Stewie Live is making the rounds, an application that pretty much does the same sorta thing as Subservient Chicken, Subservient President (ask him to dance!), Virtual Stripper (you knew it had to be out there somewhere), and Virtual Bartender. The good news: It’s plenty of fun for Family Guy fans, and every entry has a sound element to it. The bad news: There’s no way to make Stewie sing “Rocketman” — damn you, vile copyright laws!
“Podscope is the first search engine that actually allows you to search for spoken words within any audio or video file.”
So: Search for a term like, say, “online marketing” or “Monty Python.” Get a bunch of results. Expand any individual result by clicking the “+” sign. Click on the “>” sign to play the snippet of the Podcast that has your search term in it.
This is pretty cool.
This is really something: MIT is working to develop a $100 laptop. “The MIT Media Lab has launched a new research initiative to develop a $100 laptop — a technology that could revolutionize how we educate the world’s children. ”
Here are stories about it from BBC News, Yahoo News, PC Magazine, and PC World.
eMarketer reports today (open access till October 11) on some interesting info about paid search advertising contained in results of an annual survey by Marketing Sherpa.
The upshot: 43% of Sherpa readers feel paid search is “very effective” vs. 34% last year. More than one in five B2C marketers (22%) plan a “big increase” in paid search spending in the next year; more than half the remaining marketers (43%) plan a “small increase.”
All of this comes in light of rising costs and diminishing click rates: The average clickthrough rate of survey respondents fell from 3.0% to 2.6% while the average Google cost per click rose from $1.29 to $1.61. (Sherpa acknowledges these numbers may be skewed “due to the high incidence of readers in the e-commerce/multichannel retail, travel/hospitality and financial services industries.”)
Takeaway for marketers: Click costs have risen, and will continue to do so. The search jungle continues to get more crowded all the time.
Splogs — or spam blogs — are getting out of control. These are automatically generated blogs that don’t offer any real content, just a buttload of links. The main reason for generating splogs is to try and game the search engines: If your site is linked to from 1,000 splogs, search engines might rank your site higher in their organic results. Sploggers also clog up the comments areas of legitimate blogs with irrelevant comments and links to their affiliated sites, and also use splogs to game Google’s AdSense program.
The problem with splogs is that search engine results get clogged with irrelevant crap, blogs get clogged with irrelevant crap, and your overall online experience has taken a step closer to irrelevant crap.
Want to see some splogs in action? Go to Google’s blog search and try searching for a spam fave like cialis or ephedra. Or maybe for something that would bring someone to your site — and see how many splogs are crowding out your site. Instead of your site being 1 in 10 results relevant to your subject matter, maybe you’re now 1 in 50. Or 1 in 100. Thank the sploggers.
Want to know more? Fight Splog! is a site that provides some tools where you can report splogs when you see them. Fighting Splog is a splog blog that provides some positive signs of anti-splog efforts starting to pick up steam. And if you want to dig into the issue further, you can’t do much better than Doc Searls’ splog posts from August 25 and September 28.
Takeaway for marketers: Don’t splog!
