Renegade Search

This week Forbes is reporting that online advertising will surpass newspaper advertising in 2010. Could this be the start of online advertising superiority over traditional print advertising? I say yes. Over the last 5 years, online advertising has steadily been on the heels of print marketing and advertising. With the innovation of "Smart phones" and tablet PCs making mobile online experiences more common place, online marketers have many more advertising outlets available. This, coupled with the unsurpassed level of data and metrics collected, make it extremely attractive to advertisers focusing on eliminating wasted advertising spend.

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Bing has begun to roll out a long list of improvements and new features across the board. Importantly, these features will not only be available on the flagship Bing.com product, but also on Bing Mobile Apps. As of this writing, it looks like some of these new improvements have started rolling out, with the remainder to come later this month.

Below is a short list of the major updates to come:

Facebook "Like" Annotations - You will now see search results that have been "liked" by your Facebook friends.

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Recently I was given a copy of Six Pixels of Separation written by the president of Twist Image, Mitch Joel. It’s a quick read and a valuable guide to the contemporary internet landscape including overall web presence, social media and search engine marketing. This book breaks down complex and newly theorized techno-sociological behaviors and details how businesses can participate and capitalize on digital communication.

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There's no denying that Google Analytics is an extremely useful and powerful set of software. Combined with its price tag (zero), it is one of the most valuable tools in the arsenal of any SEO, webmaster, or internet marketer. But an unfortunate reality for any business owner is that the true cost of GA can be significantly higher than $0.00. First of all, it's important to consider the opportunity cost of installation: for someone with limited technical knowledge, learning how to get the GA tracking codes implemented can require quite a bit of time and effort. More importantly, GA can be a difficult, imposing bit of software to learn; without any background knowledge, the interface and data of GA can run from confusing to downright intimidating.

Fortunately, there is some help on this front: in October, GA began including a Beta version of In-Page Analytics, a vastly-improved version of the old Site Overlay. With In-Page Analytics, even novices can quickly gain valuable insights from their sites in an easy, intuitive way. And even advanced users will find plenty to like about this new feature. While it is very much still in beta mode (read: far from perfect), for both of these reasons, In-Page Analytics could be an immensely valuable feature.

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I love recaps and summaries. That's why I love this time of the year, when search engines and social networks start compiling and sharing statistics about user behavior. Just today, Twitter put out their year in review, capping a year of 25 billion tweets - and while it's nothing groundbreaking from most business perspectives, it's still fun to view a year in total.

To better help users understand the significance of these number twitter did explain how trending is defined. However, I'm still not sure how their selected categories are defined. For example, Brett Favre's inclusions on the "Sports" list. Does his inclusion on the list this year really have anything to do with "sports" per se? Does his trending in "sports" preclude his inclusion (or Lebron's for that matter) in the general list for people?

Aside from better defining their categories, I'd also like to see Twitter expand their categories a little more to include some fun topics for marketers such as top 10 brands, top 10 products, top 10 URL shortening providers, or maybe top 10 websites linked to from Twitter. Another fun topic could be showing the quickest declining trends over the last year. By the time December rolls around, I'm sure I'm not the only one to find some amusement in a couple "oh yeah, I remember that Bieber kid" moments.

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