New PEW/Internet Study - Search Engine Use Up Significantly - Local Search Increasing
Hi Friends,
A new Pew Internet study shows that search engines are now being used by even more Americans. Here is a quick summary from the report.
60 million American adults are using search engines on a typical day.
From June 2004 to September 2005 use of search engines on a typical day has risen from 30% to 41% of the internet-using population and the number using search engines on an average day jumped from 38 million to 59 million
91% of all internet users had ever sent or receive email 90% of internet users had used search engines.
The latest data from comScore show that Google was the most heavily used search engine in October 2005 with 89.8 million unique visitors, followed by Yahoo! Search (68 million unique visitors), MSN Search (49.7 million unique visitors), Ask Jeeves (43.7 million unique visitors), and AOL Search (36.1 million unique visitors). Yahoo! Local had 20 million unique users (although these users likely had a large overlap with the unique users using Yahoo! Search itself). Note: AOL uses the Google search engine, effectively making Google accountable for 139.5. And the AskJeeves number seems too high relative to the other numbers being given for Google, Yahoo! Search and MSN Search.
comScore data has been tracking local searches that include geographically distinct places. These searches involve "local qualifiers" - or search terms including specific items such as ZIP codes, telephone numbers and street addresses. According to comScore in August of 2005 there were over 447 million local searches on the major search engines, with Google accounting for over 195 million of the searches with locality terms.
There is much more information in the report itself (Yellow Page searches, user demographics etc..). You can click here to the summary page for the report and then download the pdf file from that page.
Peace - Tim
:: I've Been a Long Time Leaving (But I'll Be a Long Time Gone), Dreaming My Dreams by Waylon Jennings
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Editors, Reporters, Conventional Media -> New Jobs Bloggers
Hi Friends,
Stacy and I went to the The Stanford Daily alumni dinner tonight following another Stanford loss to Cal (congrats RS). Thanks to Elna Tymes, whose son Adrian was one of the programmers at FindLaw, did a great job putting together the dinner.
As for the dinner talks, after going through the editorial and business metrics at the paper (happy to report that things are looking good :), former Knight Ridder columnist, book author and blogger Joanne Jacobs gave a talk on... blogs.
While I have heard speeches about blogs many many times, it was interesting to hear first hand from a former media connected writer about her experiences and thoughts. Especially since she left the Mercury News to work on her book, freelance and blog.
- A few selected notes from her talk:
- Joanne saw blogs as being great for the readers and the bloggers. She especially liked the speed in which bloggers comment on the events of the day (and mentioned The Volokh Conspiracy and Instapundit as examples). She noted how lawyer are very active bloggers
- Joanne thought that not being part of the conventional media did not necessarily make bloggers less trustworthy. But that without an formalized media brand, it did require individual bloggers to build up the trust over time.
- Joanne talked a lot about the blogging community and how they help each other. This is similar to the statements made by Ernie the Attorney in last week's BlawgThink.
- Joanne said that blogs were a great place for someone to show or develop their expertise (see any of the many posts by Kevin O'Keefe on this :).
- She did not see blogging as a business model in itself, at least right now. While a few bloggers seemed to be able to make money, most hardly made anything (eg. click on the donation button, Google ad or Amazon referrals are not making a normal print writer/editor's salary).
- Joanne felt that her blog and the blogosphere was a great place to promote her book: Our School : The Inspiring Story of Two Teachers, One Big Idea, and the School That Beat the Odds (I have used Joanne's Amazon code should you click on that link and buy the book :) She also asked the editors from some of the nations large papers that were there to review her book... like the Wall Street Journal did... here is the book review by the Wall Street Journal.
As we watch Knight Ridder try to explore of strategic alternatives it will be interesting to see not just what happens to the papers, but also to the reporters and editors. I myself no longer subscribe to any print newspapers (I used to subscribe to the SJ Merc, WSJ and NY Times, now my only subscriptions are RSS feeds) and supplement my main news sites (CNN.com, NYTimes.com, WSJ.com, SJMercury.com with Google RSS alerts on different keyword phrases and the headlines from a 20 or so blogs of various editor/writer/colunists (in particular Bob Ambrogi, whose LawSites turned 3 on Saturday and Dan Gillmor) and about 150 or so information blogs (BeSpacific, ResourceShelf etc... etc...).
My guess is that most of the current Stanford Daily students are going to have a tougher time finding media jobs than their predecessors unless they are really good bloggers AND can find a business model... OR law school OR maybe Yahoo! (Read Dan Gilmor's post on Wall Street and Journalists and... Yahoo!).
