netactr

Jason Calacanis, the beleaguered founder of Mahalo, gave the best keynote at the SES New York. Mahalo is a start-up search engine which tries to reinvent what Yahoo pioneered in the 90’s – a directory for internet maintained by humans. Mahalo pays $15+ to anyone who is willing to build a wiki-like page with links […]

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Nicholas Carr gave the opening keynote at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York. I have my disagreements with Mr. Carr. For starters, he has a Wall Street approach to technology, any technology. His favorite comparison is that of computing power and electrical power. Carr likes to use such terms as “raw computing power”, […]

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Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web inventor, threw his weight behind the semantic web and “mega-mash-ups”. “In the semantic web, it’s like every piece of data is given a longitude and latitude on a map, and anyone can ‘mash’ them together and use them for different things”, Bernes-Lee said in an interview with Times Online. […]

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More and more service providers and technology vendors develop javascript codelets or server-side technology enriching web pages by automatically adding icons or underlining links or keywords. Examples: Yahoo Shortcuts, Snap, Surfcanyon, Kontera … the list goes on and on. Why care? My prediction is that this technology will be used more and more for marketing purposes, but the tech and […]

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If you are looking for ways to better engage your audience, check out Microsoft’s Left vs Right. This site hosts two fictional characters representing the spectrum of political opinions. Visitors use the chat metaphor to initiate searches on Live Search and watch short skits that are loosely based on submitted queries. Left vs Right builds […]

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Snap is an interesting gadget for spicing up your web content and earning ad revenue in the process. After you integrate a 3-line java script into your home page - I just created a title-less text widget on my WordPress blog and copied the code over there - all your links will be “snappable”. Snap […]

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I just stumbled upon Openads.org – a publisher (as in “ad publisher”) solution available both as software and hosted service. If you own a few websites and are considering allocating some of your web real estate to revenue-generating ads, you should definitely check these folks out. I like the fact that Openads aggregates ad inventory […]

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If you have a few free minutes, check out zaaz.com. Zaaz is an interactive marketing agency and their site concept is truly refreshing as it is built around a combination of search and chat metaphors. First, the Flash-based site recognized my wide aspect ratio display and printed a quirky message. I was hooked. On my […]

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The supply side of the Web Analytics Data market is dominated by comScore, Nielsen//NetRatings, compete, and hitwise. The first two (comScore and Nielsen//NetRatings) provide the most accurate and stable data sets and are quoted throughout the industry. Compete and hitwise are good info sources for triangulating or researching trends but sometimes have wide swings month […]

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I just stumbled upon this collection of internet-related research and forecasts by Morgan Stanley, your friendly neighborhood i-banker.  The Internet Advertising Outlook report by Mary Meeker is very good, especially because it spells out various assumptions and drivers like Coverage, Click-Through-Rates etc. Not surprisingly, Paid Search leads the pack at least until 2010. Marketers like performance-based tools. It’s all about improving […]

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