by Larry Sivitz, Seattle24x7 Managing Editor The rising tide of Internet Search marketing that is known by synonyms such as “pay-per-click,” “sponsored search” and “paid search,” and acronyms like PPC, CPC, KPI and ROI, breaks gently along the rocky shores of Port Townsend, Washington, where it lifts large auto ferries and rocks hand carved wooden [...]
Before it became fashionable to speak of Googling, blogging, or i-Podding in your spare time, before broadb and and Wi-Fi entered the daily word-stock, not to mention the family room, before the Speakeasy Cafe became famous as Seattle’s first commercial Internet gateway and espresso bar where you could simultaneously click your spoon in a real [...]
Cash from Nigeria, Chat Room Romeo, The ‘Under Construction’ Blues. Each of these phrases could caption a screen-shot of the erratic events that transpire on the Internet each day. But penned by digital Web designer and singer-songwriter Jody Levinson (aka Eva Moon), the idiomatic language of the Internet is being handily transformed into rollicking music [...]
There are some companies that can trace their origins to soft-selling, including to the opposite sex. Facebook lore has it that the fabled business actually got started as a way for Mark Zuckerberg to meet attractive young co-eds on the Harvard campus and invite them to see their faces in Facebook. At the Apple store [...]
Have you ever watched a snowboarder launch 20 feet above a half pipe and execute a twisting 360 rotation, or a downhill skier fly off a mogul at 90 mph? How about a competitive biker cascading down a mountain path of air, stream and rock? What could be more exciting? How about seeing it through [...]
In what promises to be the Puget Sound high tech community Awards gala of not just this year, but the past twenty-five years, the WTIA and the Paramount Theater will play host to the 25th Anniversary of the Industry Achevement Awards. on March 25, 2009. “Our panel of judges spent countless hours evaluating a record-breaking [...]
The Garrigan Lyman Group has been selected as the agency to create and launch a new website for the Seattle Museum of Flight and its campaign to bring the NASA Space Shuttle to Seattle. Boasting the tagline, ‘There is no better Space on Earth,’ the campaign positions MOF against 20+ museums around the country competing [...]
Once voted the best place to have a heart attack (because so many of our citizens know CPR), the heart of the greater Seattle Web community is beating loudly these days for its vitality with health matters online. Perhaps no one is doing more for global health than the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation from [...]
Mobile media. Social media. Analytics. Search advertising. Engagement mapping. To blend the bumper crop of Internet marketing products stored inside its various silos, Microsoft officially rebranded those assets as Microsoft Advertising at the recent advance08 Leadership Summit. Simply put, Microsoft Advertising puts all the company’s tools and solutions for advertisers, ad agencies and publishers under [...]
Marc D. Snyder, Founder of Careers.Org, Remains With Domain as Chief Content Manager Domain Strategies, a Monster Venture Partners company and a leader in building businesses on premium domains like Healthcare.com, Patents.com, Alerts.com and Wifi.com, is pleased to announce a partnership with Marc D. Snyder to build on the success of www.Careers.Org and develop the [...]
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May 14 2012
Google Blinks! Bing Sings, and Slings the Arrows of Social Interface Discontent! Amazon’s Social “Denny Triangle!”
At last week’s Bing Search Summit in San Francisco, Microsoft took the wraps off a brand new Bing featuring a new, right-hand social column (“The Sidebar”) that will eventually include Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Quora and LinkedIn integration, as well as people who may know something about your most recent Bing query. The new Bing search even offers a way to ask questions on your favorite social network, directly through Bing. “The search engine has been reinvented!” wrote Mashable’s Lance Ulanoff.
In total, there are three new Bing columns in all:
* Core Search: minus many of the social annotations that Bing has added over the years (that have been relocated).
* Snapshot: providing additional information about a particular search listing, without having to leave Bing
* Sidebar: serving as the new home for social integration with search
“With this update, the competing search philosophies are clearer than ever,” opined Mashable. “Google sees the world as a deep blend of data, people and activities, all of which can be mined simultaneously for a rich and useful experience. Bing sees a more structured world, where social interactions, while extremely helpful, are kept a safe distance from the core results you desire.”
How does Bing build these “Friends Who Might Know” lists? Microsoft execs explained they’re leveraging as much publicly available data as possible from Facebook (for now) and soon Twitter and other networks. Inclusion in the list is not necessarily based on something you posted about the topic.
The sidebar includes people you know through your social networks that have, say, posted a photo about the topic, liked a certain relevant topic or searched for a similar topic in Bing, and people you don’t know, who are, for example, known Topic Experts and Enthusiasts (identified by Bing). All of them could be considered helpful in your quest for knowledge. Conversations revolving around a query topic are viewable through the social pane — you just hover over the activity and a small box will slide out to the left with the original post. You can add comments in any conversation in the activity pane or see the conversation in the slideout.
For example, a search for “Seattle restaurants” might pull up Facebook friends who have “liked” dining establishments in the metro area under a header that reads “Friends Who Might Know.” Bing users can also post comments or queries in the sidebar interface that will automatically be published to their Facebook page (provided they’re signed into Facebook) and could hypothetically flag their Seattle-based friends in posts seeking advice on where to go for dinner.
To see the new pane at work, you have to sign into Facebook and install the Bing App in Facebook. With that done, your social pane will be filled with recent Bing activity that’s also been shared on Facebook. When you enter a search query in the Bing interface on the left, the pane will also display a list of Facebook friends, and topic experts who might be able to assist with your query. Note: The Bing App defaults to sharing your posts with Everyone. If you do a lot of searching, you may want to dial that down a bit.
This deep integration with Facebook isn’t the first time the two have collaborated, and Bing has been adding social recommendations powered by Facebook to its search results for the past year. But it’s a sure sign that Microsoft — which bought a 1.6% stake in Facebook for $240 million in 2007 — will lean on a company it’s heavily invested in to improve on the social-search product Google introduced in January. “Search Plus Your World” pulls up Google+ content deemed relevant to signed-in Google users and has gotten a tepid reception, said Adage. [24x7]
Amazon Advances Its Vision for a Social Campus Compass, Not an “Apple Circle,” but a “Denny Triangle.”
The City of Seattle’s Department of Planning and Development has posted the latest renderings of Amazon’s proposed Denny Triangle campus.
At a public design review board meeting, attendees liked proposed amenities that include outdoor artwork, a playing field, a dog park and space for food trucks.
The venue also incorporates a healthy measure of social engineering into the design. To ensure public open spaces between buildings are both lively and safe, buildings are designed so that people who park their cars in the underground garages will have to walk outside to get from the garage elevators to the elevators in the building lobbies. “That will help ensure a steady flow of people moving through the plazas.”
The project will also be a haven for bicyclists. Each of the three blocks will have a dedicated bike entrance and storage for as many as 400 bikes. That could allow as many as 1,200 Amazon employees to bike to work. [24x7]