Froogle is being elbowed out of the online price comparison sector. Like or not, the essence of a good price comparator is the quality and depth of its database, and the quality of its search. In my opinion, the google search and google base combination will inevitably see froogle out of the the door.

Meanwhile Google is circumspect about Froogle's future, stating

G: Froogle is alive and well. We are continuing to integrate shopping and product search features into Google.com to make it as easy as possible for users to find product information through Google. We don't have any more specifics to share publicly on how this will look down the line but we will make sure to let you know about any developments. [Via John Battelle's Searchblog: News:

Google is no stranger to failed projects. In fact it thrives on them, using the darwinian approach of beta testing a huge number of potentials and only picking the best and fittest projects.

Technorati Tags: froogle , google+base

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 9:51 AM | Permalink:Froogle is Bound for Obscurity | TrackBacks (2)

Littlewoods has announced results of over €3000m in turnover, with internet accounting for 30 per cent, or €570, of Littlewoods’ turnover, making it the fourth-largest online retailer in the UK.

Littlewoods redoubled its online efforts a year ago, in order to beat decreasing high-street sales. Improving its distribution through price comparator sites like, enclick shopping, and affiliate networks.

Littlewood's data feed is one of the more complete on the market, with an emphasis on clothing and footwear. Littlewoods goes to some lengths to provide product descriptions and details in its data feed. Results on our price comparator show that, prices being equal, the greater the detail and depth of inventory in a merchant's data feed, the greater the the sales through vertical portals and affiliate networks. Enclick shopping has a range of 10,000 Littlewood products on sale, leading the clothing and footwear categories on Enclick shopping.

As shown in the figure, Littlewood lags behind argos.co.uk and tesco.com, with Amazon the clear number one in UK sales. Littlewoods is conspicously absent from online sales of DVD and music, where amazon, tesco and woolworths battle it out.

[Via: Guardian Unlimited Business | | Makeover for Littlewoods to boost web sales]

Technorati Tags: data+feeds , littlewoods , online+shops

Posted by Paul Salber at 8:37 PM | Permalink:Littlewoods €570 in Online Sales with a 10,000 product Data Feed | TrackBacks (1)

Order the defendant to withdraw the articles, photographs and graphic representations of Belgian publishers of the French - and German-speaking daily press, represented by the plaintiff, from all their sites (Google News and "cache" Google or any other name within 10 days of the notification of the intervening order, under penalty of a daily fine of 1,000,000.- € per day of delay;

The court clearly does not understand that

• the online newspapers are liberally rewarded with a huge influx of traffic from Google
• small quotes appearing on Google are great PR and marketing for the newspapers
• the material published is a very small fraction of the material in each article

The belgium court in question is clearly a copyright and trademark stalwart, not even allowing for a small quotation of the copyright material. Quite the opposite of the open source business model.

Google CEO, Eric Schmidt thinks the conflict should have remained as business negotiation between Google and each newspaper.

Because of our scale and because of the amounts of money that we have, Google has to be more careful with respect to launching products that may violate other people's notion of their rights. But also, frankly, we find ourselves in litigation and the litigation was expensive, and diverts the management team, etcetera, from our mission. In the cases that you describe, most of the litigation in my judgment was really a business negotiation being done in a courtroom. And I hate to say that, but that is my personal opinion. And in most cases a change in our policy or a financial change would in fact address many of the issues.

Danny Sullivan offers the best coverage of the case, with interviews with the two parties.

It remains to be seen whether the papers are actually advantaged by being excluded from the Google search engine, which dominates European internet traffic. After all the "fair-use terms" of copyright material were designed into the law for the benefit of both authors and the community.

Technorati Tags: copyright , google+belgium

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 9:47 AM | Permalink:Ridiculous Court Ruling Against Google on Fair Use of Copyright Material

The adsense have released a new ad format, smaller than its current 300x300. Great addition given how difficult it is to design well balanced pages.

The 200x200 is unlikely to be a hit in terms of clickthrough, Google has published its highest performing ad sizes:

• 336x280 large rectangle
• 300x250inline rectangle
• 160x600 wide skyscraper

The graph shows the best performing locations for adsense; dark orange is the strongest performance location, while to light yellow is the weakest performance. Naturally, ad placements above the fold tend to perform better than those below the fold. Ads placed near rich content and navigational aids usually do well because users are focused on those areas of a page.

But nothing beats trial and error with web analytics of user behaviour. [Via Google's Inside AdSense: New channels page, new ad format]

Technorati Tags: adsense

Posted by Paul Salber at 9:18 AM | Permalink:New 200x200 Adsense Format

The declining impact of TV advertising is having a positive impact on politics. A billion dollar war chest will no longer guarantee you an elected office. Now you need support from social groups and communities that are hard to influence centrally.

