Healthy Blog Reviews

Ask has always been the red-headed stepchild of the search industry. It’s always lurking in the shadows as the #4 search engine and usually gets a mention in search share only if there was significant up or down movement. Accounting has the Big 4 but search only has the Big 3 which is soon to be the Big 2 ½ or something once bing and Yahoo fully consummate their relationship. Ask is usually not included in those talks but is making changes to differentiate itself and hopefully make more of a splash in that area. The key to that hope: good ol’ fashioned human beings! The Ask blog reports Today we’ve officially launched the public beta for the new Ask.com, which combines our proprietary answers technology (specifically tailored to extract questions and answers from the Web) with the human insight of the thriving Ask.com community drawn from our 87 million monthly uniques. Now available on an invite-only basis (you can request your invite here), the capability to pose questions to real people is now possible for those complex, subjective and/or time-sensitive queries that, no matter how advanced, computers simply can’t address. That means that Ask.com is now uniquely able to offer the most comprehensive and convenient approach to getting answers, combining pages and people to help users find the answers to all questions – even questions for which no answer is published online. In the search world there may just be a place for this kind of service if it can catch on with people who are ‘blue text link trained’ like myself. In this age of social media and trusting sources that reach far beyond our truly trusted circle of friends (be that a good or bad thing, it still is) there may be more of an acceptance of this approach. Mashable’s Jennifer Van Grove sums up the improvements for you The beta offering is a product of four new features: a completely overhauled look with a focus on highlighting trending questions from the community, semantic search with answers displayed on the page, a large Q&A database and a user community element that targets members for answering questions based on their areas of expertise. The latter somewhat mirrors Aardvark’s formula for finding answers to user questions, and is initiated when users click the “Ask the Community” button on the right-hand side of the results page. Even if this Q & A approach seems to be somewhat antiquated it could have some legs if for no other reason than it looks different. Once again, though, Ask needs to drive people to the site and in the past their approach has been mass advertising pushes that come on real strong then disappear. There has been very little attempt to keep the Ask brand in the mind of the searcher in a way to help them possibly convert from Google or somewhere else to the new Ask. I have always hoped that Ask would put together something that was worthy of challenging bing and Yahoo! to at least push them a bit. Whether this approach is the answer certainly is a big TBD. If it’s not the answer then the next question has to be, is there a place for Ask at the search table or is it time to move on and look for someone else to challenge the Big 3 (or 2 1/8 or whatever it’s going to be)? Your thoughts?

Tags: answer, answers, ask-com, cloud-computing, cloud-hosting, improvements, mind, proprietary, relationship, Search, search-engine, Social Media, thoughts, Yahoo
Posted July 27, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media

(Not really, of course.) Six Apart, owners of the blog-hosting service TypePad, have found a new way to monetize blogs: advertising. Okay, so that’s not new, and neither is the basic concept of sponsored conversations, but the execution this time is a little different. We’ve seen sponsored blog posts for reviews and pay-per-post models—and we’ve seen them done badly, too. Paid reviews often ended up sounding like (surprise) ads, with or without disclosure. Six Apart’s new TypePad Conversations seeks to avoid that problem—by not having bloggers actually talk about the products. With the inaugural advertiser, Sprint, Six Apart is rolling out a few different forms of advertising. The first is the TypePad Conversations site. Right now, they have six questions up for discussion. You can answer the question on its page on the Conversations site, or from your blog (they pull your answer and put it on the Conversation page, too—with a real live link). The Conversations site features a leaderboard ad at the top of the page and a large square ad in the right corner. Several partners also get to feature what’s essentially a large ad for the conversation (with a large square ad for Sprint) on their site—the first example I found was actually after an article about Sandra Bullock on limelife (the answer directly below the question appears to be the blogger’s): Other partners are featuring the discussion on the front page. TechCrunch reports this unit is called the “Awesome Bar,” though obviously it’s not really either of those things. Bloggers get a share of revenue from the ad, though it appears it’s not on the basis of how many comments they generate for the conversation. The comments featured scroll through the whole discussion, and comments posted from the Awesome Bar are aggregated on the Conversations site as well. Interestingly, the conversations aren’t all directly related to Sprint products and services—some of them not related at all: Is technology making us better or worse at communicating with each other? How so? What’s the best parenting advice you’ve ever received? Have you ever wanted anything from an informercial? What was it and did you buy it? Do your kids respond better and faster when you text or call them? If you could connect up to 5 devices at a time using just your mobile phone, how would that change how and when you access the internet? Do you want a 3D TV? Why or why not? And will you ever get one? The about page says the questions are written by the Conversations editorial team. The regular, everyday respondents (whether on their blogs or on the Conversations site) don’t appear to be getting a cut in the advertising, or the “Awesome Bar.” According to the about page on the Conversations site: The biggest benefit of TypePad Conversations is that it allows bloggers to engage their readers about relevant topics. One of the best parts of blogging is getting comments from your audience; TypePad Conversations is a simple way to start a dialogue and hear from your readers. In addition, you are participating in a conversation that is happening across the Web and, as a result, will see an increase in traffic to your site. I guess that’s not a bad benefit, especially since you don’t have to carry a space-sucking-probably-not-much-revenue-generating ad. What do you think? Is this good enough for the average blogger to want to participate in the conversation?

Tags: advertising, answer, cloud-computing, conversation, Conversations, Display, internet, kids, mobile, question, readers, Sandra Bullock, time
Posted May 12, 2010 by cgseo under Social Media