Miscellany

Today’s pet peeve: illegible captchas.

Driving in this morning, three stories on NPR caught my ear as having a paid search angle.

As a citizen, I’m pleased to see the Palin paid results free of crass commercialism, partisan attacks, and sleazy picture sites. But I wonder: why are those ads not there today?

Zappos has expanded beyond shoes.

Merlin Mann at Google on managing email overload.

Asking about what would complement someone best — what a nice and effective way to discuss someone’s less strong areas.

Softball, mysql, and Bush.

“But one thing that struck me is that I just found out today that the way AdSense works is we don’t actually know how much of a cut we’re getting. We just take their ads and run them on our site and they send us a check at the end of the month, and we trust them to give us a fair amount of whatever they were paid, though there’s no actual way to determine what a fair amount might be.” – FJY

Forrester’s Carrie Johnson speaking on the idea, “Search Is.”

I recorded my NEMOA presentation and posted video.

Because we use our tools to build ever better tools, our technological prowess is increasing exponentially fast.

This was a new one for me: a job seeker running AdWords against a brand name to try get an interview. Ack!

We run an internal blog where all employees can post, and it is working well for us.

Interesting free and/or open source alternatives for handling online meetings, videos, screenshots, and files.

Seth Godin points to research by Steven Johnson comparing book sales success to book language complexity.

Back from TED in March: Blaise Aguera y Arcas’ PhotoSynth demo. Stunning technology from Microsoft Live Labs for building 3D models of the world from collections of regular snapshots.

Spam is so gosh darn obtuse these days.

MarketMotive just came out of beta, and they’ve provided me some guest passes for a free month, each a $299 value. Drop a note if you’d like one.

DMA Chicago, a dynamic mix of the old and the new.

Off topic: the light tunnel at the Detroit airport just makes me grin.

MarketMotive is an educational site focusing on web marketing. I’m looking forward to participating as their pay-per-click expert.

When was the last time you backed up the computer(s) on which you depend?

Incredible paper folding video from MIT.

Shop.org increases its lobbying efforts, starting with web taxation.

A small efficiency idea: use Jott to capture notes after conference conversations.