Readers of the Wall Street Journal were surprised to see the ad, “McCain Wins Debate!” in the morning when results were supposed to be in the evening after the presidential debate in Mississippi. 

The ad which declared “McCain Wins Debate!” had McCain’s headshot with the American flag as the background. Though the advertisers mention this as a mistake and blamed it as a purely human error, many think it’s a fix to support McCain. 

Joseph Gallagher, Vice President of Advertising, Wall Street Journal stated that the mistake was found out immediately and was removed from the site.

The opposition party has not yet raised a voice regarding this fault.

Google had requested young people aged between 5-16 across the UK to design their Google Doodle. This year Google had requested to design a logo based on the idea “My Community”. This is the third year the competition was held. Now, its your turn to chose the best Doodle among the top chosen ones.

Google Doodle competition has created a lot of interest among young people especially in schools. Last year more than 60,000 doodles were created based on the theme, “My Future”. The winning Doodle was displayed on Google UK home page for a day which was viewed by 18 million people.

Visiting Google’s Doodle, you would be requested to vote for the best Doodle under ages 5-7, 7-11, 11-14 and 14-16. Among 70,000 doodles, 48 were selected by the judging panel for voting.

The winning doodle will be used on the UK Google homepage on 1st October.

Adding Meta Keywords was considered a common practice during the last century. It is now considered prehistoric and of no relevance. But not according to the Massachusetts District Court which ordered McGills Glass  Warehouse to pay $426,487 in damages, attorney fees and other costs.

McGills and Venture Tape Corp sell competitive products. McGills as was a common practice, placed Venture Tape’s trademarks, “Venture Foil” and “Venture Tape” in their Meta Keywords and as white font texts in a white background to get some traffic from search engines using Venture’s popularity.

In 2003, Venture Tape found this out and sued McGills in the district court. The court ordered $230k to be paid for damages during 2000-2003, $7k in costs and $188k for attorney fees incurred.

Though McGills defends stating that there are no evidence that any consumer were lured to their site, Court does not accept this claim. The court stated that “By the conduct of its case below, McGills effectively admitted seven of the eight elements” and also mentioned that the defendant’s conduct was willfull.

Even after McGills showing that their entire profit during 2000-2003 was only $230k, the court seemed unconvinced. McGills will have to pay their entire profit to Venture and in addition also pay the attorneys fees and other costs of $195k.

Cisco is strengthening its plan to enter into the internet industry with the purchase of the messaging platform, Jabber. Cisco has already purchased WebEx, Securent, PostPath and IronPort. The Jabber acquisition will help Cisco enhance its services across multiple platforms by providing on-premise and on-demand solutions. Doug Dennerline, Cisco senior vice-president of the Collaboration Software Group stated “Enterprise organizations want an extensible presence and messaging platform that can integrate with business process applications and easily adapt to their changing needs.” He also stated that the acquisition will help extend the instant messaging service and make Cisco a interoperability benchmark.Jabber is a popular messaging platform and it is compatible with different systems and platforms. MS Office Com Server, AOL AIM, Google, Yahoo! And IBM Sametime can be used with Jabber. Employees of Jabber would become part of the Collaboration Software Group which consists of Ciscos most profitable businesses like the IOS network operating system, Unified Communications solutions, SaaS offering, policy management and network and service management.

Studies have revealed that banner ads, campaign programs and visits on a branded website helped pharmaceutical companies create a brand awareness and better sales results among prospects and patients.

A recent study by comScore evaluated the impact of banner ads. The study found that interactions and expotures thru online ads improved adherence rates among patients. This resulted in pharmaceutical companies resorting to the brand’s website for online marketing.

Bridget O’Toole, executive vice president at comScore stated, ““The most effective online marketing tool for both patients and prospects is the brand’s Web site.  It’s important to realize, though, that visits to a brand Web site are achieved through the use of a variety of offline and online tactics, such as online banner ads, search and offline advertising.” He also added, “This is why it is essential for marketers to develop fully-integrated campaigns that not only raise awareness and educate consumers but that also drive visitation to a site.”

These reports reinstate the fact that brand value is vital in life saving products as it helps create a trust factor among patients.

