Barack Obama added another “first” to his already notable list yesterday: he became the first U.S. presidential candidate — and, I’m guessing, the first high-level elected official in any country — to have a ready answer to a standard Google engineering interview question. Asked by Eric Schmidt about “the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers,” Sen. Obama replied that “the bubble sort would be the wrong way to go.” Though some might view this as shameless pandering to the bucket-sorting community, others will see a bold pragmatism.

Obama then reaffirmed his stance on Net Neutrality, and offered the following vision for transparency between the United States government and its electorate:

I’ll put government data online in universally accessible formats. I’ll let citizens track federal grants, contracts, earmarks, and lobbyist contacts. I’ll let you participate in government forums, ask questions in real time, offer suggestions that will be reviewed before decisions are made, and let you comment on legislation before it is signed. And to ensure that every government agency is meeting 21st century standards, I’ll appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer.

Is this just another campaign promise? We’d love to hear your thoughts. You can see video of Schmidt’s “fireside chat”-style job interview with Obama in its entirety at Google Public Policy Blog.

No word yet on whether Senator Obama consumed his weight in free sushi at the company’s all-you-can-eat gourmet cafeteria. But rest assured that the issue has a good chance of coming up during tonight’s televised debate among Democratic Party candidates (yes, there’s another one).

Poor Al. Not only has he endured the pain of winning the popular vote, then losing the 2000 presidential election in a landmark court case — now this?

Recently, Wired Magazine editor — and bestselling author of The Long Tail — Chris Anderson elaborated on Tim O’Reilly’s Facebook application research, which found that “87% of the usage goes to only 84 applications! Only 45 applications [out of approximately 5,000] have more than 100,000 active users.”

Although it’s unclear whether the “Election ‘08″ app is one of the popular ones, it’s not doing much to boost Gore’s imaginary campaign. Still, he’s still coming in at #4 for the Democrats, according to last month’s CNN poll (see thumbnail image). Not bad for someone who’s not running!

So, what gives? Is all this social networking stuff better left to “the kids” (and I don’t mean Al Gore’s kids)? Robert Scoble doesn’t think so.

[Hat tip to Miguel Senquiz at Flavorpill.net for nabbing the Facebook screenshot.]

Their latest soon-to-be-overshadowed endeavor, Yahoo! Search Assist, includes an advanced version of the predictive keyword results the major search engines are using, and improved video and Flickr photo search integration.

Here’s what Yahoo’s Yodel Anecdotal blog had to say:

With this launch, we took some liberties with the search box itself, turning it into an interactive experience that senses when you need a hand. In a dropdown window on our home page and on our results page, Yahoo! Search Assist provides both query suggestions as you type as well as related concepts you can explore to get you to your answer by just pointing and clicking. Try it with searches like “energy savings” to see what we mean. In testing Search Assist, we found that users were 61% more successful in completing their task with this new search feature at their disposal.

For instance, notice the relevant “concepts” that display when I search for our pal, Bryan:

Pretty cool, right? And I’m sure Bryan’s wife and kids will be proud to know Yahoo wuvs him (see third result down, on the left).

But is it a “Google killer”? Really? Search Engine Journal’s Loren Baker thinks so. Or does he? In a post called (*achem*) “Yahoo Search Launches Google Killer,” Baker implies that it is, then gives the most comprehensive analysis we’ve seen of it so far, then says, oh, by the way, it’s not.

Is the new Yahoo Search a Google killer? More than likely not. The new Yahoo Search may win some converts over from Google or help with a bit of marketshare, but ideally the new Yahoo Search Assist will result in assisting the happiness factor of Yahoo users and searchers who are not used to finding what they are looking for via conventional searching methods.

OK, so maybe I’m nitpicking because, honestly, enough already with the tech blogging world’s insistence on calling everything the next “something-or-other killer.” Besides, at this point, Yahoo should be thankful that Yahoo’s not a Yahoo killer.

How ’bout this zinger from the first person to comment on the Yodel Anecdotal announcement:

“Great! Welcome back to the search industry… “

I tell ya… No respect.

The New York Times has some bubble-bursting hindsight on the broader effect of eBay’s soured Skype acquisition.

Skype earned $90 million during the second quarter of 2007, far below eBay’s projections. EBay said in a regulatory filing that the charge was “the result of the updated long-term financial outlook for Skype.”

