Discover is a component of the Omniture Online Business Optimization Platform, and is a solution that Omniture claims can accomodate all levels of business users by generating everything from simple reports to more complex methods of data aggregation and analysis.

The features included in Discover 2.0 include:

– Real-Time Segmentation: Allows users to create and simultaneously compare multiple customer segments and key performance metrics to identify and optimize the most profitable customer segments

– Multi-Dimensional Site Analysis: Provides visual analysis of site navigation by customer segments using color, size, movement, position and volume which help businesses to improve site design to drive an increase in desired customer actions such as: revenue, subscriptions, form completion, pages viewed, trips booked, etc.

– Virtual Focus Group: Provides deep insight into the unique site experience of an individual customer within a selected segment to better understand their requirements and preferences in order to make changes in real-time site design, content and promotions to enhance the customer experience

– Advanced Fallout Analysis: Allows users to dynamically build and analyze the effectiveness of online processes to more effectively improve customer conversion or understand content interest

– Dynamic Path Flow: Helps interactively explore unique customer paths to optimize content placement and page navigation

"Multiple analytics platforms and technologies can create big reporting problems for companies," said Bill Gassman, research director for Gartner. "Industry advances in data integration, business intelligence and analytics make it possible for users in different roles to work off a common set of information. With shared information comes greater insight and better decisions."

"Discover is superior to other approaches because of its virtually unlimited power, flexibility and ease-of-use," said Brigham Graff, director of website marketing, Overstock.com. "Now, we can get real-time insights to create customer segments on-the-fly and make immediate changes to our marketing campaigns that maximize every dollar of our online advertising investment."

"To effectively compete today, businesses need a faster and easier way to identify and respond to new business opportunities," said Josh James, CEO and co-founder, Omniture. "As new customer interaction channels proliferate and the impact of search marketing continues to grow, Discover is a lifeline that can unlock the incredible insights hidden in data so businesses can more clearly see and focus on what they need to do to win."

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• Forrester: Digitizing the Human Experience
• How Discover Card Is Connecting With Customers
• Charlene Li on Social Computing
• Oh, The Humanity!
• Nicholas Negroponte on One Laptop Per Child

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Christopher Carfi, CEO and co-founder of Cerado, looks at sales, marketing, and the business experience from the customers point of view. He currently is focused on understanding how emerging social technologies such as blogs, wikis, and social networking are enabling the creation of new types of customer-driven communities. He is the author of the Social Customer Manifesto weblog, and has been occasionally told that he drives and snowboards just a little too quickly.

Mashable’s Pete Cashmore pointed out the nascent MySpace clone populating the Internet. The new site, called YoungFeds.org, describes itself as “an online and live destination for young professionals working in and with the federal government to meet, network and advance.”

Maybe going to Georgetown Law means you don’t hear about places like MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, Live Journal, Xanga, Multiply, or any one of Yahoo’s seemingly endless social networking locations on the vast Internet. It doesn’t seem likely though.

There is a single post on the site’s blog, posted by GoodGovGuy welcoming visitors to the site. GGG wrote that the new site is an effort of the Council for Excellence in Government.

If you’re as cynical as the typical hack writer, the first thing that entered your mind just then was, “Council for Excellence in Government? Must have just launched.” It actually debuted in 1983, but asking when they might get started would probably be rude.

Geico supports the YoungFeds.org site too. I learned something new, namely that Geico wasn’t the name of a CGI gecko, but an acronym for Government Employees Insurance Company. Geico is one of Warren Buffett’s centerpieces in the Berkshire Hathaway cornucopia of companies, so there’s a pretty good chance my tax dollars have helped fund some of Buffett’s and Bill Gates’ bridge games.

One feature of YoungFeds.org, the 35 < 35 group, forms an advisory board for the site. These are 35 people under the age of 35 described as "a group of informal advisors who help us with content ideas, write articles and opinion pieces, and even "guest blog" for us." They come from a variety of federal agencies, including Cabinet-level departments.

