We all should keep an eye on Flash, and how we use it in our Web sites. Apple does not support Flash. Consequently, because iPad’s are becoming so widely used, this is going to cause some tough decisions to be made.

This is a strange turn of events for me. I typically am the person who fights against the use of Flash in Web sites. But now I find myself on the other side of the discussion.

Flash has become a solid tool for presenting multimedia content. And right now, I don’t believe there is a better technology that can take its place.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. Will you take the Flash movie off of your site?

Here are all the news stories from the past week that I found interesting:

Marketers Respond to the Apple v. Flash Battle

Programmers and Web designers say clients increasingly are asking that their websites or applications be compatible with Apple’s iPhone and iPad. Those sites can’t be built with Adobe’s Flash technology, which is used widely for online video and animation but which Apple has banned from its devices.

Yahoo Buys Associated Content and $5 Per Article ‘Journalists’ Celebrate

The deal, which will be announced later today, is part of an effort to shore up Yahoo’s content offerings and underscores the increased use of low-cost, crowd-sourced content, a strategy that AOL is pursuing through its SEED content factory, as well as by Demand Media, which reportedly hired Goldman Sachs to explore an IPO this summer.

Foursquare Check Ins Growing Rapidly

Responding to criticism for Foursquare’s recent downtime, the company said it’s now handling an average 600,000 “check-ins” per day.

That’s basically double the less than 400,000 check-ins per day in late March — just two months ago — and up about 5X from when it hit 1 million check-ins a WEEK in February.

Google Handles Privacy Blunder Well

Google added that, Google has made a decision to completely stop using the WiFi data collection technology with Street View cars in the future. Those wifi collecting cars will be taken out of the rotation and not be used due to the privacy concerns expressed globally. In addition to these steps, Google promised to ask a third party to audit the software at issue and conduct internal reviewing procedures to ensure that the controls are in place to prevent these issues in the future.

Is Social Conversation The Future Of Polls And Surveys ? [Study] – Search Marketing News Blog – Search Engine Watch (SEW)

In a study called From Tweets to Polls: Linking Text Sentiment to Public Opinion Time Series, researchers found that online social conversation analysis could also “capture important large-scale trends.”

U.S. Q1 Online Ad Revenues Hit Record $5.9bn As Market Looks Up – Search Marketing News Blog – Search Engine Watch (SEW)

Online advertising revenues hit a record $5.9 billion in the U.S. in the first quarter, reflecting an uptick in the country’s economy as well as the increasing role of online advertising in marketers’ campaigns, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) said in a report.

How to Cloak Your Affiliate Links the Easy Way

Nowadays, I use a much simpler technique that puts all my affiliate links on one php page, i.e. link.php, which resides in the root directory.

Photo from: Philips Box Flash on Flickr

I put a lot on the line with this event.

I’ve been a huge fan and participant of The Web Association for years.

Recently, we were talking and they mentioned that they would like to try an event in Akron.

The first idea that came to mind was a social media event featuring the Akron-Canton Airport. They are doing some world-class, cutting edge social media tactics. I really wanted this to be the first event.

Everyone at the Web Association thought it was an awesome idea.

I then talked to Kristie VanAuken, the airport’s  Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing & Communications Officer about the idea. Because of her extreme awesomeness (you’ll see what I mean) she was all about it.

But here’s where it got tricky. The Web Association was concerned about having the event too far south. They were afraid they might not get enough people at the event.

But it seemed like the place to have the event was right at the airport.

I really pushed for them to try it here. They said it was a huge risk because if we didn’t get a good turnout we might not be able to do another Akron / Canton event.

But I knew my Akron and Canton peeps would totally come through.

And sure enough, the event is filling up fast.

But I don’t want the attendance to just be “good.” I want The Web Association to be blown away!

So, let’s show those Clevelander’s what we’ve got. Let’s fill this puppy up!

If you are available:

May 27, 2010
11:30 AM – 1:30 PM

Please come to this most awesome event.

You are going to learn a lot about how social media is done right. You are going to be able to check out the very sweet CAK airport.

And you will be able to show your Akron / Canton amazingness.

PLEASE COME TO THIS EVENT!

CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE AND REGISTER.

The story that impressed me this week was Facebook Served Most Display Ads in Q1.

Facebook seems to be an unstoppable force.

There has been a lot of talk about Facebook privacy. But I have my doubts that’s going to do much to their popularity. I have a feeling that most of that conversation is just inside baseball.

This display ad fact is just another feather in a well plumed hat.

Also, this is not good news for Yahoo. Even though search is a deteriorating asset for Yahoo, at least they were world leaders of display. Now they have that taken from them.

It’s a fascinating industry.

Here’s the rest of the news:

YouTube Gets Unlisted (A Step in the Right Direction for Privacy!)

The new feature will keep unlisted videos from the general search results, but still allow anyone with a direct link to watch the video. (So it will still be completely possible for video sharing to get more than a little out of hand if people continue to pass a link along.)

Facebook Served Most Display Ads in Q1, Beat Yahoo

Facebook served 16% of all display ads in Q1 of this year, according to comScore, making it the largest online display ad publisher in the US—handily beating #2 Yahoo

Twitter Biz Center Being Introduced

the most interesting is likely to be the ability to receive a direct message from any follower whether your company is following them or not. This could be a boon to companies using Twitter to assist with customer service efforts. There will also be a verified account optiond as well.

Google Up While bing and Yahoo Slip

Hitwise is reporting that all is once again normal with the world of search as Google garnered 71% of the total searches performed in the US in April. This is a 2 percent increase from March numbers. While bing had been showing some gains recently and giving some people hope that they would be a possible contender to Google at some point the search wannabe saw a 2 percent slip.

Advertisers Eager To Try Google AdWords New Broad Match Modifier

This new modifier is named the “broad match modifier” and it is currently being tested in Canada and the U.K. To implement the modifier, just put a plus symbol (+) directly in front of one or more words in a broad match keyword. Each word preceded by a + has to appear in your potential customer’s search exactly or as a close variant. Close variants include misspellings, singular/plural forms, abbreviations and acronyms, and stemmings (like “floor” and “flooring”). Synonyms (like “quick” and “fast”) and related searches (like “flowers” and “tulips”) aren’t considered close variants.

Image by Wordle

Image by: http://www.wordle.net/

I’m one of these people that is always looking for a cause.

In the web world, if I had one main cause it would be: Stop changing your web addresses.

This topic had recently come up on a Google Webmaster Central Forum. But the defining heart of this argument can be found here: Hypertext Style: Cool URIs don’t change. This article is written by the good people at w3.org.

People change web addresses like they change cars. And as a result it causes breaks in the web. This was never the way it was meant to be. Links are meant to be around forever. If you make a page imagine you are making a time capsule for your grand children. They should be able to find the page you wrote about the cool new product you just launched today (April 26, 2010).

This article talks about things like “duty” and “2000 years from now”. You aren’t just a marketer or a web developer… you are a historian. Don’t take your job lightly. I think I’m going to go make some t-shirts for my new found cause.

Here’s the rest of the news:

Mobile Couponing Set to Explode?

Text-based coupons are the fastest-growing and most obvious mobile marketing application, and the easiest to implement, says the report. Redemption rates for mobile coupons are 10x that of mail or newspaper distributed coupons. The report summarizes the future by noting that a restaurant in Texas pays $37 to send out 500 text messages for a “buy-one/get-one-free burger” offer and gets 60 people to walk in the door, for incremental revenue of $1,000 per day.

Hulu Plus: Content at a Cost?

Under the proposal, Hulu would continue to provide for free the five most recent episodes of shows like Fox’s “Glee,” “ABC’s “Lost” or NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.” But viewers who want to see additional episodes would pay $9.95 a month to access a more comprehensive selection, called Hulu Plus, these people said.

Facebook Has Over 40% of Social Media Traffic

The chart, according to comScore shows that 41% of social media traffic is going to Facebook.

Google Local Business Center Now Google Places

Google has decided to change the name of what was called the “Google Local Business Center” to “Google Places.” The rationale, according to the press release, is to better connect Google Place Pages with the place where local business information is claimed, entered and enhanced:

Hypertext Style: Cool URIs don’t change.

It is the the duty of a Webmaster to allocate URIs which you will be able to stand by in 2 years, in 20 years, in 200 years. This needs thought, and organization, and commitment.

My Secret to Running Successful Competitions on a Blog

I must have run 50-60 competitions on my blogs over the years but if there’s one thing I’ve learned about which ones work best it is this – MAKE THEM SIMPLE.

Me at my Palmer House in Chicago “office” for the next couple days.

I think the big news that seemed to make the rounds of all the major blogs this past week what the whole “Using site speed in web search ranking” thing. This makes search engine optimizers all abuzz. But I suspect it’s going to end as much ado about nothing.

Just the same, if I were you, I’d read the article and then follow the links to learn how to determine what your site load time is. Chances are it’s fine. But if you find there is an issue you might want to take a look to see what you can do to speed things up.

Here are all the rest of the Web marketing news articles in the last week:

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Using site speed in web search ranking

that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

If you are a site owner, webmaster or a web author, here are some free tools that you can use to evaluate the speed of your site:

Apple’s iAds Bring Advertising to iPhone Applications

Apple plans to host and sell the ads, and will give the developer 60% of the collected revenues.

The ads will be interactive, take advantage of video, and allow developers to create free apps and monetize them with the ads.

Retargeting Picking Up—And So Are Privacy Concerns

Last month, Google announced a new “remarketing” feature, allowing advertisers to later target people who’d visited their sites or YouTube channels. Retargeting like this is a popular marketing topic: an Advertise.com/SEMPO survey (via) found that slightly under 70% of marketers had never used it, but 46.3% of marketers thought retargeting was the “most underutilized marketing strategy.”

Post Tech – FCC loses Comcast’s court challenge, a major setback for agency on Internet policies

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, in a 3-0 decision, ruled that the FCC lacked the authority to require Comcast, the nation’s biggest broadband services provider, to treat all Internet traffic equally on its network.

