Behind the Scenes at YSM

I attended a seminar on various aspects of managing Yahoo Search Marketing (YSM, formerly known as Overture) campaigns yesterday. For those of you unfamiliar with YSM, it is a paid search advertising system that allows advertisers to bid for position within the sponsored listings area of several major search engines (including Yahoo,...

Cruising the Sphere

A colleague of mine pointed me towards Sphere; a fast, new blog search engine. The interface is simple and uncluttered, making it easy to perform searches and track trends. After entering a search term and selecting “custom range” from the first drop-down, a graph of mentions appears just above the results....

Resources on How to Name Your Company or Product

We’ve been working the last few months on a sister product to our ImpactWatch media monitoring tool and one of the real struggles has been coming up with a name and accompanying URL. Anyone who has tried to name something in the last five years knows that most good, short URLs are taken by legit companies or being poached by domain name brokers....

U.S. Kids Bad at Geography. Really Bad.

MSNBC ran an AP story today about a recent Roper poll commissioned by National Geographic. Among 510 respondents, aged 18 to 24, 60% couldn’t find Iraq on a map.

Other major findings:

• One-third of respondents couldn’t pinpoint Louisiana on a map and 48 percent were unable to locate Mississippi.
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The Internet Remote Control

The Center for the Digital Future has some interesting statistics about Internet usage in their recent five year report:

• 78.6 percent of Americans use the Internet and

• Nearly two thirds of Americans are connected at home (more have it at work)

More interesting to me is that Internet users are going online without a specific task or destination in mind....