Engaging Your Customers in Unconventional Ways
It’s not an apples to apples comparison but while people have been debating HTML vs text for years, craigslist has built a business out of the lowest common denominator– really plain text with no graphics. (originally seen on Susan Mernit’s blog)
Craigslist and cottage industries
This comes from Potomac Tech Wire. Is this a surprising report? That surfers can’t tell the difference (on a search engine) between search results and ads?
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Jan 25 Report: Surfers Can’t Differentiate Search Results from Sponsored Ads
Washington, DC — Only 18% of adult U.S. Internet users can tell the
difference between actual search results and paid ads on search
engines,
according to a survey conducted by the DC-based Pew Internet and
American Life Project. Such paid, or "sponsored," search results, which
appear on Google, Yahoo, MSN and other engines, are typically placed
above or to the right of actual results, often in a different-colored
box.
Forty-five percent of those surveyed said they would stop using search
engines if they thought they weren’t being clear about offering some
results for pay. Overall, the survey found that 38 million Americans
use a
search engine each day, more than half of the U.S. Internet population.
The average user spends a total of 43 minutes a month conducting some
34 searches.
Tuesday, January 18, 2005 Preventing comment spam
If
you’re a blogger (or a blog reader), you’re painfully familiar with
people who try to raise their own websites’ search engine rankings by
submitting linked blog comments like "Visit my discount pharmaceuticals
site." This is called comment spam, we don’t like it either, and we’ve
been testing a new tag that blocks it. From now on, when Google sees
the attribute (rel="nofollow") on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any
credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a
negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a
way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas
like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.