As the amount of information continues to grow on the internet, it is becoming harder and harder to find stuff.

As you know, necessity is the mother of all innovation. I recently ran into searchme.com (thanks to Kim F. for the heads-up). Basically, searchme.com is a visual search engine. That’s right, a visual search engine.

This is how it works: you type in your search phrase and press enter. What happens next is a hybrid between the iTunes music slider and ask.com’s website preview option. And then some. Here are some of the neat features that I noticed right away:

• No pagination – search results are loaded right on the page using AJAX, and they keep loading as you keep scrolling
• Highlight keywords – each search result image highlights the keywords matching your search criteria
• Traditional results – this tool also allows you to toggle between full screen visual search results and traditional text-based search results

You have to play with it to really understand how it works. I highly encourage you to test it out and think about how web design can change if this catches on… how can this change search engine optimization?

Remeber, the eye and the mind can process images a lot faster than it can process text. People also gravitate towards “credible” websites. Credibility is instantaneously established when a user looks at the page’s design. All these factors stack on the side of searchme.com. Let’s keep an eye on these guys and see where this goes.

Labels: Design, search engine optimization, search engines, usability

Just when you thought the whole “open a storefront in Second Life!” B.S. might have cured us of our overestimation of Dumb Internet Marketing Trends, along comes Marketing Using Twitter.

That’s right… your friends at the BBJ have spotted the hottest new trend in PR: Twittering to, for, and about your clients. Now, never having been a client myself, I can’t say this for sure, but I hope that I would not be reading my PR firm’s Twitter feed in my spare time. Call me a curmudgeon, but reading about how some flack is going to be painting her bathroom ceiling this weekend is just not all that interesting to me.

Says one, “[d]elving into the personal gives clients a little bit more into Kel as a human being as opposed to Kel just the CEO of a marketing and communications agency." I dunno, if I were his client, I might think Kel should spend a little more time coming up with strategic insights for his clients and a little less time letting us get to know him.

Maybe that’s really what bugs about Twitter in general: it’s so aggressively one-way and navel-gazing. It’s like, “Look at me! I am so interesting! I don’t want to hear about your day, read about mine! In minute, excruciating detail!” It makes personal blogging look positively epic in scope. Social networking is precisely that: networking, a dialogue. But Twitter’s just a content-free stream of consciousness from people who just aren’t that interesting to begin with. Why should we care?

Luckily for all of us in the business, clients are not yet asking about this—and probably never will, since AdAge called it one of the most “asinine” trends of all time. Too bad the BizJournals didn’t get the memo.*

*I have nothing against the BizJournals folks and in fact, in the spirit of full disclosure, must say that I have written for them in the past. I suspect they may have had a news hole, because this article in the BBJ was actually a rehash of one done in the Boston Business Journal about a month ago.

Wow. I'm really glad that we're not running the online campaign for Thomas Edison State College, an institution which bills itself as "Higher Education for Adults With Higher Expectations." I think their marketing people should have been a bit more selective with the content networks where they're placing their ads.



Ouch! Those guys don't exactly look like adults with expectations much higher than making it to Taco Bell for "Fourthmeal" before it closes.
Found here. CAUTION: not exactly SFW, though it's kind of tough to actually hear what they're saying.

Why post this? Because it illustrates an important point: know where you're placing your ads! It's amazing how many people obsess over their brand when it comes to the creative and then ignore where those ads get placed.

Maybe they would have been better off advertising on this show: