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I recently ran across this article on a Search Engine Optimization site. Many may not know that SEO/SEM peoples are also interested in interface design for the best and easiest way to reach their customers. Bill Slawski of SEO By The Sea found some interesting research papers from Stanford about a point and click interface – except without a mouse. I haven’t read through them entirely yet, but somehow the computer senses which part of the screen you’re intently staring at and if you hang on it for long enough, your eye will “click” it. It’s mostly for people with disabilities at this stage and it might not be too easy to figure out, but it may become the “wave of the future”, as some say.

Marketers are odd people. Internet Marketers – doubly so. Sure, their jobs are getting their client’s sites to the top of the search engines, but they also know how to use the web for fun (or personal gain – or both). And, of course, they’re not your normal blue-collar workers; they’re out-of-the-box, mind-blowingly smart people.

In the last couple years, one thing they’ve used the media for is to make engagement proposals. The owner of Search Engine Roundtable, Barry Schwartz, even made mainstream news headlines by working with Ask.com to propose to his girlfriend.

But only this year was Barry one-upped by another member of the search industry. Apparently Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz (which has a great site and Internet marketing blog, btw) had been secretly planning to propose to his girlfriend during the Super Bowl. It didn’t work out because even the local the Super Bowl ads are sold out far in advance, but about a month ago he did the next best thing. Rand ran a spot during his girlfriend’s favorite show, Veronica Mars. She agreed and they are to be married, but that’s probably the most public thing I’ve ever seen anyone do for a marriage proposal.

Web analytics tools such as Google Analytics can provide a lot of useful information, but you have to dig through the data and know where to look. Of course, for large companies, there are the expensive, full-featured packages such as WebSideStory and WebTrends. I recently found this interview with Jim Sterne, who seems to be a leader in this field. I found some good ways to think about Analytics. Many people try to say that there’s no way to get accurate information about your visitors, but he counters that you can discern changes in user behavior and figure out most of what is going on. If you’re trying to market your own website, I would recommend giving this a read.

So, about a week ago, I was browsing Digg and said to myself, “Oh nice, Google’s showing me a Chipotle text ad! How did they know I loved the large burritos so much? Do they know I have a T-Shirt?” After looking at it a bit more, I said, “Hmm… I wonder where this new location it mentions is?” Here’s an image version of the ad on Last.fm:

After a bit of looking, I found that this location is in St. Louis, MO. However, I’m in Minneapolis, MN and have never been to St. Louis. What’s going on? Is it Google’s fault or is the advertiser doing a bad job? I don’t know, but I find it intriguing.

In an interesting move that proves Google is as much an advertising company as a research company, it seems that Google has decided to buy AdScape media. AdScape has been in the news a lot recently because of a bleeding-edge market that they’ve almost created, and that is advertising inside videogames. Apparently last year Microsoft bought Massive, another prominent in-game advertising. It also continues the Google trend of buying non-web advertising companies. Google has recently been testing selling ads on the radio and in print newspapers in magazines as well. Apparently they are setting out to bring the highly-targeted advertising systems to less-targeted places such as TV and such. It may be working, because profits are way up this past quarter. But we’ll only find out as time goes on.

The big event this weekend is the best night in television: the Super Bowl commercials. (The rumor is that some people watch the football game that happens during the commercials, but most smart people know that’s the time to go get more burgers, brats, and chips.) This year companies are spending $2.6 million for a 30-second ad, and none of them are guaranteed a touchdown in reaching their audience. Here’s some interesting information:

• This year marks the first time in 10 years that Coca-Cola has purchased ads at the bowl game. Expect Coke and Pepsi to go head to head.
• As usual, Anheuser Busch is buying 10 ad spots for Budweiser and Bud Light.
• Apple has purchased a spot and no one really knows what they’ll be promoting. One likely candidate could be that, due to the settled lawsuit with Apple Corps., The Beatles are soon going to be on iTunes. But as Leo Laporte said a couple weeks ago on GeekBrief.tv, they have to announce something bigger than “you can buy The Beatles online now.” Leo thinks it may be a Beatles themed iPod with all their music on it or something. I hope it’s actually an iPod that looks like an iPhone and has an 80GB hard drive.
• In other tech news, of course GoDaddy.com is going to have a rather risque advertisement. The fun twist this year? Many of the stars of podcasts that GoDaddy sponsors will be in the commercial spot.
• There are two tech-related newcomers to the big ad game. The first, Garmin, is one of the bigger sellers of GPS electronics.
• The second newcomer, SalesGenie.com, better get their stuff together. Although they may have an ad, their homepage looks like crap in FireFox. Oh wait, nevermind. Their product is only for business people that use Microsoft products exclusively anyways.

