It's Cool To Use Cuil - But Does It Work?

Former Google employees have launched a new search engine in an attempt to rival Google. Cuil claims to index three times as many web pages as any other search engine.

Cuil, pronounced cool, uses about 120 billion web pages to create its index of information. What's with the name Cuil? Well Cuil is Gaelic word meaning knowledge! The site's founders claim that this is more than Google uses, however, Google has stopped reporting how many it indexes.

Cuil's uses search technology which ranks results by the content on each webpage, not by its popularity. It then carefully organizes similar search results into groups and sorts them by category. The results are displayed in a magazine style format, rather than a list. The site looks very boring and lacks colour, It appears that they are trying to stick clear of looking anything like Google as the site is almost the polar opposite of Google, using a black background with grey and blue colours.

Cuil's technology was developed by a team led by Tom Costello and Anna Patterson. between the two of them they have developed search engines at Stanford University and IBM, and worked for Google. Russell Power, Patterson’s former colleague from Google is also involved and is a co founder of Cuil.

Costello stated the follow when Cuil was launched: "The web continues to grow at a fantastic rate and other search engines are unable to keep up with it. Our significant breakthroughs in search technology have enabled us to index much more of the internet, placing nearly the entire web at the fingertips of every user." Unlike Google, Cuil does not keep any personally identifiable information on users or their search histories. Due to the site's search method, personal data collection is unnecessary.

I gave it a try and will not be using it again anytime soon. It brings up loads of results, but unfortunately they're mostly irrelevant and useless. I really like the format, but who cares what it looks like if it doesn't work well! It seemed to have a major problem when I searched for more than one word. In some cases it couldn't even find any sites! whole Google showed 830 sites for the same keyword I searched......and they were relevant.

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Facebook To Get A New Look!

Facebook has been in the news almost every week for the past month! A couple of weeks ago it was because of Mircrosoft and Facebook agreeing on an advertising deal! Then only yestaday Facebook was accused of promoting volience, because one of applications allows users to virtually stab each other!

However the major story that really caught my eye is that according to early reports Facebook will undergo a revamp in the next 2 months. The new look Facebook will feature a simpler design. But Facebook are tasking careful precautions not to make any sudden changes. Facebook will be inviting users to preview and use the new design and try out the improved features by navigating back and forth between the new and current versions of the social networking site. Access to the new design will be limited at first, but over time will become available to all users. The new Facebook design will be made available to users under the following URL: http://www.new.facebook.com/.

Brand republic report that among several new features will be included in the revamp. This includes a "publisher" feature which enables users to create content in a centralised area allowing users to add photos, upload video, or write notes, rather than navigating to each individual application. Also facebook are keen to tidy up unwanted applications/widgets by allowing users will have the option to interact with an application before adding it. Therefore allowing users to decide if they actually want the application on their profile and if they do, where. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg stated that the new design will make it a lot easier for users to share information.

Why change a winning formula? Facebook should concentrate in making Facebook more international friendly, It may be the most popular social network group in the UK and U.S. elsewhere in the world Facebook doesn’t dominate the social network universe.

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A Look at Facebook's Advertising Solutions

Social networking sites have become extremely popular all over the Internet today, and are being used for much more than simply meeting new friends. Many businesses are realizing that social networks can be a powerful way to tap into a huge potential customer base. As every now knows Facebook launched their much awaited advertising solutions earlier this year. But why advertising through Facebook? A common complaint from many companies is that their advertising is not reaching the right audience. Instead of creating an advertisement and hoping that it reaches the right customers with Facebook, companies can select the age, sex, interests ensuring they reach the right audience. In a previous blog I spoke about how to create a Facebook page for products. In this blog however I will take a look at the complete Facebook advertising platform and capabilities.

Facebook Pages:
This capability is for companies trying to create a brand image inside Facebook. Obtaining a Page is free and it is great for businesses such as: bars, pubs, music artists, and sports teams. It allows businesses to connect with customers on Facebook similar to the way users connect with their friends. Through a Facebook Page, users can show their support by becoming a fan, writing on your Wall, and other actions that automatically generate News Feed stories. Once joined advertisers can send updates to fans such as special news or offers. You can also link the page to your Facebook social ads.

