ITNews

The New York Times posting How Do They Track You? Let Us Count the Ways details some of the ways advertisers are tracking you.

Such targeted advertising requires data, so there’s a good argument to be made that we can spot the companies that will lead the pack in online advertising by looking at the depth of data that large media companies can collect about each of their Web visitor. Here is some more detail about the methodology comScore and I came up with:

(Credit: New York Times)

What is important here is not the precise numbers, but the overall picture that the biggest Internet companies are accumulating many different ways to collect data about users. Many caveats are needed: Not all of this data is useful; not all of it is retained by the companies with access to it; much of it cannot be traced back to individuals.

Check out the posting for more details and caveats.

I’m looking forward to the day when we the people open up our windows and yell out we’re mad as hell and aren’t going to take anymore ad manipulation abuse, then boycott companies that are spending the most trying to manipulate us.

Unfortunately, I think I have a long wait ahead of me.

…John

The key findings of the 2008 Annual Google Communications Intelligence Report aren’t very encouraging.

Trend #1: As the number of electronic messages increased in 2007, spam continued to be the biggest issue for most organizations

(Credit: Google)

Trend #2: Executives look to IT personnel − rather than end-users − to ensure security and compliance

(Credit: Google)

Trend #3: IT professionals face serious challenges in reaching security and
compliance goals

(Credit: Google)

Trend #4: Ensuring communications security and compliance is a significant productivity drain on IT resources

(Credit: Google)

Trend #5: Organizations felt they spent too much time and money on their current communications security and compliance solution and had several key requirements on their wish list for a solution that overcomes these financial and productivity drains

(Credit: Google)

Trend #6: SaaS models are gaining in popularity − and market share − because they directly address key IT productivity pains

(Credit: Google)

(Credit: Google)

Conclusion

The continued growth in electronic messaging − and the accompanying surge in spam − is a consistent and increasingly painful thorn in the side of IT professionals.
In most organizations, it is the IT department that is held accountable for ensuring the security and compliance of their electronic communications, but the obstacles to success are significant.

IT professionals today are not only facing the threat of spam, viruses, and worms, but they are also attempting to secure their increasingly mobile workforces, ensuring the availability and continuity of critical business processes, meeting compliance goals, planning for disaster recovery, preventing data leakage, and protecting their internal systems from hackers. It’s no wonder IT professionals are feeling the pain most acutely in their productivity levels.

SaaS solutions in general, and Google’s message security and compliance services in specific, address these IT productivity issues and help organizations tame the threats that lurk in electronic messaging. By deploying Google’s services, organizations can reduce the pains of ensuring security and compliance − and improve the productivity of their IT professionals.

Thank you Google for this sobering information.

Please read this most interesting report for much more detail.

…John

Google AdWords will soon be penalizing slow landing page load time, in its continuing efforts to improve user experiences.

Read all about it in the Google blog posting Landing page load time will soon be incorporated into Quality Score.

I think the traditional wisdom that Web surfers abandon a site if the first page doesn’t load within 8 seconds is no longer true. High speed Internet connections have most likely increased impatience to 4 seconds or less.

…John

Being an introverted sort, I just don’t get the explosive growth of social networks.

(Credit: compete)

…John

The author of CNET posting Making the switch from Microsoft Office to Web apps, Dennis O’Reilly, has been using ThinkFree Online instead of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.

(Credit: ThinkFree Online)

ThinkFree Online is a Java-based service that provides 1GB of storage for your files, though individual files can’t be larger than 10MB. You can upload .doc, .xls, and .ppt files to the site (it works with Office 2007’s XML formats as well), work on them in an environment much like their native Office apps (though in a smaller window with text ads along the right margin), and return them to your desktop, where they open in the Office equivalent with all changes in place. There’s also a limited-function, Ajax-based Quick Edit app for making fast, simple changes to files.

You can choose to keep your files private, or share them, either with a select group, or the world. In fact, easy collaboration is one of the great features of the service for workgroups. You can tag files for easy retrieval, but ThinkFree’s search feature located the files I was looking for without having to attach tags to them.

I gave ThinkFree Online a whirl. It ran very slow on my Mac workstation. I think I’ll stick with Google Aps.

…John