The Skype deal helped to initiate a renewed acquisition frenzy in the online world, and a return to what some call a bubble mentality. After the spectacular dot-com flameout seven years ago, Internet executives pledged to begin judging technology companies by revenue rather than by something as ephemeral as “eyeballs,” or traffic on a Web site.

But somewhere along the line, the high-tech industry reverted to its old form.

“We are almost going back to year 2000 types of errors,” said Aaron Kessler, a senior Internet analyst at Piper Jaffray. Internet companies “are buying users instead of revenue and profitability. That’s what eBay did for Skype. They saw a great asset with tons of users but no clear monetization path.”

How bad’s the bleeding? Ebay says it’s $1 billion-bad. Silicon Ally Insider’s Henry Blodget says it’s probably $1.4 billion-bad. And, on The Next Big Thing blog, Don Dodge even adds Skype to his list of “Worst Billion Dollar Acquisitions of All Time”. Says Dodge:

I wrote a post “The 10 Worst Billion Dollar Internet Acquisitions of All Time” Skype didn’t make the list at the time because it was too early to tell. Not anymore. It takes a spot very high up on the list. AOL, Lycos, and Excite are still the clear leaders in this dubious category.

If you’re reading this, eBay, we may not be able to provide much comfort — but here are some tips for selling “it” on eBay.*

[*Please Note: The term "it" may not apply to "IT".]

Our friends at CenterNetworks spoke with SmartShopper CEO Oren Dobronsky about this exciting new tool for consumers and e-commerce shops.

• The add-on is only .5 mb in size
• Automatically recognizes any product or travel offering
• Oren’s mission statement is to, “make the comparative shopping experience better and easier”
• There are no ads in the add-on
• Two million active users in the last month
• SmartShopper is one of only twelve applications that are trusted by TRUSTe
• The team is made up of 20 people in Israel and Oren in NYC – they are working to open a NYC office in Q4 2007
• Oren claims that it’s the next generation of comparative searching engines
• Funding comes from a few angel investors
• August 2007 is their first profitable month
• They are working on some major distribution deals – which will be announced soon.
• Merchants pay a CPC (Cost-Per-Click) to be listed
• [...] there is no advantage as to [the merchant who] pays more because sorting is by item price.

On face value, this seems like a great thing for lazy, cheap deal-seekers like yours truly.  But I wonder…

How might this change buying behavior?  In other words, if the price is right there, will self-described “frugal” shoppers be tempted buy more or more often?  Would you or someone you know use it?

I’d have to agree with most of what he says; I just wonder about the speed of decline and consumer adoption.

Is Bill Gates too far off in your opinion? How many years do you think it will take for us to see all these changes take place?

This is a powerful counter-punch to Google Checkout. PayPal is by far the most popular payment service with over 100 million users. From where I sit, this looks like a smart move by both eBay and Yahoo!

If you’re a merchant who is Yahoo! search customer, I’d love to know what you think of it.

“But even with all that knowledge being shared, one of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve gotten from our users is to make Answers “smarter”, enabling them to get even better answers to their questions and connect to the smart people they know in (and out of) Answers. Well today, we think Yahoo! Answers just got a little bit smarter.

We just added a new capability to Answers, the Yahoo! Answers Network – currently in beta, which enables you to build your own personal knowledge network. So what exactly is a knowledge network? Simply put, it enables you to directly connect with people whose knowledge you value so you can easily share knowledge and discover interesting information on topics you care about.

More specifically, the Yahoo! Answers Network enables you to see if any of your contacts have asked a question, provided a great answer, or simply “starred” a question they found interesting.”

What do you think of Yahoo! Answers? Have you tried it, liked it, use it regularly?

Given this, you can imagine my thoughts when I saw “10 Landing Page Optimization Tactics” from Larry Chase arrive in my inbox. In my experience Larry’s stuff is fantastic, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt, even with my low expectations given the topic. You know what I discovered? His tactics were really just principles, and in them were some excellent words of wisdom, as always. Experiment with registration forms, and test multiple landing pages (see a theme here?) were just two of his stratagems. To his credit, he also added *sample* tactics (following through on his chosen title), but more as clarification and inspiration than as implementation orders.

It’s not all a love fest here this morning however, Larry did present what I’d consider to be the cardinal sin of Landing Page Optimization- keep them in the funnel. Don’t offer escape routes, as he called it. Hmm, escape routes. I don’t know about you, but I’m hard pressed to think of a positive mental image involving escape routes. Burning building. Bank Robbery. Painful (and long) first date? Why do we assume eliminating the “escape route” is sufficient for visitors continuing the process? Doesn’t the X button at the upper right corner of the browser offer the ultimate escape route?

