Archive for May, 2007
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Chris Winfield in The LA Times: ‘Mahalo, Call it a search-engine curator’May 31 2007 | Press, Search Engines |
Yesterday I spoke with Alex Pham from the Los Angeles Times for an article she was doing about Jason Calacanis’ new “search engine” called Mahalo. The article was published today and I am quoted in it:
Calacanis, a New York native who lives in Brentwood, said Mahalo didn’t have to keep up with everything — just things that most interest people.
“It will take some time to complete, but when it’s done, it will be glorious,” he said. “Until then, we invite people to compare our results with any search engine out there. For results that we do have, they’re going to be five to 10 times better because humans have thought about them.”
Mahalo faces other challenges. With editors behind each search, there’s the opportunity for bias, said Chris Winfield, president of 10e20, a New York search-marketing firm.
Comments - Posted in Press, Search Engines by Chris Winfield
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StumbleUpon Gets Sold to eBay – Initial Community Reactions Aren’t GoodMay 30 2007 | Social Networks |
The rumors have been confirmed – eBay has officially acquired StumbleUpon. This acquisition has been rumored since November and tonight StumbleUpon confirmed it on their blog:
StumbleUpon has officially joined eBay. We’re excited about this, and we hope you are too.
Looking to the future, we think that joining eBay is the right thing to do to help us to grow StumbleUpon to its full potential. We think eBay is a great fit for us because eBay and StumbleUpon share similar approaches – we’re both driven by our community of users, and we are both dedicated to connecting people.
One interesting aspect to this sale is the immediate feedback from the StumbleUpon community. The page was immediately ‘stumbled‘ and the community immediately started voicing their opinion. So far the majority of the feedback has been negative and against the deal. Here are just a few of the comments so far (many can’t be printed here):
Comments - Posted in Social Networks by Chris Winfield
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Mobile Web Usage is on the Rise – What it Means for Your BusinessMay 30 2007 | Business |
Mobile web usage is on a steep curve northward and everyone from major corporations and small companies continue to push mobile device web usage for good reason – more eyeballs with more time on websites will yield better sales and hopefully better revenues. In a recent study Comscore points out that 30 million Americans accessed the Internet from a mobile device in January 2007.
There is nothing more convenient than traveling and being able to find what you need while on your mobile device or to get your personal chores or business affairs in order on your mobile while you are commuting from place to place. For and end-user, mobile web access is a great convenience and a big time saver. For a business owner, it is the difference between gaining or losing a sale or enriching that ever so valuable client relationship to extract more lifetime revenue. For major corporations, it’s about retaining existing relationships in increasingly competitive business environments. In an economy dominated by services, to be competitive, you must offer better services, and mobile web is one way companies are reaching out.
Comments - Posted in Business by Jake Matthews
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Photo2text: Convert your photos into instant ASCII art!May 29 2007 | Design |
ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) is character encoding based on the english alphabet. ASCII art refers to the way that graphics were created by using text only…its old school so to speak. The most basic form of this would be the smiley face ; )
Some people have created some amazing images with just text characters- now you can be one of those people.
Photo2text.com is a cool simple to use application to convert your photos to ASCII art in 3 steps. So you don’t have to do all that intense typing and spacing!
Simply upload a photo with a maximum file size of 200 kb. When uploaded, enter a nickname for the picture.
Comments - Posted in Design by Patrick Winfield
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You Shouldn’t Miss These – 5/25/07May 25 2007 | Roundup |
I haven’t done one of these round-up posts in awhile but there’s just too much good stuff lately to not share it:
Social: Lyndon illustrates the Tao of Linkbait Method – the art of hitting your target audience by aiming at a completely different audience. This post is inspired by a great movie and a really good idea.
Links: Joe Whyte shows you how to get hundreds of free links from .edu’s ethically and for free (you will rarely ever see .edu links | ethically | free together in the same sentence).
SEO: Eric Enge gives us 17 poor quality signals that your site might be sending. Some might be obvious (too large a percentage of your links are reciprocal) but others not so obvious (web server downtime too high).