The social networking features one might expect to see, like personal profiles, don't seem to have a place on the site. It's kind of hard to "meet, network, and advance" when the closest thing to a social networking tool seems to be the calendar listing a Young Government Leaders event at Health & Human Services tomorrow night.

Maybe they have a lot of functionality under the hood that we civilians can't see. But if the inside is like the outside of YoungFeds.org, they need to bring a couple of extreme programmers in-house who know Yahoo well and can plug in all kinds of social networking API and widget goodness into the site.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Are you among the thousands of professionals who have a newsletter that doesn’t get results? … Do you struggle to get your newsletter out to clients and prospects on time every month?

Yes? Then maybe you are guilty of committing one or more of the following deadly newsletter sins:

1. You spend hours surfing the ‘Net, researching for an article, getting ‘screen sucked’ without any apparent value

2. You format it yourself using your Outlook email program

3. You send your ezine from your email program

4. You get business cards of people you meet at events and add them to your subscriber list

5. You manually add and delete email addresses from your list

6. You manually send subscribers a welcome message, thanking them for signing up for your ezine

7. You miss your monthly or weekly ezine deadline and send it out ‘whenever you can’

8. You only send it out whenever you have a new product or service to announce

9. Your ezine consists mainly of sales copy, with a clear call to action: buy your product

10. Your ezine is purely information-based, with interesting articles, but with no reference to your products or services, and no call to action

Okay, I’m exaggerating here, I’m sure you are more sophisticated than that!

You may already use one of the list management services such as Constant Contact or Aweber and would never think of committing these ‘faux pas’! Or perhaps you still print out and mail newsletters, and have decided to start emailing your company newsletter to save costs.

You have a list of people you’ve met at conferences and trade shows, and are not sure if it is permitted to add them to your subscriber list. Maybe you’re scratching your head wondering where you’ll find the time to do your electronic newsletter (“ezine”), so you keep putting it off.

So many questions! If you are an entrepreneur or a small business professional learning how to use the Internet, you already know how fundamental an emailed newsletter is for your online marketing.

How do you learn all this while still managing your business and other marketing tasks?

Did you know that you can send out your ezine through your shopping cart, if you have the right one?

These are some of the advanced secrets that insiders use to get better results from their ezines. Emailed newsletters are getting more complex, with laws regulating what you can and cannot do. The percentages of opened email rates are getting lower each year. Yet ezines are still a fundamentally effective way to market your products and services onlineif you do it right. If you follow best practices of successful ezine publishers on the Web, you will reap many benefits.

When your readers receive your ezine regularly, they have a chance to get to know you. You will be seen as a credible expert in your field. They will be ready to call you for products or services. They may even forward your ezine to colleagues, increasing the number of people you reach. You can communicate to a global audience. Some readers will convert to clients; others will propose joint venture business opportunities. Your business will grow as will your list of subscribers over time.

Caveat: you must do your ezine right, according to best practices. Otherwise it will become a time- and energy-consuming task instead of effortless marketing. Be wise and invest in learning how to do an ezine that gets results.

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For more leading edge ezine tips go to www.coachezines.com. You can also subscribe to Newsletter Nuggets at http://www.newsletternuggets.com. To learn more about using ezines and other tools like blogs, go to www.blogsquad.biz. Patsi Krakoff, Psy. D. is writer and Internet Marketing expert with over 7 years experience marketing online.

Over 100 websites controlled by Gannett’s (GCI) publishing empire will receive a healthy dose of local search technology. Gannett purchased privately held Planet Discover to fulfill that purpose.

Instead of partnering with an online advertising provider, Gannett, which owns USA Today and about 90 daily newspapers in the US, will keep all the advertising money it garners in-house.

