Top Internet Strategy, Marketing & Technology Links – Jan 21, 2010

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For a long time, small businesses struggled with search marketing, because to succeed, they had to specialize, rather than being all things to all people in a local area. That’s still good advice, but changes in how people use search (and in how search engines work) are suddenly making your location every bit as important as your specialty, at least for some businesses. – Does Your Small Business Think Local? (Search Engine Guide)

Local is becoming increasingly important for businesses that rely on in-person sales (as opposed to online). But local is also important for businesses which have a presence in a locale, even if they don’t sell only in-person. Because more searches are happening on mobile devices (phones), those searching are often in the very purchase process when companies need to connect to them.

StyleFeeder, a recommendation engine for shoppers, has been acquired by Time Inc., the WSJ reported earlier this morning. Time chose not to disclose the purchase price, but the newspaper cites a source who said it was “well into eight figures.”. – Confirmed: Time Inc. Buys Personal Shopping Engine StyleFeeder(TechCrunch)

Content providers are looking for ways to create revenue other than advertising. Ecommerce is one such way – whether it will be successful remains to be seen. Large content websites certainly have the traffic for good sales. The key will be whether they can provide products that those readers are interested in purchasing.

So what exactly is Seesmic Look? Well, we know that it will involve “brand marketers” and thus may be the first time Seesmic brings some form of advertising to its product, which is one of the more popular Twitter clients across the desktop, the Web, a native client for Windows7, and mobile platforms (Android and Blackberry). But all of these clients so far are aimed at Twitter power users. Seesmic Look sounds more like a women’s magazine. – It Looks Like Loic Is Getting Ready To Launch Seesmic Look (TechCrunch

Whatever Seesmic Look is, it’ll be launched soon. If it’s a new tool for mainstream Twitter users, it’ll be interesting to see if that helps Twitter’s growth. One of the complaints I often hear is how hard it is to filter through what’s going on, so I think there definitely is a need for tools to make it easier on the non-pro users.

What would happen if you tried to print Twitter? The folks at CreativeCloud have done the imagining for us and come up with an impressive and detailed graphic that answers the big what-if question. – If You Printed Twitter It Would Cover 350 Million Sheets of Paper [Infographic] (Mashable)

I was thinking about how much is written every day and minute (maybe subconsciously thinking about this article). It’s quite a bit. It’s a lot of information floating around – some of which is valuable and some isn’t. Often, whether it’s valuable or not depends on your point of view and who you are. It certainly shows why being able to search through all that information is important. There have to be some diamonds in all that rough.

You’ve played with Google Wave, but maybe you’re still unsure about how it sits in comparison to other more established tools like email, IM, forums and wikis.. – sure, google wave is confusing, but how does it stack up to other tools? (brandflakesforbreakfest)

I’ll be honest. I’m still not actively using Google Wave. Why? Because I haven’t had the need to collaborate in a way it supports recently. My biggest complaint right now is lack of integration with other Google apps. There’s no notification of whether a wave has been changed or updated (maybe they’ve fixed this?) and you have to go into Google Wave to do anything with it. I think it would be much more useful if they integrated it with Gmail and Google Apps so you could use it as part of your workflow instead of having to remember to go to it. But, I also think there’s a lot of interest in Google Wave and how it could be used, so maybe they can fix some of these “features” and make it more useful.

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