Comments - Posted in Roundup by Chris Winfield
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My Public Relations Secrets RevealedMay 24 2007 | Press |
Over the weekend I did an interview with Neil Patel for his new blog titled: The Secrets of Public Relations Revealed. Neil asked some great questions and I tried to cover as many of the things that have helped me get coverage in places like The New York Times, USA Today, Entreprenuer Magazine and over 100 other major media publications.
In the interview I share the following:
* How I first got major media coverage
* Practical steps that you can take to get coverage (without paying a PR firm)
* How I have used PR to brand myself
* What can be done to speed up the PR process and get coverage quicker
* And many other secrets that you can read over at Neil’s great new blog Quick Sprout.
Comments - Posted in Press by Chris Winfield
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Chris Winfield in Investor’s Business Daily: ‘AOL the First in Google Search…’May 24 2007 | Press |
Back in early April, I spoke to Pete Barlas about the deal AOL had struck with Google to give advertisers a white label version of AdWords. This new arrangement was significant because it would allow advertisers to target only AOL audience members. The article titled, AOL The First In Google Search Ad Network Allowed To Sell Own Ads, ran yesterday in Investor’s Business Daily and here is one of my quotes:
Following up on a deal struck in 2005, AOL last month began selling AOL-branded versions of Google’s search ads, giving advertisers an opportunity they never had before. It’s an opportunity many appear be eager to take, says Chris Winfield, president of 10e20, which helps companies place ads online.
“It’s really exciting for advertisers to be able to advertise directly with AOL because the quality of traffic the quality of the conversions there is much higher than in other places,” he said.
Comments - Posted in Press by Chris Winfield
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Technorati: All Your Blogs Are Belong to ShoeMoney?May 23 2007 | Foo |
I knew that Technorati was making some major updates today. But I was bit surprised to see that ShoeMoney had taken over control of all of the recent blogs that had linked to 10e20:
According to Technorati, ShoeMoney (Jeremy Schoemaker) not only runs his own blog but also melange, Neil Patel’s new blog and even Bruce Clay’s…. 
Update: This looks to be a bug with all of the images in the first 5 listings for all blog posts. For example, look at what Technorati is showing for Bruce Clay’s recent links:
According to Technorati, I now control all of those blogs. What it normally would show is the picture of the person (or whatever icon they chose) who originally claimed the blog and verified it, along with their name (or whatever they chose). But what’s happening is that it it is taking the info from whomever the last site to link to them and displaying that instead.
Comments - Posted in Foo by Chris Winfield
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Google’s Hot Trends – Apparently Not All FluffMay 23 2007 | Google |
Yesterday I wrote a post titled What part of a graduate’s costume gave the cordon bleu cooking school its name? No, I’m not trying to compete with Yahoo! Answers and launching a new service. That strange phrase (without the question mark) was actually the hottest term in Google’s new Hot Trends service at the time of writing. Personally I was a bit perplexed at how something that random could be so popular yesterday. Luckily some commenters were able to fill me in on a few things I had completely overlooked:
- Radio trivia contests
- Crossword puzzles
The purpose of my post was to see if anyone really was searching for that term:
How can you benefit from this service as a marketer? One way would be to see what the most popular trends of the day are and if they match your topics, write blog posts or news articles about them. That way when someone clicks through your article could be there. We’ll see how that works out with this post….
Comments - Posted in Google by Chris Winfield
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Chris Winfield in The NY Post: ‘Ad & Subtract’ |
Yesterday I spoke with Holly Sanders from The New York Post and appear in her article in today’s paper called Ad & Subtract. The article is all about the recent emails that Google sent out to many AdSense publishers informing them that their accounts would be disabled on June 1st.
Search experts said Google routinely cuts off publishers who run afoul of AdSense rules, but they believe this latest round of notices was a more widespread effort to clean up its ad network.
“I don’t really remember where this many people reported it at one time,” said Chris Winfield, president of Internet search marketing firm 10e20.
Google confirmed that it had sent out notices, but characterized it as part of an ongoing review.