Larry’s not the first person to suggest this of course, and he won’t be the last. It comes from thinking about where you drop the visitor who clicks through your email or PPC ad as a page, rather than an event within a scenario. You want one principle to improve your landing pages?- Don’t do that. Don’t assume you can stuff your visitors into a linear funnel, and because there’s no way out, gravity will pull them through. Stop waiting for your cat to bark. The online world is one without gravity. In the online world, visitors control their own momentum.

In a report titled, "Marketing Technology Adoption 2006," June 2006, Forrester interviewed 371 marketing technology decision makers and influencers, and more than 40 percent say their organizations "have plans to implement Web interaction optimization software by the end of 2007."

We are glad to see the market catching up with what we have been preaching since 1998 and are looking forward to releasing more features of our Persuasion Architecture MAP^TM suite of software and releasing little micro apps to make the software available to many more interested customers in 2007.

Paul English founder of GetHuman.com sent us his thoughts on Bryan’s fresh new ClickZ article Building More Effective “Contact Us” Pages.

Hi Bryan, I enjoyed your column on contact pages. I’m the founder of the www.gethuman.com site, and we will soon be publishing and maintaining info about contact forms and email addresses. In addition to the contact us pages, there is of course the issue of *how* the contact actually works. Please see http://gethuman.com/kayak.html for my philosophy on this, for example.

Paul

Paul is also the CEO of Kayak.com, his philosophy is refreshing. He requires every single employee to interact with at least one or more customers a day. Paul says…

This keeps us honest. It keeps us focused. Rather than adding a zillions features to Kayak, we refine it every week, trying to make the product simpler and simpler to use.

Analysis doesn’t happen in a vacuum. And as we’ve said a thousand times: you can torture the numbers to confess to … uh, we mean, rationalize … just about anything.

Matt Belkin of Omniture blogged recently about the differences between Visits and Unique Visitors as they relate to measuring reach and as they factor into the Conversion Rate formula. Matt argues that Conversions per Visit is more important than Conversions per Unique Visitor. We occasionally see our own clients make this sort of slip-up, so it’s worth examining the merits of the argument.

Read the rest of this article.
Read the entire newsletter: Volume 128

Our very own Chief Persuasion Officer Bryan Eisenberg is an advisor as well. 

We expect big things.

"Way back in the last millennium – 1999, to be exact – the world of big-money art auctions meeting the online world looked pretty grim. Sotheby’s, the renowned auction house, joined forces with online heavyweight eBay to offer fine art. Four years later, the joint venture was dissolved, at a loss of about $100 million to Sotheby’s. Buyers just weren’t ready to spring for five- and six-figure art online. In fact, more than a dozen high-end art sales Web sites began and faded around the same time.

This seems funny, in a way, since people are willing to spend a lot of money online for cars, computers, even homes. But something about high-priced art caused people to think twice. Auctioneer eBay still sells art online, as do other, smaller sites, but there isn’t a site where a connoisseur might plunk down $10 million for a Monet. Back at the time of the dissolution of the Sotheby’s venture with eBay, Sotheby’s chief executive William Ruprecht said there were not as many people “prepared to buy authenticated fine art online as we had hoped.”

That’s still the case, but perhaps not for much longer. As more people become comfortable ordering online. On the day after Thanksgiving, U.S. shoppers spent $305 million on online purchases, excluding travel, a 22% increase over the comparable day a year ago, according to comScore Networks, a Reston, Va., market-research firm. Nielsen//NetRatings reported that the volume of Internet search queries grew to more than 5.1 billion in October 2005, up 15 percent from five months ago. While that kind of interest may not translate into sales of Picassos and Renoirs immediately, it’s bound to open the market for lesser-priced but still
quality works.

Indeed, the auction houses themselves are now embracing the Internet as never before. Sotheby’s and Christie’s – the two main auction houses in the world, with about 95% of the business – now publish their auction results online. Sotheby’s also makes its catalogs available online (these can cost $40 or so apiece for the bound versions), and both of the Web sites for these houses have excellent search tools, too. Another art site, ArtNet, is a valuable resource for art news and for tracking the price histories of certain artists – something that collectors once relied exclusively on their dealers and the auction houses for."

