Parisian Love - Google

Just a lighthearted video..

HoneyGrid Reveals 95% of User Generated Content is Spam or Malicious

Websense Security Labs has published its bi-annual State of Internet Security report and, as usual, it makes for pretty interesting if somewhat scary reading.

Covering the last six months of 2009, the report is based upon the findings of the ThreatSeeker Network which is used to discover, classify and monitor global Internet threats and trends courtesy of something called the Internet HoneyGrid.

Makes you wonder if someone searching for you actually finds you, or just the 'noise.'

So what did the HoneyGrid have to report about the Internet security threatscape for Q3/Q4 2009?

Here are the key findings:

• 13.7% of searches for trending news/buzz words (as defined by Yahoo Buzz & Google Trends) led to malware.
• The second half of 2009 revealed a 3.3% decline in the growth of malicious Web sites compared to the first half of the year. Websense Security Labs believes this is due to the increased focus on Web 2.0 properties with higher traffic and multiple pages.
• However, comparing the second half of 2009 with the same period in 2008, Websense Security labs saw an average of 225% growth in malicious Web sites.
• 71% of Web sites with malicious code are legitimate sites that have been compromised.
• 95% of user-generated posts on Web sites are spam or malicious.
• Consistent with previous years, 51% of malware still connects to host Web sites registered in the United States.
• China remains second most popular malware hosting country with 17%, but during the last six months Spain jumped into the third place with 15.7% despite never having been in the top 5 countries before.
• 81% of emails during the second half of the year contained a malicious link.
• Websense Security Labs identified that 85.8% of all emails were spam.
• Statistics for the second half of 2009 show spam emails broke down as 72% (HTML), 11.2% (image), 14.4% (plain text with URL) and 2.4% (plain text with no URL).
• 35% of malicious Web-based attacks included data-stealing code.
• 58% of all data-stealing attacks are conducted over the Web.

This comprises of honeyclients and honeypots, reputation systems and advanced grid computing systems, all of which combine to parse through one billion pieces of content every day while searching for security threats. Every single hour the Internet HoneyGrid scans some 40 million websites for malicious code as well as 10 million emails for unwanted content and malicious code.

De-Anonymizing Social Network Users

The H has an article about some researchers who found a new way to de-anonymize people. Compared to the EFF's Panopticlick, the goal of this experiment is not to identify a user's browser uniquely, but to identify individual users.

The test essentially exploits the fact that many social network users are identifiable by their membership of various groups. According to the researchers, it's very unlikelly that two people on any social network will belong to exactly the same groups. A 'group fingerprint' can thus allow websites to identify previously anonymous visitors. They describe the setup and all details and the results look very interesting.

They also have a live demo for the social network Xing that was able to de-anonymize me.

Tracking Browsers Without Cookies Or IP Addresses?

The EFF has launched a research project called Panopticlick, to determine whether seemingly innocuous browser configuration information (like User Agent strings, plugin versions and, fonts) may create unique fingerprints that allow web users to be tracked, even if they limit or delete cookies.

Preliminary results indicate that the User Agent string alone has 10.5 bits of entropy, which means that for a typical Internet user, only one in about 1,500 (2 ^ 10.5) others will share their User Agent string.

If you visit Panopticlick, you can get an reading of how rare or unique your browser configuration is, as well as helping EFF to collect better data about this problem and how best to defend against it."

Twitter Intros Local Trends

Sick of all this Apple Tablet talk? Why not switch your Twitter Trending Topics to something more localized? Actually, the new feature is still confined to major cities, so odds seem pretty good that, no matter where you go, most people will be breathlessly tweeting about Steve Jobs and company.

The new feature, rolled out last night, lets users "localize" their top trends, by country or by city. The spot reserved for Trending Topics on the right hand column of the site now reads Trending: Worldwide. Users can change locations with a pull down menu.

Countries include Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Mexico, the UK, and the US. On the city side, the service is largely confined to the US, including Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Philadelphia, San Antonion, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington D.C. London and Sao Paulo are also on the list.

Twitter is currently working on adding more cities.

Facebook, Attorney General of California, and Web 3.0

An interesting discussion/interview with a Facebook employee regarding their data retention policies. Cliffs notes: Never put anything on Facebook you don't want stored forever, even if you delete it.

Due to overwhelming privacy concerns, many large web companies are now employing a new position: CPO "Chief Privacy Officer." Chris Kelly is Facebook's CPO, now running for AG in California.

The interview touches a bit on "Web 3.0" and the direction things are headed. Worth the read.

Read the whole interview: http://therumpus.net/2010/01/conversations-about-the-internet-5-anonymous-facebook-employee/?full=yes

How you can find SmartBox??!

