Marketing Tom - Internet Marketing

Apple Turns 30

Apple will be 30 on April 1st and Wired magazine has a special series of articles to celebrate the event. One that caught my attention was the series of screenshots showing how the operating system has developed over the decades.

Seth Godin at Google

Why not take time out (48 minutes) and listen to Seth Godin impart more pearls of wisdom to the good folks of Google?

Rocketboom - Videoblog

I don't think I've blogged about this before, even though I often go on the site. Rocketboom, is a sort of news service offered via streaming video and hosted by rising star Amanda Congdon. Rocketboom offers a daily 'newscast' which covers all manner of issues. According to Wiki (yes, they have an entry on Wikipedia!):

Rocketboom (subtitled: daily with Amanda Congdon) [1] is a three-minute daily videoblog created and co-owned by producer-director Andrew Baron and Amanda Congdon. Actress Congdon appears five days a week as Rocketboom's anchor and host, occasionally doing interviews at interior and exterior locations.

It is extremely addictive, due to the excellent delivery by Amanda Congdon and the diverse (eclectic) content on the show. She tends to interweave standard newsroom delivery with photo, video and web clips and even has a number of contributors (call them correspondents) who create video feeds for the show.

Rocketboom offers that WOW! factor for me and though it can be categorised as light, web entertainment, I can't help think that it should trigger thoughts on how videocasting - streaming or downloadable video can be used by businesses. I have already showed Rocketboom to one of my clients and they came up with some innovative takes on how they could use the technology. Let me know what business applications you can think of.

Technorati Tags: rocketboom | vlogging | podcasting

Podcasting and Search Engines

If you've already started doing your own podcasts, you may be interested to read an article on Clickz, entitled Search Engine Optimization for Podcasts. Drawing on a podcasting session at Search Engine Startegies in Chicago Grant Cowell offers some good tips for podcasters. Here are some neat tips:

Speakers offered the following tips and guidelines for optimizing podcasts:    

• Promote only one feed. "Many podcasters create a podcast, then move over to a different content management system, promote a new RSS feed, and wind up with all of these different feeds out there for every podcast," said Dick Costolo, CEO of Feedburner.

• Optimize the audio file. A lot of people listen to a podcast on their computer as well as MP3 players.  Close the findability gap. "Optimize a landing page for each episode of your show, as well as your category page," said Amanda Watlington, owner of Searching for Profit. "Provide subscription information on the landing pages that's very visible."

• Build correct and valid feeds. "Validate your feeds with feed validator tools," said Watlington. "Remember that iTunes does not redistribute. So you must build a separate feed for iTunes. I like to promote doing 3 separate feeds: a 2.0 feed, a media feed, and an iTunes feed."

• Include a transcript or summary. Whether or not it is a transcript or a summary will depend on the podcast's time span. "If you're giving just a little short tip, that's one thing," said Watlington. "Typically, a summary is all you need for your landing page, a nicely optimized page that covers the podcast's high points."

One thing to bear in mind is that search engines, like Podscope, actually use speech recognition to determine the relvancy of the podcast.

Technorati Tags: podcast | search engines

Google Buys Writely

Both the Google blog and Writely Blog announce that Google has indeed bought Writely. Writely is a Free, at the moment!, online collaborative tool which allows users to share, upload/download documents through their website. I have been using this tool for the past few months on a number of projects and am mightily impressed. I just hope now that Google will ensure that it remains an exciting Web 2.0 tool.

Technorati Tags: writely

Take Part In an Online Survey and $25 Will Go To Charity

Last week I wrote an article about how the Business Development Institute was conducting an online survey on behalf of the City of Amsterdam. In return for taking part in the survey, the City of Amsterdam would donate $25 to a charity called A Little Hope. Here's what the charity does:

A Little HOPE is a 501(c)(3) charitable foundation which grants funds in order to provide grief counseling and bereavement support services to children and teens who have experienced the loss of a parent or loved one, regardless of the circumstances of the death.

Well, after an email follow-up from Steve Etzler of BDI, I would like to invite readers to participate in the survey - don't forget that for filling out the 2-minute (or less) survey, $25 will be donated to charity.

And one more thing, please provide a link to the survey from your own websites.

Search Engine Strategies New York Roundup

If you missed Search Engine Strategies in New York, Search Engine Roundtable has got a complete list of all sessions including the keynote from Barry Diller.

Happy St David's Day!

Happy St David's Day to you all!

Reciprocal Link Spam

Practically every day I get emails from people asking for reciprocal links. They invariably start off with:

I recently found your site http://www.marketingtom.com and am very interested in exchanging links. I've gone ahead and posted a link to your site, on this page:

At which point I check and find that I am listed at the bottom of a long list of other websites. These emails always finish off with the folloiwng paragraph:

As you know, reciprocal linking benefits both of us by raising our search rankings and generating more traffic to both of our sites. Please post a link to my site as follows:

One thing that rankles me is that every time I use my Google Toolbar cached tool I find that these sites have not even been listed on Google. So, we have a situation where:

1. They want me to put a link to them from one of my web pages which has a Google PR rank of 6 or even 7.
2. The value I get from a link, even if it has a good PR ranking is minimal as there are so many other links on that page.
3. What the hell doesHome Insurance, a Czech hotel or Work at Home Ideas have to do with Internet Marketing and Blogging.

In this instance reciprocal linking only benefits the site that asks me to create a link to them.

What to do?
I just tend to add them to my Yahoo! email spam list (they are almost always bulk spammers).