When your fans interact with your Facebook Page, the actions they take are automatically generated into social stories. These stories are published to News Feed, which friends may see the next time they log into Facebook. The stories link back to your Facebook Page, inviting more people to interact with it, which generates more social stories and drives even more traffic to your Page. Viral marketing at its best!

Facebook social ads:
Facebook Social Ads allow your business to become part of people's daily conversations. Ads can be displayed in the left hand Ad Space, visible to users as they browse Facebook to connect with their friends, as well as in the context of news feed attached to relevant social stories. The social stories, such as a friend's becoming a fan of your Facebook page or a friend's taking an action on your website, make your ad more interesting and more relevant. Social Ads are placed in highly visible parts of the site without interrupting the user experience on Facebook.

Facebook Beacon:
This function allows customers to share with their friends the actions they take on your website. For user actions you define, Facebook Beacon will publish a story in the user's profile and to friends' news feeds with a link back to your site. Facebook Beacon actions include purchasing a product, signing up for a service, adding an item to a wish list, and more. When a user performs the action, they will be alerted that your website is sending a story to their profile. Facebook Beacon enables your brand or business to gain access to viral distribution within Facebook. Stories of a user's engagement with your site maybe displayed in his or her profile and in news feed. These stories will act as a word of mouth promotion for your business and may be seen by friends who are also likely to be interested in your product.

Facebook Platform:
Facebook Platform provides you with the tools to quickly create custom experiences for users to interact with your business and their friends while maintaining the look and feel of the Facebook interface. you can create an authentic social experience for your users by integrating your current web site or web application directly with the Facebook Platform or sponsoring an existing application. You can also integrate mobile and desktop applications with the Facebook API. Facebook Pages enable you to easily create a custom business presence on Facebook, and you can further customize the experience with a Facebook Application. You can create an application to engage even more with your users or leverage one of the thousands of compelling existing applications. Facebook Platform makes it easy to authentically connect with your customers.

Facebook Polls:
Tens of millions of people express themselves authentically on Facebook, you can accurately target your Polls by gender, age, location, interests, and other demographic data. Your poll will only be shown to the people who meet the criteria you set.

With the easy to use creation interface, you can create and deploy a single question poll within minutes. The polls will immediately start showing up in your target audience's news feeds where they can respond as soon as they log in to Facebook. Based on the level of activity at that time, your question could be answered by hundreds of people in as little as 30 minutes. The detailed results are broken down by age group and gender.

Facebook Insights:
Of course with all these types of advertising advertisers need a way of measuring the success. Therefore Facebook’s offers an Insights package that allows social ad users and pages users to see metric data, including different activities such as how many people viewed videos and photos, the fan demographics, ad performance, trends and more.

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Google Knol launched.......

Google has launched a new online information service called Knol to rival internet encyclopedia Wikipedia.

The website allows people to write about their areas of expertise under their bylines in a twist on encyclopaedia Wikipedia, which allows those posting to remain anonymous.

The site has been tested over the past few months, and will offer a set of community tools that offers different forms of interaction between readers and authors, including allowing people to submit comments, rate or write a review of a Knol, with Google ranking entries by popularity.

Other points of difference to Wikipedia include Knol encouraging writers to reduce their contributions on a topic to a single page, which will not be chronologically updated, along with it not allowing visitors to be able to contribute or edit a Knol unless they have the author's permission. Knol has publishing tools similar to single blog pages.

Google wants to rank entries by popularity, decided by user ratings, reviews and how often people refer to the specific pages, to encourage competition.
In another point of difference from Wikipedia, the new offering does not edit or endorse the information and visitors will not be able to edit or contribute to a Knol unless they have the author's permission. Readers will also be able to notify Google if they find any content objectionable.

The website was first announced at the beginning of December 2007 when Google began limited testing on the site. Additionally, if an author includes ads, Google says it will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of the ad placements.

Knol focusing on individual authors or groups of authors in marked contrast to Wikipedia's subject entries. The problem with Wikipedia is that anyone can edit information and stay anonymous, so there is always a stigma as it is unknown if the information is correct and from a reliable source. But if well known knowledgeable people start using Knol, This will enable Google to have a more credible online encyclopedia! Which will wipe the floor with Wikipedia.

