Just a week after Google's Chief Executive in Spain and Portugal "confirmed" that a future Google Phone was in R & D, the Sydney Morning Herald reports,

"Google has poured cold water on claims it is developing a mobile phone. The search giant said it was more logical to form partnerships with existing handset makers instead...Google's chief internet evangelist, Vinton Cerf, [said] that building hardware would be a dramatic shift in the company's business model."

Google is instead "very focused on software" and seeks to extend its search technology to existing mobile providers. As Engadget points out, however,

"[no one] has come straight out and denied an actual device, or taken steps to contradict Isabel Aguilera's statements about a low-end phone in the works."

Random tidbits:

- I get a bit unsettled when someone goes up a level of generality in their domain naming. Like, "we managed to snag a more generic domain name than you'd expect - so look at us!! and be prepared to be thrilled for us in six years when we flip that sucker for $1,650!!" The Keele Street Christian Church proudly displays their domain name, www.keelestreet.ca, in the front window. Hey, shouldn't that be keelestreetchristianchurch.ca, or keelestreetchurch.ca? At the very least, make it geographically informative, like keele-and-annette.ca, by putting the cross street in there.

- Topica, the email campaign management service, has a beautiful graphic on its home page. A huge 3-d "2007." Beautiful. Folks, it's March 21.

- It isn't very hard to find great Toronto restaurant reviews, if you know the main sites (Chowhound, Toronto Life, etc.) that purvey reviews. These will generally come up easily in a search. And if you're a good searcher and know the type of food you want, or the neighborhood name (Queen West, for example), you can even kind of do a themed or geographic search, in a way. But as for Google Local and the other blue-chip "local" and "map" based search engines, currently they aren't doing a very thorough job of aggregating this information. No doubt in a couple of years this problem will be solved and the maps and results will be intuitively and comprehensively populated - but for now, knowledge of your favorite sources (Toronto Life, NOW Magazine, Chowhound, etc.) and how they divvy up the city or leverage the community for recommendations, is the only path to foodie satisfaction. In case you were wondering, for dinner tomorrow night I'll be at one of: Parsi Restaurant, Jules, or Czehoski's. Vote now!

Apple TV is available for shipping today, and will hit stores this weekend. Initial reviewers have called it "simple and elegant" and "very well designed." AppleTV was revealed in January as an afterthought to the iPhone, but has since gained traction following the explosion of online digital video. Bloomberg predicts that Apple may sell 2 million devices this year.

At $299, Apple TV can store up to 50 hours of video, 9,000 songs or 25,000 photos, or a combination of the three formats. Apple is currently offering free shipping for online orders.

Yesterday Google announced the extension of its Pay Per Action ad test as a limited beta. As many have pointed out, entry into PPA puts Google in direct competition with affiliate networks using a similar model, such as LinkShare or Commission Junction. Cost-Per-Action ads are appealing to advertisers because they eliminate risk of clickfraud or ineffectiveness. Though smaller sites like Snap.com and Turn.com have been experimenting with CPA for some time, Google's announcement indicates a turning point for this early-stage market.

That aside, Google's announcement included another small tidbit that has been largely overlooked. From the Google Q&A on PPA:

"What ad formats can I use?
You can create text, image, or text link ads for your pay-per-action campaign.

What is the text link format for pay-per-action ads?
Text links are hyperlinked brief text descriptions that take on the characteristics of a publisher's page. Publishers can place them in line with other text to better blend the ad and promote your product.

For example, you might see the following text link embedded in a publisher's recommendatory text: "Widgets are fun! I encourage all my friends to Buy a high-quality widget today." (Mousing over the link will display "Ads by Google" to identify these as pay-per-action ads).

Though the maximum length of a text link is 90 characters, we've found that shorter links perform better because they allow the publisher use the link in more places on her/his site and in different context. The maximum length is 90 characters but less than 5 words is best. Even better, just use your brand name to offer maximum flexibility to the publisher."

Text link ads are already used by companies like Miva or Intellitxt, and are generally regarded as annoying and confusing to the user. They've generated controversy in the past because they can potentially skew Google's page rank system that relies on links to judge authority. As TechCrunch writes,

"They’ve crossed a hazy ethical line here. If this product was announced on its own, it would be heavily debated by the blogs and press. But by burying it in other, bigger news, they’ve mostly avoided the critical analysis that this actually deserves"

TechDirt agrees,

"What's not clear is why Google has decided to lump these two things, the text link ads and the pay per action beta, into the same announcement, since the two really have nothing at all to do with each other. It seems possible that Google knew the text link ads might elicit a negative response and so the company decided to mask that with the other announcement, knowing it would get overshadowed."

