ComScore Chairman: Down with Clicks, Up with Video. Clicks just aren’t what they used to be. In fact, they’re pretty much meaningless for the online advertising business, said Gian Fulgoni, chairman and co-founder of comScore, during a keynote speech at the OMMA Hollywood conference in Los Angeles on Monday. In their place, advertisers and Web publishers need to focus on improved targeting, adding rich media and video to their sites and using better metrics to determine the effectiveness, return on investment and engagement, he said. “We have to get off the idea that a click is a valid metric. There are many other ways of measuring the effectiveness of ads,” he said. But if clicks are passe, what’s a more useful measure of effectiveness for web ads? ComScore can track the impact of online video ads by measuring whether Internet users who saw an online video ad then went on to visit a site or buy a product, for instance, he said.
302 Redirection. Twitter tweaks page titles, breaks out on Google | Webware. Twitter has changed its HTML title tags on user profile pages to make the site more search engine friendly. Instead of displaying its previous title of Twitter/"username," the site's new title displays the person's name, followed by his or her Twitter user name in parentheses and "on Twitter" after that.
The decision to change title tags is already working out to Twitter's advantage. I performed a vanity search on Google to see where my Twitter profile ranked in results for "Don Reisinger. " For the first time, it was on the first results page. I tested the new pages with random followers on Twitter to see if their profiles were on the first page of Google results. Twitter hasn't commented on the new title tags, nor has it released any traffic data showing the impact of having Twitter profiles in the first page of Google results, but search pages are coveted territory, especially on celebrity queries. Google Insights For Search Adds Valuable New Features. Three new features just announced this week will make the already valuable Google Insights for Search an even stronger keyword research tool. Here’s a look at what’s been added: 1.)
New data sources In addition to web search, you can now do keyword research for Image, News, and Product search, too. This opens up new opportunities for different types of web sites to do more specific data mining. 2.) The addition of categories lets you compare your keywords to similarly-themed keywords. 3.) You can more easily drill-down into pre-selected metro areas across the U.S. For more about the new features, see the official announcements on Inside AdWords and the Google News blog. Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: AdWords | Google: SEO | SEM Tools. Facial Recognition Comes to Facebook - ReadWriteWeb. This morning, Face.com announced that they're bringing advanced facial recognition technology to Facebook by way of a new application called Photo Finder.
Using proprietary facial scanning algorithms, this application scans through your photos and those public photos belonging to your friends in order to identify and suggest tags for the untagged people within them. The results of these scans are highly accurate - almost frighteningly so - and should lead to some interesting discoveries as the app spreads through Facebook when it finally becomes public. Limited invites available, click though to learn more! How Photo Finder Works Face.com's facial recognition software is able to scan through millions of photos in a relatively short amount of time. Although the results of the scan are not immediate upon adding the application, you're able to view them even while the scan is in progress.
After Photo Finder has finished its work, you can return to review the results. Privacy Concerns? Obama Reiterates Need for Cleantech Entrepreneurs in Rebuilding Economy. President Obama last week visited an electric vehicle R&D lab in California where he called on battery developers to step up and innovate. Today, back at the White House, the President once again reached out to cleantech entrepreneurs, this time at an event dubbed “Investing In Our Clean Energy Future.”
Obama met with entrepreneurs and researchers to talk about building an economy that runs on renewable energy and creating green jobs — and to continue promoting his 10-year budget plan, which includes $75 billion to make the Research and Experimentation Tax Credit permanent. Paul Holland, who focuses on early-stage cleantech investments as a general partner at Foundation Capital and sits on the board of green building materials maker Serious Materials (and will speak at our Green:Net conference tomorrow), kicked off today’s session by telling event attendees about Serious Materials’ plans to reopen shuttered plants and rehire laid-off workers. At this point, “We’re hiring!” The Future of the News Ecosystem. I've known Steven Johnson's work since reading Mind Wide Open. I missed his talk at SxSW, but thanks to the connection with the topic and idea, I am now reading it on his blog. [hat tip Bruno Giussani] In our conversation last week we talked about we media and the question of what would happen to the democratic process if journalists didn't have work anymore.
In the past, we also discussed whether we would pay for news in a form different than newspapers. We could have some form of freemium, as suggested first by Chris Anderson - perhaps free general information, then a cost for a deeper dive. This was also the finding of an AP-sponsored report on the news consumption of young-adult readers. What happens if newspapers disappear as businesses? In fact, the main question Johnson asked in his talk (and post) is what is the future of news itself? The other example Johnson shares is that of political news. Surviving elements of the old system, changed. [image by Steven Johnson] Redesign Revolt: What Should Facebook Do Next? Facebook users are still buzzing angrily about Facebook's recent homepage redesign. The latest installment of this social media drama is an email Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent to his employees stating that "the most disruptive companies don't listen to their customers. " This is in addition to a popular application that has polled users on the redesign, with over 90% voting in disapproval.