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Recent YouTube updates

In the past few months YouTube has received a number of new features, some good, some not so good. The new features, includes a new site update which is aimed to create a more personalized experience for users. In this Post I will take a look in more detail at some of these new features.

NEW PERSONALIZED HOMEPAGE
Following the launch of iGoogle it wasn’t long before Google implemented the same idea for YouTube. The new personalized, customizable YouTube homepage is aimed at making it easy for users to find the videos. Of course this is a clever step that YouTube because to gain this service users will have to log in. This will in hind sight will increase the registrations of users on YouTube, however how much will YouTube current court case impact this?

YouTube also state that since they have launched this, data has shown an increase in the number of users visiting the homepage, the number of visits made, and the number of subscriptions users have made. YouTube are of course using this data to support that the customizable feature is a not only a better experience for users, but is also helping to expose for your videos.

The actual layout of the page itself isn’t all that different from what the normal homepage looked like. The editor picks is replaced with personalized recommendations, and in addition featured videos and new videos from your friends are shown. Below the new videos from your friends, is a feature which allows you to see the latest activity from your friends. Popular clips also are still shown at the bottom of the page.

It looks like YouTube is trying to ride the current “social network wave” with increasing the interactivity with video owners and enabling you to keep track of your friends.


IMPROVED EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS

The email messages sent from YouTube have been updated with a new layout. In addition to a modernized design and many wording changes, text for comments and messages are included directly in the body of these update emails, so you can see what these messages are without having to return to YouTube and logging in.


ANNOTATIONS
YouTube launched the first of many planed interactive video editing tools - Video Annotations. Using the Video Annotations tool this allows you to insert commentary by adding speech bubbles, notes, links, and highlight boxes anywhere you want in your videos.

I like this feature and I am looking forward to YouTube enhancing this tool in the future. One way it could be improved for example is including some images/graphs which can also be added to videos.


NEW TAB FOCUSED LAYOUT
The new tab layout features a consolidation of Share, Favorites, Playlists and Flag into a dedicated tab driven box. The share tab expands out to give a more extensive range of sharing options which includes social bookmarking and voting site, the ability to post a video to a blog, and send to the friend via email. Again another sign that YouTube really are increasing the social network side of there website.

PUBLIC VIDEO STATISTICS
Commentary is now offered in a tab next to “Statistics and Info.” This tab is not only available to video owners privately through the YouTube statistics feature, (spoken about in a previous post) but also video viewers. The “Statistics and info” tab provides information on video honors and video referrals. Video honors are awards presented by YouTube, for example: the most watched video in the UK, most discussed, most responded, etc.

Other information displayed is the names of recent users who rated the video and a map of the location where the video was film. Personally I really like this feature, but I don’t really understand how this is interesting to viewers of videos? Surely this information is only of interest to the video owners?

Overall I think these are just a number of changes which will happen this year. I think a number of users will have a problem with the new layout changes due to that fact YouTube has kept the same layout for so long. We all should have expected the changes once Google got their hands on it. Let me know your thoughts on the new layout.

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Benefits of advertising with Web 2.0


Online advertising is growing faster than ever, any popular site will eventually feature adverts, but why is this form of advertising so popular? Well here a just a selection of some of the bigger benefits of online marketing:

Measurability
One of the greatest benefits of online advertising is that advertisers can track the success of campaigns far more effectively than they can do offline using web analytics and other online advertising tools. Not only can you measuring clicks through your website, you can also track user behavior to build up a complete journey of users visit. I know this quote is almost in every text book but, John Wanamaker famously said ““Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don't know which half”

Cost
Online marketing and advertising is far cheaper than advertising traditional methods. In some cases it’s even free; the only thing you need to provide is your time.

Reach Your Target Audience
Marketers often moan about the difficulties of reaching the 18-34 age group. The say that Traditional channels such as television adverts and press adverts just don’t work! But a study from the Online Publishers Association found out that 18-34 year olds are far more likely to go online (46%) than watch TV (35%), listen to the radio (three%) or read a newspaper (also three%). Marketers aim is always to reach the consumer in their natural environment with advertising that is engaging, entertaining, maybe even useful; they may be more receptive to advertising messages. Web 2.0 can be exactly all those things.