In 2005 Matt Cutts wrote,

"Selling links muddies the quality of link-based reputation and makes it harder for many search engines (not just Google) to return relevant results...Yes, Google has a variety of algorithmic methods of detecting such links, and they work pretty well. But these links make it harder for Google (and other search engines) to determine how much to trust each link."

Though I'm sure Google's text link ads wont factor into the advertiser's link reputation, they certainly contradict Google's longstanding devotion to the quality of user experience. As far as I can tell, the only motivation for text link ads is monetary - so where's the benefit to the user on this one?

One finicky poster at Engadget wonders why the Blackberry 8800 was even made. I mean, it may be super thin, with a better phone in it, GPS-enabled and much much more, but no flash camera! I mean come on!

Answer: believe it or not young Jedi, traditionally the majority of Blackberries were always bought for employees, so they could be better leashed to the office. Then free agents and bohemians found a way to convince themselves that the devices were kind of liberating. This doesn't overcome the underlying fact that the basic reason for a Blackberry is to keep your cube following you around the planet.

So the reason that some of these devices don't come with cameras, I suppose, is similar to the reason the new line of Steelcase office equipment doesn't come with complimentary snowboards hanging from the units.

And if your work/play does involve photography (which for many it does), either you'll need a better piece of equipment, or you'll buy one of the Blackberries that does.

Spend too much time on the blogs and you start to overlook the fact that not all time is free time. Present company excused.

I was going to be holding out for an 8800, but now I'm holding out for an 8300. If this indecision keeps up, I'll be free forever.

Google has launched a new Pay Per Action AdSense product. From the Inside Adwords blog,

"Pay-per-action advertising is a new pricing model that allows you to pay only for completed actions that you define, such as a lead, a sale, or a pageview, after a user has clicked on your ad on a publisher's site. You'll define an action, set up conversion tracking, and create ads that publishers in the Google content network can then choose to place in new ad units on their site."

Available as a select beta test, Adsense publishers create text, image or flash ads with pre-defined fixed prices. Actions are monitored through Google's Conversion Tracking system, and advertisers have the option to offer rewards based on sale or sign-up. As many have pointed out, this look suspiciously like an affiliate marketing product. Though Google denies any intention to compete, they also believe the new PPA platform to have "more automation, more options, more control" than affiliate networks (via Marketing Pilgrim).

Further Reading:

• Google Expands Pay-Per-Action Test (Traffick)
• Google Launches Pay Per Action Ads (Search Engine Land)
• Google to Test Pay Per Action Ads (Search Engine Watch)

After his debut on YouTube with Nationwide's "life comes at you fast" commercial, Kevin Federline is evidently extending his online prowess to search. No, really though - at Searchwithkevin.com, fans have the opportunity to win Federline goods (and dates) by using his branded search engine.

Recent winners are displayed prominently on the sidebar, alongside a clock that counts the seconds to the next winning search. The site's directions on How to Win encourage users to "make searchwithkevin.com your primary search engine" and "tell all your friends". Searchwithkevin.com is the brain child of PRODEGE, " the first socially-conscious search engine." Originally a search portal that used search to raise money for non-profit organizations, PRODEGE recently expanded their offerings to include fan contests within celebrity-branded sites. They've built custom engines for Wynonna Judd, the Coachella Festival and Meat Loaf, among others.

Threadwatch questions, "does creating a novelty or branded search portal make it more accessible/desirable to any segments of the population? Ultimately the people want the best results..." Okay, I'm pretty sure K-fed isn't going to make an enormous dent in Google's market share, but as a promotional vehicle for Federline's album, it's a novel idea. I find it especially interesting that Federline's search engine is powered by Yahoo - is this something Yahoo will include in their future "Brand Universe"?

Google has been testing a "pay-per-action" ad model since July 2006.

Today they're announcing a wider rollout of the service, but still in "limited beta release."

In a brief chat yesterday with Rob Kniaz, product manager for Google advertising products, I learned that AdSense publishers will be able to add the pay-per-action units in addition to their current AdSense (CPM or CPC) ad units. They'll be able to shop for potential offers in a variety of ways, either by selecting a specific advertiser's offer or by incorporating keywords into their code and letting Google's system smart-match from their advertiser list.

From the advertiser side, there will be a dedicated interface that allows them to upload creatives as well as the parameters for payout (eg. $3 per sale; $35 per lead, etc.). I'm waiting to see the full implementation, but at this early stage it looks like there will be a couple of things to look out for:

• Verification of the actions is a key concern. I always argued that cost-per-action was no panacea to the verification issues around CPC or CPM based advertising. To be sure, you can't fake a sale if money changes hands, but a no-good publisher or random vandal could certainly potentially generate low-quality or fake leads. As with pay-per-click, it's not quite good enough to argue that advertisers should lower their bids accordingly, since the impact of bogus activity could be quite uneven.

