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My 2 featured articles for the week ending Sept. 16, 2005:

Archived blogs for the week of September 12, 2005

991 - September 16, 2005 - 11.01 AM EST

Comparing ROI between SEO and PPC

"The fact that organizations continue to invest in search engine optimization and pay-per-click advertising without being able to measure the ROI of each is alarming," said Naga Krothapalli, director of algorithmic search at iProspect.

"If an organization cannot determine the ROI of a medium, how can they justify continued investment in the channel, to say nothing of increasing that investment?"

Other findings included that 35 percent of organizations said SEO produces higher ROI than search ads while 11 percent said SEO produces a lower ROI.

"Numerous studies have found that search engine users find natural search results to be more relevant to their search engine queries," the study said.

"Savvy search marketers know this, and make the investment in outsourcing the management of their natural SEO to take advantage of this search engine user behavior."

Posted on Businessblog™

990 - September 16, 2005 - 9.04 AM EST

China shows a 'thumbs down' at Yahoo

Yahoo is facing unrelenting criticism following the disclosure last week that the company provided information that helped Chinese authorities convict a newspaper reporter on charges of leaking state secrets to foreigners.

In April, the journalist, Shi Tao, 37, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for passing on a propaganda directive about coverage of possible protests on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

Yahoo has offered few details about the episode, but at an Internet conference in China on Saturday, the company's co-founder, Jerry Yang, said the firm had little choice but to accede to the Chinese government's request.

"I don't like the outcome of what happened with this thing. We get a lot of these orders, but we have to comply with the law and that's what we need to do," Mr. Yang said.

Mr. Yang's comments have only intensified the vitriol being directed at Yahoo.

"The idea 'we're just following orders' is about as ethically corrupt as an organization can be," said Simon Davies, whose London-based nonprofit organization, Privacy International, has called for a boycott of Yahoo. "The argument advanced is essentially the Nuremberg defense. That was ethically discredited decades ago," he said.

A leading China scholar and former Asia-based journalist, Bruce Gilley, also denounced Mr. Yang's explanation. "That's an atrociously inappropriate comment," Mr. Gilley, who is an adjunct professor at the New School University, said.

"It sort of suggests that if someone was caught stealing a Yahoo e-mail account in Saudi Arabia, then Yahoo would step up and help the regime cut off their hand. That's not the expectation of an American company to go and take part in whatever repressive, noxious practice is found in various countries around the world."

Mr. Gilley and other analysts said the episode had echoes of the public-relations debacles that snared manufacturing companies such as Nike and Reebok in the 1990s, when they were accused of using sweatshop labor in low-wage Asian countries, including China. "Until now, in the Internet, we haven't had the same issue arise," he said.

Mr. Gilley said the sneaker and clothing companies initially took the position that Chinese law precluded some reforms urged by labor advocates, such as the creation of worker committees distinct from the communist-run trade unions. However, when the international companies insisted, local officials suddenly adopted a more flexible interpretation of the law.

Yahoo declined requests for an interview for this story. It offered only a written statement that reiterated Mr. Yang's comments.

Posted on Businessblog™

989 - September 15, 2005 - 8.45 AM EST

Google launches new blog search function

Google has launched a blog search feature from both its Blogger.com site and from a separate URL available that produces the same results.

Google's new blog search results aren’t limited to just Blogger.com but rather attempt to search other blogs as well.

Google said that its new beta blog search is available in eight languages other than English. Right now, blog search results are separate from Google’s main search engine, but I would expect the company will seek to integrate more blog search results into its main results over time.

Right now there are no ads that will appear on Google’s blog search results. However, clearly the door is open.

Google now joins Technorati, Intelliseek’s new-and-improved BlogPulse, Ask’s Bloglines and others - Yahoo! is testing blog search - in seeking to mine content from the mushrooming Blogosphere (add echo sound effect). Thus it would appear that blogs are indeed a new front in the so-called “search wars.”

Technorati has said that the number of blogs is doubling every five months. comScore reports that 50 million U.S. Internet users visited blog sites in the first quarter of 2005, roughly 30 percent of all U.S. Internet users. BlogPulse identifies over 16 million blogs as of this morning.

comScore also reports that blog readers live in wealthier households, are younger, have high-speed connections, conduct e-commerce and spend more time online.

This post could go on and on, depending on my coffee intake, and are lots of things one might say about the emerging competitive blog search landscape.

One might compare the comprehensiveness of the blog search indexes (which, because of their nature, are updated faster than the general search indexes) or the features they offer, and so on. But my interest is in the content contained on blogs (organizing that content for consumers is another session at ILM:05 in November).

Blogs aren’t inherently local. But they are an increasingly important source of news, product/shopping information, opinion about all manner of things and, yes, local content.

Posted on Businessblog™

988 - September 14, 2005 - 10.19 AM EST

Google hires Internet evangelist Vint Cerf

Google has hired Vinton Cerf, acclaimed by many as the Father of the Internet and presiding Chairman of ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), to serve as Google's Chief Internet Evangelist.

While working at the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Vint Cerf played an important role in the development of Internet. At DARPA he co-designed the TCP/IP protocol, on which the Internet runs.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt said “Cerf is clearly one of the great technology leaders of our time”.

Besides the Internet here on Earth, Vint is also working with NASA to develop Interplanetary Protocol which is planned to be “a new standard to communicate from planet to planet, using radio/laser communications that are highly tolerant to signal degradation.” Google taking this Google Moon stuff a little too seriously?

Why did Vint make the switch from MCI to Google? Is this just a PR stunt hiring? What exactly is a “Chief Internet Evagelist"? Is Cerf now the Pat Robertson of Search Enignes? Read all about Vinton Cerf here.

Posted on Businessblog™

987 - September 13, 2005 - 6.36 PM EST

A forum member reviews MSN's AdCenter

A forum member posts his findings on the new MSN Keywords AdCenter. For bidding, you basically set a price by keyword phrase and ad.

In addition, you can opt to increase your bid to reach a targeted audience, through “targeted bidding,” more often. Read all about MSN's AdCenter here and find out how MSN wants to help search marketers with their bidding.

Posted on Businessblog™

986 - September 12, 2005 - 6.41 PM EST

Microsoft launching attack on Google

Microsoft's technology shift is a direct attack on Google, which has dominated the online space using that very same technique.

Most of Google's offering, from its Search to Maps service to Desktop Sidebar all provide methods for third parties to extend -- and improve on -- the technologies.

This new development model, frequently referred to as Web 2.0, relies on modern Web standards and the wide adoption of broadband to facilitate almost instantaneous communication between a client and server.

AJAX, or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, has taken center stage as the programming language of choice for Web 2.0 applications.

Posted on Businessblog™

Copyright © Serge Thibodeau 2005. All rights reserved.

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