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I have personal proof that your search history, when logged in to Google, is applied to other Google properties.
I’ve been using Google Reader as my RSS aggregator. The blogs I have subscribed in Reader fall into three categories: Search/Marketing, Bicycling, and maybe one or two blogs belonging to friends that are a mix of both SEO and personal stuff. I also subscribe to updates on my friends’ Flickr feeds.
Nothing about parenting in there. However, I had been doing a lot (LOT) of searching around infant feeding recently due to the need to feed an infant, and figuring stuff out as a new parent. Note that NONE of my Google Reader feeds had anything to do with these topics.
So, today, in my ‘Top Recommendations’ box, what’s suggested to me? Two SEO-focused blogs and a blog about… breastfeeding:
(image is clickable for detail. You can see the sort of stuff I have subscribed in Google Reader, too, if you’re that kind of voyeur!)
Nothing in my RSS history suggests I care about breastfeeding. My search history is another thing altogether. I can only conclude that the suggestions are feeding from my logged-in search history, and not just which feeds I have live in Reader. There is no other logical explanation.
I really don’t know that I like this. There’s all sorts of stuff I search on that I might not want to read about every day. Like… breastfeeding.
Google is now providing ‘trend data’ to web site owners. Neato, eh?
If you read their FAQ, data is shared via the opt-in feature of Google Analytics, which various people have pointed out is hidden in the GA interface.
You can opt-out of the Google Analytics sharing, but you can’t opt your site out of the Trends interface without opting out of the index entirely.
Sure, there are plenty of ways to turn up competitive research. Google is simply making it idiot-friendly. No finesse will be required, although sure, you can question the accuracy/value of the data via this source all you want. People will use it anyway.
I, myself, will be investing in additional aluminum foil.
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune
today reports that the city of North Oaks, Minnesota, has requested that all street-level images of their community be removed from Google Maps.
Google says that no community has ever issued such a blanket request. This doesn’t surprise me – North Oaks, sometimes known as the ‘Forbidden City,’ is somewhat unique. All roads in North Oaks are private land, which means that the typical Google approach to getting street-level images – sending in a car with a dashboard camera – isn’t legal to use. Non-residents (or uninvited guests) using the roads in North Oaks is considered trespassing.
North Oaks aren’t requesting to Yahoo or MSN that satellite-level images of the city be removed from their services. However, satellite image collection would not violate right-of-way rules on city streets as the Google street-level collection does.
Interesting stuff.
I was reading a magazine today and in many ads, service providers were listing both web sites and e-mail addresses for contacts. Great, huh? Small local landscape architecture firms, promoting themselves and doing the right thing!
Actually, there was one small hitch: A lot of these places/people would have their fancy business URL, then be listing e-mail addresses from jumbo ISPs.
Frankly, if your Web host and/or developer can get you a URL and build you a site, it is not rocket science for them to provide a Webmail service with POP/IMAP mail fetch suitable for use in Microsoft Outlook or Mac Mail (assuming ‘least common denominators’ for mail programs). And they should. Using your domain as both site and e-mail just looks better in offline ads, on invoices, on business cards.
But then, I am a cranky and should probably just be pleased that these individual businesses are making the effort. They’ll learn as they go.
On the Internet, ‘being a good guy’ will not drive performance in and of itself.
Being a good guy who leverages good guy qualities, such as friends who like him and will link to him and people who will write positive reviews on user-generated review sites helps a lot more than just complaining that a site ’should’ work because someone is a ‘good guy.’
The tangentially-related reality is that ‘experience’ and ‘reputation’ only apply in similar fashions for late-adopters of online media. Years of success and Yellow Page double-truck glory will not magically rocket a site to the top over perhaps less prestigious competitors who took the leap and worked to make it a good one.
