Archive for the ‘advertising’ Category
Google Chrome Promotion inside Gmail on Firefox
Just noticed that Google web mail interface is showing recommendation to upgrade to Google Chrome on reasonably modern version of Firefox (10.0.5 Extended Support Release)
Google Chrome Promoted on the Most Valuable Online Property
Google’s new browser Google Chrome is being promoted on arguably the most valuable property on the web – Google Homepage. 
The browser itself is “google cool” with Javascript applications performing much better. Flash performance seems a bit sluggish. Need a password manager and status bar perhaps, and a Linux version of course.
The open source project behind Chrome is called Chromium. The rendering engine is Webkit, and Javascript “monkey” is a new JS virtual machine V8.
Microsoft gets IT
Microsoft, the object of hatred for a large geek pop (and wannabes), is actually far from over. They are as fierce competitor as one can be. Latest evidence – Microsoft creating a YouTube channel for promotion of Vista and Live brands. Significance of YouTube here is that YouTube belongs to its “enemy” Google. That’s atypical for an “an underdog beats the incumbent” story, so it very well might not be one.
Yahoo! Mail Lets Me Hide Adverts
Useful feature especially when you need to widen email body, which is pretty often. If only gmail lets me do that without having to resort to greasemonkey.
Email Scrolling
Something on standardized emails/newsletters over at 37 signals – People don’t scroll…emails.
Clearification
Clearification – this viral marketing campaign for Windows Vista is very well executed creative marketing stuff coming out of Microsoft. It’s a clever 6 part video series. Not sure, it’s doing any good to Vista, or is viral at all, but I rate it pretty high on creativity scale.
“Time is the fourth dimension…for now”
IBM’s “Anthem”
I loved this “Anthem” TV advertisement from IBM.
Direct link to “Anthem” (Windows Media Player required) :
http://play.rbn.com/play.asx?url=ibmpdc/pdc/open/wmdemand/mar06/
rtoranzo/anthem-v125.wmv&proto=mms?mswmext=.asx
(Remove line break from url to play)
Yahoo! Messenger 7.5 comes with Ads
I don’t really mind having ads in applications (Adobe Reader et al), but Yahoo! seems to have taken great ‘care’ to piss me off. New YM client has one big ad banner at bottom, totally obtrusive, distracting and unpleasant, and showing an absolutely useless eBay ad. And I, for one, don’t object to their bundling of Toolbar and Extras, and highjacking my homepage with YM install because I can choose to uncheck that.
I wholeheartedly ensured that I uninstall new YM client and install the old happy-to-live-with YM 7.0 instead. No YM8 beta for sure a(d)s of now.
[Update] Looks like there is a small registry hack to ‘fix’ these ads – just open regedit.exe, navigate to ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ Software\ Yahoo\ pager\ YUrl‘ and create a new string key named Messenger Ad that has the value * (an asterisk). I haven’t tried this yet as I won’t be re-installing YM7.5.
After Digg, Del.icio.us, now Reddit spammed
It seems spammers have found the new avenues. First it was digg, then del.icio.us, and now reddit. And this time they seem to use down-voting bots to suppress legitimate posts and up-vote spam to make it more visible. Innovative eh!
While it doesn’t make much sense to spam del.icio.us for Search Engine Optimization, as its pages don’t get indexed by Search Engine bots
<meta name="robots" content="noarchive,nofollow,noindex" />
digg and reddit both don’t have any such measures AFAIK. As if mail and blog comment spam were not enough of trouble, spamming digg/del.icio.us/reddit is walk in the park – for all practical purposes.
Now, whether ‘Collective Intelligence’ is flawed is a matter of debate. Apparently, whatever is done to facilitate ease of use to the user, equally works for the spammer. There in lies the challenge of user generated content. How insightful!
Reverberations 