Executives with both companies touted local search as the key point. “Gannett is exactly the kind of partner we need going forward. There are huge opportunities in local search, and Planet Discover is superbly positioned to take advantage of them,” said Terry Millard, president and CEO of Planet Discover.

“Gannett truly understands the importance of local information, which is why Planet Discover is such a perfect fit for us. With this new relationship, we will move more emphatically into deep, robust local search for our 100-plus Web sites,” said Jack Williams, president of Gannett Digital.

Local search is gearing up to reach billion-dollar figures in advertising sales. Borrell Associates has predicted $1 billion in local search ads in 2006 and $4 billion for local paid search ads by 2010.

Gannett isn’t the only publisher to see the glittering salvation of thousands of ad revenue dollars on the horizon. McClatchy (MNI) purchased Knight-Ridder earlier in 2006, and followed that with a local search marketing deal with WebVisible.

McClatchy will use WebVisible’s “Geneva” software to broker deals between advertisers and providers like Yahoo and Google. It’s a different approach than Gannett’s; McClatchy will work with the two big search advertisers instead.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Companies like Apple and Microsoft should be happy with the announcement from six Hollywood studios that movies will go on sale for download this week. The terms of usage for movies downloaded from MovieLink or CinemaNow can only be played on a television if it his connected to a home network, a CNN report said.

Well, maybe not Apple. Visiting MovieLink with a non-Internet Explorer browser throws the site into a paroxysm of digital rage. “Sorry, but in order to enjoy the Movielink service you must use Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher, which supports certain technologies we utilize for downloading movies. Click here to get the latest version of Internet Explorer.”

We think MovieLink and its supporting studios, Warner Bros., Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures, Paramount Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox and MGM, read SecurityProNews.com from time to time. They may wish to discover some reasons why IE may not be the browser of choice for some users.

CinemaNow, supported by Lions Gate and Sony (in a bit of bet-hedging on the latter’s part), at least renders its home page in Firefox and Opera browsers.

Pricing for downloadable videos ranges from $20 to $30 for the newest releases. Older titles are supposed to be available at a lower cost. It isn’t known what constitutes an “older title” in Hollywood mind-speak; for all we know Nosferatu could be the only film that qualifies.

Once a film has been purchased and downloaded, the user may create one backup copy for archival purposes, and that’s it. The copy cannot be viewed on standard DVD players. At least, not until DVD Jon releases a “fix” for that issue.

When considering that movies may only be viewed on a networked TV, it may be too soon to say this helps Apple as much as it does Microsoft. Both companies make media center software, Apple with Front Row and Microsoft with, well, Media Center. MovieLink’s system requirements list IE 5.0 or higher and Windows 2000 or XP.

That leaves Apple, its Mac mini, and Front Row out in the cold. And, it may irritate potential purchasers who own vehicles equipped with DVD players, like several minivan models.

Hollywood does not want to cannibalize DVD disc sales, and rightly so. The industry profits mightily from those sales. But how much could it make with a more generously priced online delivery model, where people could purchase just the movie with its restrictions for a lower price or choose the feature-filled DVD version at current rates?

The MPAA probably will never let us find that out.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

“You won’t believe what’s out there.” That’s not a line from Mulder or Scully, but AgWeb’s introduction to its agriculture search engine.

This isn’t the same as Google, the site noted in a list of frequently asked questions:

The project offers self-service advertising for contextual and banner ads within AgWeb Search. They also have an affiliate program to place its search box on publisher sites.

AgWeb said on its site it is the first search engine designed and built for acriculture and agri-business. “From crop or livestock production to machinery and technology, we search for the information that best matches your needs.”

Searching for soybeans brings back results related to selecting a variety to plant, trading prices for soybean futures, and state and federal marketing on the first page.

Advertising delivered by Planet Discover appears atop the results in banner ads and sponsored text links; text ads also appear on the right of the search results.