• How are these outcomes going to be tracked? I assume through Google Analytics, Google Conversion Tracker, or Google Checkout.

• As such, it does certainly expand the Google footprint in all of these areas. It also confirms that the introduction of products like Checkout were not disjointed experiments but rather part of a broader overall strategy that is only being shown to us gradually.

There are some clear positives in this experiment. In potentially opening up a CPA marketplace to all of its several hundred thousand advertisers, with tens of thousands of publishers on board as well, it instantly gains the clout of a service like Commission Junction or Amazon Associates, but with less friction and lower cost (and over time, greater variety to choose from, for both sides in the transaction). It gives publishers a new way of experimenting with maximizing their monetization efforts (with better targeting, not user overload as shown in the last post), and allows advertisers to explore a new way of buying content-targeted exposure through Google. Put another way, it allows merchants to set up an "affiliate program," but with considerably less hassle than with other affiliate systems.

To be clear, the cost-per-action test has nothing to do with the search results or ads next to them. It's an additional marketplace being built to facilitate cost-per-action ad payments between AdWords advertisers and AdSense publishers.

I was about to link to this site because they had a relevant article to my next post. But their article was nearly unreadable because of all the monetization around it. Hey, it's nice to sell ads, but...

So now they're officially in the usability hall of shame.

To review, they've got:

• A banner at the top
• A tile, top left
• Too much nav down the left
• Another top banner
• A "developer marketplace" text link unit
• A big square bugger
• A right-side skyscraper
• IntelliTXT underlining of keywords in content
• Another tile (lower left)
• White paper marketplace
• IBM stuff
• A single little text link ad for LocalLaunch
• Two extraneous widgets
• A large square AdSense unit
• A conventional AdSense unit

Is this supposed to be a joke? Too bad I gave up on the idea of reading the article here.

That's fifteen separate monetization pieces on a single page of content, an article that is unnecessarily chopped up into four parts to generate more "pageviews." Can you top it? Post examples, if so.

Today Yahoo oneSearch launched across the Mobile Web, opening its services to over 85% of US mobile users. OneSearch first launched in January 2007 on Yahoo Go! for Mobile 2.0. From the press release,

"Yahoo! oneSearch is designed to make searching for and finding information as quick as possible for consumers by providing relevant results right on the page such as news headlines, images, business listings and more as well as easy navigation to other websites. For example, if a consumer wants to go to a movie this weekend they just need to type the name of the movie into the search box. The search results would first list the movie, including a user rating, local theaters the movie is playing at, news headlines related to the movie and more."

In short, oneSearch breaks results into different categories - images, news, local businesses, etc - and orders them based on your location. By simplifying results, oneSearch retools web content for a mobile screen. The ordering and type of listings aren't customizable, but results will apparently be heavily dependent on locational information.

As Lee Ott, Director of Mobile Web at Yahoo, told me, "2007 is the tipping point for mobile search and this product is going to make that possible." Yahoo's oneSearch is aimed at a mainstream audience, and though Ott wouldn't tell me what's on the road map for the future of oneSearch, he did say, "we're just kicking it off...we plan to be #1 in mobile search."

Screen Shots:
Below are three sample searches for "pizza", "Apple", and "nyc"


Click image for full view

Did ya’ll feel that? It just happened again. Extremely slight but measurable tremors are recorded under the west coast of North America thousands of times a day. At least once a day, a tremor can be felt on Southern Vancouver Island, Mother Earth’s not so subtle memorandum mori. It’s been that way for centuries.

“Geologic time” and “Internet time” are similar in that both are extreme expressions of how we measure time. Geologic time can be measured in eons. The last extreme (9.0) earthquake in the southern Pacific NW happened around in January 1770, mere moments ago in geologic time. Another one is expected anytime between right now and 2250. Apparently these things can happen around here with some frequency, geologically speaking. Living in what will eventually be the epicenter, we learn to take it seriously but put it out of mind. The daily gentle rumbles are rarely even noticed.

Internet time however, can be measured in months, sometimes in days, and in extreme circumstance, in hours. That’s why seismic rumblings in search should be taken seriously by search and social marketers. Deep underground, the search environment is shifting.

Case in point earlier today the Wall St. Journal reported, “Comcast Corp. is negotiating to use Microsoft Corp.’s Internet search services on its broadband portal, a sign the cable titan isn’t happy about its current search deal with Google Inc.”

Another minor rumble felt today came in a NYTimes article by John Markoff about a sophisticated form of fraud built around PPC distribution programs, primarily using Google’s Blogger.

Last week we read about Viacom suing Google’s YouTube for $1Billion and in previous weeks we have read about other distribution partners thinking they should be cut in on some more of the ad revenues Google is generating.

