WebProNews

MySpace, Facebook To Spread the Love.

Christmas isn't even here yet and the social networking giants Facebook and MySpace are already focusing on Valentine's Day. MySpace will introduce members to a pickup artist, while Facebookers get access Match.com's Little Black Book, both in efforts to help members' love lives.You remember in college when you had a large circle of male and female buddies and everything was awesome until two of the buddies started dating and then it just got weird? Well, Facebook and MySpace are looking to mimic that phenomenon online.

Google's Online Marketing Challenge

Google needs a Google contest page to track their list of contests both past and present all in one place. They use contests in different ways (to get work for free, to train future employees, and to expose more people to their products).

Amazon Buys Extremely Rare J.K. Rowling Book

J.K. Rowling created seven handwritten, leather-bound copies of a book called The Tales of Beedle the Bard.  Six were given to close friends, and the last was sold to Amazon.com for about $4 million.

What Do You Think About Paid Links?

Paid links and PR drops were a hot topic at Pubcon Las Vegas last week. We talked to Matt Cutts about it in a video interview, and he explained it quite rationally.

PubCon - Optimize for Contextual Ads

Contextual ads clearly require a different type of optimization from traditional graphics and banner ads. Focusing your site specifically for contextual ads will often result in higher search engine rankings because of the added targeting effort. This panel will look at various optimization and utilitarian methods of engineering a site specifically for contextual based advertising. Moderator: Detlev Johnson Speakers:

Social Media Release Useless?

Greg Jarboe of SEO-PR started the trial over at Search Engine Watch, taking all proponents of the SMR to task and declaring that social media releases are a meatball sundae - a phrase from Seth Godin's new book on marketing. 

Bonnie Brown On Massaging Google Geeks

Bonnie Brown was working as massage therapist at Google from 1999 to 2004. Before that, she ran a private school for 10 years. Now, Bonnie is traveling and also wrote a book called Giigle: How I Got Lucky Massaging Google. I met up with her on Google Talk (the transcript below has spellchecking and punctuation added).

Recommended Online Marketing & PR Reading List

At ad:tech last week, fellow PR/new media marketing practitioner and blogger, Rohit Bhargava and I were talking about his new book, “Personality Not Included - Why Brands Lose Their Authenticity and How Great Companies Get it Back”, and he mentioned that I should send him a list of recommended reading for a new bookstore feature he’s adding to his blog.

Google Helping the Autistic with Project Spectrum

Take a look at this video, where Google explains Project Spectrum, an effort by Google to help those with autism take advantage of their gifts for working and expressing themselves visually using Google SketchUp, its free 3D modeling software:

Google Won't Dominate Book Search

Despite the hubbub generated by a New York Times report, the world of book digitization doesn't start and end with Google, or even the participation of Microsoft and Yahoo in the Open Content Alliance.