of your blog or site, and there’s also a wide version that could be placed at the top or bottom of the page.

A swicki is a natural extension of personal publishing on the web. Just as you can create a webpage, blog, or podcast, now you can publish a community powered search engine, tailored to produce only the targeted search results that you and your community want!

A swicki shows a buzz cloud of what is hot in your community and makes it easy to find the best content, news and info on the web.

I’m not quite sure about the possibilities this swicki thing has when it comes to a decent site search, but I’ll give it a try. If it makes sense and returns what I want to search for, I’ll probably integrate it.

Get your own swicki, right here.

UPDATE: The swicki search isn’t up to date at all. I hope it’ll change because of its activation on this site, but as for now, it still lists files from the previous blog that have been removed over a month ago… Their cache really needs an update.

They are:

• Results must be trackable
• Promote trial
• Let others speak for you
• Data. Not hype.
• You’re smart. And your time matters.
• We’re serious. Except when we’re not.
• Big ideas move us

Now HBO is coming up with some new stuff, to make the entire story more trackable and to fit it even better in everyday life. With the interactive Google Maps plugs, you’ll be able to pinpoint the exact locations of the crimescenes and story plots.

Nathan writes:

In ten days, HBO plans to go live with a Google Maps mashup that will help viewers track the actions on the Sopranos. There will be markers on the map that correlate to key plot points, and clicking on them will bring up a popup with information on the episode, including video clips. Its an interesting way to promote the show.

I’m so glad there’s going to be another series of this brilliant story. Actually, I think it would be very cool if there would be a movie about it too. There’s more than enough footage and the writers have proven that they have the imagination to pull this off. I’d buy it for sure. It’ll be on top of my list. I’m counting down the days to see this Google Maps mashup and find out all the things about the new shows. I can hardly wait.

Watch the trailer of the new season :
Visit HBO’s Sopranos Section
Check out a load of other clips of The Sopranos in HBO’s archive

With new and greatly improved features, UK Mediaspace is your daily resource for digital media. You’ll find everything you need to research, plan and deliver compelling proposals and strategies for your brands. There’s also a wealth of analysis, ideas and insights to inform and inspire you. Everything on UK Mediaspace is free for you to use. Simply take what you need to benefit you, your colleagues and your clients. It’s the ideal tool to help you achieve the results you really want. Take a minute to sign-up for UK Mediaspace now and customise your account. It makes the service very easy to use and ensures you feel the maximum benefit.

In his keynote, Mike Butcher talks about the savvy Consumer 2.O, in which he points out the power of search and the trend of the researching consumer. Indeed, regular marketing tactics seem to fail and more and more consumers turn to search engines to perform research about the products they want to purchase. Word of Mouth and reviews take over from the banners that promote consumer goods. Reputation and trust, powered by the Web 2.0 of social software, has the potential to have far a reaching impact on the worlds of media and marketing

The point of view of eBuyers nowadays is being formulated like this:

It’s communities which are the new feature here. Now, when I want to buy something, I don’t just buy the product, I research what other people have to say about it. If I find one on ebay, again, I don’t just buy it, I see what everyone had to say about the seller first.

In very large part I ignore all “spin”. I avoid adverts, I look for trusted sources, I hunt down the smart view, the community of souls looking out for my interests, and I after theirs. [...]

Assuming most people check the home or work PC instead for now, and that the perfect Google phone turns up soon, that means it is going to be harder and harder to “spin” products and services to the average punter. [...]

The average punter is getting connected. Really connected.

Check out AOL UK Mediaspace
Check out the 2.0 zone
Read Mike Butcher’s ‘Web 2.0, The Marketing Nightmare’ keynote. (.doc, 23 kb)
Or read the article at NetImperative.