Marketing Tom - Internet Marketing

Typepad Adds Captcha technology to Reduce Comment Spam

Given the amount of comment spam that is flying around on blogs, Typepad has just announced the addition of CAPTCHA technology to reduce it. Turning this on in your blog configuration will add one more deterrent to automated comment spam programmes. This is the same technology that Yahoo! uses to reduce spammers using Yahoo! accounts.

Some Reading for Easter

Over the next few days I will be giving the computer a rest but here are some of the articles that I hope to read over this time:

Marketing Sherpa
Exclusive: MarketingSherpa Interview with Web Design God Steve Krug (Audio MP3 + Transcript)
MarketingSherpa's Viral Marketing Hall of Fame 2006: Top 12 Campaigns You Should Swipe Ideas From
Inside Hyundai's Online Advertising Tactics: What Works for Behavioral and Launch Campaigns
How to Conduct an Interactive Survey & Turn the Results into Must-Attend Webcast Content
Seven Inspirational Site Tweaks Newegg.com Used to Raise Online Sales to $1.3 Billion

Marketing Profs
How to Create a Successful Business Blog: 9 Steps to Implementing
How to Create a Successful Business Blog: 8 Planning Tips (Part 1 of 2)
Give Away Your Research—Win Valuable PR and Marketing Prizes
How to Beat the Competition With Your AdWords Campaigns

Fast Company
The Beauty of Simplicity

HBS Working Knowledge
Lessons from the Browser Wars
Does Your Company Belong in the Blogosphere?

Have a Happy Easter!

25 Things Danny Sullivan Hates About Google

Danny Sullivan is one of the leading lights of the Search Engine Industry and is the catalyst behind Search Engine Watch and the Search Engine Strategies conferences. Over on Clickz he has written an interesting article about the 25 Things I Hate About Google - I didn't know there could be so many issues with Google! It looks like Google's purchase of Writely pushed Danny to write this article - his gripe would appear to be that they are focusing on a new toy without having fixed the other ones. Some of the 25 include:

Web search counts make no sense
You confuse people by changing UIs [User Interfaces]
Where are the related searches?
You aren't responsive enough to click fraud complaints
Give us paid Web search support
Blogger is free
I don't have a list of all my referring pages in Google Analytics

Disney on Podcasting

There's an interesting interview over on Clickz - Questions for disney's Director of Synergy - between Zachary Rodgers and Michael Petersen. In it Michael Petersen describes the incredible take up of podcasting - 250,000 have signed up - since it lauched in August of last year much of it driven, by the sounds of it, through iTunes. In it he talks about its evolution, the decision to place adverts on podcasts and quite refreshingly just how new podcasting is, even to a company as huge as Disney:

Q. Have you done a lot of research into the medium and how it's used, or are you throwing your hat into the ring more casually to see what happens? The latter, like everybody else right now. It's so new. Through focus groups and conferences that have kids on panels, we know how technologically savvy they are... anecdotally rather than through any hard data.