Vinny Lingham's Blog

Happy Holidays! I’m going on a blogging holiday for the next few weeks. I’ll be travelling alot and won’t get a chance to blog much. I am working on a comprehensive white paper on the differences between Google, Yahoo & the impact of Google’s “Keyword Tax” (a neologism that I have just coined!). I should have this post out by the first week of January.

Until then, Happy New Year and all the rest!!

Before I start making predictions for the New Year, we should revisit my old ones from this posting:

Quick Acquisition Predictions for 2005
1. Google will look to buy Skype or similar.
eBay got there first, Google released GoogleTalk (apparently G was in discussions with Skype)

2. Yahoo will look to buy Linkshare or similar (ValueClick?).
Yahoo’s Japanese competitor, Rakuten, took the plunge and are now the proud owner of a $450m company called Linkshare (and are out of pocket for the same sum). I think eBay may acquire Valueclick, but not before their stock gets hammered for all the tracking problems they are having.

3. MSN will launch themed search capabilities (better content targeting).
Yup, this was confirmed by the MSN AdCenter Beta Program (for search currently, but content is definitely next).

4. Google will do one of the following : A. Buy Mozilla, B. Buy Opera, C. Build a browser

Now here is the kicker, from Danny Sullivan, just released today…

Hindsight is 20/20 vision, foresight borders on insanity…

Today Todd Tweedy launched his new company, BoldMouth, a Word of Mouth Marketing company. Here is the email that I received.

****

Happy Monday!

It’s official. Today I launched my new company — BoldMouth – http://www.boldmouth.com focused on delivering real word of mouth marketing relationships. And, in January I’ll be speaking at the Word of Mouth Marketing Associations conference on building a word of mouth plan for business. The plan I’ll present is called Interest Recognition and integrates business strategy, organic search indexing, content profiles, content tags as well as alternative forms of content distribution and publishing, collaborative filtering with personal agents – think bots, and finally content positioning and navigation. I’ll be posting pieces of the model prior my January 19th panel on my personal blog about word of mouth at http://www.wordspreadsquickly.com.

Here’s the official release that went out earlier today

And, we’ve even generated some early blog coverage as well:
http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2005/12/todd_tweedy_lau.html
http://www.adrants.com/2005/12/new-word-of-mouth-firm-slams-buzz.php

That’s not all… the entire site was built using a new development language created by Mike Spencer called PTM. I believe PTM will change how we create dynamic websites in the future and I’ve included a link if you’re interested in learning more about the technology we’re using => http://www.boldmouth.com/techoverview.html

And, of course, design credits go to Valerie Cole. She is amazing! She’s worked countless hours on this project!!

Finally, we’re working on a study of word of mouth practices and ethics with Osterman Research. Here’s a link to the survey:
http://www.ostermanresearch.com/survey_2005DEC08.htm. If you want to receive our report on findings and data, drop me an email.

Looking forward to reconnecting soon…

Many thanks,

Todd Tweedy

I did a quick comparison of Search.Yahoo.com & Google.com, and here are the results from that comparison. It’s obvious why Wall Street is backing Google on this one, but the race is far from over…

Based on some VERY prelimary research and testing:

1. If you have AdSense or any other form of advertising (Y!PN) on the landing page, you will get penalised in the Quality Score (QS).
2. Google checks the keyword density of the landing pages to ensure that the keywords match up with the keyword being bid on, and the Ad Text. By using dynamic keyword insertion, this also reduces your quality.

More to come…