CogBlog

AQuantive, parent company to AvenueA, GoToast, and AtlasDMT, has announced it is purchasing Utah firm SBI.Razorfish for $160 Million.

1) Gmail is not spyware. Spyware/AdWare involves an application that (depending upon the source) runs in the background while you do other things, recording your behavior. Gmail does nothing like this. Access your account, you'll see ads. Leave your account and Gmail won't be there spying on you.

2) Ads are targeted in the same way that AdSense ads are targeted. It is an automated process. No human beings are reading your mail. The only risk is in having your messages on a third party server. But, that is already the case for most people.

3) Other free mail services already use the content of messages to target ads. If you use Yahoo mail in conjunction with MyYahoo or Yahoo Finance you've probably given them much more information than Gmail.

4) You can delete messages with Gmail.

5) Believe it or not, you might find the ads useful. Although, I'm sure that is a matter of personal taste.

6) They don't share information with third parties.

7) A totally voluntary system which serves relevant marketing messages, in a very targeted way, is a positive for our industry.

8) You can stop using it at any time. After 9 months your account will be deleted.

9) The actual Big Brother already reads your email with the CARNIVORE system. And their purposes are more scary than sending a link to Red Envelope.

10) Unless you're life is more interesting than mine, even if someone did read all your email, it wouldn't make any difference. :-)

According to this press release BMW will be integrating iPod support into it's auto line, including the Mini. The iPod will plug in to a powered cable in the glove box, and the driver can control the iPod from the steering wheel.

Sounds great to me!

The press release describes a new website, www.ipodyourbmw.com that will support the new product. But, unfortunately when you go there you see a "coming soon" message from their domain registrar! How hard would it be to at least put up a basic single page, even if the rest of the site wasn't ready. What a waste of a press release.

This event passed by with no-one even noticing. Looksmart has finally paid it's debt to it's long-time customers and will be ending it's free-click program.

If you were around oh-so-long-ago when Looksmart changed it's business model from a one-time $300 listing fee per business, to a PPC model, you might remember the fury they unleashed. Webmasters the world over were steaming mad. How could you charge us for clicks! We paid our $300, that entitles us to free clicks forever!

Looksmart was sued, and as part of the settlement had to pay off all those old customers with a click-credit, equal to the amount of their original listing price. But, they did it at $15/month for 20 months.

We had 19 Looksmart listings, so we've been collecting our $285 in free Looksmart clicks for the last almost two years. It all ended yesterday.

Looksmart probably needs some good news right about now. They lost Microsoft at the end of last year -- their biggest customer by a huge margin. The stock is in the toilet.

All this could have been avoided (maybe not the loss of Microsoft, but the refund hassle) if someone early on would have questioned the wisdom of charging only $300 for a lifetime of service. But, at least they had the guts to make the change, no matter how painful.

Good luck Looksmart.

If you use Mac OS X, like I do, then you probably see the occasional site that doesn't quite appear as you would expect it too. It is rare, but an annoyance just the same.

Well, just recently I started using FireFox, another Mozilla browser, and have found that it is by far the most compatible browser I've yet found for OSX. And, even better it is OS X native, so it is super-fast.

Here is my highly scientific Mac browser opinion matrix.
I think I'll grade them too:

Internet Explorer: A carbonized version of the previous IE browser for OS 9 (this means it is slower than it should be). It's alright from a compatibility standpoint, but there are some CSS2 implementations that completely fall apart. Witness the Looksmart administrative interface for an example.
Grade: C-

Safari: Props to Apple for putting together an OS X native browser. It renders pages very quickly, but sometimes type sizes display in unpredictable ways. The Overture management interface is nearly unusable in Safari. So, just don't start thinking that what you see in Safari is what everyone else is seeing.
Grade: B

Camino: This is a good browser. Comes with automatic pop-up blocking enabled. They were the first browser I know of to use tabs (which I could not live without). Good all around compatibility, but also fails in rendering some CSS2 properly. Oh, and it is OSX native too.
Grade: B+

FireFox: All the good things of Camino are here, along with a nifty Google toolbar. I give Camino a slight edge in the way it handles bookmarks. But, in terms of compatibility there is no equal. FireFox is the only browser officially compatible with Gmail, and it is the only one I've ever seen on a Mac to properly render the Looksmart log-in page (http://listings.looksmart.com).

Here's another great feature of FireFox: If you have multiple accounts that use the same login screen most browsers password manager will only remember one version. FireFox remembers a separate password for each username -- even for the same log-in screen. This is great for a site like Overture where we have many accounts which all log into the direct traffic center from the same location.

I've only encountered one significant bug -- when you get a JavaScript alert box, sometimes you just can't close it. You must exit the browser to get away.

So that's it. FireFox gets docked half a grade because of that bug, but all the other features still earn it a well deserved A-.

Oh, I didn't mention Netscape. Sadly, it is the only Mac browser I never use. The agonizingly slow application launch time is just too much for me.

This is an interesting tidbit from Frank Barnako's Internet Daily column on CBSMarketWatch:

The Internet is one of the most important sources of information for people deciding whether to buy expensive items, says a Harris Interactive survey commissioned by the consumer service portal Reply.