Here is how NOT to be a catalog retailer on the Internet:
- Mail out a spring catalog with the new line as the feature
- Launch your new web site, complete with a big feature on how neato-swell they hope everyone finds the new site
- Fail to include ANY of the new spring line on the web site, whether due to failure of database integration, misguided idea that the site should focus on winter clearance a bit longer, or simple poor coordination between merchandising and technology
- Despite the web site allowing order of the new merch via stock number, have the web site reject all promotion codes and customer loyalty codes
Note that this retailer has a long history online and should really know better. They fail a user experience test well before I get into the usability issues of the new design, which are many and awful.
I’ve been planning a rant about the baby-industrial complex, which I have concluded to be EVEN MORE EVIL than the marriage-industrial complex. However, it seems a new book’s
Eyes Wide Shut trailer
Hero Wanted movie
Arsenic and Old Lace dvd
been released that may even include something like research on the whole topic, not just my general rantiness.
Amazon sez:
Pamela Paul (Pornified: How Pornography Is Damaging Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families), mother of two, probes the business of parenting, exposing the high price of raising kids in our consumer-driven nation. Paul points out that it costs upwards of a million dollars to raise a child in the U.S. these days, especially if one buys into the theory that baby must have everything on the market. Following the money, Paul dissects the booming baby business, including smart toys that don’t really make kids smarter, themed baby showers and parenting coaches and consultants. The text is a tireless rundown of parents’ seemingly bottomless pocketbooks when it comes to bringing up baby, and according to Paul this is not just an upscale, cosmopolitan phenomenon—throughout the country parents are reaching deep into their pockets to fuel this spiraling craze. Though Paul incorporates the pithy quotes of a number of experts, such as psychologist David Elkind’s observation, Computers are part of our environment, but so are microwaves and we don’t put them in cribs, readers may find themselves wishing for more commentary and less litany. But Paul isn’t preachy, although she does reveal that what babies really need is holding, singing, dancing, conversation and outdoor play.
Which isn’t far off from what I say, which is that MY parents raised me without a $400 stroller, let alone an $800 stroller, and I seem to be a functioning member of society JUST FINE. (For those who might debate that, I will observe that I am employed, lack a criminal record, and have an excellent FICO score, regardless of anything else you might choose to observe about me. I did finally get a hair cut last week, too.)
My thing about the marriage industry is that they at once have the attempt to guilt you that ‘This is the best day of your life and will only happen once so it has to be perfect!’ issue running against the prevailing divorce rate. And also the fact that if it is, in fact, the best day of your life, everything else is downhill and wouldn’t that just suck? (Hm, maybe that explains the last 6 months of my life.)
With pregnancy and raising a child, the guilt stakes are far higher. The divorce rate is one thing, but do you want to risk your child not getting into a good college?! If you mess up a wedding, it’s just a wedding and hey, you’ll be divorced in 5 years anyway. If you mess up a child, SOCIETY WILL PAY! And the kid, of course.
The very existence of cashmere onsies appalls me. Let’s see, what do babies do? They do a very special triathlon: Eat, sleep, poop. Transitions tend to involve fussiness and crying. Dry-clean only? WHAT?
Y’all can start reporting me to child welfare when my child wears cheap cotton onesies that machine wash warm, tumble dry low. I’m ok with that.
Back in my misspent youth, I worked for a major provider of health insurance and clinic/hospital care. One year, early in the Intarweb era, we offered a program in which instead of sending out the provider directory to all the renewing members in our government groups, we sent them a one-page business reply card that let them request one if they wanted a new one. The card took up only a bit of the 8.5″ x 11″ format, so the remainder of the card discussed the two options they had to learn about the clinic network. The first, naturally, was getting a directory, but the text pointed out that if they HAD a doctor and LIKED the doctor and they hadn’t received a letter that the clinic was leaving the network, maybe it didn’t matter so much for them. The second option was the then-new online directory, which instead of being printed twice a year, was updated weekly and had doctor pictures and bios too.
We saved a ton of money with this program. We printed fewer directories, we only mailed them to people who wanted them (and directories are HEAVY), and the world was jellybeans and songbirds. I won an internal award for making the pilot work.
