Google – Verizon Deal. – Why Net Neutrality is not a Topic of the Month?

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Google and Verizon will announce a deal that the New York Times describes “could allow Verizon to speed some online content to Internet users more quickly if the content’s creators are willing to pay for the privilege”.

We believe that the best and the worse in this area has already been done already and now we just carefully watch where this is going. We are web people who are aware what this type of deal may mean for us vs huge corporations. For now it looks like another Googlenet story which may or may not be a huge problem… stay tuned for more news from the Verizon-Google-Obama Administration front.

Net Neutrality The Worst up to date:
The confusion in the US after FCC vs Comcast over Net Neutrality case (2008-2010) which ended in early April 2010. Federal Communication Commission fined Comcast for blocking BitTorrent usage. Comcast won only because they proved in the U.S Court of Appeals that the FCC has no authority to give such a fine. Imagine: broadband service isn’t currently defined as Telecommunication! – Shocked? – me too!
Of course this confusion allows companies to talk about possible deals.

The best on Net Neutrality front up to date:
The Paccific Telegraph Act from 1860 says “Massages received from any individual, company, corporation… shall be impartially transmitted in order of their reception”. This says it all and if current congress will be able to pass an update to this act and extend it to broadband services we are all good. Of course before this happens we have months of lobbying and pressures on Congressman.

The biggest unknown on Net Neutrality up-to-date:
Obama’s Administration – which is trying to patch law and ensure Net Neutrality for the future. Is the president strong enough to gain support from US Congress? Is he interested enough to make an effort? We don’t know.

So we have the typical pressure, lobbying and race between Government/Regulators and Industry itself, which is going to make sure trade standards are faster than regulator’s law.

Google-Verizon Deals and Net Neutrality Guards

Online Marketing in Offline World – We Love IT!

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Facebook ‘Liking’ is one of the ways businesses have recently started using to attract customers to their special offers and other activities. The biggest companies try the odd TV or Newspaper Ad, which is sending people to their Facebook page where in exchange for clicking the ‘Like button’ you are given the chance in a competition to win products or served with a money off voucher for your next purchase. But recently we are pleased to notice that people have inserted online marketing to their day-to-day activities. This is no longer associated with huge budgets and cutting edge online activities (such as games producers, online merchants etc). We had the pleasure to witness half a dozen coaches on ZSL Zoo parking all proudly carrying big stickers with the “Become a Fan on Facebook” invitation.

Facebook Fan Sticker on the side of the coach - well done!

OK, so what if they didn’t update their stickers and they still have “Fans” instead of “Likers“? But who cares?

“The Golden MIM” Award for July goes to Olympian Coaches. Well done!

Please let us know when you find some other samples of holistic approach to marketing!

AdWords Ad Extensions – The Full Story

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Google are slowly rolling out a new Adwords feature called Ad Extensions, which you’ve probably already come across in your account. They can be found in the Settings tab of each Campaign and allow you to add your Business Location for example, from your Google Places account or by manual address entry. Then when someone is served your Ad they will see an expandable link below your Ad that shows them a map of your business location. This is one Ad Extension you may have already used if your business relies on walk-in customers.

Using Ad Extensions

Sometimes providing additional information in your Ads is necessary in order to get the best response, and Google Ad Extensions does exactly that. For example, when you’re trying to describe a product, including a picture could make the message more relevant and valuable. Or when trying to describe a location, an Ad that only contains text can be confusing. In this case, having a map can help someone find your location more easily.

embedded by Embedded Video

Available Ad Extensions

There are only a handful of Ad Extensions available to everyone at the moment, like Locations (as mentioned above), Click-to-Call (for mobile devices) & Sitelinks. But in future all of the following Ad Extensions will be available:

Currently these Ad Extensions are available in limited release & limited beta only so it’s unlikely that you’d see these in your account yet but we’ve spotted some already so they are definitely out there! Take a look at this example of Adwords Product Extensions:

If you were lucky enough to be part of the beta testing, or currently using the limited release, we would really like to hear from you!

Daily Telegraph D-Day headline cock-up

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As most of you will know it was the 66th Anniversary of D-Day yesterday. Not the 65th as some very confusing headlines suggest.

