I finally discovered my favourite social media gem of the internet industry, that of StumbleUpon. It`s not that I`d never heard of it, in fact it had already been green-lighted by those I trust , it’s just that I`d stagnated in signing up, until now that is. The current competition is so rife and furious in the assortment of social media devices that are available for innocent passer-byers to spend their precious and underrated time on. I naturally felt tired by the prospect of looking into yet another media product. However, this little diamond impressed me as a genuine item.

StumbleUpon simply does the job of delivering the kind of web content I want directly into my browser, along with an assortment of websites that I didn`t know I wanted to see, but now am extremely convinced I do. Perhaps, like with so many of its predecessors, the excitement is a novel storm that will eventually blow over, or at least until something more cleverly devised comes knocking.

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As search engines become critical to life online, the future of online advertising becomes increasingly blurred. We find ourselves searching for the website we are looking for even when we know the URL. Its laziness really but we all do it, everyday. This just emphasises how all online activity starts with the search engines.

Have we become immune to advertising, sponsored ads and those annoying banners and popups. Has our selective viewing officially kicked in? I think it definitely has.

The only real solution is change; a rapid and meaningful change in online advertising is desperately needed.
As ad-blindness becomes more prominent in society, Google continues to take in 40 percent higher profits quarter after quarter. Google has started integrating video into AdSense, and overlaying ads on YouTube. The fact that they continually spend money on ad display companies and prime real estate like YouTube means that advertising is in fact still thriving.
There are some changes happening at Google, and as Tiernan Ray mentions “the convergent optimizer” will be launched in beta soon:

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Viral content is golden thread on the net. It’s easy to understand and easy to share. It can come in the form of lists of resources, quotations, theories, arguments and points of view. Digg is a great place to find viral content. Social media are perfectly suited to spin viral content, as it’s usually interesting and rewarding to share it.

Turning a blog post viral should be every blogger’s dream – ditto for marketers and copywriters. As the copy is passed along the networks, a number of hot-seated individuals come into contact with it. Prospective friends, business partners, clients and people with viral clout will get to know you. This kind of success can bring you into the public consciousness. And with your newly found friends comes inbound links, which boosts your SEO in a self-perpetuating cycle (so long as your on-site factors are sorted).

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A new online marketing community has been launched which promises to be the next big thing in social media. Gooruze is the first online marketing community where content is both created and rated by its members. The platform is the same as the successful Minti.com, which is a community for parents.

The site combines the elements of already successful social media sites, such as Digg, Sphinn, Webmasters World and SEOmoz. They are the first online communities to make online marketing accessible to users. They have merged various social media components into the website.

Users are able to have a profile page, where they can up load all their information. There is a “friends and contact” option as well, plus news, articles and questions section. Users are able to write their own articles and news for this section. Their activities will be displayed in their profile page. Activities get archived under a calendar marking.

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YouTube released a Video Identification tool last week. This move will help kerb the increasing piracy issues that YouTube faces on a regular basis. Finally, a concrete policy on Video piracy is in the pipelines.

According to Dan King from YouTube:

The system works by creating a database full of abstract images of copyrighted videos that are then matched with videos that are uploaded to YouTube.

YouTube is currently working with Google to filter its technology of identifying the ownership of videos uploaded in YouTube. They are giving video content owners the ability to manage their videos, and the choice on what to do with these Videos once they have been properly identified.

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Before I begin I’d like to point out that South Africa won the Rugby World Cup. I don’t mean to rub our superiority in the faces of the losing roses, kiwis, wallabees or jaguars. I just want to point it out. Okay.

I think that the greatest triumph for a writer is receiving a warm response to his writing. Having many people read your work is like the Webb Ellis for writers. They lust after a Digg frontpage, want to be Stumbled, Sphinned and bookmarked all over the place. There are a few ways to be noticed, and foremost among them is saying something sensational/brilliant, in a sensational/brilliant manner. This involves being the best (like South Africa is, at rugby). If you can’t do that – because it isn’t easy to win the toughest tournament in the world – be funny.

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Marketers use market research as a tool to find their way into customers` heads. They want to find out exactly who their customers are, what they are thinking and how they identify with the brands in question. One way to gain insight into the way that customers use language is to use search data or search behaviour data, which enables marketers to better formulate their advertising and brand positioning from the customer`s perspective.

According to Robert J Murray (http://searchengineland.com/071017-091707.php), president of iProspect, an SEM firm, smart marketers should firstly mine keyword data at a detailed level. He writes that marketers should look for patterns in the conversion rates of different keywords and remember that words that are not found in the data can be just as informative as the words that are found. It is important to question possible reasons why words are not found. Could it be that customers don`t identify with them, or do customers not remember them? The answers to these questions are necessary to help marketers create more successful customer focused campaigns in the future.

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Google is offering up the fruits of its tireless pioneering efforts to the infants of the next computer science generation. They have announced from their Googleblog that they will be passing on their knowledge from their revolutionary work in the world of mass parallel computing – using networks of computers, as apposed to single processors, to process the massive internet-scale amount of data – to the young and striving students of the computer sciences.

Already included in the implementation are various universities, such as Washington, Stanford, California at Berkeley and Maryland. The program is called the “Academic Cluster Computing Initiative Pilot Program”, and the University of Washington, along with others, has developed course material. AJAX tutorials, video lecture content, and much more is available freely for anyone to make use of. On top of this big step forward, IBM has partnered with Google in the program – the two companies have begun providing the hardware resources that are much needed to facilitate in-depth student research into the obstacles of parallel computing development. Grid Today states that hundreds of computers are already dedicated to the project, which is planned to grow to include thousands.

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