I mention this anecdote because today’s Star-Tribune has an article about that dinosaur of all directories, the phone book. Apparently, 85% of phone directories in Minnesota go in the trash – which is illegal. They have to be recycled.
Telephone companies spun off their publishing businesses in the late 1990s, setting off competition among firms selling yellow page ads and distributing their own phone books. Hickle estimates that homes, apartments and businesses received an average 13 pounds of telephone directories last year.
“There are more publishers delivering more products because it works,” said Maggie Stonecipher, associate vice president of paper, print and delivery services for R. H. Donnelley, publisher of DEX Yellow Pages for Qwest.
Really? 85% of them go to the can, and they ‘work?’ I would love to see the performance metrics on work. I know most people getting 3-4 directories dump either all of them, or all but one. (Quote a friend: “What if the power is out? I can’t get online then!”)
The gist of the article is that advocates and legislators are now talking about allowing opt-out for phone books, although some of the more activist advocates would prefer an opt-in system. The directory publishers don’t want legislation, of course, because they plan a voluntary, non-legislated system to handle it – that probably would lack enforcement teeth when the directory delivery people ignore the lists.
I’d like to see opt-in, just like I prefer for e-mail programs. And I feel slightly smug that I started dealing with directory opt-out – albeit a different KIND of directory – 10 YEARS AGO. Ha.
Some time back, when the big lawsuits were filed and won against Big Tobacco, ads about how bad smoking really is were supposed to get worse – messier, scarier, truer.
Years later, we now know that this didn’t happen. Whether it’s just squeamishness by creators of PSAs, influence by tobacco companies, or squeamishness by broadcasting companies, I can’t tell you.
When I see ads on TV about smoking cessation, they’re very clean – dude in his doctor’s office, with a tagline about ‘if you don’t plan to quit, what are you planning?,’ dude in a hospital bed watching TV and looking very well-fed despite the oxygen tube. For a while, they did some ads with people who had emphysema filmed in grainy, art-school black-and-white, but the people in the ads were still pretty lucid, obviously.
End stage lung cancer is pretty horrific. Really, most end-stage cancers, in which the cancer has gone metastatic and is spreading via blood or lymph, is horrific. This is not depicted in advertising or in media. They dodge the true situation.
Almost anything an oncology ward, a hospice, or an information provider will give you on end-stage treatment and issues, even without pictures, are a lot more accurate. Dementia? Coma? Pain? Yes. Death-rattle breathing punctuated by the cold suck of an oxygen machine? Yes. Massive weight loss, except where visible tumors jut out of the body? Yes.
You want to motivate people to quit? Show them that when cancer goes end-stage, they will lose their mind, they will dehydrate and be unable to eat, they will not recognize their own children, and they will die choking on a combination of phlegm and tumor. Show them pictures or film. Then break their fingers and slap nicotine patches on their foreheads.
Put it on TV. Put it in ads. Write it into scripts, because even if the cancer doesn’t spread into lymph, organ shut-down is equally horrifying. No one looks well-fed and rosy-cheeked in end-stage cancer.
I live not far from a used car dealership that is an outpost in one of those dealer mega-empires. This one is a bargain lot – you know, we’ll advance you your tax refund for a down payment, etc.
They regularly put giant inflatable things out front to advertise ’sales.’ There’s always a sale. We sometimes give directions on where to turn with the inflatables: “Turn left at the giant inflatable clown, before you pass the giant inflatable space alien across the street.”
This week is a MONSTER OF A SALE. The featured inflatable is a giant pink gorilla wearing polka-dot boxer shorts, lipstick, and nail polish. However, this pink, cosmeticked gorilla is wearing no shirt.
I am now baffled as to the gender messaging of this gorilla. It is just a topless girl gorilla (who is wearing boxer shorts)? Is it a cross-dressing male gorilla, and thus the toplessness? Am I just overexamining the subtext here? (probably)
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