Speaking at a conference over the weekend in Orlando, the most frequent question I was asked was "How can we contact you for more info on your services?"

Well, the easiest way is simply to Google us.  Like this:  http://tinyurl.com/ybtfdg9

Or, if you can't remember the name of my business, try just my name: http://tinyurl.com/ycszv22

:)

The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s

The NY Times has an interesting report on the iGeneration, born in the '90s and this decade, comparing them to the Net Generation, born in the 1980s. The Net Generation spend two hours a day talking on the phone and still use e-mail frequently while the iGeneration — conceivably their younger siblings — spends considerably more time texting than talking on the phone, pays less attention to television than the older group, and tends to communicate more over instant-messenger networks.

'People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,' says Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project. 'College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.' Dr. Larry Rosen, a professor of psychology at California State University, says that the iGeneration, unlike their older peers, expect an instant response from everyone they communicate with, and don't have the patience for anything less.

'They'll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone, because after all, that is the experience they have growing up,' says Rosen.

12 Things Made Obsolete This Decade

We're entering 2010 with all kinds of new gadgets, gizmos, and tech tools, but let's not forget that we've lost a few things this decade, too.

HuffPostTech took a look back at 12 things that became obsolete this decade.

From fax machines to landline phones check them out (and get nostalgic) in the slideshow below!

We'll start with the YellowPages..

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/26/obsolete-things-that-expi_n_402674.html?slidenumber=EAtemGCqMvg%3D&slideshow

Adding an authorized user to your Google Analytics account

A quick video on how to add SmartBox as an authorized user on your Google Analytics account so we can view and manipulate your data as required. 

Each American Consumed 34 Gigabytes Per Day In '08

Metrics can get really strange — especially on the scale of national consumption. Information consumption is one such area that has a lot of strange metrics to offer. A new report from the University of California, San Diego entitled 'How Much Information?' reveals that in 2008 your average American consumed 34 gigabytes per day. These values are entirely estimates of the flows of data delivered to consumers as bytes, words and hours of consumer information. 


From the executive summary: 'In 2008, Americans consumed information for about 1.3 trillion hours, an average of almost 12 hours per day. Consumption totaled 3.6 zettabytes and 10,845 trillion words, corresponding to 100,500 words and 34 gigabytes for an average person on an average day. A zettabyte is 10 to the 21st power bytes, a million million gigabytes. These estimates are from an analysis of more than 20 different sources of information, from very old (newspapers and books) to very new (portable computer games, satellite radio, and Internet video). Information at work is not included.' Has the flow and importance of information really become this prolific in our daily lives?

Failure Rate Study in Netbooks and Notebooks

Netbooks are more likely to fail within the first year than their more expensive laptop brethren, according to new research. SquareTrade, an independent US warranty provider, analyzed the failure rates of more than 30,000 laptops covered by its own warranties. It found that 5.8% of netbooks malfunctioned within the first year, compared to 4.7% for regular laptops and 4.2% for premium laptops costing more than $1,000. The research also raises question marks over the legendary reliability of Macs. 

Three PC manufacturers — Asus, Toshiba, and Sony — boasted better reliability rates than Apple. Macs have a 17.4% malfunction rate over three years, compared to market-leader Asus, which has a 15.6% failure rate. HP was the worst of the nine PC vendors listed, with a malfunction rate of 25.6% over three years.

Microsoft Office 2010 to Include Social Networking

From Microsoft's press release regarding the "5 Best Features in Office 2010":

Microsoft recognizes the social networking trend by adding Outlook Social Connector to the Outlook 2010 application. Outlook Social Connector will let you see emails, status updates, shared files and photos, and more all in a single view. You will also be able to see who your mutual friends are and other information to help you maintain and extend your social network.

Read more @ PCWorld

Your Business & Social Media

If you think social networking is only B2C, watch this video:

The accelerating decline of newspapers

U.S. newspaper circulation has hit its lowest level in seven decades, as papers across the country lost 10.6 percent of their paying readers from April through September, compared with a year earlier.

The newest numbers on newspaper circulation, released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations, paint a dismal picture for an industry already feeling the pressures of an advertising slump coupled with the worst business downturn since the Great Depression.

The ABC data estimate that 30.4 million Americans now pay to buy a newspaper Monday through Saturday, on average, and about 40 million do so on Sunday. These figures come from 379 of the nation's largest newspapers. In 1940, 41.1 million Americans bought a daily newspaper, according to the Newspaper Association of America.

In September, for instance, Nielsen reported that the New York Times was the Internet's most popular newspaper site, with an average of 21.5 million unique visitors per month, up 7 percent compared with a year earlier. Yet last week, the Times Co. reported a 27 percent drop in ad revenue for the quarter. At The Washington Post, which has lost $143 million through the first six months of 2009, the number of monthly unique online users was down 29 percent, to 9.2 million, compared with September of last year, just before the presidential election.