Well, that’s my wrap-up for now. Thanks to this great news article on Newswire and the always-informative Superbowl-Ads.com for all the latest information on the only night of TV worth watching. An interesting note from the Newswire article:

Why so expensive? One of the main reasons companies pay as much as $2.6 million for 30 seconds is that the Super Bowl is the only true mass media outlet available today. If you want to reach a very large audience of males and females, young and old, the Super Bowl is the only game in town.

Yesterday, while at my grandfather’s 90th birthday party, I was talking to my cousin once removed, who has been involved in the business world for the past 30 years. He’s a smart guy and I respect him.

However, over the course of the night, he talked about a couple technology companies. For some reason, he enjoyed predicting their demise. He said that Google would only be a brand name of a larger company in 10 years. He also said that Amazon.com would not exist in 10 years. When trying to press him for reasons to this, I was unable to get much of any answer. I guess he assumed it would be too much for me to understand or something.

To be honest, I highly doubt these companies will be gone. Sure, Google has only been in existence for less than 10 years, but they are currently one of the biggest companies in the world and are nowhere close to being bankrupt. They’re one of the few tech companies that are doing many intriguing things. Plus, they are synonymous with “search”.

For me, Amazon.com is the same thing as “shopping”. Sure, I price compare a bit, but often I end up at Amazon.com anyways. They may not have the lowest price, but they have a great, low price and don’t charge me sales tax. Plus, for almost everything, if I order more than $25 they will ship it for free, and those factors usually make it the cheapest. Plus, they’re reliable.

There’s an interesting interview with Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos on BusinessWeek’s site. The founder of the Internet’s largest online store talks about the many things they’re doing with their online presence, some of which are not that related to shopping. He explains that most of these are just opening up their internal systems for the benefit of others. Also, he talks about the benefit of their customers providing information that computers cannot compute. The biggest point about their process was that they spent the time to get the backend systems working great. That’s important.

A couple years ago I ordered a CD from another large online retailer. After a couple months, the retailer sent me an e-mail saying that they could not get the product so they refunded me my order. With Amazon.com I’m sure they got their stuff together and that won’t happen. A couple times it has taken them a while to find a product, but their automated systems kept me updated by e-mail on the status of the product ordered. With the other retailer, I was like, “How am I supposed to get the product now? You seriously let me down.”

A book I recently read, Naked Conversations, talks all about the benefits of blogging, and specifically blogging in the corporate world. It was a great read, and maybe someday I’ll review the book. But the point I wanted to mention is that the book says blogs get “Google Juice”. This “Google Juice” seems to be some brand of magic that makes blogs much more visible on the next and highly ranked by search engines. And, my, do I have an example.

For the past eight years, I’ve been running cMusicWeb.com, a music review site that I was doing the old-fashioned way. It was just a static site that just looked a lot nicer and more organized than when it was on GeoCities, but technically it wasn’t that much better. The site has built a pretty good reputation over those eight years, gathering links from around the web and listed several times on DMOZ. It’s gotten pretty well and some artist pages rank well for their respective artists.

In the past four months we’ve started our transition to inReview.net, our new name and new brand. The site isn’t really complete yet, but already its Drupal software and blog-style format have been making waves. A quick look at Yahoo!’s results finds already more links than cMusicWeb.com ever had. Of course, they’re not all quality links like cMusicWeb.com had, but links from blog aggregating sites like Technorati and the like are nto bad. I attribute most of it to the pervasiveness of RSS feeds and RSS aggregators.

Of course, hopefully soon it will get us listed in Google. I don’t know if this is what people refer to as the “sandbox,” but it seems we have to get mroe quality links to gain any ranking in Google. Or maybe we just have to be out there for a while. We’ll see.