More FREE Ways to Track Your Web Presence

Due to the popularity of our post last week, 'Easy and FREE Ways to Track Your Online Presence...Plus, See What California is Up To', I thought we would mention a couple other online tools that can help you track and understand you presence on the web.

Not to mention kill off a few hours at work obsessing over your Google Page Rank.

Google Trends: Speaking of which, Google Trends is a good (and fascinating) look at trends relating to keyword searches via Google. For example, you can enter two keywords...such as 'ski resorts' and 'cruises'...and be presented with a graphical representation of the number of searches for those words. See the chart above. Of course, very granular or specific keywords might not show any results, but it is an interesting way to determine search volume, on a timeline, from a high level.
http://www.google.com/trends

Microsoft adCenter Labs: Ah, probably my favorite, not to mention the (at times) most confusing, free stats / SEO tool out there. While Microsoft commonly gets overlooked by Google and Yahoo! in the ad sales space, the adCenter Labs offering is a great look into some of the data available from search engines (not to mention a scary look into how much Microsoft and Google know about your search patterns). Stats available include basic information such as Ad Text Writer, which automatically generate text ads for an input URL, and Keyword Group Detection. However, if you have a computer science degree from Oxford (or a lot of free time) you can investigate topics such as 'Entity Association Graph' and 'Context-Based Acronym Resolution.' In all seriousness, adCenter Labs is another great free tool.
http://adlab.msn.com/

Quintura: Our final example is the 'visual search engine' Quintura, which displays your results as well as a related keyword cloud. The cloud results provide an interesting (and slightly addictive) view of your key search terms as well as some insight into other keywords that you might have been unaware of.
http://www.quintura.com/

Travel Trends - Yahoo! MapMixer, PayPal

Yahoo! MapMixer - An interesting addition to the Yahoo! Local / Map offering, MapMixer allows users to combine existing maps with the Yahoo! Maps program. In the example above, a user has taken a detailed map of Grand Canyon National Park and created a new map containing both maps. The site lets users zoom, pan and explore the map in the same fashion as the normal Yahoo! Maps site. Microsoft Research has a similar product called MSR MapCruncher.
http://maps.yahoo.com/mapmixer

PayPal Your Airline Tickets - Following the lead from Northwest Airlines, several carriers including Southwest, Midwest and US Airways now accept payment via the online e-commerce firm PayPal. JetBlue began allowing customers to pay via Bill Me Later, a similar product earlier this year.

Travel Trends - MSN, Video, Google, Newspapers

Farecast.com & MSN Travel - MSN and Farecast.com, the airfare prediction Web site, announced an agreement today in which MSN will offer its users free airfare predictions and planning tools on the MSN Travel Channel. This agreement marks the first distribution deal for Farecast to bring its unique travel technology and planning tools to a broader consumer audience. (Ironically posted on CNNMoney.com)
http://www.cnnmoney.com

Online Video Numbers - comScore's Video Metrix report for May said that nearly 75% of U.S. Internet users watched an average of 158 minutes of online video during the month. Viewing of online video has reached 63% of U.S. Internet viewers according to a CTAM report.
http://www.mediapost.com

Google Small Business Search - Google Custom Search Business Edition is a service hosted on Google computers that starts at $100 per year and does not require businesses to run Google ads. The new service marks a middle option between Google's existing Custom Search Engine, a free, ad-supported service, and Google Appliance, a hardware device selling for prices starting around $2,000 which customers manages on themselves.
http://www.reuters.com

Newspaper Crossover - A new study recently released by the Newspaper National Network LP, conducted by Scarborough Research, found that 81% of newspaper website users also read the printed newspaper in the last 7 days. Crossover users (those who used both print and online newspapers in the past 7 days) have deep affinity with both their printed newspaper and their newspaper website, and 83% say "I love both my printed newspaper and visiting my newspapers website."
http://www.centerformediaresearch.com/

