Searching Bing By Voice from Your Phone
Back in 2007, Microsoft acquired Tellme Networks, the company that provides the Tellme service, which is a technology that allows mobile users to "get what they want" on their phones with their voice.
Marketers Ignoring Customer Feedback from Social Media
A Social Media Survey conducted on behalf of PRWeek and MS&L by PRWeek and CA Walker found that marketers don’t make changes to their products based on customer feedback, despite monitoring feedback being one of the most common business uses of social media in the first place.
The survey found that 70% of marketers say they’ve never made a change to a product or marketing efforts based on feedback from consumers on social media sites.
Why Your Robots.txt Blocked URLs May Show up in Google
Matt Cutts has appeared in yet another Google Webmaster Video, and this time he has a whiteboard with him so he can illustrate what he’s talking about. What he’s talking about this time are uncrawled URLs in search results.
Cutts says Google gets a lot of complaints from webmasters who say the search engine is violating their robots.txt files, with which they intend to keep Google from crawling certain pages. Sometimes those URLs still end up in search results.
Google Goes Back To Browser Basics
Leave it to Google to (try to) plug an odd little knowledge gap. Even as people can’t find Iraq on a map and push the limits of irony by misspelling "embarrassed," the search company has, for some reason, created a site to teach what a Web browser is.
WhatBrowser.org is a very simple site that is able to tell visitors what browser they’re using. A 69-second video also defines the term, while other sections talk about useful tweaks and offer speed tests.
Facebook Tries to Monitor Happiness
Facebook has revealed the United States "Gross National Happiness," the results of a study on the collective mood of Facebook users. Facebook "data scientists" started a project earlier in the year to measure the overall mood of people from the US on the social network, based on what they said in status updates.
54% of Businesses Prohibit Employee Social Media Use
New research from Robert Half Technology indicates that over half of chief information officers (CIOs) do not allow employees to visit social networking sites for any reason while they’re at work. This information comes from a survey of 1,400 CIOs from companies around the US with 100 or more employees.
Bloggers Can (Not?) Be Fined Up to 11K Per Post for Non-Disclosure
Update 2: The FTC is now saying that the $11,000 fine is not accurate, at least for the first violation. Fast company got some responses from Richard Cleland, assistant director, division of advertising practices at the FTC, who says:
Google, Bing Reps Talk Best Practices
Google and Bing employees know tons of useful stuff about search engines, and many people find their tips useful. But let’s admit: a lot of SEO experts have seen the same pieces of advice repeated at conference after conference for years, and so at SMX East, two speakers went a little bit off the beaten path into the subjects of speed and security.
Mobile Subscriptions To Reach 4.6 Billion
Global mobile subscriptions are on track to reach 4.6 billion by the end of the year, and mobile broadband subscriptions are set to surpass 600 million in 2009, according to a new report by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
More than a quarter of the world’s population is online and using the Internet, as of 2009. Increasing numbers are opting for high-speed Internet access, with fixed broadband subscriber numbers more than tripling from 150 million in 2004 to a projected 500 million by the end of 2009.
The Most Loyal Traffic Comes from Facebook
There’s no question that search engines can be a tremendous source of traffic. Social networks are also proving to be big traffic generators for a lot of content producers, and Twitter is one of the big ones.
However, it is Facebook and Digg that are driving the most repeat readers according to a study conducted by online ad network Chitika. Traffic is great, but traffic that returns is even better.