According to a poll of 2,245 The Web is a more popular source than referrals by parents, friends, professionals, news articles and clergy.

"Other than their spouses, people seek advice from the Internet before any other source," says Payam Zamani, CEO of Reply. "People don't just turn to the Web for small purchases like CDs and books anymore. They trust the Web as an essential referral source for making major purchases such as homes, cars and loans."

Understanding that many of the visitors to your site are looking for advice or product comparison information helps explain why those cheesy long-copy pages do so well. And, It is more of a challenge than you might think to properly address your online marketing to advice seekers. I think most people have a very strong urge to do what seems to fit, rather than what may be most effective. Consequently you have ads that "look like ads", and copy that "sounds professional", and sites that try to be "entertaining", rather than addressing the mindset of your potential customer in a useful way.

Yesterday, I attended one of the MarketingExperiments.com online seminars. If you are not familiar MarketingExperiments (ME) is a group headed by Dr. Flint McGlaughlin that performs large scale online marketing experiments.

ME makes their money from subscriptions from online marketers interested in hearing the results of their studies. They also do twice monthly webinars which tackle a particular subject. Yesterday's was on the subject of marketing subscription websites via PPC (pay-per-click).

You'll have to subscribe yourself to get the details, but they did have some interesting conclusions. One important conclusion applies to all marketing, online and off -- an understanding of your customer's lifetime value is critical to determining what you can profitably spend.

One attendee asked how they manage all the data, analysis and management required when you have thousands of keywords. Their answer surprised me. They use a combination of some third party tools like GoToast for bid management, but for ROI tracking they prefer their in-house proprietary system.

This is exactly our own experience. There is just no substitute for hosting your own data. Most third party tools have to make compromises in the interests of serving many users, that are not necessary when you manage your own system. And, the ability to run your own custom queries or address specific client requests just can't be beat.

Here is a link to Marketing Experiments.

I recently heard someone on a search marketing panel keep referring to paid search positioning as "search arbitrage". Arbitrage? It sure didn't seem right hearing this at the time but I think everyone in the room had the "does he know something I don't" feeling. So no one said anything.

But, now with the help of Google's handy define: function (which, if you don't know, is a great little feature of Google -- type define: yourword into Google and it will provide you a list of definitions) I realize that was just another misused word that sounds more important than the real thing.

Here is an excellent list of other examples from buzzkiller.net.

BTW arbitrage is the simultaneous buying and selling of a product or security in different markets to take advantage of a price discrepancy.

I've been beta testing Google's Gmail program for the last six weeks. I like the service so far, and it has been interesting to see how accurate the message-content-targeted ads have been.

Recently, Google has been expanding the number of beta users by allowing current beta members to invite others to use the service. The number of invites current users receive seems to vary. So far, I received one new invite a couple weeks ago, then 6 new invites yesterday. Google alerts you when someone you've invited has signed up for the service and automatically adds them to your address book.

Maybe Google is learning something about an effective soft launch from it's Orkut social networking service.

Just read this blurb about Yahoo testing a new homepage design. There is a fuzzy screenshot on SearchEngineJournal.com:

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=628

Search is featured much more prominently, and so is Yahoo Shopping. The directory has a fairly prominent position in the example. But, they've lost the directory sub-category links. I wonder how long Yahoo will continue the featured category sponsorship program? This is where you can pay a monthly fee to appear on the top of your particular directory page. I've always been skeptical of its value, and I would bet that this new design will result in even fewer visitors reaching the actual directory pages.

Ok, a little rant here.

Last week when I was attending Ad:Tech in San Francisco I was run through the money extraction machine known as hotel internet access.

The conference was at the Palace Hotel. I stayed at the "W" Hotel just around the corner. Both hotels are Starwood properties, and each uses the same service, TurboNet, to provide internet access. So, you would think that they could coordinate with each other right? No.

For wireless internet access in the lobby and (some parts of) the meeting rooms of the Palace Hotel you must pay $15/day whether you are a guest or not. At the "W" you must pay $15/day for high speed access in your hotel room (there is no access from the rooms of the Palace). But, if you also want to access the very same network in the lobby of the "W", you have to pay an additional fee, I think it was $9. So on one day, you could easily spend $40 just for the privilege of accessing the same network from three locations!

If you were willing to walk across the street, you could access the net at the local Starbucks at $30 for an entire month.

So what is so special about hotel wireless that it should cost so much? Why are they so different from your local coffee shop, library, or MacDonalds? Of course, the answer is they can get away with it for the moment. But, the day is soon coming when free internet access will be an expected room perk.

I'm ready.

This is an interesting bit of news I just read in Frank Barnako's column on CBS Marketwatch.

Circuit City is testing 10 Ebay reseller centers where you can drop off your used electronics to sell on Ebay. Circuit City will then photograph and list the item on their Ebay "Trading Post" site for a fee of not less than 25% of the sale price. Apparently Circuit City has a lot of extra space in their stores since they recently dropped major appliances.

Of course, the idea of an Ebay drop point is not new. I know of a number of small shops that will do the same just here in the SLC. But, this is the first time I've heard of a large retailer doing the same.