Posted by great scott! This week on Whiteboard Friday we're looking at visualization. Not the Tony Robbins, Zig Ziggler, positive thinking kind, but rather how to make your web content attractive to users. People on the web consume tons of information everyday, so their time is limited. A surefire way to turn people off is with a long page of text with nothing to break it up. Even if the content is stellar,

If you've ever used Google Maps on your iPhone or other mobile device, you're probably familiar with My Location already.  For those that aren't, when you click a button your exact location is shown on the map denoted by a blue circle.  Now, that nifty little feature is coming to your desktop and laptop computers. Google announced Thursday the laucnh of My Location for Google Maps, which means that when you visit Google Maps now with a supported web browser,

Does Google still rank duplicate content? How about the other search engines? With all the talk of duplicate content and penalties and such and such, you'd think the search engines would have just stopped ranking it completely. But they haven't. And all the evidence you really need that they haven't is Google's recent (within the past 6 months) announcement of a new recognized tag - the canonical URL tag. The canonical tag - attribute,

I've noticed a strange trend lately. For some reason, people seem to be equating social media with social networking . At the same time, they seem to be treating blogging as something other than social media. I find this very strange indeed. For example, here the author proclaims that he's quitting social media and gives his reasons why. But he also states he'll continue to blog , by god. Then there's this other post,

One of the session that I plan to attend at SES San Jose is "The ByerSphere Project: Understanding B2B Buyer Patters" on Wednesday, August 12, 2009, at 4:00 p.m. The moderator of the session is Gord Hotchkiss, President & CEO, Enquiro. I started speaking on panels with Gord way back at SES New York 2004. And I can't tell you how many search engine marketers - including me - have taken his eye tracking research and presented it to their clients over the years.

by Vera H-C Chan In spring, a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love. In science, it turns to spermatozoa. A bevy of studies on male reproductive cells has been unleashed in the past few weeks. To wit: Quantity improves quality : Heard at the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, an Australian researcher claimed conception rates improved with a steady sexual diet , rather than throttling back for maximum effect.

Further to Jenny's post on the Cannes Lions Gaming Workshop a couple of weeks ago, this video proves that in-game advertising isn't just effective for FMCGs and future US Presidents!

Unified search is a cool new FireFox addon that lets you easily combine and compare side-by-side search results from a number of search engines. The tool works as follows: Search base service - i.e. Google See Bing search engines appear on the same page; Notice buttons in the right top corner; Click on any button to get the search results from the selected service load instead of Bing; Click an arrow sign to get the search results from the selected service load in the new tab.

This was my first visit to the Cannes Lions Advertising Festival , and it certainly exceeded my expectations. Helps of course to get to spend a day with Steve Ballmer as he met with the heads of Global agencies, held his seminar and took Q&A from the Young Lions. But for me, I think I was struck most by the pervasive attitude that Digital had finally arrived. I have to say I was a bit shocked that its just now sinking in, but I guess better late than never.

Google has just launched a new feature of Image Search which is aimed at helping users find images that are free to use based on their usage licenses, such as Creative Commons, GNU free documentation and other intellectual property agreement. This feature includes searching for images that are free to use, edit and share. Somehow, this gives artists producing these images and making them available on the web a hand in determining how their images can be used by anyone,