Read more @ The Washington Post

Better Twitter Results in Google Search

A Google blog post announces that Google has “reached an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in the search results”. Real-time results from Twitter will probably included in a special OneBox triggered by keywords that are suddenly popular in Twitter.

“We believe that our search results and user experience will greatly benefit from the inclusion of this up-to-the-minute data, and we look forward to having a product that showcases how tweets can make search better in the coming months. That way, the next time you search for something that can be aided by a real-time observation, say, snow conditions at your favorite ski resort, you’ll find tweets from other users who are there and sharing the latest and greatest information,” explains Marissa Mayer.

The most difficult problem that Google has to solve is ranking tweets, as most microblogging search engines sort the results by date and aren’t able to filter spam and irrelevant results.

Twitter’s blog explains why the company co-founded by two ex-Googlers partnered with Google. “Our friends down in Mountain View want to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. A fast growing amount of information is coursing through Twitter very quickly, and we want there to be many ways to access that information. As part of that effort, we’ve partnered with Google to index the entire world of public tweets as fast as possible and present them to their users in an organized and relevant fashion.”

In the meantime, Bing has released a Twitter search engine that sorts the results by date and highlights the top links shared by Twitter users.

Microsoft Reaches Deal To Bring Twitter And Facebook Data To Bing

Microsoft has reached deals with both Twitter and Facebook to include real-time feeds from both sites in Bing’s results. The Twitter deal had been rumored for several weeks, although the addition of Facebook data to Bing comes as a surprise. Under the Twitter partnership, Bing users will now be able to search for a query, and then immediately see a constantly refreshing stream of Tweets roll in. The results can be filtered by date or by “best match.” A beta version of the feature—which you can visit here—just went live; the Facebook tie-in will follow at an unspecified “later date.”

All of the major search engines have coveted some sort of deal with Twitter, since the microblogging service is being widely used to search for what people are thinking about a certain topic at a given moment. Facebook’s use as a real-time public pulse finder has been more limited, since so many Facebook users keep their status updates private. That is slowly changing, however, because of recent changes Facebook has made to its privacy settings.

The deal is a coup for Microsoft because—as Kara Swisher, who first reported the news, points out—Bing will now be able to offer access to data that Google does not have. Google does index Facebook and Twitter for public status updates, but there is a significant lag. Microsoft’s advantage, however, may not last long. Google too has been talking to Twitter and Facebook about getting access to their real-time feeds, and Microsoft’s deals with both Twitter and Facebook are reportedly non-exclusive.

Microsoft did not release any financial terms of the deals, but earlier reports said a deal could involve a “several million dollar” payment to Twitter and also include ad revenue sharing. Microsoft and Facebook already have a relationship, since Microsoft owns a 1.6 percent stake in the social network.

Google Analytics Gets a Bunch of New Features

Google announced a number of new and upcoming features for Google Analytics today. The features, Google says, focus on three things: power, flexibility, and intelligence.

It is the intelligence aspect, which Google places the most prominence on, and this comes in the form of a feature called "Analytics Intelligence," which will provide users with automatic alerts of significant changes in the data patterns of their site metrics and dimensions over daily, weekly, and monthly periods. Users can be notified by email or right within the Google Analytics user interface.

Google has also added goals for "time on site" and "pages per visit," as well as the ability to define up to 20 goals per profile. Here's some more on that:

Google Analytics now tracks mobile websites and mobile apps so you can better measure your mobile marketing efforts. They will be adding a code snippet for users to add to their mobile sites. PHP, Perl, JSP, and ASPX sites will be supported.

"iPhone and Android mobile application developers can now also track how users engage with apps, just as with tracking engagement on a website," says Dai Pham of the Google Analytics Team. "What's more, for apps on Android devices, usage can be tied back to ad campaigns: from ad to marketplace to download to engagement."

They have also added Advanced Table Filtering, which allows you to filter the rows in a table based on different metric conditions. Here's more on that feature:



Now when you create a Custom Report, you can select Unique Visitors as a metric against any dimensions in Google Analytics, and they are also adding multiple custom variables to the tracking API and making it easy to share Custom Reports and Advanced Segments.

Google says that it will be going into more detail on the new features in the coming days on the Google Analytics Blog. The features will be appearing in Google Analytics accounts gradually over the coming weeks.

Credit to WebProNews

Madison Avenue: Applying Traditional Marketing Best Practices to Search Marketing

The legendary reputations in the American advertising industry were built by brand visionaries who worked for large ad firms in New York. While many of these prominent icons of marketing are hailed for their genius, the true value they deliver is in distilling messages that speak to a consumer's wants and needs.