Peace - Tim
:: Pocahontas, Rust Never Sleeps by Neil Young
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Justia's Little Sheba the Hug Pug on Monster.com
Hi Friends,
Little Sheba the Hug Pug and Justia were written about on Monster.com as part of a Take Your Dog to Work article by Heidi LaFleche. Once again, Sheba was using her cuteness and connections to get Justia some attention, after all - It is her job :)
But Sheba is not just in the office sleeping waiting for writers to call. Smiling Sheba often works 24 hour days to make things go on the product side. Helping make stuff like... free case law in the US Supreme Court Center - which is now in its Alpha-Beta 2 release - and of course Sheba came up with the free part of the free law firm Web sites on Freedom.Justia.com. And Sheba even has her own line of Hug Pug tshirts, posters and mugs. Not to bad for a puppy :)
Peace - Tim
:: Arc of a Diver, Arc of a Diver by Steve Winwood
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Targeting Your Audience Through Search Engine Optimization
Does your law firm have a web presence? One that commands attention and attracts clients? If not, you may want to focus on improving your web site's keyword selections, which encompasses the search terms that potential clients will use to locate your law firm's web site.
One form of keyword selection is focusing on the geographical location of your potential clients. For example, if you are a Houston personal injury lawyer, you would probably prefer that more of your online visitors come from Houston, Texas instead of, say, Phoenix, Arizona. By attracting more qualified visitors to your web site, you have a greater chance of converting these visitors into paying clients.
Of course, deciding to optimize your web site for Houston instead of Phoenix is an easy decision. However, to what extent should you optimize your web site for any surrounding communities? One factor may be the demographics of your nearby cities. To help you analyze demographic date, SRC and AnalyGIS have released a cool demographic mapping tool that combines Google Local maps with demographic data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
When you click on the map, the demographic mapping tool returns the population, median income, average income, median age and other demographic information for areas within a radius of 1 mile, 3 miles and 5 miles of where you clicked. And, this maps includes all the functions of the standard Google map. You can zoom in, zoom out, slide the map around, and switch between map and satellite views.
[Via Robert Ambrogi's LawSites Via Library Stuff ]
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Free Web Statistics with Google Analytics (formerly Urchin Hosted statistics)
Hi Friends,
Google's Urchin is now Google Analytics and... it is free! We have been using Urchin stats for ourselves, and our clients, even before the Urchin team was a part of Google, and it is Good. Now everyone can use it on their Web site (or client Web sites!).
Any way, I am retagging up our Web site tonight with the hosted Urchin Google Analytics code and will post some notes about it at a later date. I wonder what other kewl new (or old :) free stuff good Google will do in the future...
Peace - Tim
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BlawgThink - Thursday & Friday November 11 & 12 - Blogs and SEO Talk
Hi Friends,
I am going to be speaking on Search Engine Optimization and Blogs at LexThink's upcoming BlawgThink conference this Friday and Saturday (November 11 & 12).
LexThink is run by Chief Thinking Officer Matthew Homann (who also has the [non]billable hour blog) and Futurist and Director of Innovation Dennis Kennedy (and you can read his blog here).
You can find information on the schedule and speakers on the BlawgThink Pages. And you can get updates on the LexThink Blog.
Here is a partial list of the speakers: Jeff Beard, David Bowerman, Matt Buchanan, Henry Copeland, Ben Cowgill, Dennis Crouch, Steve Dembo, Carolyn Elefant, Fred Faulkner Peter Flashner, Michael Herman, Matt Homann, Will Hornsby, Brandy Karl, Dennis Kennedy, Cathy Kirkman, Rick Klau, Patrick Lamb, Jim McGee, Diane Murley, Steve Nipper, Kevin O'Keefe, Sabrina Pacifici, Evan Schaeffer, Bonnie Shucha, Doug Sorocco, Tim Stanley (me), Ernest Svenson and Jack Vinson.
And here is a list of the sponsors of BlawgThink, with links to their Web sites: Intel, NetCentrics, MindJet, LegalZoom, CasePost, Box.net and Gyronix
I am going to give a brief overview of search engine optimization (SEO) and why blogs do well (good post headlines used in the title tags, easy to get linked up, well formed xhtml....) and then walk though what you can do to really optimize your blog - but you will have to attend the talk :)
Peace - Tim
:: Rock Me on the Water by Jackson Browne
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