…well web stalkers and reputation managers…

I finally got around to updating all of my profiles, when a friend told me about extendr. The cool thing about extendr is that it gives a nifty little tour option for your links. People can explore your world without actually visiting the Web sites. The browser plug-in to bookmark links to your profile seems to work, but it puts all the links into a “from the web” category. So you need re-categorize all the links into the appropriate categories. Luckily, this is simple in extendr.

extendr is missing feeds. Why not let someone subscribe to updates? The 250 character limit is constraining too. I haven’t seen any of the extendr profiles ranking in the SERPs for name searches either. It looks like that is going to take some time to achieve. The extendr pages do get indexed, however.

extendr could be used in so many ways. People know you from so many different aspects of your life. Manage your personal brand. Find and express your individuality through all the noise. Use it for your business, product.

It will be interesting to see which profiles and aggregators will be adopted on a large-scale in the next few years (and what new ones will appear on the scene). If anything, extendr has make me realize how many profiles I have laying around the Internet. Its a great place to keep it all tidy.

Ignoring the fact that this man seems to believe that his wife is his property, this article exemplifies the “fun” of content network and display advertising. I will forever associate his dealership with his stupidity and this frivolous lawsuit.

Maybe his new tag line should be: “Way easier than stealing my wife!”

He needs the money!

agbn2scjfu

So I’m playing with the new Google Profiles today. So far seems like yet another profile to maintain. Possibly handy if you have a relatively common name. Probably not handy if you are say, John Smith.

If you have a Gmail account, the profile URL can only be customized as your gmail ID name or a series of numbers to mask your ID (otherwise people could infer your email address). If you use a non-gmail account, you can customize the profile URL to whatever your little heart desires. Which is what I did.

Search visibility is pretty much instant, but profiles, for now, are located at the very bottom of the page. I purposely set up my URL for my short name, Jacque, instead of Jacqueline to test. I have visibility for both names in the SERP.

Here is the result for me signed into a different Google account. Note the sponsored link:

Here is the profile on the bottom of the 1st page in the SERP. Note the links to the other Social Networking sites.

A search for my short name, Jacque shows the profile result along with with my full name:

Jackie Urick is a common misspelling of my short name. While I have thought about “dominating” search for “Jackie Urick”, once I realized a few years back that the only other person with my name is some high schooler in Montana (prolly graduated by now even), I didn’t sweat it. Besides, I use “Jacqueline” for my professional name.

What is nifty is that MY Google profile is appearing for the search “Jackie Urick” despite the fact I didn’t list it as a nickname in the profile.

TAKE THAT JACKIE URICK IN MONTANA.

You can visit my profile here: http://www.google.com/profiles/jacque.urick

I would love to get my hands on analytics for Web sites that sell tea online just for today, April 15. I noticed this ad while reading a Huffington Post article about the Tea Party in Washington D.C.

Too bad they don't offer same day delivery!

This is an excellent example of real world events that effect online advertising. The web isn’t a vacuum, folks. I wouldn’t be surprised if there is an uptick in tea purchases that are tangential to the Tea Party phenomenon. People do enjoy drinking tea as well as dumping it in protest!

The new Obama administration has set up a transition information Web site in the same vein of the campaign Web site. There is a count down to the inauguration as well as you tube videos, jobs, agenda items, information about appointments and employment opportunities. I’m happy to see that the President-elect is continuing his commitment to social media. I was so impressed by the consistent message his campaign used between emails, text messages, content ads and the main Web site.

I was even more impressed that not more than 30min after his victory address, Obama sent out a last text message:

Final Text Message From the Obama Campaign

Cuil.com – what is supposed to be the answer to Google and next-gen of search is all over the news today. So far I’m not impressed. Apparently the 121,617,892,992 web pages their crawler has indexed doesn’t include my own website!

Besides being a bit ego bruised, a quick search for myself on Cuil turns up all of these old… circa 2000 old… TCLUG (Twin Cities Linux User Group) mailing lists posts. While Google will also return some of these for my name, Google doesn’t think they are as relevant as, say, this domain… that includes my name and has my name, Jacqueline Urick, all over it. Ego aside, I’m siding with Google (and Yahoo, MSN and Ask) on this one – this site is going to be VERY relevant to a person searching for my name.

