Google’s ‘Priority Inbox’ feature has just been given the all high and mighty approval for mass consumption but what exactly is it, how does it work and what potential impacts does it endeavour to have?

Priority Inbox is a new way of taking control of your Gmail account. It attempts to automatically identify your important incoming messages and separates them out from everything else. Google servers look at several types of information to identify the ‘important stuff’, including who you email and chat with most, how often you email these people and which keywords appear most frequently in the emails that you read. (more…)

Our society has turned into a television based culture. People are depend on television for a source of entertainment. It is estimated that 4.5 billion people watch television, attracted by the wide variety of channels and high quality picture to viewers. It can be said that television is branching into social TV to become more interactive for viewers, in order to keep up with the phenomenon of social media and the trend of online television. The Internet is a potential threat to TV lead societies due to the easy accessibility of free information, and Internet sites commandeering more user viewing time than television ever did. Both social mediums; television and the Internet, lack what each other needs in order to become dominate over one another. Cue… Google TV.

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Last week I had to venture into a well-known furniture store to pick up a new desk to accommodate the growing team at White Hat Media. In my haste, I picked up the wrong size desk and had to go through the tedious rigmarole of returning the first item before collecting the second. I had a little trouble locating the Returns desk. It got me thinking about store layouts, and how customers need signposts, and what happens when someone decides to take a shortcut. Exactly the same thought processes are needed for designing navigation on your website.
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April 2010 has been a busy month in search and social media, so I cherry-picked six news stories which should be of interest to online marketers among which, a report on Facebook advertising; Facebook dropping the fan button; Ning becomes paying; and Google introducing site speed in search ranking. (more…)

There is so much going on in Search and Social Media that I thought I’d start to cherry pick stories which I find particularly interesting every month to share them with you. These are entirely my choice and I am in no way saying that others are of lesser interest! If there is a story which you think I should have included in this round-up, please let me know. (more…)

Social media flourished in 2009 and this year it’s going to become an even bigger player in the way we browse, consume and share information online. Below are my predictions for the biggest trends regarding social media’s development in 2010. (more…)

Many SEO’s believe that content is king. Quality content will always do well online, people will link to it, disseminate it for you, often it can take on a binary life of its own and raise your brand’s awareness with little more effort expended by the creator. And we’ll happily produce it for free as long as it garners us some positive link equity and other such digital marketing perks.

However for newspapers the game is a bit different. For years now the major broadsheets and tabloids have been giving away their content for free. Why spend £1.20 on the paper when you can surf the website without having to pay? This is the quandary I find myself in most days. I’ve compromised by reading articles on the website in the week and purchasing the weekend editions Saturday and Sunday, so I don’t feel like a fully fledged, ice cold cheapskate.

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There had been some speculation of Google’s dominating position online, what with Twitter implementing real time search, Microsoft unveiling Bing and buying Yahoo. However, as we should have suspected, Google had an ace up its sleeve.

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Google’s search engine developers have been secretly developing a new project – dubbed “Google Caffeine”. Caffeine apparently has a next generation architecture for Google’s web search which aims to push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. Sounds like a huge step for Google but is it all hype? (more…)

Microsoft Corp. registered a 0.4% increase in their search market share in June at the slight expense of Yahoo! not Google, said comScore.

The bigger picture of the worldwide search market now looks like this (figures updated on July 9th):

• Google 90.85%
• Yahoo: 4.26%
• Bing: 3.04%

32% of Bing visitors come from the US, taking BING’s search market share in the US to 8.45% (StatCounter, June 2009), an additional 0.4%, whilst Google remains stable at 65%. However in the UK Bing only represents 2.56% of the search market.

What’s in it for users?

Microsoft presented Bing not as a search engine, but as a decision search engine, offering more contextual, relevant results to help decision making. (more…)