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I don’t know a lot about it, but I’m a bit surprised by the reactions to this hardly new idea. (A9 has had something similar for a while with Amazon.com)

Incentives won’t make Yahoo or MSN #1 search:

On the heels of saying they were not going to focus on being #1 search and then taking that back, Yahoo is now flirting around with an incentive plan for users who switch to their search. What a cliche this “incentives to do XYZ thing” is and for them it’s a sign of desperation to me.

That’s a pretty cynical view of the situation. Let’s look at it in light of other incentive programs. The airlines have been doing this for years. You fly with American Airlines and they’ll give you “mileage points” that you can accumulated and redeem for free travel and such. Discover Card offers cash back at the end of the year.

Why do they do this?

Because when you’re in a commodity business, you need to offer people a reason to choose you and stick with your service. They need something that helps to break the tie in their head. Choosing between two or more nearly indistinguishable services is always hard.

You might not think that web search is a commodity service, but I’ve seen public and private data that suggests we’re headed that way. It was only a matter of time, right?

Does that mean there won’t be other differentiating features? Of course not. But the core services are pretty darn similar today, aren’t they?

Some people fly American because they offer more room in coach. But those frequent flier miles don’t hurt either.

Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.

Visit Jeremy’s blog: Jeremy Zawodny’s blog.

I’ve been a Marriott Rewards member for years as I’ve been a traveling consultant for the IT and now Energy Industry since 1998. After staying in so many Marriott’s I’ve come to value inside information on the company for both business and leisure purposes. My hope is that this blog will become a fine resource for travelers everywhere who prefer Marriott Hotels.

Links: Podcast NYC and Red Room Chronicles

This product-focused blog is the polar opposite of “Discover the Truth about the Land Rover Discovery 3” blog, inaugurated by a vey unhappy customer. The blog chronicles the customer’s experience and Land Rover’s response (or lack thereof) and represents a public relations nightmare for the organization. (They could certain turn the situation to their advantage by taking certain steps, but as it stands, the blog is a very public expose of the company’s lack of customer focus.)

Safuto, on the other hand, is a happy customer who prefers not to stay anywhere but Marriott. His blog represents a pure opportunity for Marriott. Whether they capitalize on that opportunity (by taking Safuto into their confidence and feeding him advance information, as they would a reporter covering the brand), “Red Room Chronicles” could become-as Safuto hopes it will-a source of information for people with an interest in Marriott.

It’s not the first blog of its kind by any stretch of the imagination. All those Macintosh-focused blogs (including the ones Apple sued) embrace exactly the same concept. But the introduction of a blog on something as non-tech as a hotel chain indicates that we’ll see more and more of this approach. It could affect everything from company PR to the role of an investment analyst.

Does it mean there’s no role for PR? As Todd Cochrane suggested on Geek News Central, does’t this just mean companies should can their PR staffs and encourage-or even pay-more Rob Safutos to blog about the company? Not on your life. In addition to the things the PR professionals do that are behind the scenes, communicators can provide support to these bloggers and use the blogs’ contents to reinforce other communication efforts.

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Shel Holtz is principal of Holtz Communication + Technology which focuses on helping organizations apply online communication capabilities to their strategic organizational communications.

As a professional communicator, Shel also writes the blog a shel of my former self.

The planet, estimated by University of Tasmania professor John Dickey to be possibly ten times the size of Jupiter, was discovered in concert with other telescopes around the world.

According to an ABC Online report, a gravitational lens event occurred, an event similar to an eclipse. But instead of a star being blocked by an object, the light of the background star gets magnified.

Scientists hope that the process, designed to find gas giant planets like Jupiter and this discovery, can be refined to seek out Earth-like planets next. One estimate places the odds of making a discovery like this at 10 million to one.

The discovery has been labeled OB-05-071, and resides about 15,000 light years away from Earth.

Congratulations to the scientists on their discovery. Said Professor Dickey: “Finding out how many stars have planets, and then how many have Earth-mass planets, will help to figure out how likely intelligent life is within our galaxy.”

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.