Here on the South-Island, we are told to be prepared for disaster while living our lives as normal. Having an escape route planned for fear of tsunami, several days of food and water, blankets and spare clothing ready, just in case, are common sense recommendations folks with common sense follow.

Similarly it is wise to look beyond the world of search as we know it today when thinking about marketing a website. We know the way people are using the Internet is changing very quickly. Video is replacing image for instance. Text can be replaced by an audio podcast.

Over at Sitepronews.com, we are trying an experiment in getting a brand new website ranked. One of the recommendations I gave to Nadine Pedersen, the owner of Black Swan Book Editing Services is to sign up for as many social media as possible, listing Linked-In, MyBlogLog and MySpace as her immediate priorities. Another was to record the various workshops and writing sessions she facilitates in order to produce a series of audio podcasts. In this way, we hope to diversify her marketing message and present her message in other venues where she might draw traffic to her site.

We also hope to ensure that as user patterns change, we are able to supply information the way those users want to receive it. While not exactly disaster planning, it is using basic common sense to adapt to a rapidly changing environment in which we can feel perceptible seismic activity.

Today Google announced the purchase of Gapmider's Trendalyzer, a data visualization software. From the Official Google Blog,

"Trendalyzer generates moving graphics and other novel effects in the display of facts, figures, and statistics in presentations. In its nimble hands, Trendalyzer views development data—such as regional income distribution or trends in global health—as literally a world of opportunity. Like Google, Gapminder strives to make information more useful, and Trendalyzer will improve any function or application in which data might be better visualized."

Trendalizer's animated visualization of data is a natural fit with Google's existing technologies - specifically, Google Analytics, Adwords, and Docs & Spreadsheets.

Today Adobe released the alpha version of Apollo, a software that lets developers build off and online applications. From CNET:

" Apollo is designed to bridge the world of Web applications and desktop computers. Applications written for Apollo function like normal Web applications but act like locally installed software. For example, Apollo applications will have an icon that shows up on a computer desktop and will be able to automatically reconnect when a computer gets online."

For a more detailed description, check out Adobe Labs, or watch this presentation. Below is a sample application, a music player, to illustrate exactly how a program would transfer from the browser to the desktop.

Here it is running music from the desktop in a browser application:

And then, the application streaming data from the internet to the music player on the desktop:

As TechCrunch writes,

"Entirely new classes of companies can be built on this platform, which takes Flash, HTML and javascript completely outside of the browser and interacts with the file system on a PC. Photos, music, email and many other everyday tasks make a lot of sense in a single environment that is both local and in the cloud simultaneously."

Apollo doesn't just enable the interaction of desktop and online data, it extends a site's presence to encourage more regular user interaction. Sites running on both the desktop and browser will need to adopt metrics that better reveal the depth of "engagement" with site content.

Microsoft is employing a similar strategy to reaffirm their presence in search. The New York Times quoted Susan Dumais, a veteran Microsoft search expert, following Microsoft's TechFest event,

"Search in the future will look nothing like today’s simple search engine interfaces, she said, adding, “If in 10 years we are still using a rectangular box and a list of results, I should be fired.”

Microsoft is creating its own search market by developing applications that seamlessly transition between on and offline data. Now with Adobe Apollo, it will be easier for smaller web companies to follow suit.

Further Reading:

• SCOOP: Apollo Public Alpha Available Later Tonight (The Universal Desktop)
• Apollo vs. WPF? (Jupiter Research Analyst Weblogs)
• Apollo blasts off from Adobe (WebProNews)

So Jim Hedger nicely commented on my recent interview with Richard Zwicky over at Enquisite. I have a little riff on Jim Collins' hedgehog concept, rolled in together with some statistical viewpoints about the overall size of the SEM spend in relation to marketing and advertising as a whole - something I try to convey in seminars, book, etc.

Jim mentions this as "injurious" and "potentially limiting". On the injurious front, especially since his name is Hedger, I'll take that as tongue in cheek, of course :) . But the idea that the sum total of SEM does indeed have its limits is important, in my view. Advertising spend outside our realm is indeed seemingly limitless. I think it's important to talk about limits, though. If all you can spend on relevant clicks in a year is $1,000,000 - even as a large company with a big budget - then that's all there is here. I think it's important to admit that. SEM is a large and growing field that does specific things for a large number of companies. It's approaching 50% of online ad spend, depending on how you measure. But it's finite, and the daily and weekly impact can indeed be quantified.

I do think we could do to dig in with a bit more research about the thus-far underquantified impact of search listings in driving offline revenues and choices, though. Especially when it comes to local and long tail research.

Meanwhile, over at the Enquisite Blog, Richard Zwicky posts another of (what I’m calling), his Enquisitive Minds interviews, this time with the brilliant Andrew Goodman of Page-Zero Media.

