Google Plus is now in image ads. The Google Plus image looks a bit too large for the ads.
My Best for 2011
Best Book of 2011: The Postmortal by Drew Magary. A great book from a guy who writes about sports and everything else (mostly food, adult content and going to the bathroom) over at Deadspin and Kissing Suzy Kolber. The Postmortal book has none of that stuff. What is does have is a great story about the human race finding a cure for aging. People live forever (unless they get cancer or shot, etc.) and the world becomes a pretty horrible place. Read a great interview with the “Most Read Writer on the Internet” at BeatBeat.
Best Album of 2011: Breaks in the Armor by Crooked Fingers. The Archers of Loaf hit the road in 2011 as well as re-released Icky Mettle on Merge Records, but the latest solo album form Eric Bachmann was my favorite new album of the year. The sound is nothing like the Archers, but is highly recommended. (Also Recommended: Wild Flag.)
Best Website I Discovered in 2011: The Smoking Jacket. (Warning: Might be slightly NSFW*). This blog run by a team over at Playboy offers a number of posts featuring the women of Playboy, but those posts are outnumbered by better ones featuring stories about fantasy football, humor, news and more. You can truly say that you read “Playboy for the articles.”
*I read The Smoking Jacket via RSS on my iPhone so I do not know how NSFW the standard web-based site is. On a side note, a co-worker had no idea what NSFW meant. Can you believe that?
Best Prediction I Made that Came 66% True in 2011: I predicted that Bill Simmons, Chuck Klosterman and Will Leitch would start their own Sports/Pop Culture site this year. 2 out of 3 was pretty close.
Raleigh is now added to the Twitter trends city list.
AdWords Editor Updated to Version 9.7.1
AdWords Editor has been update. Features include:
- Faster downloading for large accounts, and faster cut, copy, and paste (including drag-and-drop).
- A new tool for changing the capitalization of selected text in one step.
- More AdWords settings available within AdWords Editor, including advanced location settings, user interest category targeting, and Wifi traffic targeting.
Google is now allowing users to block ads from a specific advertiser in search results after clicking and visiting the website.
ShareFile Jobs
ShareFile is hiring for a number of different positions.
Click here to apply.
We have been slowly growing for the past 5 years and have ramped up hiring in engineering and sales. We will have a number of openings listed soon in other departments so be sure to check back or follow me on Twitter for updates on listings.
Amazing article at The Atlantic on how baseball games were shown to large crowds using manual displays, lights and puppets. The modern ESPN online gamecasts are very similar to how the games were shown to crowds back in the early 1900s.
There, a series of lights shone through the thin fabric indicate the progress and location of hits, base runners and fielders. At right in the photo are ball, strike, and out lights. This was not a one man job. Several controlled the indicators, one acted as announcer.
Google Analytics: Flow Visualization
Google Analytics has announced a pretty interesting feature, Flow Visualizatuion. This feature will enable you to analyze site insights graphically, and instantly understand how visitors flow across pages on your site.
Bing Inflating Search Numbers Through Promotion?
Bing has been running a promotion that rewards searchers with points that can be used to purchase items such as gift cards, vacations, contest entries and more. I have redeemed points earned through my Bing searches for Xbox Live points.
Over the past few months Bing’s PR staff, and some search professionals, have praised the search engine for increasing search share, but how much of it actually legitimate? In August it took 3 searches to earn 1 point and in September only 2 were required. The data below shows Bing’s September 2011 search numbers and a dip from the previous month.
How many people come to Bing, search for a random word, and then just click the related searches 20 times and get their allotted 10 points for the day? I do.
Since Bing has been running this campaign for quite some time now and has been gaining market share according to Venture Beat, how much traffic is actually from single searches and not incentivized searches with no real value?
Dan is currently the Sr. Manager, Online Marketing at Citrix / ShareFile. 