Inside the Valley

Having just read the article on Twitter in Time Magazine, and having been involved in some Silicon Valley venture capital meetings around Twitter apps, the most important element to consider is the “noise to value ratio” which measures the number of tweets to the number of relevant tweets a user experiences. Whilst no-one can dispute the “real time” benefits that Twitter offer, I’ve just experienced two Twitter-esque start ups not recieving funding because Venture Capitalists were concerned about the limited value versus volume of tweets. Relevance is key for advertisers and knowing Google so well, I realize that blog posts may become shorter due to Twitter’s 140 character competitor threat but there is something inherently more valuable in expressing an idea beyond a tweet which readers value more.

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We extend our congratulations to the Campbell Family for a successful election victory in British Columbia, Canada - earlier this month. SearchForecast was able to provide some advice on search engine optimization for the campaign and provided online marketing advice to their campaign team. It is a fascinating process to be involved in given the constant media coverage and impact that search engines - like Google and Yahoo! - have on the imagery, messaging and perception the public at large has of political personalities and party policy.

AdSpace was a huge success with over 500 people attending the conference on 22nd April at Moscone Centre West. My thanks to all the team and speakers as well as sponsors…. here’s one of the signs on the show floor!  We also received some great media coverage as well:  http://www.siliconbeat.com/2009/04/23/conference-features-money-making-tips-for-web-publishers a

 With 10 days until the conference, it is already a huge success with over 300 people registered!

Smart entrepreneurs be warned as Apple Apps for iPhone/iTouch apps - http://www.apple.com/webapps/whatarewebapps.html - are dramatically redefining Internet usage. With 200 million apps downloaded - most are free - but many have with low price points of $0.99 to $4.99 each, the gaming/app industry is going to massively increase.  Taking advantage of this gaming trend is www.MyGameMug.com - a social gaming network based in San Mateo, CA which I am an advisor to. The site allows gamers to find other like minded gamers…. see who you are matched with at http://www.mygamemug.com/matchtest.php?p=2

The SearchForecast ‘Directory of AdSense Publishers’ now has 350,000 AdSense Publishers inlcuded. Correct me if I’m wrong but I do believe its the largest in the world and with Google getting 35% of their revenues ($5.78 Billion) from AdSense in 2007, its important to understand who these publishers are.

Search and browse the directory at http://www.searchforecast.com/directory/index.php. Website Publishers can also now add a description, photo or video to their directory listing!

Recently, I’ve recently become an advisor to Parallel Capital Ltd. - a $10 million early stage venture fund.

Last week, I listened to Scott McNealey, co-founder & Chairman of Sun Microsystems, address a small room of 50 or so start ups in Sunnyvale, CA. talk about open source.  I learned that there are 68,000 downloads of MySQL a day. 4 years ago I made the decision to build SearchForecast with MySQL believing open source is the way forward.  With over millions of records now, the decision was a right one as it costs zero in licence fees. My advice to start ups is to watch and listen to guys like Scott McNealey who in 1982 began thinking differently about computer networks. Today, he’s giving back at www.sun.com/startups !

We have received excellent feedback from the commencement of David Rodnitzky’s series of editorial articles on SearchForecast’s AdSense Publisher Directory.

Based in San Francisco, David provides excellent insights into what technology trends are impacting AdSense and other contextual Publishers. I’m sure you’ll enjoy reading David’s article as much as the SearchForecast team does.

http://www.searchforecast.com/article/article_details.php?itemSelected=5

We did it…..Our crawlers collected the 1 millionth keyword from meta tags across the worlds largest websites which run AdSense (i.e Goolge advertisements). Our keen users of the Keyword Suggestion Tool can now enjoy more targeted keywords and have greater reach for their keyword research.

We slightly changed our reporting at http://www.searchforecast.com/user/search_keyword_result.php so you can search on keywords and see the “Frequency” - that is, the number of AdSense websites that used the keyword.

I call this the “wisdom of the crowds” approach to synthesizing keywords -as the publishers running AdSense are generally more knowledgeable about which keywords drive traffic and conversion.

I decided this week to release more SearchForecast real time seo tools, SEO learning PDFs and a limited number of SEO video tips. The simplicity of these tools is really what clients want. With over 10,000 people now having used our “Real Times Scores” we have recently added 3 more scoring tools:

1. Online Reputation Management Score
2. Local Search Score
3. Video Optimization Score

With 1 in 5 search results having a video, image or blog - it is important website publishers understand the requirement to include Local and Video content on their website.

Please see our videos shot outside Facebook in Palo Alto, California