Andrew is one of the more interesting people in the search sphere. As Richard points out he is, “… one of the most educated SEM’s out there.”

After noting his potentially limiting and injurious comments about hedgehogs, I too share Richard’s observation that Andrew is obviously a few courses short of the doctorship. Putting that highly personal issue aside, I think the guy is amazingly smart and try to catch all his writings at Traffick.com.

Over at Search Engine Watch, Eric Enge does a long interview with Ask.com director of online information resources Gary Price. Gary is widely considered one of the smartest people in an industry overflowing with genius. A conversation with Gary is a whirlwind experience, which might seem strange to those who’ve only met the man.

Talking with Gary is literally like walking through the Web. His encyclopedic knowledge and ability to match seemingly unrelated points are uncanny and might even be unnerving if he carried or showed even an ounce of pretension in person. He does not, making him one of the most intellectually challenging but delightful people to speak with.

When Gary starts to explain even a small facet of the numerous search resources at Ask.com, it can be difficult to fully keep up with the rapid flow of information and ideas. That’s ok. You know he is guiding you to a most interesting place. By the time you get there, the maze of ideas he has guided you through will be lit by the light bulbs left floating above the places he took your head. Like I said, a conversation with Gary Price is an intellectually elegant, unforgettable experience.

In the interview, Gary gives some insights into his experience at Ask. One of the reasons he says he moved from his previous job as editor of Search Engine Watch is because of the leadership and vision offered by Jim Lanzone and the congeniality of his colleagues at Ask.

Ask has a huge range of excellent search products, none of which has caught on with consumes in the way Google or Yahoo offerings have. The article outlines several of them, some of which have been copied or innovated on by competitors. Gary, of course, is too polite to make a point of it but he is happy to note that Ask has features none of the others offer. (see the parts about AskCity and Maps)

Towards the end of the interview Gary talks about one of the most important points for researchers, academics and educators moving forward into the next decade. Though it often feels like we live in a uni-search world with Google being the world’s default search device, we need to use and expand the number of information resources that are already at our fingertips. As a good essay pulls from several sources, good research habits include getting information from different search tools and knowing how to use them.

Check out the interview at Search Engine Watch. It is well worth the read. After reading the piece, perhaps you might want to try a weekend using Ask.com, just to get a glimpse of what you’re probably missing.

Just a week and a half after Microsoft's legal team ripped into the Google Book program, CEO Steve Ballmer delivered another battle cry speech to business school grad students at Stanford University. Calling Google's plan to double in number "insane", Ballmer said,

"Google built one very good business. They only have one thing they do. Everything else is sort of cute. We do a lot of things that are cute, too. I'll tell you about our robotics effort, for example, but that's not paying for me to come down to Stanford."

Ballmer also criticized Google's organizational model, their rapid growth, and impeding stagnation.

In the meantime, Microsoft is stepping up their PR efforts to reinforce their position in search. Today LiveSide wrote about the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional Global Summit,

"Consistently we heard that Microsoft at all levels are committed to win...They've realized that the first wave of Windows Live was a little rocky, but they're learning from it for wave 2...Microsoft is going back to basics. Ideas are going to be well developed inside the company before pushing them out to the public, where confusion can become rampant as we've seen. There's going to be a clear distinction between what's a Windows Live product and what's an MSN product, as well as what's a beta product or a technical review product."

Robert Scoble had a slightly different take on the event,

"Microsoft executives are bragging to MVPs that “we’re in it to win.” I don’t think Microsoft is. The words are empty. Microsoft’s Internet execution sucks (on whole). Its search sucks. Its advertising sucks. If that’s “in it to win” then I don’t get it...Microsoft: stop the talk. Ship a better search, a better advertising system than Google, a better hosting service than Amazon, a better cross-platform Web development ecosystem than Adobe, and get some services out there that are innovative (where’s the video RSS reader? Blog search? Something like Yahoo’s Pipes? A real blog service? A way to look up people?) That’s how you win."

Incidentally, Ballmer told the Stanford students that Microsoft's greatest threat was not coming from Google, Yahoo, Adobe or Amazon - but from the open source and advertising-based social media sites of the world.

Isabel Aguilera, Google's chief executive in Spain and Portugal, has confirmed the existence of Google Phone. Engadget writes,

"It seems that the oft-rumored handset from Google has taken that final leap into the "confirmed" column, though it may not be quite the be-all, end-all device we were expecting. Isabel Aguilera, Google's chief executive in Spain and Portugal, has admitted that the searchmeisters have some mobile goodness in the works but appeared to play down the project, noting that the phone is just one of 18 R&D initiatives the company currently has underway. Furthermore,she mentioned that Google's mobile skunkworks were designed to make their way into developing countries, suggesting that this may not be the Samsung sourced, iPhone-killing monster we'd been getting an earful about as of late."

