Very interesting news that Google will now use page load times as part of their Quality Score. Google is siting the following reasons, “Two reasons: First, users have the best experience when they don’t have to wait a long time for landing pages to load. Interstitial pages, multiple redirects, excessively slow servers, and other things that can increase load times only keep users from getting what they want: information about your business. Second, users are more likely to abandon landing pages that load slowly, which can hurt your conversion rate.”
Flash developers and flashurbators beware…time to optimize your Flash files and approach to web design.
This is so damn cool. According to ECO-SAFE ”The Merit Badge is a symbol of hope & love for the world we all live in. It allows all of us with a website or blog to make a positive impact on the environment by simply placing it on our websites. The Merit Badge offers website guests alternatives to printing pages. The number of web pages printer per day are staggering.”
It’s a cool idea, a great concept, and you get FREE music from iTunes for participating.
Please someone for the love of god explain this campaign to me? It just won the Cyber and Titanium Grand Prix at the Cannes festival and I do not understand why.
This was really good freaking work. Good team, great collaboration, and had measurable success. This was one of the coolest projects because Starcom let us impact the type of media they bought as opposed to just buying the media based on CPM.
No seriously…if you want buzz/viral exposure/etc. spend money on advertising. I’ve referenced this in the past, but it bares revisiting. Take some time and read this article from MediaWeek on the impact advertising has on buzz.
According to MSNBC, Hillary is set to stop campaigning and endorse Barack Obama. Here’s the thing I’ve never understood about political campaign; do candidates really think people are stupid? Seriously, I have to ask. I’m pro-Hillary, which in effect makes me anti-Obama. Now that Hillary is going to endorse Obama does she really think that I’m now going to say, “well, Hillary must have had a change of hear and this Obama guy looks like a good fella. I suppose I’ll vote for him now.” There’s no way that’s going to happen.
This would be like Miller Lite, saying you know what, we’re going to stop making beer; please drink Bud Light now. No Miller fan would ever drink Bud.
Personally, I’d like to see Hillary march on, keep the party divided and make sure Obama loses. It’s never going to happen though. Oh well, such is life.
No commentary from me can be any better than the commentary from my good friend Jason Striegel via email.
“It was only a matter of time, but Google has written a browser plugin that now allows the Google earth interface to live inside the browser and communicate with javascript. It’s only available for Windows browsers right now, but that’s a matter of time issue as well.
What this means is that current maps can be immediately 3d-enabled by adding a single line of code to anything that uses the maps api. It also means that we can create custom applications in javascript that can interact with the Earth platform. Think planetary 3d games.
Somewhat related, they also recently released an official Flash API for the standard maps interface. You can write maps applications entirely from flash cs3 now.
I’ve been compeletely swamped the past few days and I know I’m completely guilty of not offering enough meat in these posts. With that in mind, I’m opting for a quantity approach in this post. Here are 10 great links that I’ve stumbled on and are worth sharing:
SEMPO Study on the impact search has on sales. This is a PDF white paper.
Wii Fit Viral. Offers proof that viral is sometimes indeed pure luck.
Competitive Intelligence. Avinash waxes on what competitive information is important for site metrics.
