I find myself often defending the validity of the review section in Google Maps almost immediately after telling someone that I work for the local division of an interactive direct marketing company. “Those things aren’t real,” they say, “those are written by the owners themselves”. At first, I was surprised that people were so cynical about reviews, but lately, something has happened. I feel my brow furrowing as I examine the review section because of some of the things I see. Things like names of competitors in reviews that had such bad service that the customer had to turn to the business that provided them with excellent service. Or the same review by the same name on the same day in different channels, all pulled in by Google to create one suspicious looking review section. Or, maybe the same person feels the need to write one review for multiple locations of a same business. The latest favorite, the inclusion of names in reviews written by, get this, a person with the same name (sometimes with a competitor’s business name spliced in for good measure). I now understand why the reviews in local results have the stigma that they do.
~Search DivaThe team at Microsoft have been busy working on updating their Desktop application for the MS AdCenter advertising platform in the recent months. If anyone read one of my earlier posts 10 Ways to Make AdCenter Desktop Crash they may have noticed that a few members of the Desktop team commented on it asking me to contact them to follow up on the issues I was having.
~Stephanie
For all you fledgling internet barons out there – your real estate is about to increase in value (and cost). Starting July 1, pricing on .NET and .COM extensions are increasing. Reasoning is hard to come buy. VeriSign, the organization who manages the registry for those extensions merely announced that prices are increasing (so get over it).
~Lindsey
Unlike messy search engines that force you to spend time looking though pages of results for one piece of information, WhitePages may become your new solution. When I found out the online directory just announced its new version of WhitePages Business Search, I was immediately interested and wanted to know more. After all, features include people search, reverse phone and address lookup and a store locator, all of which are available for mobile.
~aguruleA month or so ago Steve Jobs from Apple posted an open letter to explain why the iPod and the iPad do not and will not support Flash. To paraphrase, it is because it is a proprietary 3rd party closed source development tool. Adobe can update Flash at any time and if your hardware or applications can’t support the update it can become redundant. There are also serious concerns over the security of Flash.
~Stephanie