Google Operating System speculates that the future Google phone could be something in line with the One Laptop per Child initiative, while Gizmodo is speculative of the whole thing,

"Why Aguilera would bypass Google HQ and release info on the GPhone is beyond me, so we're not 100% convinced yet, and you shouldn't be either. Call us skeptical, but we'll become believers once there's an official announcement, not a thread of "could be" quotes."

(via Searchviews) comScore begins touting a new metric, "visits," that allows a second visit and a third to be counted from a single user if that visit is more than 30 minutes after the previous one.

OK, well first of all, the concept of a visit is far from new. But let's run with it any way.

On the "pro" side, it's going to be vitally important to look at new measures of attention online. Time spent, and yes, visits, are key metrics because of the so-called death of the page view. New presentation methods such as AJAX will mean it's harder to measure pageviews (or impressions), and that makes it hard to fairly price advertising. I'd add that this is a good development in that content sites sometimes or often chopped up their articles unduly, or otherwise engineered a navigation model that actually produced more pageviews per visit. Should that be considered "more ad inventory" or not? Clearly we have always been dealing in nebulous concepts of user attention and some online advertising is well overpriced and some underpriced.

On the "con" side, I'll refer you to the perennial problem of sites gaming their traffic; or again, simply engineering more of what they have for sale. Valleywag's been relentless in poking holes in those who use small tricks to pump up the volume of what they're selling. The concept of visits is going to be unduly exploited by some sites, inevitably.

In the end, happy advertisers will be happy advertisers, and overpriced advertising will disappoint. But we do a disservice to clients if we don't continue to probe these various metrics for, shall we say, the "gaming opportunities" they might provide for some publishers.

Is "visits" better than uninformative stats like "reach"? Absolutely. Publishers and agencies have no business selling "reach." I'd rather see us be looking at a multifaceted stats package for pricing ads, like a quarterback rating (comprised of pageviews, time spent, heat mapping, and a list of various other stats). Or that could be considered at least a method of providing a third-party "scorecard" for how users work with a given website; of what type of audience and attention you're dealing with. You hear a lot of tough talk about third party advertising "audits," but that misses the point. You're not selling something that is ever 100% quantifiable, as the death of the page view shows. So as an industry I'd love to see us innovate, use scorecards, and explain the value of targeting.

Google Webmaster Central says that they've begun reporting full anchor text for links back to your site. The Webmaster Central Blog writes,

"For quite a while, you've been able to see a list of the most common words used in anchor text to your site. This information is useful, because it helps you know what others think your site is about. How sites link to you has an impact on your traffic from those links, because it describes your site to potential visitors. In addition, anchor text influences the queries your site ranks for in the search results.

Now we've enhanced the information we provide and will show you the complete phrases sites use to link to you, not just individual words. And we've expanded the number we show to 100. To make this information as useful as possible, we're aggregating the phrases by eliminating capitalization and punctuation. For instance, if several sites have linked to your site using the following anchor text:

Site 1 "Buffy, blonde girl, pointy stick"
Site 2 "Buffy blonde girl pointy stick"
Site 3 "buffy: Blonde girl; Pointy stick."

We would aggregate that anchor text and show it as one phrase, as follows: "buffy blonde girl pointy stick""

Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land has a good rundown of what anchor text is and why it matters in search. As he points out, knowing what text people are using in reference to your site is helpful for any number of reasons - know your most popular content, spot any "googlebombs", understand how your site ranks, etc.

For example, the top five anchor text terms for searchviews are:

1. searchviews
2. searchviews dispatches and discussions on the search engine
3. search views
4. http www searchviews com
5. www searchviews com

Ha. So much for aggregating like terms. Still, this is a helpful little tool.

Read More:

• Google Shows Datalicious Anchor Text (WebProNews)
• A Quick Word About Googlebombs (Google Webmaster Central Blog)
• Webmaster Central Showing Increased Backlinks (Webmaster World)

SEL reports on the latest development in Google Webmaster Central: reporting on the anchor phrases that link to your site. Just more proof that Webmaster Central is a great new development in relations between the search engines and their immediate ecosystem: website owners & webmasters.

Stumbled across a blogger's profile on Blogger. This blogger, called "Product Advocate," runs blogs on:

Toys

Jewelry

Speeding Tickets

Clown Makeup

... you get the picture. They're really not blogs, they're a few posts by SEO types on behalf of their clients but pretending to be "real" content, purporting to be about that particular industry, and then there are "links" that basically feature the client's site. I honestly don't know too many people who set up a whole blog just to enthuse about their traffic ticket paralegal firm. It's hard to come across such people in real life, because there aren't any.

