AOL Wants To Be Your Local Reporter
AOL has gotten some heat about their plan to <a href="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/12/aols-seo-strategery.html#comments”>overrun the Internet and in effect, the search engines, with waves of content. Many people are not keen on this plan hatched by Tim Armstrong and company to generate content at break neck speed. While it may not be popular that’s not going to stop it from happening.
Now, AOL has another content that is getting a “no comment” from AOL officially but is being reported by The Business Insider as part of the plan to bring the troubled Internet company up from the ashes. Interestingly it is going to be centered on AOL’s Patch service that Armstrong had a vested interest in at one point. Hmmmm.
According to an internal communication with employees, AOL (AOL) plans to expand Patch, its network of local news blogs, from 30 sites to “hundreds,” by the end of 2010.
The goal: “To be leaders in one of the most promising ‘white spaces’ on the Internet.”
In the same communication, AOL said it wants to be “the global and local leader in sourcing, creating, producing and delivering high quality content.”
Are you ready for AOL to be your hyperlocal reporter / blogger? It will be interesting to see how they intend to pull this off since it will take actual people in the markets to source and generate this content in order for it to be relevant.
What is your take on AOL’s push to become the global and local leader in content?
How To Improve .EDU Link Requests Using Academic Metaphors
As a web marketer who is requesting high-quality links from the gatekeepers of academic sites, understanding the lingo and professional culture of the academic world can greatly improve your success rate. Academic environments can be a bit more formal and regulated than web or business world. When you get through to a blogger or .com [...]
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Bing… In… Space! (& Google, Too)
A reader pointed us to the Delta 2 rocket launch where Microsoft was a co-sponsor. If you look closely, you can see the Bing logo on the rocket ship.
While Bing’s logo went into space, Google today announced a partnership with DigitalGlobe to launch a satellite into space to provide “high-quality imagery in Google Earth [...]
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Jim Lanzone: Vengeance in Video?
In January 2008, Ask CEO Jim Lanzone stepped down. He moved to Redpoint Ventures, a VC firm, to be their entrepreneur-in-residence. But his latest project brings him back to search: Clicker, an online TV video search engine. Kinda.
Lanzone is CEO of the video service, which launched yesterday at TechCrunch50 into private beta. Clicker aims to be a TV guide for online video—”the most comprehensive way to find the video content you’re looking for on the web.”
What makes Clicker different from the myriad other video search engines out there? TechCrunch reports:
[Clicker] creates a structured database of programming, organizing shows by things like network, genre, and show name. This type of data not only allows for better search results, but it allows you to browse content without having to do text-based searches, which you probably won’t be doing when television and future web-enabled tablets start to serve up this content. Clicker already has a deal with Boxee.
The goal is really to be the best search engine for video content. Clicker will point you in the direction of whatever you are looking for (and will do embeds if they’re available), but won’t serve up the videos themselves. They will also delve into surfacing content not explicitly produced for television, but is still high quality web video content. But they don’t want to be YouTube, which is cluttered with user-generated content. Clicker is going for a different market.
Clicker will also allow users to edit and submit information about shows wiki-style.
My question: what’s with all those vowels?! Are you sure you didn’t mean “clickr”? Way to shoot yourselves in the foot, guys. 
Naturally, the first real question is what’s their business model. And the answer is typical of search engines: advertising, both search and display. However, they also plan to offer premium accounts, “which the company envisions might be used for storing your favorite videos online, kind of like a DVR of sorts.”
We’re obviously still learning new things about how to do online video all the time, as Hulu has shown us. But is there room for another video search engine—and if so, will Clicker be it? What do you think?
Google Buys Video Compression Company On2
Earlier today Google announced that it had acquired On2 Technologies in a stock deal worth approximately $106 million. There’s little true information about how Google intends to use On2 in the release. Here’s the Google quote:
“Today video is an essential part of the web experience, and we believe high-quality video compression technology should be a [...]
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Google Sets & Squared: Powerful Keyword Research Tools
One of the toughest challenges facing pay-per-click marketers is keyword expansion. Marketers need to be adept at selecting keywords that will not only drive traffic, but more importantly, will drive conversions in a cost-effective manner. As competition intensifies, identifying unique, high quality keywords becomes increasingly important-and difficult. While basic keyword research remains important, search marketers [...]
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