U.S. has sort after Yahoo! Finance for information about economic conditions, general inflation and stocks. More than 18 Million visitors have accessed Yahoo! Finance in May making it the top financial news and research site.

According to comScore, a Internet research company, Yahoo! Finance topped the category followed by AOL Money & Finance with 15.2 million visitors. This is a 58 percent increase for Yahoo! And 48 percent increase for AOL when compared to their previous year.

Demographic Indicators

The report by comScore also reveals some interesting facts. 46 percent of unique visitors who accessed the financial news and research category were persons above the age of 50.

Also, 40% of the visitors had a house hold income of above $60,000. A large number of visitors have also been from large families with more than 5 people. This report portrays how families who have more financial responsibilities or needs keep themselves updated on today’s economic growth.

The recent reports by comScore reveals that 81% of internet searches done in India were using Google sites. This shows Google’s monopoly in the country which has the world’s second largest population.

Google reported 1 billion searches in June which is an 81 percent of the total searches done. Google’s dominion was followed in a far distance by Yahoo with just 117 million searches. This is a huge difference when compared to Google. With just 9.4 % by Yahoo other sites like Ask had 1.9 and MSN sites had just 1.7 percent of total search.

Rediff.com, one of the hugely popular internet portals in India shared 1.5 percent of the searches ranking in fifth position.

Jack Flanagan, executive vice president at comScore stated, “As the top local player in the search market, Indian web portal Rediff.com attracts slightly less than 2 percent of all searches, indicating that there is substantial room for growth among the local Internet brands.”

Though 15% of the world’s total population are Indians, India ranks 37th with 53 searches per user per month, the global average being 93. However, with the increase in internet users in India, there seems to be a larger market and tremendous growth for internet search.

E-commerce growth has reduced from 25% during June 07 to just 11% in June 2008. Industry analysts feel this might be the result of the recent economic stimulus by the U.S. government.

comScore, Inc. an internet information provider in its recent release stated that there has been a reduction in purchases during the last two months. The report also reveals that the purchase growth drop off started from November 2007.

According to Chairman Gian Fulgoni of comSore, “With the first round of the government’s economic stimulus checks having been mailed in early May, one would have hoped they would have bolstered online spending in May and June,” He also added, “However, recent comScore research reveals that fully two thirds of consumers said they had not planned to spend their stimulus checks and rather intended to use the cash to pay off debt or put the money into savings, a finding we’ll be taking a closer look at during next week’s webinar. In addition, it’s likely the impact of the stimulus may have been felt more offline, where a variety of merchants made it particularly easy for consumers to cash their checks at retail stores.”

The report also discloses that the top hot sellers were video games, consoles and accessories. This was followed by furniture, appliances and equipments.

Scrabulous would no longer be accessible to users except in India. The restriction is due to the case being held in the Indian High Court.

Most of the Facebook users are aware that Scrabulous cannot be accessed in Facebook. The popular game developed by Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla of Calcutta is a game similar to Scrabble. Interestingly, Scrabble owns the rights outside North America and Hasbro another company owns the right to Scrabble in the U.S. and Canada.
 
Following the complaints and court proceedings, Facebook has replaced Scrabulous with a similar game called Wordscraper. Wordscraper is no different than Scrabulous except that it uses circles instead of boxes.

Not much publicity or hype has been on the new Google Knol [A unit of knowledge]. But it looks like Google prefers ranking its Knol articles in SERP better than other websites.

This favoritism has been noted by a number of publishers. Even an article originally posted in a different website with good PR many months back, if when copied and posted in Knol can give higher results than the original article. This has caused a number of concerns as Google who played the Pope all these days is now trying to promote its own website. This is not a fair game by Google which would just result in loss of reputation.

When a duplicate article is posted on Knol, Google warns that it is a duplicate content as it identifies from where the content was extracted. However, when the same duplicate content is posted, it ranks even better than the original content. Google might claim that this is based on the “Query Deserves Freshness” algorithm which it has been promoting during the recent days. But that doesn’t mean that “new duplicate content deserves more” or “we will add PR to our sites the way we want” Google algorithms are valid.

With Google falsely promoting its own new site, SEO experts have identified the potential in linking to these pages and a large number of search engine experts have already started adding articles or linking their websites to Google Knol.