NebuAd - New Twist on Behavioral Targeting for Online Ads
News stories this week highlighted Silicon Valley startup NebuAd, which recently unveiled their behavioral targeting network at ad:tech.
Behavioral ad targeting is nothing new on the internet, and I easily recall it being offered in one form or another as far back as about 1999. In fact, 24/7 Real Media currently offers behavioral targeting through their ad network as just one case in point. So what’s new with this incarnation is the way in which NebuAd collects data to base the targeting upon. NebuAd’s innovative twist on behavior targeting is based upon monitoring individuals’ internet browsing habits through their ISP, essentially seeing all the sites and pages that a user visits. (more…)
Popularity: 11% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 12/11/2007 | Permalink | 
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Filed under: Advertising, Paid Search, Research and Development, Security, technologybehavioral targeting, internet ads, internet advertising, Nebu Ad, NebuAd, online ads, online-advertising
WikipediaVision Mashes Up With Google Maps and Wikipedia
An addictive little mashup called WikipediaVision has combined Google Maps with live data on updates from the English Wikipedia to display the geolocation of people editing articles in near real-time. The map rapidly pans back and forth across the world, pinpointing the locations of users who have just edited an article, and displaying the name of the article and its hyperlink.
It’s interesting and hypnotic to sit and watch where in the world
Popularity: 17% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 11/05/2007 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Maps, Research and Development, ToolsFlickrVision, Google-Maps, Maps, Mashups, Wikipedia, WikipediaVision
New Breed of People Search Engine Launches: Spock.com
A little startup called Spock.com has moved into public beta today for their official public launch - previously they were only available to a handful of invite-only beta-testers. Spock is to white pages what Google Maps was to yellow pages - Spock is a sort of people search engine that pulls data from many different sites together to automatically form personal profiles of individuals. The service also allows one to search for people who match up with certain criteria like celebrities, kidnapped children, billionaires, sudoku fans, “journalists killed in Iraq”, “Baptist women who love to travel”, etc.
Spock is one of a new breed of people search engines which pulls data in from a variety of online sources including MySpace, LinkedIn, My Yahoo!, Wikipedia, company websites, blogs, and other sources to compose these composite profiles which include photos, descriptions, links to people related to the person in question, and tag lists of common keywords. Check out this search I did for “Danny Sullivan”:
And, here’s the profile Spock generated for the search engine marketing “Danny Sullivan”:
This automatic generation of profiles from other data sources, similar to a meta search engine, is not all that new, of course - ZabaSearch has been touted for doing similar stuff to compose info on people out of various public records, sort of like a poor man’s background search. And, ZoomInfo has worked to build a directory of searchable business profiles of individuals. IceRocket also used to have a metasearch engine that pulled in data from a handful of various singles/personals sites.
What makes Spock a bit different is how they’re actively composing these profiles from sources that really haven’t been associated with one another previously, and making them publicly available, for “free” (eventually paid for by ad revenue, of course). While the general public likely hasn’t been aware of it, the CIA or NSA has actually also been working on a similar sort of search engine system which automatically composes secret dossiers of information on individuals from a multitude of sources including credit card information, criminal databases, as well as many of the same online sources used by these web services like ZabaSearch, ZoomInfo, and Spock.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 08/08/2007 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: General, Research and Development, Searchingpeople-search, privacy, privacy-concerns, spock, white-pages
New Research Could Improve Google Image Search
New research recently published out of University of California - San Diego could allow Google’s Image Search to easily begin using elements from “true image search” — that is, the ability for software to detect and identify elements appearing within the image itself rather than just relying upon external text metadata to associate keywords with the images. Read on for more details.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 04/05/2007 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Google, Image Optimization, Research and Development, SearchingGoogle, Google-Image-Labeler, Google-Image-Search, image-search, Supervised-Multiclass-Labeling
Could Nanotechnology Save Print Yellow Pages?
Technological evolution continues to change our everyday lives, and the speed of changes over the last two decades has caused an acceleration of impacts to traditional forms of business. Nowhere is this more evident than in the impact to usage of printed yellow pages directories. Once the mainstay for locating businesses, many consumers now treat the books as doorstops or fireplace kindling.
The Yellow Pages Association’s annual report and other research indicates that consumer usage of print directories is on the decline while usage of online yellow pages and local search are increasing. The main divergence of opinion seems to be in how long it will be before print dies completely - ten years, fifty years, or a century? Simba research indicates that profits of core yellow pages are down while independent publishers are increasing at double-digit rates, indicating that advertisers continue to see value in print YP exposure. Even though the print biz still has lots of money and usage, those who have watched tech trends during the Information Age know that transitions of this sort can often reach a tipping point rapidly, perhaps rendering print YP irrelevant at the closer end of the timeline estimates.
In all the rush to sound the death-knell for print most folks are looking upon it as merely a dinosaur, soon to die as a result of the meteor-strike of internet search technology. But, could there be another future in store for print directories?
