Using Google Analytics? Here's a great blog entry on add-on tools that improve Google Analytics (these work ONLY in Firefox). ROIRevolution.com/blog/2009/01/6_google_analytics_tools.html 0 comments

I was talking with a company this morning. Their web person had been trying for two months to make changes to the analytics tool's configuration. I made the changes in five minutes. That's the difference between experts and non-experts.

Whatever. Still looking for Karen Brodnick. 2 comments

The End of TV: Let's go to the numbers. Obama's inauguration was watched on TV by 30 million people and on the web by 70 million. Not just more. Twice as many. 1 comments

Google Shuts Down Newspaper Ads: Last week, Google turned off its print ads service. This allowed you to place ads in newspapers, just as you can use Google to place ads in search engines, radio, and TV. Why did Google shut it down?

Other bloggers talk about this, but we actually use the print ads tool. I see two reasons.

A) It didn't work as easy as the other tools. The web, radio, or TV ads are digital and are automatically inserted into the media. Just create your ad, set your bid, and the ad shows up. But newspaper ads were different. The bids weren't based on competition. You made an offer, and the newspapers would manually review the offer. If it was sufficient, then they selected the ad. The ad showed up several weeks later.

B) Newspapers are dying. Their revenues are dramatically falling every year. Everyone agreed that most newspapers would die, but the New York Times would survive. Well... it's the NYT that will die first. They operate at a huge monthly loss (millions of dollars per month) and was expected to shut down this May. Last week, Carlos Slim, a Mexican billionaire (he owns Mexico's cell phone network) put $60m into the NYT (at 14% interest!). So there's no future in newspaper ads. 0 comments

Obama's family is black, white, and Asian.

They are Christian, Muslim, and Jewish.

They speak English, Indonesian, French, Cantonese, German, Hebrew, African languages (incl. Swahili, Luo and Igbo), and even a few phrases of Gullah, the Creole dialect of the South Carolina Low Country.

A few are wealthy, and some, like Sarah Obama, his step-grandmother who only recently got electricity and running water in her metal-roofed shack, are quite poor.

Click the photo for a larger image. 1 comments

Here is a good article on Google China (strategies, goals, problems, etc.). The article is mostly about Google China, and if you don't know about Baidu, Alibaba, TaoBao, TenCent, etc., you may miss some of the context. Maggie Guan and I are preparing a book about the web in China, to be published in early summer 2009. 0 comments