Archive for April, 2008

« Older Entries

United Online: NetZero, Classmates.com and now FTD

April 30, 2008

FTD Group Inc., the second-largest online florist after 1-800-Flowers.com Inc., is being acquired by Internet company United Online Inc., the companies announced today.

Nasdaq: UNTD is a provider of consumer Internet and media services with over 50 million members. The company’s brands include Classmates.com and NetZero and Juno.

“This transaction will meaningfully diversify our revenue base within a large global market experiencing significant migration to the Internet,” said Mark R. Goldston, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of United Online. “Our proven expertise in implementing marketing initiatives to drive results should enable us to leverage the FTD brand and bring FTD products to United Online`s over 50 million consumer accounts. Further, we will explore opportunities to encourage repeat purchases of FTD products using reward programs based on our MyPoints loyalty marketing service.”

United Online will pay FTD shareholders $456 million in cash and stock. Assuming FTD’s debt will put the value of the deal at approximately $800 million.

By cross-pollinating (pun intended) FTD with its existing brands, United Online believes the combined businesses will have a rosy future.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Classmates.com, FTD, United Online | Leave a Comment »

Brand Lift through iGoogle Artists Themes

April 30, 2008

Google re-introduce an expanded roster of Artist Themes for iGoogle.

What if you could have your brand’s most loyal customers display your brand image alongside Google’s in your customer’s browser’s homepage?

Can you say Brand Lift?

Innovative earlier adopters like Dolce & Gabbana, Philippe Starck, Diane von Furstenberg (I guess Mr. Diller approves) the Beastie Boys and even Lance Armstrong have already taken the leap.

See for yourself in this YouTube video montage showcasing 68 original iGoogle themes by world-class artists:

Find more Google iGoogle Artist themes at Google.com

iGoogle Artist Theme

iGoogle Artist Themes

iGoogle Artists Themes

iGoogle Artist Themes

Tags:, , , , , , ,
Posted in Brand, Brand Management, Brand Manager, iGoogle | Leave a Comment »

Possibly Related Posts?

April 29, 2008

Today some of my blogs started receiving traffic from other WordPress.com blogs I wasn’t yet familiar with.

After investigating the referral strings, I noticed WordPress has begun placing a set of four links at the bottom of their WordPress.com hosted blogs.

I have tried for nearly 20 minutes to upload screen capture of the links being displayed but seem to be having problems loading any images.

Wisely, WordPress has made their first link to a post already within the author’s site. The other links point to other WordPress blogs.

Cross pollination of blogs should increase WordPress traffic significantly.

Tags:,
Posted in Possibly Related Posts, Wordpress.com | Leave a Comment »

Make This Blog Your Personalized Blog.com Domain Mapping Trial

April 29, 2008

I am trying out the WordPress.com “Make this blog your personalized blog.com” domain mapping service with my personal domain: TimothyCohn.com

Make This Your Personalized Blog.com

Previously the TimothyCohn.com domain was hosted and parked at WhyPark.com.

TimothyCohn.com at one time was in Google’s search engine results. However, like all short cuts – the WhyPark.com domain parking solution proved to be both: short and cut.

I own TimothyCohn.com and haven’t changed the domain’s ownership during this trial. Only time will tell if my realigning my site with WordPress.com will find the TimothyCohn.com domain back in Google’s index.

Google recently made it clear they weren’t planning on indexing parked sites while also outlining their methodology for identifying parked sites and eradicating them. Google simply searches for parked domain “web template patterns” and then deletes the parked sites and their offending patterns from their index.

This particular WordPress.com sub-domain TimCohn.Wordpress.com is in Google search results and also appears in Google Blog Search.

The purpose of this blog post is to see if and how Google will crawl and then supplant this TimCohn.Wordpress.com subdomain with the TimothyCohn.com domain.

I am looking forward to seeing how long the “Make this blog your personalized blog.com” domain mapping service from WordPress takes to replace the TimCohn.Wordpress.com subdomain results in Google search results – if at all.

Tags:, , ,
Posted in Domain, Google | 1 Comment »

Google Who Is Domain Search

April 29, 2008

Google search now provides WhoIs domain registration information directly in their search results via Domain Tools.

Domain ownership details can be found by clicking the result.

A search for: whois domaintools.com produces the following result.

Google Who Is Domain Search

Be sure to to type whois as one word as opposed to two because a search for who is domaintools.com doesn’t produce the domain’s registration information, it produce the site’s search results.

Google Who Is Domain Search

I have used Domain Tools for several years and highly recommend their site and tools. As far as I can tell, there are few if any other domain intelligence tools that provide anywhere near the data Domain Tools does.

Jay Westerdal of Domain Tools blog posts about the domain industry are also worth investigating further.

Tags:, ,
Posted in Google, Google Search Results, Who Is, WhoIs | Leave a Comment »

New Alexa.com Rankings

April 25, 2008

Alexa.com has revised how they rank web site traffic.

Excerpts regarding their changes from the Alexa.com blog:

“Alexa began displaying rankings in 1998 it was with the goal of showing Alexa Toolbar users how popular any given site was within the Alexa community. We generated the rankings through an analysis of Internet usage by people who use the Alexa Toolbar. Since that time we’ve been delighted to see that the Alexa Rankings have become a yardstick by which website popularity is measured.

