Queries like “time in china” and “what time is it in uk” now return OneBox results with a clock icon and the appropriate place and time zone.  Pick something slightly vague, like “time in austin,” and you may get more than one result (Austin, Texas and Austin, Colorado are not in the same zone).

It’s also possible that Google will get it wrong – a search for “time lexington” yields results for cities in Massachusetts and Illinois, but not Kentucky, where the WebProNews offices are located.

Oh, well.  Now you more easily make sense of those Japanese news stories that appear to have been written one day into the future.  Or you can schedule international phone calls without spending five minutes squinting at maps.  “It seems time difference calculations can not be triggered though,” notes Google Blogoscoped’s Philipp Lenssen.  “Entering time difference germany china and similar will not show any onebox, even though it might be helpful.”

Again, Google’s clock feature isn’t going to change the world, but it’s a nice little add-on.

Yahoo Shortcuts Searchers To Enhancements

Yahoo had revealed its Major League Baseball Shortcuts recently. With the close of SES San Jose for 2007, a trio of new ones have been opened for Yahoo searchers.

The Yahoo Search blog has a preview of the latest shortcuts. We’re thrilled that they finally rolled out one for the National Football League. Let’s face facts: which one are we looking forward to seeing play in a couple of weeks, the Reds or the Bengals?

Yahoo’s other two Shortcuts focus on topics that are of significant interest to searchers. Queries for consumer electronics items like laptops bring up a Shortcut with shopping results, including links to brands, specific models, and buying guide information from the Yahoo Tech site.

Medical conditions and medications have a set of Shortcuts available now. Searching for a pharmaceutical will bring up a Shortcut with its name, generic name if available, and linked articles and communities about the drug.

Looking up a medical condition yields similar information, but includes links to other resources when available. Yahoo does not appear to be using a specific health information partner for those resources, as we have seen Ask.com do with Healthline for its medical Smart Answers debut this month.

Ask Makes Smart Answers Healthier

With technology companies ranging from the titans of the Internet to the stealthiest web startups locking on to health-related information, we think signs point to 2008 being a big year for healthcare and the online world.

Ask’s director of online information resources, Gary Price, let us know about the new Health Smart Answers appearing on Ask.com now, as the company takes a step toward the melding of health information with search resources. Here’s a sample query on hip replacement, a common procedure these days for many people.

A study Ask commissioned with Harris Interactive found that people rely on the Internet nearly as much as they do their primary doctors when it comes to healthcare information. It’s an area where Ask wants to be in front those searchers with information at their fingertips (as Gary likes to refer to Smart Answers.)

Partnerships with Healthline and ex-AOL CEO Steve Case’s Revolution Health provide content – including medical definitions, images, links to reference materials and other data – for Health Smart Answers on Ask.

Yahoo Gets Smart About Behavioral Ads

Behavioral targeting for ads has been an area of interest for the major search advertising companies. Google has been playing with it, while Microsoft made it a featured part of their new AdCenter service.

Yahoo has joined the behavioral game with a SmartAds product that should become available today. The New York Times said SmartAds is being tested on Yahoo’s sites by a couple of major airlines, which were unnamed in the report.

Advertisers buying their placements through RightMedia will have SmartAds technology available to them. Yahoo bought RightMedia by acquiring the rest of the company in April 2007; Yahoo previously owned 20 percent of RightMedia.

The Times cited Todd Teresi, senior vice president of display marketplaces at Yahoo, in describing how SmartAds will work:

"We’re doing real-time creative assembly that leverages what we know about our audience," Mr. Teresi said. "You can buy the entire Wall Street Journal site, and when a female shows up, we will create a different ad or when someone from New York shows up, another one."

Yahoo has enjoyed success with branded display advertising, even as its search advertising business faded behind Google’s dominance. SmartAds could make those display ad spaces more valuable to Yahoo and its brand advertisers.

Yahoo Search recently added a shortcut to the music lyrics available through Yahoo Music. They announced the new lyric shortcut with their "Rock the Cash Box?" title at the Yahoo Search blog.

That must be a generational thing. If you’re old enough to have grown up when The Clash were still together, you know it’s Rock The Casbah. Yahoo’s lyric shortcut takes users to "the first ever free and legal lyrics site," which is a nice change from some lyric sites that have popups and even malware on them.

