Archive for August, 2009

by Mike Krumboltz

Danger! Justice! Kate Gosselin! This was another wild week on the Web. Searchers sought the scoop on the world's most "dangerous celebrity," as well as updates on a long-running Hollywood dispute. Oh, and, of course it wouldn't be planet Earth if there wasn't something going on with Kate, right? Right! Buckle up for the Buzz Week in Review.

Danger is her middle name
Jessica Biel is undeniably gorgeous. In fact, she's so attractive that her looks tend to inspire otherwise rational human beings to seek out her image on sketchy sites and via dubious downloads. This past week, Ms. Biel was named the world's most dangerous celebrity to search for by McAfee, a computer security company. According to Yahoo! Tech, fans who search on the lovely lady have a 20% chance of "landing at a website that has tested positive for online threats, such as sypware, adware, spam, phishing, and viruses." Ironically, the news did little to stem the tide of searches on Biel. Queries on "jessica biel photos," "jessica biel pictures," and the redundant "jessica biel pretty" all stayed strong. Now that's devotion.

The Chris Brown Case
Several months ago, singer Chris Brown was involved in a domestic violence case with fellow singer Rihanna. The case took the world by storm as many wondered what sort of punishment Mr. Brown would eventually receive. Those questions were answered this past weekend when a judge sentenced Brown to five years of probation, one year of domestic violence counseling, and six months of community service. The judge also placed a restraining order on Brown that requires him to stay 50 yards away from Rihanna. Over the week, lookups surged on "chris brown punishment" and "chris brown sentence." But the story ain't over yet. Word has come out that Brown may have already violated his probation. If so, a spokesperson from the LAPD says "it won't be taken lightly."

Kate coming to "The View"
Anyone with half a brain could have seen this one coming from a mile away. Kate Gosselin, formerly of the super group Jon and Kate Plus 8, will sit in as co-host on "The View" for a few times in September. She with the spiky locks will apparently fill in for Elisabeth Hasselbeck while she's on maternity leave. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that devotees of Ms. G will want to tune in on Sept. 14 and 15 to watch their favorite supermom mix it up with Whoopi and company. And from the looks of Search, many are already programming their TiVos. Queries on "kate gosselin on the view" posted triple digit gains. Whether those lookups come from fans or from folks hoping she'll screw up, we can't say.

Also buzzing this week...
• Troubled starlet Mischa Barton talked about her stay in Cedars.
• Los Angeles coroners ruled Michael Jackson's death a homicide.
• You know that dude who plays Jim on "The Office"? Well, he's engaged to Emily Blunt.

Follow Buzz Log on Twitter.

Follow us on Twitter

by Claudine Zap

Michael Jackson will be buried in Los Angeles. But on Saturday, the King of Pop will be celebrated in Brooklyn.

The free fest on the day Jacko would have turned 51 moved from a neighborhood block party to a major happening in Prospect Park as estimates of the crowd swelled to 10,000. The party will be put on by director Spike Lee.  The filmmaker told The Root he was hit hard by the singer's death: The two were born a year apart and collaborated on a music video, "They Don't Care About Us." Spike Lee even admits he wanted his afro to be as round as Michael's from the "Jackson 5" days.

The party promises the music of Michael Jackson and a declaration of August 29 as "Michael Jackson Day." And what New York event would be complete without a prayer by the Rev. Al Sharpton?

As the date approaches, buzz is building. Searches on "michael jackson birthday" hit a high note, along with lookups on "michael jackson tribute," and "michael jackson news."

Brooklyn's bash may be the biggest, but there are lots of other ways to toast MJ on his big day. Santa Cruz, California, will be holding a Thriller dance-along. Madonna reportedly will have a surprise to honor Jackson during her performance on his birthday. Even Bangalore plans to salute the legendary singer with a "music carnival."

So grab one glove, brush up on your Moonwalk, and don't forget to sing "Happy Birthday."

Follow us on Twitter

My awareness of green initiatives and eco-friendly lifestyles has grown significantly in the last few years. One of the most effective education tools I’ve seen for this topic is surfacing interesting facts and familiar ratios. For example, a coffee mug with “60.5 billion liters” printed on one side, and “Water saved in one year if everyone in the U.S. stopped using paper coffee cups*” printed on the other. Cool huh? Well, now you can have tips and information like this on your My Yahoo! page.