The firestorm simply doesn't subside for Mark Zuckerberg and company. Given the controversy, what should be Facebook's next move? In my view, Facebook has three different choices in approaching the redesign revolt: 1. I don't know how they'll approach the redesign revolt, but this is unlike past revolts such as the News Feed revolt because more features were taken away than added this time around. The Future of Twitter: Social CRM. Geithner: My Plan for Bad Bank Assets. Tony Steward from LifeChurchTV | chrisbrogan.com. I was really happy to have a few minutes with Tony Steward, the online community pastor for LifeChurch.tv. Tony’s an energetic, passionate guy with a lot of great ideas about what comes next. I liked what I saw of LifeChurch, and so I asked Tony to talk a bit more about it. We shot this at SXSW09 at the Pepsico Podcast Playground. Originally, I thought of LifeChurch.tv as a place to cater to those who couldn’t make it to church, like shut-ins and others who are physically infirm.
Tony explained that it went far beyond that. Quite interesting, to say the least. ChrisBrogan.com runs on the Genesis Framework The Genesis Framework empowers you to quickly and easily build incredible websites with WordPress. With automatic theme updates and world-class support included, Genesis is the smart choice for your WordPress website or blog. Find out more about the framework features Check out the Genesis demo and the wide variety of child themes See example designs in the Genesis design showcase. Living | Are you sushi savvy?
Zoom Pardon me, Toronto, but your sushi manners are atrocious. Servers cringe when you unwrap your chopsticks and rub them together vigorously like some demented carpenter with a splinter phobia. Chefs weep when you pick up delicately seasoned bundles of nigiri with chopsticks and dip them rice-side down into an overflowing dish of soy sauce, the colour of which approximates the Don River owing to runoff from vast amounts of wasabi. It's not your fault. The finer points of sushi etiquette are largely unknown outside Japan. "Nobody cares about it," says Keiichi Masuda, owner and chef at Mikado restaurant on Laird Dr. in Leaside, which he opened 31 years ago. About five years ago, he gently suggested to a sushi-bar customer that she shouldn't dip the nigiri into the soy rice-side down, and that she was using too much sauce. The one-page handouts on sushi etiquette are scattered about the restaurant and inserted inside each menu.
"I don't want to push too many Japanese customs," says Masuda. Bubbl.us - free web application for brainstorming online. How AIG Became Too Big to Fail. Get YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, and Yelp Previews From Inside Gmail. Google's been busy making sure you never have to leave their products to view the content your friends share with you. They recently made YouTube videos watchable in Gmail chat, and now they're extending that functionality to your entire inbox. Your inbox will never look the same once you enable the four new Labs features for Gmail — YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, and Yelp previews. To enable the new Labs features, just click on the green labs icon, enable the previews you want to start seeing in your Gmail, then click save.
Once YouTube previews are enabled, you can watch videos from inside your email whenever a YouTube URL is shared with you. With Flickr and Picasa previews, photos will appear within emails. Meanwhile, Yelp previews allow you to view ratings, phone numbers, and total number of reviews without ever leaving your inbox. More Gmail Resources From Mashable - GMAIL TOOLBOX: 60+ Tools for Gmail- 13 Gmail Extensions for Firefox 3- 7 Ways to Send HUGE Files: 25X Bigger than Gmail. RateADrug: Get the Real Scoop on Prescription Drugs and their Side Effects. So your doctor has just prescribed you a new medication to address whatever it is that’s ailing you. How do you know what the side effects might be? Sure, your doctor will probably explain them and you can read the label, but what do real users have to say? Will it make you see blue, cause indigestion, or simply zonk you out and make you think you’ve been fishing all day?
That’s where RateADrug comes in. The site allows users to share their own experiences with different prescription drugs, ranging from Ambien, to Zoloft, to yes, Viagara. For example, under Zoloft, one comment reads: “[Zoloft] actually changed my life. Most of the feedback on RateADrug is anonymous, which, isn’t surprising since most people don’t want the world knowing what medications they’re on. There’s lots of interesting data on RateADrug, and if you rate drugs yourself, you’ll get comparative data of how your experience compares to other users on the site.