Ask has Smart Answers for May in place. While Mother’s Day will be the chief focus for many people this month, Ask has set up a bunch of other Smart Answers for other May-related topics.

Star Wars progenitor George Lucas has a Smart Answer and a birthday this month; May 14th for the non-Star Wars faithful out there. It’s the day after Mother’s Day, so if you’re celebrating Lucas’ special day by watching all the movies and realize you forgot to get Mom a card, you’re just too late.

Google’s AdWords Editor reached version 3.5, with support for image ads, campaign targeting by region and city, and a drag-and-drop feature.

Current Windows AdWords Editor users will be prompted to upgrade, and new users can get the latest version online. Mac devotees will have to wait a few weeks for 3.5 to become available for OSX.

This all began back in January when I asked Did Gmail’s Spam Filtering Freak Out This Week? and followed that up with Gmail Spam Filtering Update after exchanging a bit of mail with a Googler who worked on Gmail. But ever since then it’s still been a little twitchy, and I’d just decided to accept that and move on.

But at some point in the last couple weeks it finally turned the corner. I can’t recall a single false positive I’ve seen this week and the false negative rate has been remarkably low as well.

See Also:

• Gmail Spam Filtering: Smart but could be Smarter
• Comparing Spam Filters: Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and SpamCop
• Using Gmail as My Spam Filter

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My first reaction is that people are jumping to lots of conclusions about what this program means, what it will do, who it’s competing with, and what it will mean for advertisers, publishers, and arbitrageurs.

I was going to refrain from making a post about this until I had really digested it more and potentially even tried out the beta program if accepted, but since Pete Caputa somehow confused me for being smart, I’ll at least post a few thoughts.

CPA is harder on publishers

There’s no arguing that with CPA ads, publishers take all the risk. This is good for advertisers, and generally it’s harder on publishers. However, GOOD publishers who understand CPA, persuasion architecture, delivering users who will convert, and funneling your site correctly, can actually make more money from CPA then they would from CPC or even a flat CPM. Publishers who don’t understand these things and are used the normal Adsense model will most likely struggle to generate more money with this ad type because of the difference in how you monetize a user.

CPA is a different ball game

There is an assumption that this will be a major challenge to affiliate networks like Commission Junction and Linkshare. Maybe it will be, but I can say that these networks provide a lot of value because they help advertisers create the right kinds of creatives and really optimize CPA. How much advice is Google going to really give on setting everything up? How much human touch will they provide to this process? With Google’s program, if the advertiser’s landing page sucks will Google consult to help them improve it? Sure, they provide access to their Website Optimizer Tool, but those who have tried multi-variate testing know that isn’t just a cut and dry automated process like Google is trying to make all of this.

Will this hurt lead generation or affiliate arbitrage?

I’m not sure I care. Businesses need to provide value, and if Google just made it more efficient so that it’s harder to arbitrage stuff, so be it. I’m not necessarily against arbitrage, but you can’t expect companies to leave things inefficient. Arbitrageurs are always looking for an edge, and most likely they’ll still find one somehow and somewhere.

Overall thoughts

Until we see the program in action, see what advertisers succeed with it, and how publishers can work with it and what types of results they get it’s hard to predict what will happen. The general assumption is that since Google has dominated with Adwords/Adsense/CPC they will dominate CPA by adding it to the mix. Well, Google HAS NOT dominated CPM and display advertising when they added it to Adwords/Adsense. I don’t think it’s a given by any means that this will work as well, however I do give it a better shot. I think the CPA direct marketing advertisers are closer to being the same group that does well with CPC now, while flat CPM and display advertising tend to be a different type of advertiser. It will be interesting to watch.

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Architecture for Humanity held its logo design competition on Flickr and received entries from across the globe. This is a really smart use of Flickr, but an even smarter non-profit using social media to get international graphic design consultation for free.

 2) Retail Hi-Jinks at Best Buy & Wal-Mart News Reports

Best Buy shows us a new definition of bait and switch using its Intranet and Wal-Mart’s latest gaffe has HP hoping its media espionage scandal will now fade away. If only some of Wal-Mart’s political hires were from the Nixon era we could dig up old Watergate jokes.