Searching for some clients, I found a blog post that referenced a blog post dated from 2005 in the first ten results that is now 404. Not so relevant.

Searching for linkedin (without quotes) doesn’t bring up linkedin.com. It doesn’t bring up anything. The error page you get is somewhat condescending.

We didn’t find any results for “linkedin”

Some reasons might be…

* a typo. Please check your spelling.
* your search includes a term that is very rare. Try to find a more common substitute.
* too many search terms. Please try fewer terms.

Finally, try to think of different words to describe your search.

I like how all the reasons the search fails is somehow my fault for sucking at searching.

If I put “linkedin” in quotes, I actually get results. That is really intuitive.

Maybe I’m jaded from using the “old way” for too long but I’m having a hard time meshing cuil’s results with my idea of relevant. According to their philosophy listed on their website, they appear to know what is relevant.

The Internet is getting bigger and more disorganized every day. Cuil’s goal is to solve the two great problems of search: how to index the whole Internet—not just part of it—and how to analyze and sort out its pages so you get relevant results.

Cuil’s founders worked with other search engines and knew that tinkering with old systems wouldn’t work. A fundamentally different approach was needed. So we’ve developed new architecture and algorithms that can handle the exponential growth of the Internet and organize results that reflect its enormous complexity.

Maybe we have different definitions. Maybe cuil is just inundated with requests right now. So far, I’m not impressed. I’m willing to give Cuil another chance.

Ok so 24 hours ago (April 11, 2008) I received the following email:

Thanks again, for signing up to download our Razer Gaming guide.

In approximately 24 hours time, we’ll be launching an exclusive
piece of news only to readers of this list(those who have downloaded
the Razer Gaming Guide).. and what can we say, we’re truly excited about
sharing the launch details with you, but I’m afraid that the *VERY
BEST* we can do right now is to give you a primer on what’s to come!

This launch will likely go down in history as one of the *LARGEST*
and craziest(and perhaps most fun) things that we ever did in our
Razer labs, and we hope you will join us in making this happen!

Some Razer fans have already realized what’s about to happen and
have already jumped the gun, but unfortunately we will still have to
keep it a secret till 24 hours later.

Some clues…

It’s 8 letters, blue and very likely, a world record.

Be part of this!

More news to come in 24 hours!

Best regards
Ryan C

I was so intrigued that I totally forgot about their attempt at the internet records! (Internet records are serious business.)

At any rate, this evening I received an update on their diabolical scheme:

24 hours are finally up. What are we up to?

Over in the labs of Razer, our team has always
pushed towards the envelope of innovation and precision
technologies in each and every one of our products.

We have always been meeting challenges in every step
of our product research, development and innovative
technological breakthroughs and today we’ve set forth
to achieve what few other companies have even tried
or attempted, and that is to forge a ground breaking
Facebook challenge!

If you haven’t already known (or have been hiding under
a rock for the past year) Facebook is an extremely innovative
company which has risen in popularity within an extremely
short period of time and has been on the forefront
of leading-edge social websites.

Facebook allows you to connect with your friends, family, schoolmates,
co-workers and best of all, allows you to be updated on the daily
happenings over at Razer. (In fact, there’s a whole bunch of
Razer folks online and if you dig around hard enough
you can find Robert Krakoff a.k.a Razerguy too – hint hint)

Our challenge is to hit 10,000 fans on our Facebook
page *within a WEEK*! Truth be told, some of us don’t even have
more than a hundred friends on our list each, but that
won’t stop us from doing whatever it takes to break
records.

Especially in just *SEVEN SHORT DAYS* and that dateline
ends next Sunday night, the 19th of April at 23:59 hours.

While such a challenge would probably scare away other
gaming companies (hey we don’t blame them), we embrace
them with much gleeful anticipation hence we would like to
extend an invitation to you to join us today and be part
of Razer’s history… for eternity to come.