I’ve been watching developments in a number of converging lines of technology for a while now, and I foresee another potential fate for the print directories: nanotechnology. Read on and I’ll explain.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 03/20/2007 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Futurism, Local Search, Online Directories, Research and Development, Yellow Pagesiyp, nanotech, nanotechnology, Online Directories, Online-Yellow-Pages, print-yellow-pages, Yellow Pages
Game of Life Updated
I just noticed that my Chromatic Game of Life utility wasn’t displaying properly for FireFox - my bad! I had added in FireFox support when I built it, but I somehow failed to upload it.
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FireFox users would’ve called up the utility and not seen any grid, so it wouldn’t have been apparent that they should click on the squares to set up initial state patterns to iterate through.
This has been corrected, and I also added in very brief instructions to improve usability for those unfamiliar with Conway’s Game of Life. Check it out at the Chromatic Game of Life page.
Popularity: 3% [?]
Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 03/02/2007 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: General, Research and Development, Toolscellular-automata, conways-game-of-life, firefox, game-of-life, games
The significance of GData
Gdata, short for Google Data APIs, promises to be Google’s new standard protocol for transmitting all sorts of data back and forth to Google and its various services. As Google states on Google Code: “All sorts of services can provide GData feeds, from public services like blog feeds or news syndication feeds to personalized data like email or calendar events or task-list items.” Imagine for instance, starting with a base feed, then adding query parameters like restricting to a particular category and date range and ending up with a customized feed that specifically fits your criteria. Gdata builds on the RSS 2.0 and ATOM 1.0 protocols.
Imagine your desktop machine — armed with your personal profile — communicating with Google (and even with the Web in general) about your email, search history, RSS subscriptions, calendar, bookmarks, blog posts, and the news… and all through the GData protocol. As Reto Meier states, “Google already has a ridiculous amount of my information. Now with an API that promises access to this information to use the way I want to, there’s one less reason to think about storing it anywhere else.” Kinda scary but also exciting at the same time. Google Operating System here we come!
Will we all be speaking GData in years to come? Will the GData protocol become as ubiqitous as the HTTP protocol? Only time will tell, but I certainly think GData is one to watch!
Popularity: 6% [?]
Posted by Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts on 05/12/2006 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: Google, Research and DevelopmentAPIs, ATOM, GData, Google, Google-APIs, RSS, XML
New Study - Importance of Rankings on Brand
36% of search engine users associate top rankings with brand leadership
In addition, 88% of users will change engines or search terms if they don’t find what they seek within the first three pages of search results, up from 78% in 2002.
Brian
Popularity: 5% [?]
Posted by Brian Klais of Netconcepts on 04/21/2006 | Permalink | Email
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Filed under: General, Market Data, Research and Development, Tracking and ReportingBranding, Searcher-Behavior
Google Releases New Related Links Feature
Google Labs has just released a new feature called Google Related Links which allows webmasters to place a little tabbed user-interface navigation box on their site. The box will pull in links to sites related to the content on your webpage, allowing you to display related links to Searches, News, and Web Pages.
I’ve copied a screengrab below so that you can see how the real thing looks:
Perhaps this is a useful feature for some, but I’m thinking that most web editors prefer to choose their own related links and are better able to choose appropriate ones than this automated option.
So, are there other incentives to adding the code?
Their FAQ states that they do not pay publishers for adding the feature “at this time”. This would seem to hint that they’re considering paying for the referral traffic, which I think that most publishers would agree that they should.
A question: will Google bias the links supplied by this application towards searches which have better pay-for-performance ad revenue for themselves?
There’s something just a hair insidious seeming about this as well, however. On the PR face of it, Google represents that they want to help people out, make life easier, and enable people to find what they want to find on the web. But, Google is integrating itself more and more deeply into people’s websites, increasing dependency upon them. They provide search services for sites already, they’ve launched applications to allow people to design webpages through them, and they’re providing people with free web usage reporting and maps.
If there’s one thing that people have learned within the IT disaster recovery industry, placing too much dependency upon a single entity will create a single point of failure in a system. Admittedly, Google has nice infrastructure, but have you ever seen a company yet that never had a technical failure of some sort? What happens as increasing amounts of the internet itself is supported by Google, rather than by distributed systems?
In any case, it will be interesting to watch how many sites adopt this new feature without monetary incentives to do so.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Continue reading »Posted by Chris Silver Smith of Netconcepts on 04/05/2006 | Permalink | Email
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Trackback | Comments (0) | Comments RSS | Filed under: Dynamic Sites, General, Google, Research and Development, Tools
Google isn’t going to develop a web browser
In a recent blog entry I referred to The Register’s speculation about Google building a web browser to compete with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Apparently that isn’t going to happen any time soon. This according to Associated Press:
Chief executive Eric Schmidt has, however, ruled out developing a Google browser to compete with Microsoft’s dominant Internet Explorer.
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Posted by Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts on 11/22/2004 | Permalink | Email
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Trackback | Comments (0) | Comments RSS | Filed under: Google, Research and Development
