Archive: May, 2006

I’m not Barry Schwartz, and can’t possibly blog these events as well as he does. (I have neither the patience, nor the stenographer skills :-) ) But, I haven’t seen him here, so I’ll jump in. :-)

First presentation regards the various PPC programs. Google and MSN presented. A Yahoo Search Marketing representative stood up as the first question from the audience, and announced that a group of people from YSM was here too, and available to talk to anyone. Not sure why she didn’t leave that to Kalli West from Yahoo who was a presenter ( ! )

During a couple of other questions to the podium, she stood up to answer from Yahoo’s perspective. Kind of odd. I must admit, I got distracted just prior to her standing up, so I may have missed something, but a few people seemed perpelexed by her participation. Oh well, it’s nowhere as bad as the fellow from Yellow Pages Group that stood up during the SES Toronto with the first “question” and proceeded to lecture the room for 8-10 minutes on the role of the YPG Directory in Quebec. That was almost surreal. I still wonder if he’s clued in yet that we were discussing search engine usage trends, and not directory usage trends.

I just got back from the VIATeC awards dinner. Our firm was honored with the Innovative Excellence Award for our Enquisite product. We’re thrilled. I would like to thank all our users and supporters for making this possible.

For those of you who don’t yet know, Enquisite is what made it possible to extract the data for the 98052 post (and the 94043 one too). That data report barely scratched the surface of the tool’s capabilities. I was blown away this evening by how many companies have been using it to improve their online and offline marketing campaigns, and how it’s revolutionized a few companies’ sales processes, and success rate. I’m shocked at the effect it’s already had; and, we’re still building out the feature set!

For those of you who have not tried Enquisite, but would like to, please feel free to sign up at Enquisite’s signup page. There’s not much information there, just a sign-up form. The public site will be ready in a few short weeks.

Thank-you again for all your support!

I saw the posts around the Net about the Google Notebook Beta, and decided to check it out.

The concept behind Google notebook is simple; rather than making notes offline when researching something, use Google notebook. While you can already use your favorites / bookmarks to organize pages of note, Google Notebook takes it a step further. Instead of helping you track down just the pages you find information on, Notebook lets you add clippings of text, images and links from web pages – kind of like a virtual clipboard / notebook. Good idea.

There were not a lot of links to different areas available, but one of note was the Privacy Policy page. While reading it, a thought occured to me. Google Notebook offers spammers a new tool to manipulate results.

Lots of people commented on the post about search trends from 98052. People like, Rick Segal, Hugh MacLeod, and many, many others, posted nice comments, either on their own blogs, or in the comments section on this site. Thank-you all.

I don’t expect anywhere near as much commentary on this post. In fact, since this is essentially a follow-on post, even one would be surprising.

Fortunately, I don’t do this for the comments. I don’t do it for the money either. That makes it difficult; Whenever Teresa asks me why do I do this, I don’t have an answer for her!

That said, I did get asked to post data about a few other Zip codes. Here goes – Search Trends for 94043: