Google Street View Still Unwelcome in English Village

Broughton, Buckinghamshire, England, has found a way to get on the map—by staying off the map. Back in April, an angry mob defeated a Google Street View car by forming a human chain, and apparently this is news to UPI. It was a good thing the villagers acted when they did—the search giant is so powerful [...]

Bing’s Visual Search Needs to Be Seen to Be Believed!

When the folks at Bing first demonstrated Visual Search, I was blown away. That’s quite an accomplishment for this search cynic. Now you get to try it for yourself–as the feature has just gone live. It’s really hard to describe Visual Search, which is why I told Bing, “You have to do a video demo of [...]

Ask.com Introduces ‘Search for the Cure’

What’s a great way for a search engine that struggles to be mentioned with the top search providers in the marketplace to get some traffic? Do something for someone else. That’s exactly what Ask.com is doing with its ‘Search or the Cure’ campaign which is designed to raise one million dollars to Susan G. Komen [...]

Real-Time Google Search Hack–With Free Açaí Berries!

Psst! Want some real time search in ya Google? I’ve picked up a batch from the same people that make Açaí “detox-weight-loss-live-forever” supplements, so you know it’s the real deal! You in? OK, all you have to do is make a slight change to the output URL for any Google search. It’s easy. Conduct a search for anything and [...]

Is Your PR Agency SEO & Social Media Savvy?

[Note from Lee:  The PR industry is in a state of flux with changes in the print industry, citizen journalism and the social web. Consumer behaviors with information discovery, consumption and sharing have been significantly affected by the dramatic increase in social platform usage and ease of self publishing. Companies that rely on reaching and [...]

Cartoon: Radical Transparency

Never fear, you won’t find me adopting this the next time I give a talk about my book. (via) Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

Cup of Joe: Transparency is Killing Ad Profits.

Not long ago we reported that Hulu is now attracting more viewers than Time Warner Cable. However, despite that, the cable networks that own Hulu are still making the majority of their ad profits from traditional media. Hulu is not the only one suffering from failed ad programs while their user base rises. Facebook now has [...]

Affiliate Marketers to Courts – Kill the Amazon Tax!

By Trisha Lyn Fawver If ever a cause was near & dear to me, this is definitely one of them. As an affiliate manager, affiliate marketing is my livelihood.  Over the last year, several states have introduced legislation defining affiliates as tax nexus for businesses.  This means that if a merchant has affiliates in a [...]

Job Seekers and Social Media: Not So Perfect Together

You hear the stories all the time. The human resources manager decides to do a little ORR (online reputation research) on a job candidate. They hear that they is a great candidate for a job opening. They are the best interview by far and the scuttlebutt in the office is that they are the person [...]

Is Bing 2.0 in the Chute?

Apparently, Twitter is making waves with Microsoft in ways that you may not consider. Yesterday Mary-Jo Foley of ZDNet reported about some of the tweets coming from the annual Microsoft product demo event (and pep rally â€" her terminology) held at Safeco Field in Seattle. About 20,000 folks attended and were leaking some info (not [...]

Social Media: Total Copycats

Is it just me, or does it seem like every time one social media service comes up with a cool feature, it’s only a matter of time before every other site copies it, and there are no cool new features left? This time, Facebook is copying Twitter (yet again) and YouTube is copying Facebook. YouTube’s latest [...]

DOJ Ups Bingahoo Scrutiny

If you were just waiting for the other shoe to fall on the Yahoo-Microsoft deal—good news. Wait no longer. The US Department of Justice is taking another long, hard look at the deal. The New York Times reports that the DoJ has requested a second round of information from the companies about the pending search deal. [...]

If Your Domain Includes “Google” the Search Giant is Coming For Ya!

That great idea you had that involved launching a new SEO company using PwnGoogleRankings.com? Yeah, you probably should have saved the $10 you spent on domain registration fees, because you have approximately zero chance that ICANN will let you keep it. Just ask Absolutee Inc which registered googlewebmarketing.com hoping to convince us all that it was [...]

4 Scary Scenarios That Twitter’s New Terms Allow

I know it may appear I go looking for trouble, but I promise you I just like to share with you my concerns. In the case of Twitter’s update to its Terms of Service, I started thinking about what the changes could mean to us users. I’m a huge fan of Twitter, and very much rely [...]

5 Tips for Writing Fresh and Unique Copy for the Web

A novelist can ride the tails of that one great book for years. And a print journalist who’s broken the story of the century might be able to play off that success for several months. But for writers producing copy for the web, creating that one great blog post or article is just that: one [...]

CMO Summit Thoughts

For the past day and a half I have been able to listen to some of the leaders in the world of marketing discuss the trials and tribulations of marketing’s corner office dwellers: CMO’s. As I discussed yesterday there are plenty of specifics from these marketing leaders and I will likely be talking about some [...]