We listened to your suggestions, and we believe that our new rankings system is much closer to what you asked for. We now aggregate data from multiple sources to give you a better indication of website popularity among the entire population of Internet users.”

I had stopped looking at Alexa.com data several years ago because Alexa data was being manipulated and exploited by webmasters who were looking to make their traffic appear greater than it actually was.

Previously, Alexa gathered its data from a single source – the Alexa tool bar installed in web browsers.

Webmasters simply installed the Alexa tool bar and visited their own site(s) once, twice, several times a day which then resulted in an exponentially higher traffic ranking for their site because of the way Alexa.com extrapolated its data.

By gathering their data from more than one source, Alexa should restore the spirit and accuracy to the web traffic rankings system Alexa.com pioneered.

Alexa.com Rankings

Tags:
Posted in Alexa, Alexa Rank | Leave a Comment »

Google Earth Day Word Search

April 21, 2008

Search for the Earth Day word that isn’t really one from the following list of 21 iGoogle tab themes.

Google offers custom Google page themes for iGoogle account holders.

After you have established your iGoogle account, you will see your home page tab followed by “Add a tab” and then to the far right “Select theme” and “Add stuff” links.

iGoogle

Click on the “Select theme” link and you will be taken to directory of Google themes for use as images within your iGoogle tabs. You can search for word specific themes or drill down through their list a page at a time.

iGoogle Theme Search

I have searched through the majority of iGoogle page theme options to produce the following selection of 21 Earth Day related images and words for use in your iGoogle tabs.

To keep things interesting, I have slipped in one image and word that under most circumstances wouldn’t qualify as an Earth Day related term.

See if you can figure out which one word and image aren’t even remotely related to Earth Day and submit your answer in the “Leave a reply” section of the post.

Hamburg

Hamburg

Moscow

Moscow

Beach

Beach

City Scape

City Scape

Cutler Maine

Cutler Maine

Digby Sunset

digby sunset

Earth Light

Earth Light

Fenway Panaorama

Fenway Panaorama

Grass

Grass

Hong Kong

Hong Kong

Kenai Mountains

kenai-mountains-at-kachemak-bay

Live Planet Northern Hemisphere

live-planet-northern-hemisphere

Morning Moon

morning-moon

Mountain

mountain

Mt. Katahdin

mt-katahdin

New York City

new-york-city

Paris

paris

The Mediterranean

the-mediterranean

Stephen Colbert | Stephen Colberticon

Stephen Colberticon

Theme 1

theme-1

Tibet Himalaya Mountain

tibet-himalaya-mountain-theme

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Earth Day, Google, iGoogle | Leave a Comment »

US Population Statistics and Clock

April 21, 2008

The United States Census Bureau provides some great statistics of US population data.

Two of my favorite sources of Census statistics are the US Population Clock and the US Population Density Map.

Only with a firm grasp of US population figures and density can direct marketers begin to target their prospects let alone acquire new customers profitably.

The US Population Clock projects US population in GMT daily.

US Population Clock

According to the US Population Clock, the US has:

One birth every……………………………. 7 seconds

One death every……………………………. 12 seconds

One international migrant (net) every………… 29 seconds

Net gain of one person every………………… 12 seconds

The US Population Density map also includes population statistics of border towns. The US Population density map provides a quick way to visualize where US geographic markets are.

US Population Density

Tags:
Posted in Marketing | Leave a Comment »

YouTube Clogs Internet?

April 20, 2008

YouTube was founded 2-15-05.

According to Sergey Brin via Search Engine Watch, 10 hours of new video are going up on YouTube every minute.

YouTube’s bandwidth costs are estimated at approximately $1 million a day.

Forbes reports YouTube’s traffic is 50 petabytes per month.

The amount of original cable, television and radio content created annually totals 100 PB.

The content being uploaded onto YouTube every two months now equals the amount of traditional media content produced every twelve months.

Although still in its infancy, Internet video – according to Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T – will cause the Internet to reach its “physical capacity” by 2010 without further significant infrastructure investment.

Who ever figures out how to monetize free online video distribution first will own the next upcoming incarnation of the internet.

Tags:
Posted in YouTube | Leave a Comment »

Stop Blog Content Theft: Splagiarism!

April 18, 2008

In pictures here is what happened:

1. I wrote a blog post called Earthquake Rocks Google Too.

2. I published the blog via WordPress.

3. A splog grabbed my content and scraped the first paragraph.

WordPress Content Theft

4. The splog then fed my content to both blog and search results.

Blog Content Theft

5. My content was then displayed as the splog’s and in doing so denied my authorship and ownership rights to the blog post in both the same blog and search results.
Google Search Results

6. I began a thread about this at WordPress forums and within three hours, WordPress, the WordPress Community and Google completely resolved the issue in the search results. Not so in the blog results as of yet.

Corrected Google Search Results



Thanks!

Tags:
Posted in Blog Content Theft, Splagiarism, Splog | Leave a Comment »

« Older Entries