Google And Nielsen Link Up To Measure TV Ads

Google is putting its chocolate into Nielsen Media Research’s peanut butter. The two companies have signed a pact to cooperate on measuring the effectiveness of TV advertising. Currently, companies can buy Google TV Ads only on the Dish satellite network.

Google is bringing second-by-second analytics and feedback to the TV advertising world, but all it can do right now is measure what’s happening inside the set-top box. The deal with Nielsen will allow Google to add a crucial layer of demographic data. The combination of Google’s second-by-second reporting of which ads are being watched with Nielsen’s panel-based demographics should prove delicious to advertisers. Now all Google has to do is gain a foothold in other cable and satellite TV networks besides Dish.

I bet this will be the beginning on Ads in video.

Google Declares Jihad On Blog Link Farms

A major Google page rank update has punished large scale blog link farms and similar sites indulging in heavy cross linking by dramatically cutting their Google page rank scores.

There is some suggestion that the changes may be related to the sale of text link ads, but at this stage this is not backed by evidence, and a range of sites I checked that are selling text link ads were showing no change in page rank.

The only clear change appears to be among large scale blog networks and similar link farms, where each site in the network provides hundreds of outgoing links on each page of the blog to other blogs in the network, in some cases creating tens, even hundred of thousands of cross links. Previously such behavior has been rewarded by Google with high page rank, although it would now appear that this loop hole may now be shut.

Blogs in the TechCrunch network (we don’t link heavily on each page..nor do we have a particularly large network) and the Gawker Media network (who like us don’t go nuts with links) maintained their page rank whilst blogs across a range of other networks saw big decreases. The AOL owned Weblogs Inc was not immune, with leading Gadget blog Engadget dropping from PR 7 to PR5, Autoblog (6 to 4) and DownloadSquad (5 to 4).

The move by Google could well cause many smaller blog networks, including a number with funding, to close given their heavy reliance on text link ads and related sales that depend on strong Google page ranks for each site. Although traffic alone can and does sell ads on bigger sites, a drop from say PR7 to PR4 in one example makes the ad sell that much more difficult, particularly on blogs with little traffic. I’d suggest that the Deadpool will soon see a number of new entrants.

I guess that means I’ve got to watch what I link to!!

Google Adds IMAP to Gmail, World Rejoices


f you are a Gmail user, head over to your account settings and select “Forwarding and POP/IMAP” to enable the newly added IMAP access option. If you don’t know what the Internet Message Access Protocol is, this system allows you to access mail directly on the Google servers instead of downloading it to your computer. That way, if you access mail from multiple devices, your inbox and mail folders will look the same from every one of them. Gmail’s IMAP setup page includes tutorials for Outlook, Apple Mail, Windows Mail, Thunderbird, and, you guessed it, the iPhone. [Thanks John and everyone who sent this]

I’ll have to start using this. I bet everyone else is going to too!!

Super Charge Your Address Bar with Autocomplete Manager

Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): Open common URLs, bookmarks, and history pages by title from your address bar with the Autocomplete Manager Firefox extension. Yesterday we showed you how to enable Firefox address bar auto-completion, and while Autocomplete Manager does not perform the same sort of inline autofilling of text, what it does do is allow you to find and visit URLs based on page titles and bookmark names, any part of a URL, and lots of other useful options. It won’t be for everyone (I still prefer keyword bookmarks to all of the alternatives), but if you want to be able to perform history and bookmark searches from the same place you type URLs, it’s a handy extension to have in your toolbox. Thanks Alcyone!

Thought people would like this little extra!