06.22.06
Posted in General at 3:23 pm by Christine
Today MSN unveiled their new analytics site for (paid) Search marketers - AdLabs, sprung from this year’s earlier AdCenter release. It has been designed as an additional research site with online tools to make strategising keywords for campaigns easier.
With tools available for four classifications of paid arena, including: Paid Search, Contextual Advertising, Behavioural Targeting and Emerging Markets, this adds another great resource to the SEO’s research library alike.
A few of the tools that are currently available are:
- Search Funnels - to analyze and visualize user search sequences in the form of funnels.
- Keyword Categorization Engine - to classify words into categories. For example, when a user types the word “camera” into the keyword categorization engine, a list of 15 categories appears in order of likely relevance; “lifestyle/hobbies” is at the top of the list, while “personal/health” is at the bottom.
- Demographics Prediction - Predict a user’s age, gender, and other demographic information, based on his or her online behaviour.
- Keyword Group Detection - Given a word or phrase, find a set of similar words.
According to Media Post Publications, the site will initially contain data for about 10 000 keywords which will grow to more than 10 million keywords in the next several months.
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Posted in General at 12:44 pm by Christine
It’s been almost a week since BarCamp came to Cape Town.
The various talks have been well covered across most of the attendees’ blogs.
Especially check out Rafiq’s (Group of Web Addicts) – who I managed to share a table (and some SEO conspiracies) with, and Dewet’s BarCamp round-ups.
There are some photos up on Flickr – not very many – but proof that it happened!
Although I only managed to attend Day 1 – it went off with a great hit and I am sure that it was the first of many.
The talks that I managed to catch were great, especially Jo Duxbury’s (Freelancentral) talk on Marketing Yourself as a Freelancer and Dave’s talk on Blogging as a Marketing Tool. He also has some great tips on presentations on that post, which I for one am taking to heart! - I did a presentation on Importance of Online Marketing - which was really just a highlevel overview and went way too quick! Anyone that wants to know more nitty-gritty about tools of the trade, or would like to chat with me in more detail - please drop me a line an we can meet at Caffeine!
In addition to some great presentations I loved the coffee from Caffeine, which kept us warm in a freezing school hall, Stormhoek wines which got everyone talking, and CITI’s packed lunch goodie bag which kept our sugar levels happy.
I managed to catch up with some familiar faces, made a few new connections and got to meet those with whom I’ve only previously chatted in the cyber world.
All in all BarCamp Cape Town was a great idea – thanks Conrad for organising the event!
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06.12.06
Posted in General at 5:10 pm by Christine
Last week saw the launch of the anticipated Google Synch. It sounded very cool to download, but for once I must admit that I was not too perturbed as I had FireFox’s SessionSaver installed. One of the really nifty little features that Synch has that SS does not, is that it will work on all of the computers you use – if you use multiple computers that is. So if you’re a user like me and Joey (we usually have at least 4 computers that we work with on a daily basis!) this little feature is very useful.
Much to my disappointment when installing Google Synch, it asked that I uninstall SessionSaver due to a conflict. And being the biased little Google user and proud supporter that I am (most of the time ; ), I did.
IMHO I must confess that thus far I have not enjoyed the Google Synch experience. It has slowed down my FireFox browsing and to top it all off does not connect properly to the Google Settings Dashboard, and unfortunately lost all previous sessions I had open.
In all fairness however our bandwidth has been exceptionally horrific today and it may very well have something to do with that fact.
I have not had ample play with it to validate an uninstall (yet), so will keep you posted should my experience improve. (which I hope it will)
Let me know about your Google Synch experience!
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