3) An Open Post to Future Prospective Clients Alan Weinkrantz PR Weblog

Alan lays down his “ten commandments” for prospective clients. Ten seems like a lot to me, but the first one is worth reposting.

“We’re in it as partners for a minimum of six months. The discovery, the messaging, the strategy, the pitching, the dialogues with journalists, analysts, bloggers, thought leaders, road shows, press tours, editorial calendars, tweaking messages, and more….this takes a six month cycle.”

It took me at least six months to get things moving in my current role. Clients wanting to move the needle with a public relations program need to understand it takes time.

4) School shootings? We had Dynamite. Make the Logo Bigger

If you’re old enough to remember this publication, you’ll remember that it was as cool as The Electric Company, only in print.

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In case you’re among the few people that hasn’t seen the campaign, it created waves last year by introducing a for-profit model where companies could sign on to create products that they would sell for profit that became part of a line of items furthering the Red brand and donate a portion of profits to The Global Fund.  

According to Cordua, campaign partners include Gap, Motorola, Converse, Emporio Armani, Apple and American Express (in the UK Only).  The most iconic of partner marketing to date in the US has probably been The Gap, which has featured print ads of T-shirts with such catchy phrases as “Empowe(RED)” and “Admi(Red)” and my personal favourite: Desi(RED) …which will certainly become the T-shirt of choice for all those Desis out there.

 Yet as Piers and PSFK highlighted, among others – the model may not be effective in leveraging what is presumably a huge marketing spend(perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars) for companies like Apple, Motorola and Gap on their (Red) products.  As the counter argument says, wouldn’t it have just been better for all these brands to donate funds directly to the Global Fund instead of launching the Red campaign?  I even got an email earlier this week from Ben over at WPIWeb pointing to a site they helped put together called BuyLessCrap.org which issues a challenge to folks to donate directly to The Global Fund(and other charities) rather than giving their money to companies who will pocket some profit and only hand over the difference.  These are admirable efforts and anything to spark a debate about the level of assistance the Western world is providing to stop the Aids epidemic is good news, in my opinion. 

 At the end of the day, I think where you stand on this comes down to who you think the Product Red campaign is targeted at.  As anyone who has done significant social marketing will tell you, it’s not that difficult to get civic minded people or issue advocates to care about a cause and act to donate or contribute to events.  These are the small group of people that do much good in the world.  The real challenge is getting the person who would never ordinarily think about donating to charity to think about it in a different way.  My view on Product Red is that this is who it targets.  Whether they manage to donate $11 million dollars or $100 million, I think what the brand represents could ultimately be a good thing.  Weaving social marketing and issues into the decidedly profit centered worlds of retail, consumer electronics, and fashion is a new idea and many people won’t agree with the business model, rightly pointing out that we could do so much more good buy simply giving the money to charity directly.  The real issue is that there is a significant percentage of people in the world that just won’t be part of something like this either because they don’t know about it, or are not inclined to participate.  If Product Red can get some of those people involved and raise money in the process – I think it has to be considered a success. 

As a follow up, I’m tagging Nedra, Craig and Alison to talk about this – as I’d love to hear thoughts about it from the real experts …

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We were reminded of this by an entry on Gary Price’s Resource Shelf about a blog we hadn’t seen previously.

The Britannica Blog (Motto: “Where Ideas Matter”) features posts on a broad selection of topics. Authors for these posts tend to be people who have researched and written material for the venerable Encyclopedia Britannica.

Recent posts consider the religious beliefs of America’s Founding Fathers, the sighting of a coyote in New York’s Central Park, and the always-touchy topic of tort reform. It’s a nice distraction from PPC and click fraud discussions.

The other site has been a fixture in our bookmarks for so long it would have barnacles attached if it were a boat. Arts & Letters Daily (Motto: “Veritas Odit Moras,” or roughly ‘truth hates delay’) may look unfriendly with listings for articles based on de Tocqueville or T.S. Eliot, but thinking so would be judging too soon.

They manage to find a lot of off-the-beaten-path intelligent content that gleefully romps from subject to subject. Summarizing what they cover at Arts & Letters would be like giving bicycle lessons to a goldfish.

Both sites manage to offer the visitor something to think about when it’s time to give Yahoo Panama a break. Really.

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