I was catching up on my feed reading and noticed posts on Techcrunch and Micropersuasion about Google’s new buzz tracking product, Google Trends. According to Google:

“Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results — our search-volume graph.”

Basically, Google Trends is a souped up version of the trending tools that have been in place for awhile on blog search engines like IceRocket and Blogpulse. The advantage Google Trends has over those products is that it gets to use Google’s own, much more robust data set (much greater search volume, ability to tie to news articles, etc.) and piggy back on the fantastic graphs that were developed for Google Finance. Google Trends is an interesting product, but I would offer a few notes of caution as folks begin hyping the tool:

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We’ve mentioned our media management and analysis platform, ImpactWatch, several times (in passing) on this blog. Last night, at the 2006 Sabre Awards Dinner in Manhattan, we learned that we had won the Iron Sabre for the Research/Evaluation category, beating out Hill & Knowlton’s Wal-Mart Media Day Analysis case study. H & K has won the category for several years in a row and is quite the formidable opponent. Thanks to tablemates Stanton Crenshaw (received the Bronze Sabre for Best Media Placement: Television) for their hearty congratulations and Denver-based MGA Communications for their kindness and their spirited applause.

We are very proud of our ImpactWatch product and also our work in assisting corporations and public relations agencies with continuous measurement and analysis of their programs and initiatives. The media landscape has been evolving rapidly in the past few years and we have been developing the system so that it reflects emerging media trends and represents each company’s communications goals and objectives, while staying consistent with best measurement practices. Measurement, as so many communicators know, is not very easy and it’s important to assess program measurement in context. Anyway, we sincerely appreciate the honor. (more…)

Gary wrote an entry a few months ago about politicians holding town hall meetings with voters over the telephone. A promising new podcast service called Waxxi takes this concept even further, combining podcasting with the kind of group conference call services Gary wrote about.

The problem with podcasts is that they typically don’t offer opportunities for group participation or interaction. Podcasts are top down in nature, where you listen to a small group of people pontificate on a topic. According to Techcrunch, Waxxi solves this problem by allowing users to schedule a time for their podcasts and then invite a potentially large number of people to call in and participate. In addition, while the podcast is being produced, users can participate in a chat/IM conversation taking place simultaneously. Once completed, you’ve got a finished, hosted podcast that you can highlight on your website.

As the Techcrunch article mentions, there are a lot of unanswered questions about how the service will work (will there be moderation, will a transcript be produced, etc.). But I think Waxxi is a novel idea. And it’s a potentially great tool for politicians looking to use technology to connect with constituents and supporters.

The whirl of the turbines deafens the team as the Black Hawk skims along at what seems like mere feet above the rolling waves below. The scent of the sea tickles their noses, the salinity palpably stinging their nostrils. In front of them, the dawning sun glimmers on the surface, producing a surreal mirror of various hues ranging from orange to a burnt-amber. The team’s stomach churns, as the magnitude and uncertainty of the mission weighs heavily upon their care-worn hearts. After nearly two years, Project Panama is about to commence.

Well, sure, that is not EXACTLY how Yahoo Search Marketing’s (YSM) Project Panama is going down, but it sure makes for interesting imagery within my cubically confined imagination. Project Panama, which was briefly discussed during a seminar I attended last week and which is currently all over the media (including an article in today’s New York Times), is YSM’s code name for its ad platform redevelopment program. As an advertiser, I received a very brief email about some of the new features, and on May 17th, there with be an analyst presentation where more details about the platform and the related financial aspects will be discussed. (more…)

Anyone who has teenaged kids is aware (or should be) of what they are doing online. I have a 17-year-old boy, and a 13-year-old girl. IM is a given, as is my son’s cell phone when he’s way from his laptop. When he’s online, he plays video games almost exclusively. Runescape is a favorite of his. Has a Facebook account but rarely uses it. Surfs the web somewhat, using it mostly as a info applicance. And he doesn’t pay much attention to video and photo sharing sites or to blogs.

My daughter couldn’t be more different. Sure IM and the cellphone are the same; but she and her friends are heavy text-messagers and photo snappers. (Things we’ve needed to put a bit of a limit on.) And they’ll all got active MySpace pages, and know YouTube and Flickr well. Surfs the web for the latests fashions, not caring whether she’s on a blog or a traditional website. She’s also very adept at using iTunes. Hasn’t bought a CD in years. And hasn’t touched a video game or online fantasy game since SimLife a couple of years ago.

Other parents I’ve talked to have notice something similar. With variations on the theme, most would agree that boys play more solitary games online, and that girls are much more social beings on the web. (Just think how much time they still spend on the phone, as compare to boys.)

But I didn’t give this much notice until a friend pointed out this article in The Guardian newpaper, which describes a study illustrating the digital divide between boys and girls. And a little surfing found this story at ABC News online which describes the study and its implications in greater detail.

Warning boys: seems like girls are staking out their own territory in the online gaming world — what used to be exclusive to you!

I attended a seminar on various aspects of managing Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM, formerly known as Overture) campaigns yesterday. For those of you unfamiliar with YSM, it is a paid search advertising system that allows advertisers to bid for position within the sponsored listings area of several major search engines (including Yahoo, obviously). Given that I have been managing accounts for clients for about six years, a large portion of it was quite remedial for me. I did learn a few interesting things including some new metrics that you can incorporate and how to measure and interpret them.

What I found most interesting was two things that transpire behind the scenes that have significant influence on our campaigns and which are not widely known outside of YSM circles. Both things have a material impact on our campaigns, so I find it irritating that they are not more widely disclosed to advertisers.