So which one is it?

It was not the first time the Daily Telegraph have cocked-up their headlines. But let us not bring up the large hadron collider again, shall we?

And we thought D-Day was all about remembrance? Silly us!!

Facebook Become a Fan changed to Like

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Last night on Facebook the ‘Become a Fan’ button was replaced by a ‘Like’ button, even though the old Become a Fan system worked perfectly! The lack of communication with their users regarding this change made us a little angry, and we’re not the only ones who should be. A client of ours client’s just started a Facebook competition asking people to ‘Become a Fan’ in order to enter… NOT GOOD! The whole campaign had to be re-marketed!

At least they gave everyone a reasonable and in-depth explanation…

Why did “Become a Fan” change to “Like”?
“To improve your experience and promote consistency across the site, we’ve changed the language for Pages from “Fan” to “Like.” We believe this change offers you a more light-weight and standard way to connect with people, things and topics in which you are interested. “ - Perhaps they just got bored…

Let Facebook know how you feel about the change from Become a Fan to Like - Vote in our Become a Fan vs Like Poll…

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Cuba responds to US easing sanctions on Web services

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In Havana, Cuba’s government has said that the decision by the US government to ease sanctions on Cuba and two other countries to allow exports of Internet services is intended to destabilize the communist island.

On March 8 2010 the US State Department announced that it would ease sanctions against Cuba, Iran and Sudan to increase citizens’ access to online communication tools and open people up to free speech and information to the greatest extent possible. But Cuban President Raul Castro’s government said the objective of the decision was to use these services as tools of subversion and destabilization, according to statement from the Cuban Foreign Ministry.

The statement added; “This shows once again that the US government is not interested in softening its policy nor in developing normal relations with Cuba, but only in developing a network that facilitates its subversive actions in our nation.”

The US Treasury Department modified sanctions against Iran, Cuba and Sudan to allow exports by US companies of services related to Web browsing, blogging, email, instant messaging, chat, social networking and photo/movie sharing like Flickr and YouTube.

Cuban authorities exercise strict control over the Internet, blocking communication sites like Skype and blogs that are critical of the government.

Few Cubans have access to the Internet, which cannot be installed in private residences without express permission from authorities.

Where access is available in places like hotels, the cost often eight dollars an hour in a country where a monthly salary runs around 20 dollars, is prohibitively high.

Google PageRank removal – is PageRank dead?

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On October 14, 2009, Google employee Susan Moskwa confirmed that the company had removed PageRank from its Webmaster Tools section. Her post said in part, “We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true.”

You can read this post by Susan and all other comments in the discussion here

In mid 2009 we saw a lot of websites having their PageRank changed especially after May upgrade to Google Algorithm. PageRank which you see on toolbars and other online PageRank checkers have become irrelevant, giving inconsistent results ever since Google introduced updates to their algorithm. This change resulted in pages giving more power to people regarding relevancy. During the last 18 months Google have introduced the following tools/features which had a direct impact on the PageRank concept.

The new tools include:

Introduction of SearchWiki – a tool that makes search even more useful in users daily lives.
Introduction of Real-time Search – a tool that displays Twitter posts in real-time for certain Google searches.
Introduction of a More Show Options tab for different types of searches, included advanced Personalised Searchfor all users.

Although people believe that Google is using some sort of modified PageRank to rank websites this is not the one which you can see on the Google Toolbar and other online readers.

PageRank is a trademarked and patented technology which is now 12 years old, of course in the visible form seen in the Google Toolbar.

So, does PageRank matter anymore?

We’ like you to share your opinions on this…

Vancouver 2010 – Show Off time for Bing and Google – Yahoo! Off the Table

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Tragic start to Olympic Games in the real world didn’t stop the show to go on and the first five days went on with problems which are purely down to Mother Nature (permanent lack of snow).

Regarding virtual presence Vancouver Games proves to be even more advanced and better served by search engines than Benjing 2008 or any other Olimpics before. Apart from medal leader board we have a great design and usability features on search engines.

