All About Content

I get the Google Friends newsletter. I thought this was a cute story, but what I found most interesting is the use of “google” as a verb. For a company that doesn’t want its tradename used as a verb, to the point of having its lawyers send cease and desist letters, it certainly seems counterproductive to publish a newsletter that appears to encourage it:

We admit it: we love learning about all the things people use Google to do. Such as … how to find a lost tortoise. Here’s a story we got from Jim Lyness: “After Christmas, my son Sam wanted a turtle. We bought a Russian Tortoise instead, and named him Rocky. Well, one day, we let Rocky out for a stroll around the house. We could not find him that night, and into the following day. After the boys went to school, my wife Susan and I were stumped. Did Rocky get out the front door?
Susan googled [how to find a Russian Tortoise] and bang — we had a game plan. Russian Tortoises like warm, dark spaces. We started in the boys’ bedroom, again. We pulled the bunk bed back and there was Rocky at the head of the bed. Case solved. When we tell friends and family about googling How to Find a Russian Tortoise, they bust a gut in laughter! “

If you have a story about how Google search has made an impact on something on your world, we’d love to hear it. Use either of the links below – either submit your tale through a web form or upload your story on video to YouTube. (If you shoot video, be sure to tag it “google testimonial” when you upload it.)

Web form: http://www.google.com/contact/success.html

As for my success story, I googled “Google sues media for using google as a verb” to find the article I needed for the link in the first paragraph.

Note: I wrote this post in 2007. The link landscape has changed since then, and am not recommending these tactics/services for link building now.

SponsoredReviews.com launched in beta today and of course I went and signed up right away. (Damn, that’s one more site I need to include in my review of paid blogging services, which I said I’d do last month and still haven’t gotten around to.)

Right off the bat, the thing I already like (from an advertiser’s perspective) is that the system more closely resembles an RFP system; that is to say, you post an opportunity (here SponsoredReviews.com uses the same language as PayPerPost) and bloggers can submit bids to do the reviews for you. You can accept a blogger’s bid, haggle over the price or reject the bid outright (if the blog is off-topic, of poor quality, too expensive, etc.) None of the other paid blogging services allow you to reject specific bloggers.

Within 30 minutes of posting an opportunity to see how well SponsoredReviews.com worked, I had 2 bloggers bid on it — which seemed decent for a service that just launched earlier that morning. After about 2 hours I had about two dozen bids.

Like ReviewMe, SponsoredReviews.com allows you to actively approach specific bloggers with your opportunities, which they can then choose to take on if they wish. The mechanism by which to search for relevant blogs to approach is similar to ReviewMe; advertisers can browse by keywords the bloggers have chosen to describe their sites.

As far as the service goes from a blogger’s point of view, I haven’t had much time to play around with it, but I like that I can pursue specific opportunities (like PayPerPost) and that the payouts tend to be higher (like ReviewMe, except the likelihood of actually getting to do a review are much higher. I have yet to be approached by an advertiser through ReviewMe since I signed up).

If you’d like me to review and link to your site, you can do so from my SponsoredReviews.com profile page. But I’d caution you to read the paid reviews I’ve done of other sites first (read: if your site sucks, I won’t hesitate to lambaste you).

Short post about something not related to search engines, but an important reminder nonetheless: if you don’t have enterprise support for data storage, there are online backup options you can consider.

I have terrible luck with computers — my current work laptop has some sort of issue that causes it to spontaneously shut down at random intervals (it doesn’t even go through the shut down process, it just turns off); at my previous job I triggered Microsoft’s Blue Screen of death not once, not twice, but three times; my personal laptop went flying off my desk a few too many times after I tripped over the cord until the thingamajig that the power cord plugs into stopped working entirely (thank goodness my friend was able to rescue the harddrive) — so I really ought to make it a regular habit to back up my computer. But of course I don’t — I imagine I’m like most non-power-users in that way. Actually, I’ve learned enough about my terrible luck that I save all my work documents directly to the network because at least that gets backed up regularly. Now if only my connection to the network wouldn’t crap out so often.

The only thing I back up on my personal computer is my photographs because Flickr makes so easy. But aside from that I haven’t really considered online backup as an option, since that tends to be slow.

But one of the advertisers on PayPerPost is advertising its online backup and online storage for small businesses as enterprise-class. IBackup Online Storage starts at $9.95 for 5 gigs a month and offers a variety of add-on and collaborative features. Their service has won a number of computer magazine awards.

Frankly, since my home computer storage needs are pretty minimal (outside of my photography), it would probably make more sense for me to do all my backups onto disk (see above for story on how I have an extra harddrive sitting around for that purpose). However, if you could use an online storage/backup solution, go visit this post’s sponsor IBackup.com for a free trial.

This has been a paid post.

Online advertising will grow by 21%, reaching $81 billion by 2011, according to a research report by Piper Jaffray & Co. Internet Media and Marketing:

“The historically passive consumer is changing rapidly, not only becoming more informed and confident about purchase decisions, but also increasingly taking control of the consumption of information and content that used to be distributed by networks, studios, publishers and retailers,” said Safa Rashtchy, senior research analyst at Piper Jaffray, in a press release.

The report says that consumers are taking control of their consumption of online content and brands.