Wild Streak

Google Chrome is really becoming a browser to watch. I was looking at the browser statistics of a few sites I monitor and was surprised to discover how much market share Chrome is starting to grab. Between 5 sites, some tech-related (which would probably attract a larger Chrome fan base) and some not, the average [...]

A recent study finds that even with the best shopping cart processes, high levels of cart abandonment is something we just need to come to terms with. Reporting on a Forrester Research study, BizReports says the more opportunities a consumer has to locate a best price, the more shopping cart abandonment will occur. Forrester’s study found [...]

Ecommerce sites can tend to be a little light on content past product descriptions that have often been duplicated elsewhere. Online shoppers and search engines want more content, and more of it original. According to an article on Internet Retailer, turning an ecommerce site into a hub of information keeps shoppers coming back. The content can [...]

Nearly ten years ago, spam represented roughly one in six email messages. I still remember the days of getting a single spam message and being totally outraged. Nowadays spam represents in excess of 80% of all email. The overall absolute volume of spam is increasing every 12-18 months and outbound spam is costing ISP’s dearly. Commtouch [...]

One-third of online shoppers polled in a recent survey said they generally use coupon sites while shopping online. According to Compete’s Online Shopper Intelligence Survey, 35 million consumers visited coupon sites in April 2010, up 5 percent from April 2009. Over half those surveyed who used a coupon during their last online shopping [...]

Twitter is working towards addressing security threats posed by some shortened links – and collecting a bunch of data in the process. URL shortening services have been around for many years, but it’s been the advent of Twitter that has seen their popularity take off. The problem with links shortened by a third party service is [...]

According to the latest Domain Name Brief from Verisign, the Internet grew by 1 million domain names in the first quarter of 2010. By the end of the first quarter this year, over 193 million top level domain (TLD) name registrations were recorded, representing an increase of 11 million domain name registrations, or 6 percent, compared [...]

I wonder if Google founders Serge and Larry ever envisioned this happening as they were tinkering away in a garage in the 90’s on their search engine. The Australian Federal Government has requested the Australian Federal Police investigate Google in related to alleged privacy breaches. According to an ABC news report, Australian Attorney General Robert McClelland [...]

An article on CNN says an IP address shortage looming with new IP numbers running out in as little as 18 months – or will they? Every device that connects to the Internet is issued an IP address – a set of numbers that act as a unique identifier. The Internet currently uses IPv4, which allows [...]

The changes at Google are again flowing thick and fast, with the latest having more to do with personalization – and some directly challenging Microsoft in more than one way. The non-Microsoft related ones – a couple of days ago I noticed under SERP listings an added link, next to “cached” and “similar” called “add to [...]

Noticed a change in your Google traffic this month but can’t pinpoint what it is? Maybe the answer lies in the long tail. The “long tail” in relation to search engine traffic is the visitors you get who have used complex or less popular queries on a search engine. According to an article by Vanessa Fox on [...]

It seems some major sites are rethinking how they deal with user comments after increasing numbers of attention-seekers litter comment threads with, well, crap. Last year I published an article called “Rethinking user comments” after getting sick and tired of seeing interesting discussions turn into link-drops, peppered with “me-tooers” degrade into slinging matches, off topic rants [...]

After talking about it for months (years?), Rupert Murdoch is about to ban search engine spiders from two of his publications. The first two Newscorp properties to carry out the the wrath of Rupert are UK (soon to be pay for play) news sites, The Times and Sunday Times. According to PaidContent, the sites will only allow [...]

A couple of weeks back I posted about another blogger raising the possibility of banks using social networks as a financial assessment tool. It seems that debt collectors may have already made a start. My original post, “Bank Loan Tweeticide” was in relation to banks using social networks to assess loan risks based on the activities [...]

Google AdSense, the hugely popular revenue generation tool for online publishers, has finally revealed what has been a closely guarded secret, the percentage share of ad revenue it pays to publishers. I was expecting to see the cut being 50% or perhaps even less based on experiences with other ad networks. But the mighty G seems [...]

As click fraud detection becomes more refined, so too do the strategies of those looking to commit it. Microsoft Corp. filed two lawsuits last week in relation to a new form of click fraud the company has called “click laundering.” A previously unknown form of PPC advertising fraud, click laundering was detected by Microsoft after dramatic [...]

Google recently announced Google TV; an open platform that it says “will bring together the best of TV and the best of the web to deliver the premier entertainment experience for the living room”. Google TV will be built on Android and run the Google Chrome web browser. Unlike other attempts to marry TV sets and [...]

Video has always been a tricky business when it comes to email marketing campaigns, but this service says it takes out the complexity of getting the right video format to recipients. According to LiveClicker, a minimum of eight video file formats and static images need to be created from every source video asset to cover various [...]

A headache for affiliate marketers is the “soggy cookie” phenomenon – or cookies that aren’t set at all due to browsers set to reject them. A way around this may be browser fingerprinting. It’s not uncommon for Internet users to set their browsers to reject cookies or to be very selective of cookies they’ll accept. It’s [...]