Anyone who's ever found traditional search results to be a little one-dimensional should be glad to hear that Yahoo's addressing the issue.  Something called Glue Pages Beta slaps together normal search results, Google Blog Search results, Yahoo Answers results, HowStuffWorks articles, Wikipedia entries, Flickr images, and YouTube videos all in one place.

read more

China says it can't promise that it won't censor the Internet this summer during the Beijing Olympics.

Wang Wei, executive vice president of the Beijing Olympic organizers, had assured the International Olympic Committee that the 30,000 reporters covering the games would have open access to the Internet.

read more

Posted by kung_fu_mike

5-8%. It doesn't sound like a huge amount of most things. What if I told you it was 5-8% of the visitors to your site? Would you be more interested then? What if I told you it was 5-8% of the visitors you coveted the most. The visitors you spent the most time worrying about. The most energy on. The visitors that don't stay. Thats right. What if I told you there was a way to get 5-8% of the people who returned to the search engine results page to stay on your page? Keep reading.

Lijit is the brain child of Stan James, stemming from his masters thesis project Outfoxed. Outfoxed was social network combined with a browser plugin. It worked by appending markup to you search results pages telling you who who might know wand how much they trusted an individual result. Obviously a social network that only works when there is a bunch of people on it combined with a browser plugin is a tough business model.

Lijit was born of one of the primary values of Outfoxed. Trust based searching. Lijit allows you to create your own network of pages including social network profiles, blog, delicious tags and many other things all searchable from the Lijit widget placed on your page. The setup is easy, and it leads us to the 5-8%.

The 5-8% is the figure reported by Micah Baldwin of Lijit as the average percentage of visitors who click on one of Lijits suggested links, which come from what I believe to be Lijit's finest feature. First we start with a Google search for "term sheets".

Down at the 10th link position you will see "Term Sheet Series Wrap Up" by Brad Feld. I am headed there 1) cause he has the Lijit Widget installed, 2) because he a friend and I like his page.



When you click on the link to his page notice the lijit display at the top labeled "Looking for more about term sheets?" This is where Lijit has made its mark. It has given the visitor another place to go besides back.




Lijit is wonderful tool to keep more traffic not just in your site but in your content. I highly recommend checking them out. If you have questions feel free to post them below and maybe Micah will be paying attention.

Do you like this post? Yes No

[Editor's note: We're excited to share this next guest post from David Alston of Radian6. A fast emerging leader in the field of social media measurement, Radian6 (a TopRank client) provides social media monitoring tools to hundreds of leading PR firms, ad agencies and brand marketers.]

David is VP Marketing at Radian6 in New Brunswick, Canada with previous experience at several tech startups in the interactive advertising and the video over IP space. Most recently, he was partner and VP of Marketing at PR firm, Revolution Strategy. His blog is TweetPR.

Social media has simplified the art of the soapbox shout. Information is shared with the masses now using easy-to-use Web 2.0 tools and is recorded and cached for infinity. A shout out loud in social media has no geographic boundaries and is not time-limited. These two points make the non-stop monitoring of social media an important to-do for any brand owner. And monitoring social media does not just mean blogs. It should include video and image sharing sites and microblogging sites like Twitter, along with opinion and discussion forums.

As a provider of the tools for monitoring hundreds and even thousands of well known brands online, we’ve found a multitude of reasons for paying attention to what’s being said in social media. Here are the top ten:

The complaint – Watch for posts complaining about your products or services, company, and staff. Catching something early means getting a chance to show how responsive you are. A complaint is an opportunity to demonstrate problem-solving abilities. A posted complaint may also draw out other comments from people with the same concern, which provides an opportunity to reach out to them as well. And who knows, impressing customer with great customer service may generate some positive posts about how you resolved the problems.

The compliment – Compliments can come in many forms. It could be a congratulations message about a recent award. It could be a customer raving about the experience they just had with a product or with customer service. Social media compliments are the online equivalent of those old school references or testimonials of days past. Create a delicio.us account or use another social bookmarking utility and save all of these compliments in a list for future use. Potential clients looking for reassurance on a purchase decision would love to see what others think of your company and products.

The expressed need – The best way to watch for expressed needs is to look for keywords often used to describe those needs. People shout out what they are doing and ask the general public for advice occasionally when they are about to make a purchase. Both of these situations provide an opportunity to reach out with an offer of assistance or a free demo for example. While this may seem intrusive at first glance consider that great retail clerk who offers to help when you are trying to locate a pair of shoes in your size. A social media poster often appreciates that someone is listening and does not mind an offer of assistance expecially if it’s done in a helpful way.