What’s missing still, though, is the kind of publicity that the auction houses can drum up, the scholarship and provenance research that auction house can bring, as well as their reputations. Not to mention the excitement of the auction floor for the big sales. (In my novel, “Late and Soon,” I give readers an insider’s view of just such an auction.) Some auctions permit live bidding online during an auction, so there are strides being made. But as the blogosphere grows, who knows what kind of universe may await interested collectors in the next decade?"

From AdAge.com "What Blogs Cost American Business"  — Blog this: U.S. workers in 2005 will waste the equivalent of 551,000 years reading blogs.

About 35 million workers — one in four people in the labor force –
visit blogs and on average spend 3.5 hours, or 9%, of the work week
engaged with them, according to Advertising Age’s analysis."

Have you checked out our new podcast of GrokDotCom.com; it will only take about five minutes? We are waiting for iTunes to approve the us and it will be available there too. Here’s to more time wasted!

When women browse Gap.com’s T-shirt section, they do not have to click to a new page to see details about the 16 shirts shown on each page. Rather, when they put the cursor over an item (called “mousing over” in industry parlance), they are invited to click on a “quick look” link for the shirt. That link yields a pop-up window that shows a model wearing the shirt alongside swatches of the colors it is available in. Mouse over any swatch, and the shirt takes on its hue — and the window tells you what sizes are in stock.

When a shopper clicks “add to bag” from within that window, the site does not shuttle her to a checkout page, as many electronic retailers do. Instead, another small window replaces the previous one, showing the shopping bag and asking her to consider multi-item discounts. If she ignores that window or clicks the “close” button, it disappears and she continues browsing shirts from the original page.

From a technology and usability perspective, the new Gap.com product interface is leaps ahead. The use of AJAX (define) is impressive. The site developers should be proud; this interface will be the envy of many.

The site was down over the past few weeks for the upgrade. PR from that, however, might be helping rather than hurting. Whether or not this was by design, it’s successfully working many up into a frenzy.

The redesigned site will certainly spike sales in the short term. But if Gap really wants to maximize this opportunity, I have a few tips.

Continue reading my column over at ClickZ…

Here is the description on Amazon.com:

Don’t get lost in the digital haystack! With thousands of links for every search, the chances of your products being found online are slimmer than a needle. But there’s good news: you can pinpoint your marketing message with help from Andrew Goodman’s newly released Winning Results with Google AdWords. You’ll discover AdWord essentials, how to bid for and win the keywords you want, how to track your results, and much more. Create a profitable ad campaign using online marketing, paid search, targeting, and leveraged branding.

Have you checked it out yet?

When she emailed this morning her signature line indicated that TechSmith had started a blog. I have really high hopes for it.

"Google is poised to trump Microsoft in its potential to invade privacy, and it’s very hard for many consumers to get it because the Google brand name has so much trust," said Chris Hoofnagle of the Electronic Privacy Information Center." This is only a small extract; read the entire article on CNET News.

This should come as no surprise. I’ve told many of my friends who don’t spend as much time online as I do that "privacy" is a quaint notion; we no longer have any privacy. If you add the ability to append offline data to email addresses and a credit bureau request we’re wide open. We can simply hope and pray that our private information is handled responsibly.

"Delta Air Lines wants to lure fliers to a new destination: its revamped Web site.

On Monday, the airline will launch an updated Delta.com site that has streamlined features, including a closer focus on core consumer services such as booking trips, checking flight information, viewing itineraries and monitoring frequent-flier miles."  continue reading this article at USA Today

They’ve made the new website fancier but far worse than the old website. They may get more traffic but we wonder how badly their conversion rates will suffer. Maybe they should read today’s article in Internet Retailer that I referenced in my previous post.

Here is what they are looking for…

Helper-Group (7 people)

• Intermediate to good computer expertise
• Possible experience with PC-Sharing-Systems
• Web-Experience
• Feel comfortable helping other people

Victim-Group (7 people)

• Novice to intermediate computer experience
• Some Web-Experience

If you fit into one of the above categories and are interested inparticipating, please send an email to Betsy Weber at TechSmith to apply: b.weber@techsmith.com

Our good friend The Diamond Diva (a faith GrokDotCom reader) blogs about diamonds, diamond jewelry, fashion, and other things for the ladies.

A Future Now faithful Yvonne DeVita and her Lispsticking blog, all about marketing to women.

And Debbie Weil is the author of Debbie’s blog, who covers the increasingly popular subject of business blogging.

If you have an interesting blog that we need to know about… please let us know.