As part of the Razer-Facebook groupie, you can view our upcoming
events, exclusive news, videos, Facebook- exclusive contests, giveaways
and upcoming product releases ahead of anyone else!

And if you don’t have an account with Facebook, you
can create an account here to get started – http://www.facebook.com

You can also upload your fan photos, wallpapers, videos
and basically anything you’re obsessed with Razer with. So
don’t delay another second and add us. Time is of the
essence here and speed is everything!

Can we hit 10,000 fans in *just* ONE week? Perhaps, maybe,
but you can make the winning difference by joining us today!

*AS OF RIGHT NOW*, there’s around 90 fans who have already
added us (you clever folks!) since the last email we sent
out 24 hours ago…and more are joining us every hour! This doesn’t
cost anything but a a minute of your time, so there’s
no excuse not to go ahead and join us!

Here are the steps …

1. Make sure you have a Facebook account over at
http://www.facebook.com

2. Ensure you’re logged in to your account and access
the Razer page online at the URL below.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Razer/13848807575

3. Select “Become a Fan” on the top
right menu and you’re done!

Once you have joined us as a fan, feel free to leave a message on
our wall, post a photo or video of yourself. Just don’t go around
harassing other people or we’ll send one of our hit men, or even
better, Razerguy after you.

Note: We’ll be keeping you updated on our challenge
progress during the week ahead, so sit tight and look out
for more updates from us.

Godspeed!

Best regards,

Ryan C.

I don’t know, all I can do here is /facepalm. I mean yeah Social Media is hot. Gamers are all over social media. Ergo – get on that social media. But a Facebook friending campaign? I don’t know, it doesn’t sound innovative or revolutionary. Its a pretty obvious ploy to get contact and demographic information from Facebook.

And I know I’m helping the Razer’s cause here by blogging about it… I gotta give the n00bz a lil love, you know? Their products are great even if their marketing team is a lil green when it comes to the online marketing.

Oooh look at this! The Razer Lachesis comes in white now… I gotta get one of these little babies.

I really don’t know why I’m finding these Church of Scientology ads so amusing. At least the placement of this one makes more sense.

I love the Britney Spears ringtones ad here too. Like if all else fails, I can at least answer my phone to “Oops, I did it again”.

I saw a couple blog posts about how the Church of Scientology has begun an AdWords campaign to promote their newly redesigned video channel website. It is a pretty fancy new website.

That said, they really need to learn to PPC. Why are they buying “scientology” and “church of scientology”? They are already ranking for those terms!

Also, my friends at the CoS… the word of today is canonical. I don’t know why you guys are maintaining that old site along with the new video site. I see the link there in your video channel and I don’t get it. The branding, tone, etc is really disjointed.

As far as I could tell they were not buying money terms like “tom cruise”, “xenu”, “$cientology” or “chanology” the latter being the name of sorts for the Anonymous movement. If you’re going to buy terms to defend your good name – know your enemies!

I guess one of the more curious discovery while looking to see who was bidding on what on the YouTubes was the fact that Medifast is buying on this term too? They are all freaking over YouTube.

I don’t know who is doing their online marketing but I’ve noticed that they have been really aggressive lately. I see Medifast EVERYWHERE now. I really found this ad highly amusing juxtaposed with the Anonymous / Scientology content. Are they saying the 4chan anon kids are fat (hey /b/ does this post make my ass look fat? in before tits or GTFO)? Or the Scientologists or both? I guess we as humans can all find a commonality in our weird body-image issues. Lets all hold hands and slurp a ready-to-drink soy-shake. Maybe L Ron Hubbard should have started a diet-related cult instead.

As I wrote about a month back, you can gauge the presidential primary campaigns by viewing the PPC ads related to them.

When I wrote last, McCain wasn’t a front runner at all. He had high hopes, however – he was already bidding on “Hillary Clinton”. Now that he’s the apparent front runner, McCain is now a valuable keyword.

This “Pray 4 the USA” website is interesting. There is no mention of McCain at all on it. For good or bad. I didn’t see this website buying “Hillary Clinton” or “Barack Obama”. I guess the democrats aren’t encouraged to pray for their nation.