Beyond catchy slogans and brand icons, web marketing today is about gathering data and targeting your customers with offers that are custom tailored to their location, budget and needs.

A Data-Driven Approach to Marketing

Traditional advertising firms often conduct surveys or test groups in order to analyze the impact of a particular message before releasing a product. In today's marketing environment, trends are constantly shifting and you can launch a new campaign in a matter of hours based upon what you learn from your customers.

Web analytics provides insights into which parts of your website are generating the most leads and which need to be improved to ensure a seamless conversion funnel from beginning to end. The major advantage of small businesses today is that you can be nimble, responding to shifts in the marketplace by introducing a new special offer, service offering or approach that might take your larger competitors weeks to create.

As a successful business owner, you understand the power of cultivating brand loyalty through personal relationships. Effective online marketing carries those principles over from traditional advertising by segmenting potential customers according to their needs, and adjusting that message in real-time.

Are All 800 Numbers Treated Equal?

Whether it's the power of subconscious perception or reasoned logic, subtle clues on a web page can strongly impact our behavior on that site. Take for example the display of toll-free phone numbers. Most sites invite calls from visitors by prominently displaying their phone number on their web pages. Many times, these numbers are of the toll-free variety, with prefixes of "800", "888", "877" or "866".

Although the "800" prefix has been around for over 40 years, its next oldest sibling, "888" is only 13 years old. The "877" prefix came about 11 years ago, while the youngest "866" has only been in use for 9 years.

Does the longer legacy of the "800" prefix result in higher conversions when tested against the newer toll-free prefixes?

We utilized our call tracking software to create a test that would determine if the use of various toll-free prefixes produced different conversion rates. We wanted to measure the impact the different prefixes had on both call-in conversions and online conversions.

Our sample included 18,100 visits to one lead generation site. All visits were from paid search ads in Google and resulted in 2,614 combined call-in and online conversions. The visits were split evenly among 4 distinct landing pages, each page displaying a different toll free number. Other than the different phone numbers, the landing pages were identical. All visits were recorded during the 1st quarter of 2009.

Chart A shows conversion rates for call-in leads by prefix. Interestingly, our highest conversion rate corresponds to the oldest prefix (800) and the lowest conversion rate corresponds to the youngest prefix (866). Thus, the age of the prefix appears to directly impact the call-in conversion rate. The longer the prefix has existed, the higher its conversion rate. The magnitude of the difference between the best performing "800" prefix and worst performing "866" prefixes is 1.64 percentage points. This means that the "800" prefix had a 59.8% higher call-in conversion rate than the identical page with an "866" phone number.

CHART A

Can different toll-free prefixes impact the online (form fills) conversion rate? As expected, while the results on call-in conversions were significant, the impact on online conversions (form fills) was somewhat less than conclusive as seen in Chart B.

CHART B

The toll-free prefix that accompanied the page yielding the highest online conversion rate was "888", followed closely by "866". The "800" and "877" prefixes converted almost identically for online conversions. The spread between the highest and lowest conversion rates was .76 percentage points, less than half that of the difference in call-in conversion rates. Notice how these conversion rate results were almost opposite that of call-in conversions.

Chart C shows the results of our test on with the combined conversion rates. Notice now that the "888" and "800" prefixes convert at almost the same rate followed by the "877" and then the "866" prefixes.

CHART C

If we place the same value to a call-in lead as an online lead, we can see in Chart D the projected revenues from the four prefixes. For the purposes of this exercise, we assumed that the value of a lead is $100.

CHART D

Based on our observed combined conversion rates, the page with the "888" prefix would generate the most revenue.

In some instances, though, companies might place a higher value from a call-in lead. Sometimes call-in leads come from more highly motivated prospects, or prospects with a greater sense of urgency. If we were to value a call-in lead at twice (average order value of $200) that of an online lead (average order value of $100), the results become more striking.

The page with the "888" prefix clearly brings in the most revenue indicative of the strong call-in conversion rate for that prefix. In fact, the "888" prefix would generate 19.5% more revenue than the page with the"866" prefix.

Based on our study, the greater the difference between the average order value of the prefixes, the greater the impact expected on revenue generated.

Here are two important take-aways from our study:

1. As part of your landing page testing and optimization, you should perform a similar test to see if there are opportunities to increase your conversion rates. Call tracking software makes this an easy and inexpensive test.
2. Understand the values of both your call-in and online conversions and factor that into your results. For ecommerce companies, a call-in sale gives the opportunity for an upsell, potentially increasing the average order value of call-in leads. Lead generation companies may also benefit more from call-in leads by being able to capture the prospect when the prospect is most interested and motivated to discuss their needs.