Top Internet Strategy, Marketing & Technology Links – Jan 18, 2010

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The race to become the hot location-based gaming service is red hot right now. Foursquare and Gowalla dominate the headlines, but another iPhone app,MyTown, has managed to rocket past them in usage in a little over a month with little fanfare. Today, the service has some 500,000 users, co-founder Keith Lee tells us. That puts it far ahead of either of the two more well-covered apps. – Foursquare Who? Gowalla What? MyTown Has 500,000 Users And 31 Million Check-Ins (TechCrunch)

I admit that I’ve never heard of MyTown, but upon further examination, it looks like it’s quite heavy into the game play. Players buy and sell properties and other virtual goods. While FourSquare has some game play to it, it’s really a social app that let’s you see where your friends are and what places they like to visit. Gowalla and Foursquare may be competitors, but MyTown seems to be more in the mobile gaming niche. However, Foursquare is adding more game play to their app and changing around how they award points. It may be that these apps start to converge. Either way, have I mentioned that mobile (and mobile local) are going to be big?

Let’s face it: Most bloggers suck at being productive. They stare at a blank computer screen for a while, check their email, chat it up on Facebook and Twitter, grab a bite to eat, write a few words, and repeat. Hours later, they finally have something resembling a blog post. – 8 Ways to Become a More Productive Blogger (SEO Hosting)

Blogging regularly can be difficult for anyone – even those of us who have been doing it for awhile. You need to get rid of distractions, set yourself goals and keep writing on your mind when you come across good ideas to blog about.

Essentially, Matt says Google treats links the same whether they are from Facebook or Twitter, as they would if they were from any other site. It’s just an extension of the pagerank formula, where its not the amount of links, but how reputable those links are (the company uses a similar strategy for ranking Tweets themselves in real-time search). – How Google Rates Links from Facebook and Twitter (WebProNews)

Real-time search has been an important tool to see what’s going on and, for businesses, what’s on their customers’ minds. Twitter was one of the most popular sites for real-time search because it was able to provide a search of all the tweets across its service. Facebook has been trying to change its privacy policy so that it too can provide a real-time search feed. And search engines such as Google and Bing have been adding feeds from Twitter and Facebook into their search results. All this means that Twitter and Facebook have entered the realm of SEO (search engine optimization) because they’ll be showing up under results for keywords. Businesses are therefore concerned about how Google (and Bing) will be rating links from Facebook and Twitter – and it looks like the algorithm is similar to how Google rates regular web pages (using influence and reputation).

Taking a closer look at B2B marketing budgets in our 2008/2009 survey, we found:

1) Digital spending moved ahead but failed to shake up the status quo.

2) Traditional tactics commanded the lion’s share of B2B budgets.

3) Social media managed to make only a few budget inroads in 2008/early 09.

– Social Media’s Impact on B2B Marketing Budgets? (Forrester)

Those results are from the 2009 survey and Forrester is requesting your help with the 2010 survey (they’ll share the results with those who participate). It should be interesting to see how the recession effected the B2B marketing budgets. I’m guessing that digital may have made some inroads because of it’s lower cost and more efficient targeting.

Microsoft has issued Security Advisory (979352) after its own investigations into the highly-organized hacking attack in late December, the one that Google earlier this week insinuated came from China, led the software giant to conclude that a Remote Code Execution (RCE) vulnerability in Internet Explorer was used by the perpetrators. – Microsoft warns of IE bug used in Chinese attacks on Google (Ars Technica)

As scary as it may be that Google was attacked (although I imagine they’re attacked more often than they report – although probably in less organized ways), it’s a bit concerting to hear that a vulnerability in Internet Explorer (IE) was used in the attack. Microsoft has come under quite a bit of attack in recent years due to the security issues in their products (to be fair, products which are more popular are more likely to be attacked) – this certainly doesn’t help that reputation.

What do you think? How are these stories important to you?

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