Search Market Share Reports Show Google Losing & Bing Gaining?

Both showed Bing growing and Google not from the previous month, in fact, Google has lost share for the “fourth straight month” according to Hitwise.

Google April 2010 PageRank Update

Google had update the toolbar PageRank scores over the weekend. The last PageRank update was about 3 months ago in late December or early January. But an interesting fact is that Google has updated their PageRank values in the toolbar every year in April since 2004.

Product Feeds Offer Untapped SEO, PPC Opportunities – Search Engine Watch (SEW)

Product feeds are so imperative because, quite often, these are the source of data for your Web site, shopping engines, search ads, and more.

Research Shows Social Media and TV Importance By Age

What it shows is that the young crowd has greater saturation in who has profiles but the older age groups are seeing large percentage increases in social networking profiles.

I’ve been out of the office for much of the last couple weeks. So I’ve been slow to get the news out to you.

There’s been a lot going on in the last couple weeks. I was at the Search Engine Strategies conference in New York last week. These shows are important for our industry because they often inspire the search engines to bring a new tool or concept to market.

The third keynote address was by Bing’s Senior Vice President of the Online Audience Business, Yusuf Mehdi. Here are some of the quotes from him that jumped out at me:

• Search is now transactional & for advanced research. “What r the 5 top causes of pancreatic cancer?”
• More than 60% of the time people take 2.5 weeks to finish a travel purchase online.
• “Dialogue model” now is where search is. How does a search engine help you complete a task?
• Best practice to be found at Bing: use proper keywords, be spiderable, related anchor text.
• You need to understand my “intent”.
• “Helping you get a task done, not just giving you links.”

Bing appears to be taking an approach of addressing complete transaction needs of their visitors. This seems good on the face of things. But it is definitely a departure from the model we currently have.

The goal of Google is to get you to directly to the site that answers your search query. The Bing goal appears to be to solve the majority of your question on Bing. They say, “Make Bing your decision engine”.  This is clearly a different end result. It will be interesting to see how this all evolves.

Here are the other news stories that struck me as interesting:

Now Compare Your Search Ads to Facebook Ads Performance

It will soon be possible to compare the performance of search and social ad campaigns side by side. Clickable, the ad management platform that lets search marketers measure and track the performance of their online marketing campaigns across different search engines and advertising networks, will be adding Facebook Ads as an option on April 12.

Nestle Finding That Social Media’s Not So Sweet

Nestle has stepped in the social media muck as of late with its association with a company that supplies palm oil to the Swiss chocolate giant. So much for being neutral, huh?

Forrester Predicts the Interactive Agency of Record Will Die

You see, “the agency of record” will need to be able to handle both traditional and interactive marketing–the lines have blurred. If you’re not the agency of record, you’ll still have a role to play–even if it’s a niche role that your firm specializes in.

Google’s SiteLinks Program Very Good …. For Google

Ad Sitelinks allows advertisers as many as five links in three lines of text. Macy’s, for example includes links to “free shipping deals,” “shop online,” “find a store,” and “account login,” in addition to a link to its home page. Toys “R” Us includes a link that says, “Buy one get one free little tikes!”

Social Media Pays: People More Likely to Buy from Brands they Follow

The most popular reason people follow brands in social media is to receive discounts. But there were also many people who responded that they follow as a customer of the brand and to show their support of it. On Twitter, that reason was less popular. Only 2% of respondents followed a brand to show their support. More often, they are looking for discounts, new information and exclusive content.

Study Predicts Mobile App Market Will Show Significant Upward Mobility

According to the study, created by Chetan Sharma Consulting, mobile app downloads should jump from 7 billion in 2009 to almost 50 billion in 2012. By this time, the market will be worth 17.5 billion dollars, the study predicts, despite the expected lower price of mobile apps, which should drop from the current average of 2 dollars per app to 1.5 dollars in 2012.

Fuzzy Math Puts Facebook Ahead of Google as Most Visited Site

Facebook just overtook Google as the most visited site in the U.S

Google Acquires Episodic Online Video Platform for Broadcasting Live and On-Demand Content – Search Marketing News Blog – Search Engine Watch (SEW)

The online video platform lets publishers and marketers host, stream, measure and monetize their video content. Content creators, marketers and enterprise customers like Showtime Sports use Episodic to deliver video to the Web and mobile devices.

Google Made A Major Move To Behavioral Targeting This Week! Did You Miss It? – Search Marketing News Blog – Search Engine Watch (SEW)

The “search funnel” allows people to check what other keywords were clicked on before a conversion occurs.

No Mobile Version of Your Site? There’s a Mobile Ad for That – Search Marketing News Blog – Search Engine Watch (SEW)

AdMob now offers mobile ads for non-mobile sites.

It’s called the Adaptive Mobile Ad Unit. The ad automatically scales, even when users scale to view desktop versions of websites on their mobile browsers.

The ad appears – and stays – at the top of the page. Initially, this is only being rolled out for iPhone traffic.