Category — Development

Google is expanding search-advertising capabilities to include video, display and interactive ads

• Last year when Google introduced universal search, which includes image, video and text in search results, they saw search-result format impact the effectiveness of accompanying ads
• Google is leveraging its dominance in online search advertising to pursue ad dollars from other ad formats

Link: The New York Times

GoFish Corp, a youth entertainment media company, launched a vertical ad network for kids and teens, giving it the 3^rd largest kid/teen audience in the U.S. behind Disney Online and Nick Kids & Family

• GoFish’s network points to the growing trend of ad networks and publisher aggregators competing with branded entertainment companies

Link: MediaPost

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Every month or so I tag a new article on my del.icio.us regarding widgets. Lately the news traffic on them has been picking up. Even to the point where there are now developer contests and even a WidgetCon being held here, in New York City.

The Wall Street Journal published a good piece awhile back, on how younger web surfers are becoming more open to widgets and more opposed to ads. Good reason to start having development contests on widgets huh. As the youth are gaining more spending power, there is going to be more emphasis put on engaging them. The Washington Post had a good piece on this as well:

“Advertisers are no longer wanting people to click on a link to buy something,” said Haroon Mokhtarzada, Freewebs’ 27-year-old founder and chief executive. “Now they’re wanting people to engage in a neat product while they build brand equity.”

It is likely to fuel a push by digital ad agencies to get marketers to experiment with new ways to advertise on social-networking sites such as Facebook and News Corp.’s MySpace.

As a developer/designer I better start working on getting more familiar with widgets and their capabilities.

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I tagged this a few days in my del.icio.us, but I know I tag a lot of stuff, like this video, and important items get lost in the shuffle (granted they’re all important to me). I first noticed it in Greg Verdino’s blog earlier this week. I just don’t want anyone involved in social media to miss it. This was put together by a professor at K-State, my home state. I love that a teacher put this together, and one that isn’t in social media everyday. He provides a clear understanding of where the web started and where it’s going. Where as a lot of us are only looking ahead and have forgotten where it all began.

Link to see it if you’re reading this in a reader:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE 

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If you administer Web sites at all you may feel my pain on this.  The Google Site Maps, Yahoo! Site Maps, and all the other search engines you have accounts with now use the same site map protocol.  Instead of figuring out the tags each one uses and adjusting your site map to it you just have to worry about one!  I can’t tell you how happy this makes me.  The updates you have to make on these things can be time consuming so they’ve definitely saved me some time.

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