Target Niche/Micro Market Audiences
Alongside the big social networks groups there are also a few smaller social networks based around a community of shared interests. There are also different groups formed on some social network groups like Facebook, where consumers with the same interest gather and chat about that interest allowing businesses to have the target market in one place.

Increased Choice of Channels
With TV advertising you limited by time slot and choice of channel, which unless you have a lot of money could become be bad. But online, the choice of advertising formats is far more varied. But with Web 2.0 it’s all about being creative, when using web 2.0 to market anything is possible. Videos, games, banner the list goes on and on.

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Businesses use of Twitter

This is my second blog on Twitter, but after reading a interesting article about Twitter in BusinessWeek magazine earlier this week, it made me think about Twitter again. The Article soke about how project teams in companies are now being asked to deliver real time status updates to one another using Twitter. Therefore I took it upon myself to further look how people around the world are using Twitter.

The biggest users are Market researchers who are using Twitter to try and identify consumer trends in real time. I also came across a couple of interesting folks who use it and I thought it would be interesting to share:

In the U.S. the Los Angeles Fire Department uses it to communicate real time fires and accidents to local citizens. (The LAFD News & Information blog can be found at: lafd.blogspot.com)

In the UK, the government has signed up to Twitter and uses the site to send out updates on the Prime Minister’s activities.
BusinessWeek, also reported that Dell claimed to have boosted sales through searching for mentions of its business on Twitter and jumping into the conversations. They state that they boosted sales by $500,000 in recent months! Now that’s not a small increase of sales! Are we under estimating the power of Twitter?

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Read All About It! Tips On Making Press Releases Effective!

One of the key tasks I played a major role in over the past year is putting together and issuing press releases. Along the way I have picked up some methods and handy tips so I thought I would share them with readers.

I would recommend to try and issue at least 5 to 10 press releases every year. Sending out a press release once every 2 months will keep your company in the press. Even if you feel that your target audience is small remember that a well written press release will only help build your image and strengthen your current customer base, therefore it really is worth putting a good deal of time into press releases.

The press releases that I usually issued were launching of products, but other good topics for press releases could charity work, or reaching a specific target. This may sound silly but remember the content of a press release needs to be interesting, don’t just use press releases to sell products, the more you capture the reader’s attention the article the greater chance it will be used and even forwarded by readers. You could use a good headline and strong first leading paragraph to do this.

Keep in mind who your target market is. For example if your target market is engineers, then keep to topics they would be interested in, don't focus greatly on sale reports or marketing information.

Remember in this new marketing era, press release can feature on websites, blogs, forums, not just print. I have also heard people say that you have a greater chance of your press release being used by editors if you fax rather than email, but I cannot say that I have experienced this.

Press release are also a great way to build up some contacts in the press. By thanking reporters who used your press release will establish a good relationship between your company which will result in a better chance of future press release being used.

Don't forget also that online press release will increase year Google ranking due to the back linking!

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Flash Google- SEO & Flash!

Great news for everyone who has Flash built website's and Flash content on your websites. On 1st July 2008 Google took its first steps to start to include Flash in its website search.

Although Flash content always looks so smart and simple to use, businesses are always slightly resistant from using it, due to Google not including Flash content in search results.

However Adobe have now developed a special tool for Google & Yahoo to expose the text content within a Flash file to their crawlers. Adobe is providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines.

Google has already begun to incorporated Flash into its search engine. With Adobe’s help, Google can now better read the content on sites that use Adobe Flash technology, helping users find more relevant information when conducting searches. As a result, millions of pre-existing RIAs and dynamic Web experiences that utilize Adobe Flash technology, including content that loads at runtime, are immediately searchable without the need for companies and developers to alter them. Yahoo is expected to follow shortly.
Those who have use Flash remember that this does not mean Flash content is automatically going to show up in the top of search results. You will still have to battle for the top spot like any other site, and due to Flash content typically not having a lot of text content embedded this could become a difficuilt task.

I have created a webpage for the company I work for, which contains 90% Flash content, the problem is I will now have to do some further work as when I create it I didnt consider making it search engine crawler friendly!

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