GOOGLE – Google’s desire to create out of SERPs (tech: search engines result pages) one stop shops is visible this winter more than ever before

Schedule for particular day in particular discipline – with info by time zone

Event Schedule Vancouver 2010 Olimpics in Search engines

Results for latest events in particular discipline with names of the competitors and scores if apply

Vancuver 2010 on Google

Bing – They went all the way with homepage connected with Vancuver events through several links which are dragging people to Vancouver related visual search only one far right bottom link is connected to something unrelated.

Bing Winter Olympics Upgrade - It is all about Vancouver 2010 here

Full section with Vancouver.com homepage link on the top for general keywords (olimpic games etc)
Design rich sections for results for winter sports keywords with links to MSN/Bing powered CTV website for olimpics

Yahoo! – declining role of Yahoo! on search engines arena can be now clearly visible in the way Yahoo! covers Vancouver Games. As a portal Yahoo! deal with Eurosport creates situation that all content is fed from this particular site. When you type in “Vancouver 2010″ you are served with Eurosport content all over the place. But this wouldn’t be a problem. The sign that they do not invest any more in Search even on basic scale is visible on other Olympic related queries try “olimpic games” and you will find out that you are served with News Section and set of currently at least important links with Wikipedia ahead of well known Eurosport.

Summary

What couple of these “olimpic” searches shows us is significant and I believe it defines what we can expect from search engines over next couple of years. It shows search engines effort to cover such an event and deliver the best results in a short therm

- All Search engines developed special sections for Olympics

- Yahoo! stopped Search Engine Investments their section is has got very limited visibility

- Google is the only search engine to send people broadly from special section links directly to Vancouver 2010 official webiste

- Bing and Yahoo! both support themselves with partners delivering results for Olympic games queries (CTV and Eurosport

Out of this we can draw only one picture. Even with very heavy presence of AdWords section on the top of search results Google maintained the highest relevancy by sending you to the most relevant page in the world for this year olimpic event http://www.vancouver2010.com results are at least “contaminated” by marketing/advertising deals and offers great deal of information without leaving SERPs. What we wonder for the future is how many of these Google’s “Olimpic real time experiments” will find its way to Google Algorithm

by Krzysztof Kurzydlo

Facebook Facelift 2010 – potential new layout

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Google might not be the only internet giant making layout changes in 2010 – Facebook seems like it might be getting yet another layout change in 2010. When they tried to change it last year, users were so against the changes that they had to fight to try and persuade people it was a change for the better.

It’s unlikely we’ll see the same kind of resistance from Facebook users this time as the changes seem only very minor, yet still annoying if you’re a firm believer of the saying, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. However, the changes we’ve seen were pretty good, from a technical point of view at least, because it’s now faster to do some things such as view your message inbox, notifications and requests (the icons of which now sit sandwiched between the Facebook logo and the now rather elongated search bar), which has also been repositioned to the centre.

The changes are in testing and only visible at this moment on certain accounts, which suggests the update may not even happen but it’s likely that we’ll at least hear more about this soon.

Share your thoughts of the first new 2010 Facebook layout – a good or bad start to the new year?

Google Maps in Adwords – Sponsored Links just keep on getting bigger

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Google have been in the headlines a lot lately due to the amount of testing that’s been going on… We’ve seen various versions of the homepage; some with buttons; some without buttons; some saying ‘Press Enter to Search’; and some saying nothing at all until the user moves their mouse over the page, triggering the fancy fade-in effect, revealing the rest of the page.

And now comes more evidence that Google are willing to test new features. This time in Adwords - Features that affect the way certain Sponsored Links are displayed to the user.

So far we’ve seen Site Links in the Sponsored Links (only for certain brand keywords – for obvious relevancy reasons).

And now, we’ve even seen Maps appearing in Sponsored Links – from what we’ve seen, we can only assume that Google grabs the location for the map from the businesses location given for that particular Adwords account (optional) when people are setting up their account for the first time.

It’ll be interesting to see if Google decide to keep these changes, or if they are merely test. One thing which might scare you if you do a lot of SEO, is the shear size of the Sponsored Links when these new elements are present, and the effect it may have on natural results by forcing users to scroll down further to see them.

Tell us what you think…