The competitor – If you are watching your industry and the keywords used to describe it you will probably be the first to know when a new competitor appears on the scene. From a competitive intelligence perspective you may also wish to be alerted any time a competitor’s name is used. Knowing this may highlight opportunities to reach out to potential customers who have indicated they are trialing a competitor or dissatisfied with a competitor’s product or service. You may also discover which industry players are advocates for competitive brands giving you the opportunity to reach out and see if they are interested in knowing more about what you have to offer. Competitors will also often talk about subjects they are strategically interested in and being able to stay on top of those discussions allows you to anticipate potential future moves.

The crowd – Topics will often pop up online that draw huge crowds from a page visits or commenting perspective. There is a lot to be learned in discussion threads especially when they have the potential to affect your brand. Following the swarms can give you a better understanding of current sentiment and thinking towards a certain topic and who the players are that have opinions on it. It also may point out a topic that you will need to monitor going forward. Tracking a topic’s viral nature and how long it lives can give you an idea of its relative importance. You may also decide to participate in the crowd discussion thread early in the process, giving your company exposure to those currently involved in the discussion and to those yet to join.

The influencer – Influencers within a space can carry a lot of weight. They gain there power either from the number of times they post on a topic, the number of people who link to their posts on a topic, the number of people gathering to comment and how engaged visitors to their posts become. The hive that forms around an influencer helps spread an opinion on a brand faster and that opinion express potentially carries more weight. Often an influencer’s post appears prominently in a topic’s Google search results thus affecting the views of even more potential customers. Knowing who these influencers are and their opinions of your brands helps you determine who to reach out to for help as advocates or to understand why they currently hold a negative view.

The crisis – Discussions happening in social media can serve as an early warning system before an issue goes mainstream. By using advanced tools you can observe new words popping more frequently about your brands. If you were an airline, as an example, the sudden appearance of the word “cancellations” along with the words “bad” and “customer service” would immediate trigger a need to drill into the posts driving them. Tracking these “crisis” words over time on a go forward basis would also then help gauge the effectiveness of any outreach campaigns to address the underlying issues.

The ROI – There has been a lot of buzz lately on how to successful measure online marketing and outreach campaigns. Much of the focus has centered around the topic of engagement. While a universal engagement metric has yet to be agreed upon there are still a number of effective ways to measure engagement and ROI in general. Track the mentions of a brand in user-generated content before, during and after a campaign. Isolate positive words associated with a particular brand and gauge the number of times they were used over a period of time. Alternatively, you could sort all posts mentioning a particular brand or topic by number of comments or views to uncover the top 50 discussions where potentially engagement was the highest.

The audit – A brand is the sum of all conversations and is no longer completely controlled by the corporation. By analyzing social media a corporation or agency can score a brand’s overall user sentiment, determine which words are commonly associated with it, understand which competitors rank closest in buzz or online mentions, uncover which sites are advocates, and rank which social media channels contain more discussion versus others. By isolating which sites are discussing your brand or a competitor’s brand, an audit can also help pinpoint possible ad placement opportunities for reaching the most valuable and engaged audiences.

The thread – With so many social media channels to shout out on, conversations often become splintered. A discussion can start within one channel and quick leap into another making it rather difficult to follow. Following discussions using keywords associated with it can help bridge the thread across all types of social media. This thread would then appear as a connected conversation for easy analysis.

Customers, prospects and peers are discussing your brand, your industry and your competitors right now in social media: with or without you. Unfortunately, choosing not to listen doesn’t make those conversations go away. Actively listening means protecting brand reputation, discovering opportunities, staying competititive and avoiding runaway crisis’.

Sponsored By: Follow TopRank on Twitter Get daily updates, insights and zero “cat” tweets!

In theory, any company should be able to compete with Google on search. Yet Google owns some two-thirds of the queries made in the US search engine market.

read more

Too much variation between the company's Live and MSN properties makes it look like the branding professionals had no input into the design.

read more

Posted by rebecca

Do you like this post? Yes No

There are a few ways of controlling what pages of your site share their link love. In today's Link Building column, "Giving Links Away," Sage Lewis explains the concepts of PageRank "sculpting" and siloing: two methods that use the "nofollow" attribute to control which links are counted in search engine ranking algorithms.

Google Docs Gets Lots of Updates
Google Docs added lots of new stuff, including saved searches, offline Google Gears access for spreadsheets and presentations, custom document stylesheets (using CSS), speaker notes in presentations, and embedded YouTube videos in presentations.

Move Your Life To Gmail With Gmail Uploader
Google released last month the Gmail Uploader, a free application that moves your email and contacts from Outlook, Outlook Express or Thunderbird (on Windows XP and Vista only) to a Google Apps Gmail account. Considering the huge number of limitations (only three email programs, two operating systems, and one very specific and less popular edition of Gmail), you may never get the chance to use it, which is a shame, because most new Gmail users would love the easy migration method.

Google Charts Now Does QR Codes
Google has been trying out QR Codes (a type of 2D bar codes) in its print ads, and now they’re making it easier to generate them on the web. Before, you’d have to use a web app or software to create a QR Code, then save the image to use on your website, but now the Google Chart API can be queried to get them automatically. Right now, all you get are website URLs, though hopefully Google will extend the API to handle more complex data.

Here’s an API-generated image for this site, using the URL http://chartserver.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=300x300&chl=http://google.blognewschannel.com/:

Blogger Adds Future Posts
Google’s Blogger has added the ability to schedule posts to be published in the future by specifying a date yet to come for your post. This feature was tested in Blogger In Draft, and is yet another feature to make its way into the ever improving Blogger.

Google Invests In New Clearwire
Google entered into an agreement with Sprint and others (Comcast, Intel Capital, Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks and Trilogy Equity Partners), investing half a billion dollars in a new formation of wireless ISP Clearwire. The new company will be 51% Sprint-owned, taking Sprint’s Xohm WiMax business. Google’s a wireless provider of sorts, now, and will help get open devices, including Android devices, on the network, and provide search and applications for the network.

Google Homepage Becomes Art Project
Valleywag says it’s all Marissa Mayer’s self-interest.

Google Me - A Documentary About Search
This documentary features a guy searching for others with this same name as him. A concept we’ve heard before, though it seems to have resulted in an interest project.

Google Loses $200 Million/Year On Image Search
Mayer claims they value the user so, so much that they just couldn’t put up ads. Yet, Google continues to invest in image search, even designing the next generation of advanced image search, an engine capable of actual recognizing the content of images.

Kid Crashes Bike On Google Street View

YouTube Market Share Reaches 73%

Google’s Head of PR Goes to Facebook
Elliot Schrage leaves for Facebook, costing Google its vice president of global communications and public affairs. Of course, Google’s corporate PR policies haven’t been that smart the last few years, so maybe this isn’t great news for Facebook.

Google’s Free Food Costs Company $72 Million per Year

Google Maps Interface Slimmed Down
Google has finally trimmed some of the cruft building on Google Maps, combining and simplifying an interface that was getting too complicated and cluttered.

Blogger Gets Integrated Analytics
Google has integrated Google Analytics into Blogger for Blogger users that are interested, giving access to stats inside the Blogger Dashboard along with special stats tracking relevant to blogs. They’re also letting Measure Map users roll over their accounts into Google Analytics now.

Get IE8 Activities In Firefox
One of the new features in Internet Explorer 8 is Activities, which lets you contextually use the information on a page with other services, and because it uses some generally open formats, someone’s already adapted it for other browsers. This Firefox extension lets you practically seamlessly use Activities in Firefox, so check it out.

Microsoft’s Extreme Server Makeover
Check out this video, spoofing Extreme Home Makeover for the IT world. It’s weird in places, but just watch it, k?

How To Tell If Your PC Supports Hibernation
Milo explains how to use POWERCFG.exe to tell if your Windows Vista PC supports hibernation mode, as well as what other power modes your PC supports. It’s an extremely useful tip if you’re running into some power troubleshooting issues.

Halo 3 Heroic Map Pack Now Free
If you’re getting bored of playing Halo online, you’ll be pleased to know that one of its map packs is now free. The price has been dropped 100% on the “Heroic” map pack, giving you three new multiplayer maps for the sweet price of nothing. Enjoy.

Microsoft Buys Farecast For $115 Million
MS gets the fast growing and smartly designed airline ticket bargain website.

Microsoft Releases Popfly Game Creator
Microsoft released a game creator that lets you use Popfly, their free mashup creation tool, to create Silverlight-based games that can run on webpages, Facebook, the Vista Sidebar, pretty much anywhere.

GTA IV Breaks UK Sales Record
Grand Theft Auto 4 sold 631,000 copies on launch day in the UK alone, beating San Andreas’ record from four years ago by over 100 thousand units. The Xbox 360 version beat the PS3 version by 101,000 copies sold, and 360 console sales were up 125%.

Geometry Wars 2 Is Coming
Sequel to the smash hit Xbox Live Arcade game is on the way.