And then SEO firms wonder why all the bad public image in the press? It's hard to defend your profession if you're willing to continue to do things that appall the search engine using public.

Today ComScore introduced a new metric to help measure user engagement with a site: "The “visits” metric, defined as the number of times a unique person accesses content within a Web entity with breaks between access of at least 30 minutes, is a way of measuring the frequency with which a person views content." "Visits" will be broken down into total visits, average minutes per visit, average visits per visitor, and average visits per usage day.

Comscore provides some comparison charts to show how the measurement of visits alongside page views can dramatically change a site's traffic stats. Facebook, for example, has the second highest "visits per visitor" ranking, with 23.6 average visits per visitor during a given month. Yahoo, Microsoft, Time Warner, and Weatherbug are other sites that rank highly for visits per visitor - all of which are above Google.

For brand advertisers, Comscore indicated that visitation can often be directly correlated with offline events - Visitation to entertainment-news site, for example, spiked around the academy awards. As Yodel Anecdotal's Peter Daboll writes,

"[The Visits metric] provides a valuable reference for advertisers to determine where to increase their ad exposure and budgets. The more loyal users and 'visits' a site has, the more opportunities a particular ad has to be seen. It's also a key measure of a site's value and impact to a consumer's life."

Though visits may not replace page views, they provide a richer picture of a site's worth.

Bill Slawski at SEO by the Sea spots a Yahoo patent that looks like a formula for serving behaviorally-targeted paid search ads.

The "Framework for selecting and delivering advertisements over a network based on combined short-term and long-term user behavioral interests" describes a method of 'scoring' behavioral interest by "awareness" and "response" within different categories. According to one of the flowcharts attached to the patent, elements contributing to behavioral data include:

• Pages viewed
• Search history
• Links clicked on
• Advertisements clicked on
• Content of articles viewed by user
• User activity data within predetermined interest categories
• Short-term behavioral interest scores
• Long-term behavioral interest scores

Below is a flowchart of their process for picking out behavioral ads:



Granted, this patent is over 2 years old - but it's interesting to consider in light of Yahoo's vertical expansion across "lifestyle" content. In comparison to Google and MSN, Yahoo is probably the best suited for a behavioral targeting network because they have the largest portfolio of personal services.

How would this work, though, with Panama's quality-based ranking system? A behaviorally-targeted ad is theoretically what yahoo determines to be the *most relevant - so where do other quality score indicators of "relevancy" factor in?

Seth's right. If people really want to be negative, how can you stop them?

It's just an ajaxwhois away from finding the availability of SplendaIsTheDevil.com, SatanLovesSplenda.com, or whatever you like.

BTW, Santa loves Splenda also. A lot of people both love and hate Splenda.

Enquisite CEO Richard Zwicky has conducted a series of email interviews with several search marketing specialists known for their strong opinions. The first of these interviews with SearchEngineLand.com excecutive editor, Chris Sherman is published on the Enqusite Search Metrics Blog.

Much of Chris’ interview focuses on the enormity of personalization.

Q. What do you foresee as the biggest change coming to the search industry over the next 18 months?

Personalization. It’s going to change everything, and I don’t think most search marketers will realize how big an impact it will have. Gord Hotchkiss has written some great columns on the coming impact of personalization on search results for SEL, and as good as his analysis is, he’s just scratching the surface of this massive sea change.

Chris also makes a subtle point when giving his best advice on SEO/SEM,

“The most important thing is to understand your goals before you do anything else. Search marketing needn’t be rocket science, but it can seem that way if you’re not sure what you want to accomplish.”

Richard says he has received a great response from the people he interviewed.  Tomorrow, Richard interviews Page-Zero founder Andrew Goodman.

Search Engine Watch reports that Google is expanding its Audio Ad beta testing. Audio ads got off to a rocky start, but have since proven their value. On Monday Ad Age reported,

"Google may have finally built what years of complaining by media-buying agencies couldn't: a viable, scalable, e-business approach to buying local media...For radio advertisers, attractions include the ability to change creative on the fly and getting real-time air checks and billing...Google says its radio-sales product can tie back to return on investment: If a piece of creative seems more effective in Kansas City than in St. Louis, advertisers can adjust in real time."

Google has already signed up over 900 participating stations. The expansion of the program further solidifies Google's foothold in this $20 billion market.

Microsoft has just issued a press release announcing their acquisition of TellMe Networks, a voice recognition company. Terms of the deal are yet undisclosed, but GigaOm reports some initial information:

1. The price is over $800 million but below a billion dollars.


2. While Microsoft has been trying to position Microsoft Business Division President Jeff Raikes as the guy who took the lead on this deal, the truth is that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was personally handling this deal. I have confirmed this with two people.