Collaborative filtering sites, like digg.com, del.icio.us, and even Google, are the political battle grounds of the future. A political candidate will have to gain approval of communities of decentralized, diverse, and independent opinion.

Community reputation in these aggregate groups is difficult to buy with money. It takes an increasing amount of money for a meritless proposition to achieve top rank in Google listings. A politician will win or lose by whether his ideas spread, by whether individuals are recommending the idea. A politician will win if his ideas are new enough, potent enough to spread like viruses. As a leading viral marketing expert explains,

An example of such a disruptive flash political efficiency is The Pirate Party (Swedish: Piratpartiet). The party has gained wide support without institutional or financial backing, with the simple remit of re-balancing the power of copyright and patent laws in favor of the community, while still maintaing appropriate incentives for companies and authors to invest in intellectual projects.

TV advertising is being replaced by viral marketing; the ability to formulate and package the idea and addressing the right communities.

Technorati Tags: politics , viral marketing

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 3:52 PM | Permalink:On the Rise of Viral Marketing and Web 2.0 in Politics | TrackBacks (1)

Google dominates with 72% of the European market; higher market share than in the US, where it has to settle for 60%.

If you can't beat them, you join them

[Via kelblog : Google premier site Internet en Europe]

Technorati Tags: europe online

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 10:22 AM | Permalink:US Dominates the European Online Media Landscape | TrackBacks (3)

Youtube, the leading video clip sharing service, is creating a lot acquisition rumors with much of the debate centered round its valuation.

Looking at reach and page view alone, with 10,000m page views a month and double digit growth rate, a billion dollar valuation range, like MySpace's, is not out of the question.

Fred Wilson offers a $150M estimate for revenues with $15 CPMs. But other opinions are much less optimistic.

The debate of Youtube revenues highlights problems with monetizing video clips. Jason Calacanis touts a low value for the likely youtube revenues, with only $20M from junk CPM advertising. Jason's estimates a $2 CPM for Youtube contextual advertising, arguing that the "dorky" video clips with very little segmentation or keyword context will not earn the higher range $15 CPM's for quality full context and full segmentation video content.

Similarly Mike Cuban sees a a dramatic decline of Youtube from major problems with copyright owners

Considering the RIAA will sue your grandma or a 12 year old at the drop of a hat, the fact that Youtube is building a traffic juggernaut around copyrighted audio and video without being sued is like.... well Napster at the beginning as the labels were trying to figure out what it meant to them

I think the biggest issue is the difficulty of using the Adsense advertising model on Videos. Given that Google's algorithm works only on text, identifying keywords from video content is ineffective, and hence advertising is no longer targeted. Categorizing videos manually is not a viable solution, when you have tens of millions of video clips.

Technorati Tags: youtube

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 10:52 AM | Permalink:Youtube: Waiting for Adsense for Videos

Matt Cutts, Google's official Search Engine Optimisation blogger, has been giving the SEO community do's and don't tips for 16 months now. Blogging daily the cumulative volume of knowledge and advice is impressive.

It is only on looking back that the value of Matt's advice becomes evident. Rather than trawl through thousands of Matt's blog entries, here are my top 10 favorite Google tips

1. Use user-friendly URLs, or human readable URLs, e.g. rose-flowers.html, blog entry here
2. Minimize the number of parameters in your URL - maximum 2 parameters
3. Use natural links as far as possible; linkers to your web should be citing or referencing you for a reason; links should be earned and given by choice.
4. Google penalizes bought links, Matt says the Google algorithm now identifies bought links, and considers them outside Google quality guidelines. High PageRank web sites that sell links widely have their links dampened such that their effetive pagerank is much reduced. blog entry here, here, and blog entry here
5. Use the “id=” named parameter in a URL with care , i.e. only for a session ID
6. Matt recommends using dashes to delimit URL words, rather than underscores
7. Use 301 redirects wherever multiple URL point to the same page Where several URLs, eg: www.enclick.com, enclick.com or www.enclick.com/index.html point to the same place, you should 301 redirect to the URL where you want all the PageRank concentrated. Alternatively, use google sitemap to help Google “canonicalizes” to the url you want to use. Canonicalization blog entry here
8. Google updates its index data continuously But, the toolbar backlinks and PageRank information is only refreshed every few months. blog entry here
9. If you use flash, offer an html version as well
10. Metadata still has value. Assign useful "title" and "description" tags and headings to every page.

Pretty obvious that Google is making progress towards its perfect citation model algorithm where only natural links and value-added references and citations are valued.

