Someone is setting out to write a book: 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google and soliciting feedback. An earlier post highlights some classics. I also like Guess the Google game. Play them at work at your own risk.
Apparently people do … According to LightReading.com, AOL is losing customers at a rate of 300 an hour!
Google is giving away the web analytics program formerly-known-as Urchin.
The company wants to give online marketers and publishers analytics tools to have a better sense of what customers want, said Paul Muret, Google engineering director, who was one of the founders of Urchin. “With this knowledge, businesses can create more accurate advertising and build better web sites,” said Mr. Muret.
It boggles the mind the amount of content, as well as what kinds of user behavior data, Google is going to have at its fingertips. Don’t think for a moment there isn’t a strategy behind an offering like this - Google is in the money-making business after all.
So popular was this announcement, timed to coincide with PubCon, that enough people rushed to sign up that it caused problems for existing (paying) users.
Barry Schwartz reports in Search Engine Journal that Matt Cutts, a Google spokesperson, has confirmed what most of us already knew: the Sandbox exists — but only in some industries. (Sorry for the heresay, but you need a login to access the original thread on Webmaster World.)
… but would a rose by any other name…?
Google is renaming its book-scanning project Google Book Search. Type in http://print.google.com and it redirects to http://books.google.com. The explanation given on the Official Google Blog:
Why the change? Well, one factor was all the comments we got about how excited people were that Google Print would help them print out their documents, or web pages they visit — which of course it won’t.More important, the change reflects our product’s evolution. When we launched Google Print, our goal was to make it easier for users to discover books. Now that we’re starting to achieve that, we think a more descriptive name will help clarify what our users can do with it: namely, search the full text of books to find ones that interest them and learn where to buy or borrow them.
Only two weeks left to think of something really profound to say to your future self.
… is not something I’ll be doing any time soon, or ever. But it can be done. Want to know how?
So far I’ve only written about really annoying ways some people try to make money using AdSense, but there are of course people (”publishers” in the jargon of the industry) who are doing quite well with sites that are 100% legitimate.
Today, while putting in some serious SE-elbOw grease at work, I bumped into a guy whom some might call a minor celebrity in the blogging world — not only for being one of those people who actually earns a substantial AdSense income, but also for making it look so easy.
“Look” being the operative word. Jon Gales is sometimes described as a kid who makes really good money just hanging out on his parents’ couch while the AdSense revenue pours in. There’s more to it than that.
Jon was kind enough to agree to an interview for this little blog — sometime in the next couple of weeks, when I come up with some interesting questions that haven’t been asked before. If you’d like insights into how he does what he does, or have any other question, post a comment here or use the feedback form.
p.s. Keep in mind that AdSense TOS preclude him from discussing click-throughs and other performance metrics.
Google Base is out of beta Beta into actual Beta. If you thought I was exaggerating when I wrote Submit Anything You Want Saved, take a gander at Google’s newest offering.
Google Base is a repository for users to post pretty much anything online — poems, recipes, job postings, as well as products … and just for the hell of it, why not also a map of the human genome. When it was being previewed last week, it was being called a competitor to Craig’s List, but simply by the nature of being a Google product, this is already much, much more. IT World writes:
Google appears to have made its most concrete move to date into the realm of user-generated content and tagging, popularized by services such as the Del.icio.us social-bookmarking site.
["User generated content" is the buzzphrase of the day. Yahoo, which has been better thus far in fostering a community among its users, also just launched a user-generated shopping portal (the too-cute-for-its-own-good "Shoposphere") in time for the holiday shopping frenzy.]
Not about search, but just Internet user behavior, here’s a bit from the WebProNews email newsletter: IM Becoming Medium Of Choice
Instant messaging is overtaking email as the preferred way to communicate, especially among teens and young adults. Overall, IM’s are up 19 percent year over year, with many Americans sending as many, if not more, IM’s than they do emails, according to AOL’s Instant Messaging Trends Survey.
According to IDC (in an Oct. 5 and a Nov. 4 WebProNews article), nearly 12 billion instant messages get sent each day; 1 billion of that is over enterprise systems.
“Google is the realization of everything that we thought the Internet was going to be about but really wasn’t until Google.”
The quote is attributed to David Yoffie, who is cited as a professor at Harvard Business School, in a recent NYT article. But what’s more interesting IMO is that Yoffie is currently also a member of the Intel Board of Directors.