The first is Match Driver, which as I understand it, is a system that YSM is using to map alternative spellings, misspellings, plurals, etc. to a single root term. This would be a wonderful system (as it reduces the number of keywords that need to be managed), except that, as it turns out, it does not apply to all terms and as an advertiser you have no way of knowing which terms are mapped to which - so you either need to submit them all regardless or else potentially miss out on some opportunities.

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A colleague of mine pointed me towards Sphere; a fast, new blog search engine. The interface is simple and uncluttered, making it easy to perform searches and track trends. After entering a search term and selecting “custom range” from the first drop-down, a graph of mentions appears just above the results. Click on one of the bars and you can see all of the posts from that day. Move the sliders and you can pick a custom date range.

Additionally, you can see featured blogs for your search term. You can suggest a blog for a certain topic by clicking the “Suggest a Blogger” link, which results in a handy AJAX box making it easy for you to quickly enter subsequent URLs without waiting for the page to reload. Clicking “Related Media” results in a page showing photos, news articles, books, and podcasts related to the search term. Looks very promising.

We’ve been working the last few months on a sister product to our ImpactWatch media monitoring tool and one of the real struggles has been coming up with a name and accompanying URL. Anyone who has tried to name something in the last five years knows that most good, short URLs are taken by legit companies or being poached by domain name brokers. It’s one of the reasons for the boom in creatively spelled company names like Flickr and Zooomr and scraped together names like del.icio.us and ma.gnolia. In doing research, I came across some good articles/blog entries on naming that I’d figured I’d share. So here goes:

The new rules of naming by Seth Godin. The marketing guru and author of Purple Cow outlines his process for naming his new Web 2.0 venture, Squidoo.

The Name Game by Guy Kawasaki. The venture capitalist and Apple evangelist provides tips on how to name your company.

How they named companies by the Day to Day Activities blog. This entry details how some of the largest companies in the world came up with their names. Sample factoid: eBay became ebay only because the domain name echobay.com was taken.

The Name Game by Salon. Great (but lengthy) article that takes a close look at consulting firms that specialize in naming. The article opens with a description on how one naming company made one million dollars coming up with the name Agilent (Agile + Lucent = Agilent).

Let’s ban “cool” codenames that don’t pass search test by Robert Scoble. Microsoft blogger on how placeholder code names can be dangerous for large companies. A discussion ensues on the struggles Microsoft has naming products.

MSNBC ran an AP story today about a recent Roper poll commissioned by National Geographic. Among 510 respondents, aged 18 to 24, 60% couldn’t find Iraq on a map.

Other major findings:

• One-third of respondents couldn’t pinpoint Louisiana on a map and 48 percent were unable to locate Mississippi.
• Two-thirds didn’t know that the earthquake that killed 70,000 people in October 2005 occurred in Pakistan.
• While the outsourcing of jobs to India has been a major U.S. business story, 47 percent could not find the Indian subcontinent on a map of Asia.
• While Israeli-Palestinian strife has been in the news for the entire lives of the respondents, 75 percent were unable to locate Israel on a map of the Middle East.
• Nearly three-quarters incorrectly named English as the most widely spoken native language.
• Six in 10 did not know the border between North and South Korea is the most heavily fortified in the world. Thirty percent thought the most heavily fortified border was between the United States and Mexico.

And the winner goes to:

• Fewer than three in 10 think it important to know the locations of countries in the news and just 14 percent believe speaking another language is a necessary skill.

The Center for the Digital Future has some interesting statistics about Internet usage in their recent five year report:

• 78.6 percent of Americans use the Internet and

• Nearly two thirds of Americans are connected at home (more have it at work)

More interesting to me is that Internet users are going online without a specific task or destination in mind.

Many of us have changed our approach to using the Internet - from logging on, searching with a specific purpose and turning the computer off to now having the computer on in the background all the time for more immediate access. Users are now treating the Internet the same way that we treat the television. We are now going beyond our needs and clicking on more links with no real agenda or plan of action.

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I knew blogging was big in Japan, but I’m still surprised by the language breakdown in David Sifry’s (of Technorati) latest State of the Blogosphere report. In March 2006, 37% of all blog posts were written in Japanese vs. 31% in English. This despite the fact that there are between two and three as many English as Japanese speakers, globally. Here’s the chart:

Via Micropersuasion

The latest Beta version of Internet 7 was released a few days ago and the reaction of the blogosphere has been mixed. Based on what I’ve read, my guess would be that the the reviews are probably 20% positive, 60% middling and 30% negative. You know what though, it doesn’t matter all that much.

The blogosphere isn’t fair, and it certainly isn’t representative of typical consumers. Bloggers tend to own Macs and use alternative browsers like Firefox at much higher percentages than typical Internet users. And I’d speculate that the people who have downloaded IE 7 and written reviews at this early date are mostly Internet professionals who use Firefox and other alternative browsers more heavily than even bloggers. IE 7 is playing to an extremely tough crowd at this point. The browser is being judged by some of IE’s harshest critics.

So how do you track the reaction of the blogosphere to the release? I’d avoid the kind of good/bad approach I took in the opening paragraph. As mentioned, it just doesn’t matter that much. In this case, the conclusion a reviewer reaches is far less important than the details of what they have to say (what specifically do the like and not like). It’s sort of like playing for a coach like Bobby Knight. The fact that he calls you stupid and lazy doesn’t matter - he’s always going to call you are stupid and lazy. What’s important is what you did in this particular instance to make him reach that conclusion.