With the Green Lifestyle App, you’ll get daily “Green Facts.” These tidbits will make you the enviro-expert amongst your friends. Also, enjoy the “Daily Quiz” and challenge your friends; mine are just starting so I’m off to an early lead!

My favorite feature is you can actually plant a tree right from the App! This App was created through a partnership between the United Nations Environment Programme and Mokugift, allowing you to plant trees for friends or for a cause. You get to select how many trees you want (they’re $1 each) and where the tree will be planted. Chose from a list of 11 countries in Africa, Central America, and Asia. When you select a location, the App will give you information about your area: number of trees needed, number planted, etc.

So what are you waiting for?! Add the Green Lifestyle App to your page and make a difference with My Yahoo!…your friends will be green with envy, so to speak .

Adam
- My Yahoo! Marketing

*Figure from www.papercalculator.org

by Vera H-C Chan

Through the tears, heartache, Octomom spats, and hosting gigs, one thing has remained a constant in Kate Gosselin's life: her hair.

As rubberneckers gathered at the wreck of a reality-TV marriage, ladies the world over wondered how to get their locks cut like hers. When Gosselin was busy pounding out the dents in her perfect-mom image, lookups on Yahoo! for "kate gosselin hair" soared past fashionistas like Rihanna or Victoria Beckham. US Magazine, in an abuse of Photoshop, even re-imagined a world where celebrities sported the defiant, in-your-face pixie bob.

Well, for those who don't have what it takes to make that cut, fake it. Her spikes are, well, spiking online. Searches for "kate gosselin wigs" have outstripped queries for "mullet wigs" and "lady gaga wigs." However, they still trail "beehive wigs," so favored by the likes of Lady Gaga and Amy Winehouse.

US magazine once again has been leading the charge for Gosselin's can-do-her-'do attitude: It predicted earlier this month that she would be this Halloween's Sarah Palin craze, and the constant Search trickle might just bear them out.

But, if you want to stand out from all those other Gosselin wannabes, here's a style tip: Snip some flouncy spikes out of a blonde beehive, for that outraaaageous commando-mom look. Don't forget the oversized hanky, for those vulnerable moments.

Follow us on Twitter

by Talin, Software Engineer, Blogger (Mountain View, CA)

It's fitting that our newest birthday present was announced first on Twitter. Starting yesterday, the Blogger Navbar includes a new button: "Share."




When your readers are on your blog's home page, they can click "Share" to post the blog's URL to Twitter, Facebook, or Google Reader. If they navigate directly to an individual blog post, clicking "Share" in the navbar also lets them share the post by email.




We've already seen some nice adoption of this new feature and hope this helps you build out your audience and share your story with the world. Here's a fun hack: each URL that gets shared has a specific parameter appended (?spref=nn, where fb=Facebook, tw=Twitter, and gr=Google Reader). If you're using Google Analytics to measure traffic on your blog, you can search for those strings to see how much traffic you're getting from each source.

On the other hand, if you're interested in seeing which blogs people are sharing, head on over to Twitter search and you can watch as people share blogs and posts that they like. Don't forget to follow us on Twitter while you're there!

This is one of many features announced as part of Blogger's 10th birthday. Happy Birthday!

by Mike Krumboltz

Hey kids, Grumpy Grandpa here. Back when I was a kid, I didn't have 999 channels to occupy my time. No, sir! In my day, we had four or five channels to choose from, and by gosh, we were lucky to have 'em! Especially when "Reading Rainbow" came on.

Now, I'm assuming that most of you young whipper snappers have no idea what in the heck a "Reading Rainbow" is any more than I know what a tweet or an iTelephone are. So, listen up.

Reading Rainbow starred LeVar Burton as a very nice man who would talk about books, sometimes reading them out loud, and always making them exciting. True, the theme song was about as annoying as an AARP commercial, but I still liked the show. And now, it's going off the air after 26 years. Thank goodness for "Murder She Wrote" reruns.

NPR explains that "Reading Rainbow" is (was?) the third longest-running show in PBS history. Only "Sesame Street" and "Mister Rogers" have been on the air longer. News that "RR" is going off the air inspired a flurry of searches. Lookups on everything from "reading rainbow pbs" to "reading rainbow videos" to (shudder) "reading rainbow theme song" soared.  