Facebook Lite Lights Up in US and India

Back in August we told you of the premature introduction of Facebook Lite. Many people speculated about what this could mean for the social media world and Facebook tried to calm everyone’s nerves by deflecting all the fuss and launching the beta version just a few days later. Well, now it’s official. Facebook Lite is here [...]

Connect Propelled Facebook Past MySpace

In case you missed it, Facebook is pretty popular. As of June 2008, they’d beat MySpace in terms of total unique visitors worldwide (ballooning to twice as many uniques as MySpace in January 2009)—and even in the US, one of the few Facebook-is-#2 holdouts, Facebook has caught up to MySpace. Hitwise takes a look at [...]

More Video Coming to Google Search Ads

Back in March 2008, we first saw video live in Google search ads. However, eighteen months later, video ads are still scarce in the SERPs. But maybe Google’s rethinking that, according to a Reuters report about a conference call yesterday. Google is looking at changes in their search ads: “Our search ads have largely looked the same [...]

Google Internet Stats Could Become My Favorite Tool of 2009!

As a blogger who enjoys nothing better than nomming on delicious industry statistics, Google just served up a feast–and didn’t tell anyone. Fortunately, RWW was kind enough to share news that Google UK has quietly rolled out Google Internet Stats for public consumption. Basically, it’s another of Google’s “structured search” efforts, this time taking stats and [...]

Search Behemoth Gets Behemoth Search

Just a week after Google was granted a patent for its unique homepage design, the search engine has thrown it out the window. Yes, Google has made a HUGE change to the homepage design. OK, I’m embellishing a little. Google has made a small change to the homepage…and it only applies to the search box. The new [...]

CMO Summit Outlines Challenges and Opportunities

Over the next day or so I will be giving you some information that I have been gathering while at the CMO Summit in San Francisco. The even is put on by the Aberdeen Group and thus far has been incredibly informative. I write that with a bit of surprise because unfortunately events often sound [...]

Internet Radio Trying to Carve Out a Future

While we talk about the death of newspapers with great regularity it gets to be old news real quickly and even starts to feel a little mean. So to relieve that pressure eMarketer has come out with a report that is evidence of the decline and fall of another old friend, radio. Terresttrial radio is [...]

Nielsen to Measure Online TV Audience

Nielsen has been measuring television audiences for decades. Now online TV is starting to take over—but do we have accurate measurement of the online TV audience? comScore and other online measurement companies are watching videos—I mean, online video audiences—grow and grow. Now Nielsen will use a new “Internet Meter” with its People Meter families to measure [...]

Have a Facebook Page? Post on Tuesdays

When the company I worked for got into email marketing, the perfect day and time to send an email blast was the holy grail. Can’t send on Monday because people are digging out from the weekend. Can’t send on Friday because people are thinking about the weekend. Can’t send first thing in the morning because [...]

Big Ben Edition: BIGLIST SEO Blog Reviews 090909

What a remarkable date today! 09/09/09.  Welcome to the UK Edition of TopRank’s BIGLIST of Search Marketing Blog reviews. Since I’m in London this week, (photo above was taken with my trusty 3GS iPhone) I decided to focus mostly on SEO/PPC and Social Media Marketing Bloggers here in the UK.  It’s a nice mix of search, [...]

Warning: Marketers Are Watching Your Children

Companies that sell software to monitor your child’s online activity are double-dipping by selling the collected data to marketers, according to AP. Not every software provider is engaging in the practice, but EchoMetrix Inc’s Sentry and FamilySafe brands are called out in particular. Because the software “listens” to the instant messenger conversations of kids, it’s able [...]

WordPress Acquires Grammer Gramer Grammar Checking Software

I’ve always maintained that it’s dangerous to take a single Marketing Pilgrim post and assume you understand our sentiment and bias towards any one company. If you read yesterday’s criticism of WordPress, you’d think we were “automattic” haters. Today, you’d be eating humble pie. Automattic has announced the acquisition of After the Deadline, a service that provides [...]

Icahn’s Not the Only One: Bartz Selling Yahoo Stock

Carl Icahn’s recent Yahoo stock dump didn’t cause too much alarm—although he took a $125M loss, he still retains 4.5% of the company (and his board seats). But now Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz looks like she’s dumping stocks—and investors are none too happy. As The Guardian reports, when Carol Bartz took the helm, she was given [...]

Google Giving Up ANYTHING for Book Deal to Get eBooks

Thousands of aspiring authors from around the world can now totally sympathize with Google—because the search giant is also struggling to get a book deal. Well, okay, so mostly they’re struggling to get regulatory approval of a book deal, and said book deal is more about licensing and ePub than actually breaking into the industry—but [...]