DIY With Google’s DKI Tool?
I love PBS’s “This Old House”; the show’s experts effortlessly tackle all sorts of home improvement issues and problems, but because I don’t possess their skills, I know better than to try to duplicate their feats. Yet with Google’s dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) tool, the question is not whether or not you can DIY, but whether or not you should.
Big Easy Ain’t Easy For Google Earth
Google has faced a hurricane of criticism for changing their Google maps images of post-Katrina New Orleans to pre-storm images. The reasons for the change are flimsy at best.
Chikai Ohazama, a Google product manager for satellite imagery told the AP that the maps now available are the best the company can offer. He said that a number of factors determine what goes into the databases, "everything from resolution to quality to when the actual imagery was acquired."
Consumers Pay More Attention To Video Ads
Here’s a stat you’ll find interesting: people are twice as likely to press the "Play" button on a video ad than they are to click a standard JPG or GIF ad. The bad news: they only watch two-thirds of the ad. But they did press "Play."
The information comes from a recent study conducted by digital marketing company DoubleClick.
The study of 300 participants over a six month period showed that consumers were much more interactive with video ads, which makes DoubleClick assume the format is very effective.
In-Site Linking Is In Demand
In-site links may feel pointless; after all, you would never gain anything by listing yourself as a reference in the real world. But in answer to the question of whether in-site links have any value, the good folks at Pandia believe, “Actually, they do.”
Okay, so, “Actually, the do” is what really appears, but typos happen, and the main idea stands.
Social Media: Tip-Toeing The Transparency Line
Some believe that social media is one of the greatest viral marketing opportunities that has ever been presented. Others felt that it is a passing fad with no long-term future, and that businesses shouldn’t waste valuable time and manpower chasing the social media audience, to which they ascribe the perception of fickleness.
YouTube Streams, Lycos Mixes
YouTube has added some new services to their site. They now allow users to organize video clips around categories. A number of online publications are reporting that YouTube has recently launched TestTube on their site.
After doing some research it became clear that TestTube is not a new feature to YouTube and it has been around since December 2006 as reported here. Maybe it is a case of Internet amnesia. I will briefly cover these not so new features anyway.
The “How to Beat Google” Series
Rich Skrenta is running a series on his blog called How To Beat Google, detailing the strategies needed to defeat Google in the marketplace, and consequently, showing exactly what Google’s competitors are doing wrong. The advice includes:
Marketing: Content, Context, Community
In a previous article I talked about the 3 C’s of Marketing as explained at John Jantsch’s Duct Tape
Marketing.
Bad or Good? – Wrong Question
Aaron Swartz is an interesting guy. One of the co-founders of Reddit, the Digg-like recommendation engine that was recently bought by the Conde Nast magazine-publishing empire, his blog often has long and thoughtful posts with a refreshingly different perspective. His latest is no exception: In a post entitled “Everything Good is Bad For You,” he writes about what he sees as the downside of Web services like Twitter, and even Reddit itself.
Courts Becoming Busy With Blog Lawsuits
March was a busy month for lawsuits involving bloggers and webmasters. The court system taking them to task for defamatory statements, with one case becoming the first to go to trial and result in a liability verdict.
A legal system once tentative about taking on digital cases is braving the waters with more frequency. Most of the cases we’ve reported on have involved the statements of anonymous commentators, liability for which webmasters and bloggers have been repeatedly exonerated (or are expected to be). But these are different.