Follow us on Twitter

Sophisticated, useful and cool applications are being developed everyday through the open Google Analytics API. We're loving what we're seeing. Basically, developers are grabbing their data from Google Analytics and slicing and dicing it, mixing it and mashing it with other data and applications, creating dashboards and widgets, and innovating some of the coolest stuff a data driven person could hope for. For example, we're really impressed with an app called Trendly which makes it easier to find important movers and shakers among your data via an innovative new interface, cutting down on the time you need to monitor your profiles. The team who built Trendly is using it as their one stop Google Analytics dashboard. We asked the team to share how this application came about, and here's what they wrote:

How many of you can afford to pay someone to monitor your analytics full time? We can't. We're a small startup, and we just don't have the resources to make that happen.

We use Google Analytics to track visits to our website, www.dabbledb.com. We'd love to have someone watching the hundreds of keywords, referrers, and campaigns that drive traffic to our site, someone who would send us a quick email whenever something really interesting happened: "Hey guys, thought you'd like to know that your average visitors from 'online database' doubled last week, and it's staying there - guess that SEO is working!"

So, using the Google Analytics API, we created Trendly, a monitoring and visualization tool which you can look at anytime and easily see what's changed. In short, Trendly uses mathematical models to take noisy data like this:

and figure out when significant changes have happened, marking it like this:

According to Trendly, our average daily visitors from the search words "online database" went up from 18 to 32 in mid-January, and then up again to 50 in early February. Also, Trendly sends us periodic emails to let us know about changes like these, saving us a lot of time. It also prepares a news feed with attractive charts that put the changes into perspective relative to everything else that's going on. Take a look at this - it calls out significant changes and makes them easy to notice with a timeline on the right.


When we first built Trendly for our internal use, we cobbled it together by screen-scraping and downloading exports from Google Analytics. But part of what made this tool exciting to us is that it solves a pretty universal problem. Trendly is your analyst until you can afford to hire a full time analyst. Heck, it probably keeps a clearer log of important changes than an analyst would! And with Trendly, you can delay this much longer since it cuts down your worflow by hours per week.

The new GA Data API allowed us to share it! With no signup and a couple of clicks, anyone can authenticate with Google and authorize us to grab their data and generate the reports. Suddenly our internal tool became a new product offering which can help any Google Analytics user. Give it a try and see for yourself.

What the guys at DabbleDB built is amazing. If you have developed a useful new tool or integration on top of Google Analytics, drop us an email at analytics-api@google.com. If it's innovative and useful we'll highlight it to our readers on this blog.


Nick Mihailovski, The Google Analytics API Team

Last week we announced new high-end "Elegant" ad templates that can help you build great looking ads in minutes. Today we're releasing additional "Elegant" templates in the "General" category, as well as templates in a brand new "People" category. This new category enables advertisers to use templates that have professional images featuring people
Posted by Dan Friedman, Inside AdWords crew

by Vera H-C Chan

In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders.

Wait—add a third: the viewers, who track down criminals on their own. Here is one story: Justine Faeth saves a dirty cup and used tissue, and catches a thief.

These days, most people would be hauling out the Purell and Lysol to clear away the biohazards, but Faether's not most people. Not only is she a New Yorker savvy to the ways of the criminal element, but the assistant at the Manhattan production company faithfully watches "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit." After a co-worker found her iPod, phone, and wallet stolen from her bag, Faeth suspected the stranger who came by to pitch a story idea and then kept hanging around, claiming to feel poorly and fetching himself a glass of water before he'd leave.

The Law part, though, almost got foiled when the police didn't seem too interested in taking the cup and tissue, brewing with DNA evidence and germs, for only a robbery. But, the cops had a change of heart after watching video surveillance tape: The next day, they retrieved the cup and tissue from the trash, and arrested ex-con Kevin Moore, allegedly responsible for a rash of robberies. The Order part kicked in when Moore was charged with burglary and larceny.

Of course, any good "L&O" story has a twist: Faeth's tale of forensic preservation and fandom got her on the Today Show, where she received a shout-out from "L&O" role model Mariska Hargitay, and a walk-on. So far, no such offer for Moore, who made this all possible. Maybe there's an opportunity at "Law & Order: Criminal Intent."

Follow us on Twitter

Are you a Canadian AdSense publisher? We'll be hosting a small AdSense event featuring optimization and product seminars in Toronto in early October, and we have a few additional spaces available. If you're located in the Toronto area and would like to attend, fill out our interest form, telling us a little about yourself, your site, and your history with AdSense. There are a limited number of spots left, so if you're interested, let us know as soon as possible. We'll let you know by email if you've been selected to take part in the event.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Posted by Matthew Carpenter-Arevalo - AdSense Optimization Team