Technorati Tags: matt cutts , seo

Posted by Paul Salber at 9:37 AM | Permalink:Top 10 Official Google Search Engine Optimisation Tips | TrackBacks (1)

having keywords from the post title in the url also can help search engines judge the quality of a page

including the keyword in the url just gives another chance for that keyword to match the user’s query in some way. That’s the way I’d put it.

Matt's comments must be taken in context, keeping in mind the extensive guidelines provided by Google as a warning that keyword abusers and unethical practices will lead to banning.

Nevertheless, keywords are a legitimate tool in structuring information. Communicating clearly requires you use a consistent vocabulary, in an attempt to avoid confusion and improving style. At Enclick we are careful with keyword selection and keyword usage on web pages. A keyword analysis identifies the list of keywords that are most relevant and important to a client's site. The keyword list is taken into account in the web page copy and URLs. Keyword density measurement tools are used to keep track of whether the web page is staying relevant to the right keywords.

The use of keywords is not about gaming Google, but about communicating clearly both with users and software programs like search engines.

Technorati Tags: google , keywords , seo

Posted by Paul Salber at 1:27 PM | Permalink:Always Mind your Keywords

The Open Document movement, from the OASIS industry consortium, is slowly but surely wresting Microsoft's market dominance in word and spreadsheet applications. The Oasis consortium is formed by government and public institutions around the world, as well as software vendors that commit to public licenses. Governments all over the world are starting to demand a common open standard for their documents, such that they are no longer limited to using Microsoft's Word and Excel applications. The idea is that documents are stored in an open public domain format, such that anybody can write a program to process the document; all software vendors can compete in providing a word and spreadsheet applications.

Best of all, the open source openoffice.org suite of office applications, are free to use. The office suite includes word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, vector drawing, and database components. It is available for any platform, including Linux and Microsoft.

The commonwealth of Massachusetts leads the push to make an open document format obligatory. WIth so much pressure Microsoft has had to respond and open its proprietary binary document formats. The first step has been to set up its own XML-based file formats, and granting a conditional public license for its use; its Office Open-XML standard. The downside of the standard is that it is taylored only Microsoft Office Suite, in addition to a license prohibiting some competitors from using it.

In the most recent breakthrough, Microsoft has ceded to pressure and Microsoft's office will support the Open Document Format (ODF). Thus Microsoft Office documents will be open to other applications, like the free openoffice.org free editors and spreadsheet software, opening Microsoft up to huge market pressure.

Open Document Standard Fight Continues

The development of the document standards has been accompanied by strong debate. One the one hand figureheads from Microsoft, like Brian Jones, who is a leading player in the Microsoft Office team, and developers at IBM and SUN who are part of the Oasis and openoffice partners.

In spite of the continuing debate over the pros and cons of the two standards, the fact is that Microsoft is having to embrace a public domain format based on the XML, which is the bedrock for the long term commons vision of the web.

[Related entries

• Google Skirmishes with W3C over Data Source Standards
• Data Feed Standards Conflict Looming Between Competing Price Comparator Portals


• Shopping portal data standards

Technorati Tags: open data , open document standard , open xml

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 1:56 PM | Permalink:Microsoft Loosing its Lock on the Office Software Market

Jason Calanis, the head of Weblogs blog network (acquired by Netscape), sets out his vision of the corporate blog's role and importance to a business. In his inimitable style:

If you are in the Internet industry and you don't have time to blog about your product then you should quit. Go home, give up, and find another career. Your competitors are blogging about their products and talking to the market, and there is no way to compete if you don't engage the discussion. So, by not blogging you basically are giving up and telling the market that you don't care. That's the honest truth.

Blog or die!

You can't compete in the web-development space without a blog any more. Period, end of story.

[Blog or die. - The Jason Calacanis Weblog]

Not much room for subtlety in Mr. Calacanis' view. A more conservative company policy, which will probably reach mainstream companies in the next few years, is the importance of the corporate blog in a companies Public and Client Relationships.

On a most basic level, with more press release agencies going online, a blog is a good landing page for Press Releases. Two popular online press release agencies are:

• Webwire: The First Internet Press Release Distribution Resource
• PRWeb: The Original Press Release Marketing Company

Second, is the importance of giving the company a human face. Specially, if you have a strong corporate brand name, having an emotive fuzzy image can go a long way to generating a positive response. More and more important is also a companies interaction with its community of clients.

Unfortunately, a blog is not the be all and end all. May be necessary but not sufficient. A blog by itself will not generate a strong brand; you have to do that by other means. More and more brands are created through exceptional products and services.

Technorati Tags: jason+calacanis

Posted by Paul Elosegui at 4:21 PM | Permalink:Role of Corporate Blogging: Blog or Die