Screenshot from Yahoo Weather this morning:

We’re expecting heat today, and Yahoo (weather.com) placed a snowy pic, offering all sorts of winterizing services along with my forecast.   I guess it did not notice the weather display was in Celsius, and 31C is about 88F.

For more advertising blunders see:

• The Irony of Contextual Advertising
• Contextual Advertising Blunders
• The Scary Thing about Contextual (?) Advertising

Tags: adbrite, adsense, advertising, Adwords, contextual advertising

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words.  Well, this one certainly belongs to the  contextual ad blunder series.

(Source: IT Project Failures)

Additional ad blunders:

• The Irony of Contextual Advertising
• Contextual Advertising Blunders
• The Scary Thing about Contextual (?) Advertising

Tags: adbrite, adsense, advertising, Adwords, contextual advertising

Here’s a classic example for stupid “contextual” in-line ads:

Clicking on the “feature” link in this article brings up skin care products.  The “tool” link in the first line points to Honeymoon Planning Services.  Here are some more cases of “contextual” advertising gone bad:

• The Irony of Contextual Advertising
• Contextual Advertising Blunders
• The Scary Thing about Contextual (?) Advertising

But all these mishaps aside, here’s another reason why you should avoid such in-line hypertext ads:

They seriously reduce readability. This article happens to be quite important, so the first thing I’d like to do is click on the link to the Google tool that allows me to protect my account (you should read the original article to understand what’s at stake). But I can’t - the link is hijacked. In fact I can’t even tell if there is any intentional, relevant link in this post.   Blogs, wikis, you-name-it: online writing is all about linking and relevancy. But there’s only so many we can deal with: when your article becomes a link-jungle, it becomes impossible to find the meaningful ones, supporting your message.

See also: Ridiculous Advertising - or the Case of the Hijacked link

Tags: adbrite, advertising, gmail, Google, hacking, hypertext, in-line ads, security, ssl

I often find out what’s happening in the world just be looking at the keyword activity in my blog referral log.  Like today, when I received readers looking for news on the earthquake in Japan.  This is actually sad, I feel bad for people looking for real info and getting “hijacked” - I am clearly not an earthquake expert, not even an authority on the subject.  All I did was point out how Twitter had been the first to report on several quakes in China and Japan, long before the major news-wires, and miraculously (and unfortunately) my post became the #1 hit for the Japan earthquake search on Google for a while, even preceding Japan’s Meteorogical Agency, which should be the ultimate source for such information.

This isn’t anything new, I’ve seen some of my posts get into top Google positions before - but it’s more understandable when I write about a more obscure subject, or a startup nobody else covers… like Brainkeeper,  where my post was #1 for months, preceding the company’s own site.   Being #2 for the fairly generic search on saas very small business is a bit more surprising, and #1 for Microsoft Outlook Sluggish is certainly rather unexpected.   Yahoo, for a change, lists my fairly old post as #1 for the very generic search term Startup Executives, and how on Earth did I get to dominate the igoogle for google apps search?

Recently I’ve noticed it almost doesn’t matter what I write about, I can get a premium position for certain relevant keywords. As much as I am enjoying it (hey, who doesn’t like Google Juice), there’s something fundamentally wrong with this system.  I think blogs are somewhat overrated, and perhaps individual posts should be weighted on their own merits, not the Google Juice of the main blog itself.

But there’s another conclusion we should draw here. Content is really king, to the extent that it can compete with advertising. Businesses should take notice: you can pay for AdWords, or get to the top by developing your own content - and organic hits are worth more than paid ads.

There’s another side of the coin here: if you don’t develop your own content, someone else will - and you may not be happy with the results.   I’m not sure UPS enjoys seeing my post immediately under their site for the google search  UPS Tracking…

So once again: the old adage “Content is King” has got a new meaning.  I’ve been contemplating this for a while, and am getting ready to announce a new initiative in the next few weeks.

Tags: advertising, adword, Blogging, content, Google, google juice, marketing, pagerank, search, SEM

That seems to be the Technorati recipe: TechCrunch reports they have a new Sales VP with a 7-person sales team, and a new marketing lead. This build-up was likely in preparation for the new business, Technorati Media, a newly launched blog advertising network.

Technorati indeed needs a business model, so if this is it, fine. It’s just frustrating that they’ve spent the past two years in search of business models, while their service gradually fell apart. Anyway, in the spirit of the new-new business, I suggest they sell advertising on the Technorati page we see most frequently:

This was the rant - for details see: CNET News.com, Maple Leaf 2.0, Web Strategy, Trends in the Living Networks, A Media Circus, Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim

Tags: advertising, blog advertising, business models, Sales, technorati, technorati monster, technoratty

I’m still wondering if the How to Safeguard Your Privacy Online post on GigaOM is real or a parody. No, I’m not talking about the advice for the paranoid, which includes gems like:

Do not make international phone calls.

Do not have a home broadband connection.

After all, these are for the paranoid… but let’s look at some of the tips for most of us, assuming we fall under the Feeling Practical But Not Paranoid category:

Do not use desktop search tools like Google Desktop or Microsoft Desktop Search.

Do not use webmail from a service provider like AT&T, Google or Microsoft.

Do not use browser toolbars or desktop gadgets.

Remove all social network accounts.

Clear your browser cookies after every session.

Change your local username daily.

He is so right, yet so wrong. Yes, the above are all real dangers on our privacy - but hey, we all know since Scott McNealy we don’t have privacy anyway. He got chastised for his famous declaration in 1998 - perhaps he was a bit ahead of his time, but things got a lot worse (better?) since then.

Let’s just look at cookies. The obvious Privacy 101 principle in the 90’s was to control them. Since then we’ve seen an army of cookie-washer products, the popular browsers all offer their own privacy/cookie settings - yet all this works less and less. Quite a few sites - including blogs - will fail to load properly when seemingly unrelated, third-party cookies are blocked. Sometimes they work, but next time you come back to the site, there’s just a white, blank screen. This is ugly. Since I can’t easily figure out what blocked the site, I typically end up deleting all browser cookies as well as all cookie-rules. Then the game starts again - some of the sites / blogs take minutes to rotate through dozens of cookie-requests, literally making it impossible to read their own content. I’m about to give up: might as well just enable cookies - privacy is long gone, anyway. Besides, if I am getting ads served up, they might as well be better targeted.

Not using search? Web-mail? Changing user-names daily? C’mon… it would be completely impossible to live with these rules. We have long given up any resemblance to privacy for the sake of convenience. Get used to it. Unless you want to shut down the Internet, remove any computers from the house and lock yourself up in your home. Better yet, move to a remote island, where everything is low-tech and healthy.

Tags: advertising, convenience, cookies, inetrnet, privacy

I fully agree with Ionut: Gmail’s spam filtering is amazingly effective. I don’t really care about how they do it, as long as it works this well.

But there’s a bit of irony in his post on Google Operating System, and it comes from none other than Google: just as soon as he’s done praising Gmail, Adsense serves up ad ad from a competing service: onlymyemail.com.

Funny thing is, competitor or not, Adsense is correct: the ad is as contextual as it can get, since the article was about spam filtering.

Of course it could have been a lot worse…

(P.S. the pic is only for illustration of what I found on Ionut’s blog; I am not running ads here)

Update: Donna Bogatin found another Web Blooper.