3. Mobile search is the impetus behind this deal, but TellMe is making over $100 million a year from selling automated call-center services to large companies like FedEx.


4. TellMe is going to become an independently run subsidiary of Microsoft.


5. Mike McCue and other senior executives are going to stay with the company.

The TellMe acquisition could contribute to any number of Microsoft's speech recognition technologies. From Microsoft's press release,

"For more than a decade, Microsoft has enabled speech, handwriting and touch as forms of natural user input, making computing and digital devices easier to use. Combining Tellme’s technologies with Microsoft’s existing and future products and services will help improve the way people use voice to find, use and share information:

• Unified communications. Tellme’s voice-enabled services and solutions for enterprise customers complement Microsoft’s unified communications voice services portfolio. This will allow customers and industry partners to build highly scalable voice solutions that leverage rich identity, presence, messaging and application integration.




• Speech platform. Tellme’s robust voice-enabled platform helps open new doors for Microsoft’s hundreds of thousands of developers and partners to build innovative speech solutions based on open standards.




• Mobile services and search. Tellme’s speech expertise and work in mobile search, combined with Microsoft’s innovative local and mobile search offerings, will help take the mobile search usability experience to the next level.




• Software plus services. In the long term, Tellme technology will enhance Microsoft’s many voice-enabled applications, including the Windows Vista™ operating system, the Microsoft Office system, and mobile applications such as Windows Mobile® and Windows® Automotive.

Aaaah, I finally get to use that headline!

(via Boing Boing)

Lots of great food for thought from Jakob Nielsen and Tara Pernice Coyne reported on at OJR.

The normal stuff:

• Longer fixation as indicated in heat map studies isn't necessarily good. It can equate to less retention. So the longstanding Nielsen tenet that web users scan is still right, and so you offer them long gobs of content at your peril. So basically, at any given point in the scanning process, many users are still sort of navigating. (Broader takeaway for traditional journalism: it's not enough for newspapers etc. to just put their "great content" online. Online they might need to be investing in genuinely new media forms. Shorter fixation but longer duration might be the experience that reflects true information-gathering online.)

• Images need to be relevant and personable. Stock images, abstract concepts, and drawings often don't work. (I noticed this in action yesterday, asked to review an ecommerce site that sold an alternative type of flour. The photos on different quantities of flour were stock photos of a variety of desserts you could bake with it. Very confusing to see a cake when I'm expecting to buy flour, and then below that, to see scones. Etc.)

But of course the racy part is this: men fixate on both face and genital area - at least in the ballplayer picture; women fixate only on the face. The finding on the men doesn't surprise me all that much. Should I be surprised to note that the men are either comparing themselves to the athlete, or pondering having sex with him? No. But as always (not being female) I do find it utterly bracing to hear that the women (over 100 in the experiment) all wanted mainly to have a relationship with the ballplayer, or to see what he is focusing on or thinking. Really!?!?

Now there is an alternative explanation: the photo is of George Brett, who had a famous bout of hemorrhoids in the World Series in 1980. Perhaps the men knew this.

I know, this post wasn't pretty. I think it shed more heat than light.

Wow, I can't believe that domain squatter managed to squeeze $1 million out of Topix.net for the .com, according to Kevin Delaney's WSJ piece on the difficulty you can face if you change domain names (introducing the business world to our capricious world of lost Google traffic when sites are rewritten or redirected etc.). That's a lot of squatting cheddar. Unnecessary, in my view, but one of those buys you make if you or your investors have the money and are risk-averse. I sure hope both Topix users and Google get used to the new Topix.com domain.

I think the rest of us, especially those running content sites that need user loyalty but not purchase-point credibility, should start taking the attitude: "why bother"? How much is too much for a domain?

And yes that's me quoted farther down in the article, in relation to another domain change issue. :)

CLARIFICATION: I've received some feedback wondering why I am criticizing Topix. I am not! What I really don't like is domain squatters. I was impressed by the fact that Topix.net managed to do just fine with their name - and thought of them as sort an example of a company that bucked the trend that said you absolutely had to have a .com (like Craigslist if you like). Eventually when a company like this grows, they wind up acquiring the .com (as Craigslist certainly did); but my take for other small companies is, maybe you don't have to give in. We have certainly had plenty of egg on our face at other companies I've worked with in terms of naming and domain decisions; but the overreaction (paying outrageous sums to squatters) is something many of us can ill-afford. I recently paid $1,300 for a .net domain, and $1,300 for an "alternate" domain (completely new name) in lieu of a much higher price. I also got "lucky" and paid $1,900 for the unhyphenated version of my company name domain. These are fair prices and frankly about as high as I'm willing to go. And it's also worth pointing out to budding entrepreneurs: if you get something really original, domains are $10. OK, jawboning session over.