Microsoft Bing held a press conference on Tuesday night at the SoHo House in Hollywood to release the Entertainment section on the search engine, but the real fun began later that night when a panel of stars hit the stage in an intimate setting to talk about technology. After hearing Stone talk about Twitter you realize how poetic this co-founder can become. In a metaphor he references Twitter as a flock of birds moving around an object in flight. "It looks perfectly choreographed," he says. "But it's not." ...Read the whole story
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YouTube And RumbleFish Make 'Friendly Music' Together
YouTube and music licensing store RumbleFish unveiled the launch of Friendly Music, an online store that lets people purchase copy-protected music tracks for use in YouTube videos for $1.99 each. The site, which goes live June 29, launches with about 35,000 tracks from independent music artists like Face to Face, and Kool Keith. New songs will be added daily, with noted artists named in the coming months. ...Read the whole story
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AOL Sells Off Research Unit DMS Insights
Market research firm uSamp on Thursday announced it has agreed to buy an AOL research unit by the name of DMS Insights. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the announcement comes on the heels of uSamp raising $10 million in funding. ...Read the whole story
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Hollywood & Bing: Microsoft Enables Users To Sample TV, Movies, Music Via Search
Microsoft rolled out a section related to entertainment on its Bing search engine Tuesday night that allows consumers to watch television shows, get movie information, play games and listen to music without leaving the page. The step aims to make it easier for consumers to click, play, listen and watch. ...Read the whole story
As I write this, I'm at the B2B Search Strategy Summit in San Francisco. Mary O'Brien, the summit organizer, told me that many potential attendees -- and yes, even some panelists -- questioned where B2B search marketing was really all that different from B2C. Shouldn't the same basic practices apply? I answer that question the same way I answer all questions about marketing: Let's look at it through the eyes of the buyer. And when we do that, we find some significant differences as we step from the consumer side to the business side. ...More
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Green:Search
Since it is priced at pennies per click, it's hard to see why even the smallest consultancies would not buy even $50 per month of this paid advertising. Compared to the hours of copy optimization (or investment in SEO "gurus") required to get top ranking amongst 2.5 million competing pages, there is no question that this is money better spent. ...More
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The Google Privacy Plot Thickens
If my last column -- titled "Could This Be Google's Privacy Moment?" -- confirmed anything, it was the basic assertion that Internet users are near-wholly apathetic when it comes to privacy. Users just don't care, and Facebook and Google can have a direct pipe inside their brains, as long as they can play Farmville and also get an instant answer whenever they are met with a fleeting impulse to seek. My opinion is based on completely anecdotal evidence of nearly 15 years of monitoring the Internet space for such issues, and the minimal number of comments and retweets on that ...More
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The Promise and Peril of Social Search
Microsoft is rolling out some interesting new features for its Bing iPhone app, which have the potential to totally change the search experience for users by incorporating content from their friends' Twitter and Facebook accounts into search results. This is obviously a cool new capability -- but I can also foresee some potential problems arising if marketers try to combine this function with social commerce. ...More