Travel Trends - TripWiser, Tripbase, Photosynth, Everyscape

TripBase - Another travel recommendation site, TripBase takes advantage of some new technologies to allow users to select what features they want in a vacation and then makes recommendations based on what has been chosen. A great interface and a good site, however booking your vacation takes you to another site (Kayak.com).
http://tripbase.com/

Tripwiser - Get travel recommendations from other users by browsing various itineraries and then adding trip ideas to your itinerary. The site does feature profiles, but does not appear to take advantage of them in a social recommendation offering.
http://tripwiser.com/

Everyscape - Combining Google Maps technology with a 3D world created by several hundred images, Everyscape allows users to explore various locations in a true 3D setting. Currently in beta, you can explore the Union Square area of San Fransisco or allow the site to guide you in the 'autodrive' mode.
http://www.everyscape.com/

Photosynth - A new project from Microsoft, Photosynth takes photos from a particular location and creates a 3D image to explore. A user can explore the vairous photos by zooming or clicking around the 3D image. (Note, there is some software to download in order to view this project. Also, it is very memory intensive at this stage of development)
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/

Thoughts// Both Everyscape and Photosynth offer very interesting possibilities of showing a certain location, the Grand Canyon for example, to a potential traveler...further enticing them to travel to the location.

Microsoft Launches 'Surface'

Microsoft will unveil a coffee-table-shaped "surface computer" on Wednesday in a major step towards co-founder Bill Gates's view of a future where the mouse and keyboard are replaced by more natural interaction using voice, pen and touch.

A Surface computer is able to recognize physical objects from a paintbrush to a cell phone and allows hands-on, direct control of content such as photos, music and maps. Surface turns an ordinary tabletop into a dynamic surface that provides interaction with all forms of digital content through natural gestures, touch and physical objects. >>Full Story

Thoughts// While the initial launch of Microsoft Surface will be aimed at hotels, retail establishments, restaurants and public entertainment venues, the possibilities of such a technology in a Visitor Information Center setting could be very intriguing.

Imagine if visitors could sit around this table and download information, maps or photos directly to their phone. Or allow visitors to be able to pull up and manipulate various maps with just the touch of a finger. With a reported starting price of $5,000-$10,000, this type of technology may not be that far away.

Make sure you watch the video...it is pretty amazing stuff.

Travel Trends - Flagr, Silverlight, Second Life

Flagr: Using Google Maps technology, the social community site Flagr allows consumers to create and post maps of recent trips, famous locations or event sushi restaurants in New York (http://www.flagr.com/maps/315).
http://www.flagr.com/

Silverlight: While this is a ‘tech’ thing at this point, Microsoft’s answer to the Adobe Flash program has designers everywhere actually praising this new Microsoft product.
http://silverlight.net/

Second Life: After talking in a previous Interactive Trend Report post about how major corporations (Dell, Best Buy, NBA) are looking to extend there marketing efforts into this 3-D virtual world, a new report suggests that the majority of Second Life users are coming from outside of the US. According to a new comScore report, only 207,000 people from the US logged onto Second Life during the month of March. Second Life reports over 6 million total users. The accuracy of this report remains to be determined, but it is certainly a concern considering the large investment made by these US companies.
http://www.secondlife.com/

Email Experts on the new Outlook

Microsoft caused a stir in the e-mail marketing world when it was learned that its Outlook 2007 e-mail client would not support cascading style sheets, flash or animated GIFs, JavaScript and forms. While many experts are pessimistic about the effects of these changes on deliverability and user experience, others suggest that the rendering issues will impel marketers to create simpler and more uniform e-mail products. >> Full Story

Thoughts// The new restrictions of Outlook 2007 should be taken into consideration in our email marketing campaigns, however Flash, animated GIFs, forms and JavaScript elements should not be used in our email marketing to begin with. CSS (cascading style sheets) could be used, but a simple work around is available.