Last week I had the opportunity to try two new operating systems: Vista and Ubuntu. Both worked great. Ubuntu impresses, even on four year old hardware.
Early writeups of FreeBase are fascinating. The semantic web will transform how folks search, shop, and learn online. When we provide the machines with the structure to understand relationship between data elements, all sorts of interesting things will become possible very quickly.
Viacom hits Google with $1 billion lawsuit.
Need a temporary email to receive a registration from a website? Try Mailinator.
If your own IT wizards are responsible for the care and feeding of your web app databases, I highly recommend this series of fascinating posts on database strategy put up by O’Reilly last spring. Tim O’Rielly interviewed prominent web sites on the nuts and bolts of their database approaches.
Some interesting links from the past few weeks…
Google spent $58mil to promote Checkout in ’06.
The future of search is algorithms and clickstreams, not editors.
Every interaction with a customer or client should be consistent with your brand. Even what is often the final step in the sales cycle — invoicing.
In direct marketing, the quickest,easiest, more direct way to grow top line is by getting more qualified leads.
Hardening an e-commerce web site is hard, and too many web retailers underestimate the risk of attack.
Too often, retailers mishandle their data when evaluating multi-channel performance.
With some large folksonomies soon to launch, the retailers who tag early will define the game for those that follow them.
In February, Yahoo aggressively took back share from Google, returning to Jan 2006 levels. Digging into our largest 50 accounts, the average percentage change in Google ad spend from Jan ‘07 to Feb ‘07 was up 8%. Their average percentage change in Yahoo ad spend over the same period was up 24%
Shuman Ghosemajumder discusses Google’s click fraud detection programs over at the Inside AdWords blog.
The best opportunity to see a total lunar eclipse in recent years will happen tomorrow night, between sunset and 8p EST.
Great post on company culture from Dick Costolo, FeedBurner’s founder.
An automated robot spam comment on an old post on the search marketing client – agency relationship is ironically amusing.