More Health Resources from Mashable. Passwords of Comcast Customers Exposed - Bits Blog. Twitter Suspending Re-follows - Is Your Account in Danger? By Sherice Jacob (follow her @sherice), a web designer, copywriter and author of Get Niche Quick! One of the more openly advertised ways of getting a high number of followers to your Twitter account is to follow high-profile bloggers, tweeters and newsmakers. There’s nothing wrong with that, right? According to a new post by TwitTown – automated re-following could be putting your account in danger. If you’re like most Tweeters, you shouldn’t be worried. However, Twitter is taking a closer look at automatic re-following, originally promoted to help new Tweeters get attention and build an audience, as a case for spam and closing your account. What particularly annoys Twitter is when re-following doesn’t happen just once, but constantly over the course of a certain period of time. The TwitTown article highlights Twitter user Louis Gray who has profiled two of the rogue Twitter spammers, @PoliticalUpdate and @twtr.us (both of whose accounts have since been suspended).
Although Alison Doyle has done a nice job of starting to build a list of Career Experts and Job Sites on Twitter, I haven’t seen any “must follow” lists for job seekers. That’s why I decided to make one. The first half of the list consists of 25 people that I think that every job seeker on Twitter should be following, while the second half offers more general recommendations on what types of people you should be following to help your job search. The list is in no particular order, and it’s nowhere near exhaustive.
If you have suggestions, I’d love to see them in the comments. 1. Willy Franzen (@willyf) – Yes, that’s me. I made the list, so I get to be on it. And always has great insight into the job search process. 4. . 7. . 9. . . And his blog at IWillTeachYouToBeRich.com. 15. And I’m on Facebook–Now What??? . 25. Following all of those people will help a lot, but the true power of Twitter comes through connecting with people who share your interests and passions. 26-30. Twitter Now Growing at a Staggering 1,382 Percent. Maybe it’s Jimmy Fallon's integration of it into his new TV show, Shaq’s use of it to interact in real-life with fans, or blog’s ability to write about it non-stop, but one way or another, Twitter’s growth just continues to explode.
The latest numbers from Nielsen Online indicate that Twitter grew 1,382% year-over-year in February, registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the US for the month. Not only is that huge growth in one year, but in one month as well, as in January, Twitter.com clocked in with 4.5 million unique visitors in the US, meaning the service grew by more than 50 percent month-over-month. Elsewhere in the social networking space, Facebook continued to widen its lead on MySpace, with a total of 65.7 million unique visitors versus 54.1 million for its increasingly distant competitor.
The competition that most are now focused on, however, is that between Facebook and Twitter. Facebook is Ready to Rule the (Social Network) World - PC World. Facebook appears closer than ever to social network domination, if some freshly compiled stats are to be believed. The site has more than doubled its traffic from one year ago, analysis firm Hitwise has found, jumping nearly 150 percent from February of '08 to February 2009. Astronomical Growth There's no question Facebook's growth has been astronomical: Since opening its doors to the public back in September of 2006 (the site has been limited only to college students up to that point), Facebook has seen what can only be described as an explosion in use.
Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said just a few weeks ago that a million new users are signing up every week in the U.S. alone. Now, though, it's becoming even more apparent how drastic of a change that's bringing to the overall market. Sure, MySpace is still in the lead -- but seeing the two rates of change side-by-side can't be comforting for the folks on Tom Anderson's team. Twitter Integration. The Ultimate Open Courseware Toolset: 60 Directories, Search Engines, and Web Tools | The .Edu Toolbox. AIG yields to congressional pressure, names counterparties - Mar. 15, 2009. Los Angeles Metblogs. Why Ideals are the New Business Models - Umair Haque - HarvardBusiness.org. Ayn Rand Followers Blame Altruism for Economic Collapse. Anonymous Tweeting is Wrong. Technology | Last.FM joins Google's rights row. Forget iTunes U: Students Now Getting College Credit via YouTube - ReadWriteWeb.
Female athlete was really a man. Verizon Customers - Just Say No! - ReadWriteWeb. Please Retweet Me Makes Retweeting Dead Simple. Top 10 funniest news reporter bloopers | Webware. Google Privacy Blunder Shares Your Docs Without Permission. Platform Thinking in Personal Branding | chrisbrogan.com. Twitter: TwitteReader Gives Twitter a Google Reader Feel. Colonies of 'Cybots' May Defend Government Networks - Science News | Science.
Is Google Rewiring Our Brains? 5 Startup Tips From the Father of Gmail and FriendFeed. Facebook. Breaking: Facebook Launching New Real-Time Homepage. Facebook in 2010: no longer a walled garden - O'Reilly Radar. Find Out the Most Influential Users on Twitter with the ReTweetability Index. Joanne Bamberger: There's More to Influence on Twitter Than Being Famous. Linkedin Teams Up with Twitter Through Company Buzz. Median Home Price In Detroit Is $7,500.