According to this ClickZ report, Google is raking in 77 percent of the search engine spend. According to Hitwise, Google commands 65 percent of the searches being done. I’m not quite sure whether that 12 percent disparity is significant in any way, but whether it is or isn’t, one thing is crystal-clear: Google’s going to continue to be the 800-pound gorilla in the world of keyword search for some time to come.
Wired alerts us to the news that a file containing a half-million photos hacked off of MySpace made the top 10 list of most popular downloads on Pirate Bay.
That’s a big security issue for MySpace, but may not be much of a concern for MySpace users. As one disappointed downloader notes in the article, the photos boil down to “wedding, baby, party, wedding, baby, party, etc. Truly boring stuff.”Well, duh.
John C. Dvorak’s blog alerts us to “The Dumb Man,” a short film created almost entirely in Second Life. Here’s a great post about it over on New World Notes.
More than social networking and in-world marketing, this is the sort of thing that makes Second Life incredibly interesting to me. This is five minutes and five seconds of intense creativity with some truly powerful images.
Projects like these, known as machinima, strike me here at the beginning of the 21st century as the digital equivalent of what Georges Melies was doing with film at the end of the 19th century.
Imagine the possibilities.
The Times Online alerts us to Qtrax.
Tons of free music, but here’s the catch: You have to view ads to get it. And you have to download the Qtrax software. And it’s probably not iPod compatible, at least not out of the box. And the bitrate of the music remains to be seen.
Still, it looks like something worth exploring. And if the bitrate is decent and there’s an easy way to port the songs over to your MP3 player, then this could get a lot of attention very quickly.
JANUARY 28 UPDATE: Ummmm…
Super Duper Tuesday is less than two weeks away, and lots of people have been clicking on select-a-candidate quizzes like this or this or this or this or this or this.
Do these quizzes have any impact on voting decisions? No one knows. Countless people take these polls, and it’s possible that they have some impact, but in the grand scheme of things no one’s paying much attention to them. Which raises some interesting questions.
How accurate are these polls? Do they truly reflect the candidates’ positions, or are they skewed in some fashion?
In politics, the youth vote and the undecided vote tend to be two voting blocs that candidates covet most. In this Presidential year, I think the undecided bloc is smaller than usual, but the youth vote is looking to be significant.
Do young voters, who are plugged into the grid, use these sorts of quizzes to help solidify their voting choices?
And what about computer-savvy supporters of a particular candidate? How difficult would it be to whip up a quiz that, regardless of the answers one places into the Web form, skews the answers toward their particular candidate? Not difficult at all.
Maybe quizzes like these are utterly insignificant. Maybe quizzes like these are startlingly accurate and influential.
The only thing we know for sure is that they’re out there and getting traffic.
