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Google Reader No Longer Just for RSS Feeds

Written on January 26, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing

Attend any of my presentations on the topic of competitive intelligence and you’ll hear me recommend various tools for keeping tabs on changes your competitors make to their web pages.

Now, Google Reader has entered the page monitoring business:

For example, if you wanted to follow Google.org’s latest products, just type “http://www.google.org/products.html” into Reader’s “Add a subscription” field. Click “create a feed”, and Reader will periodically visit the page and publish any significant changes it finds as items in a custom feed created just for that page.

A quick confirmation:

And Google Reader will start alerting you to any changes it discovers on a page.

I’m going to test it out on a few of my competitors web sites and will let you know if it blows the doors of the previous tools I recommended–which I doubt, but who knows.

Oh, and the new feature isn’t just for competitive intelligence. There are a bunch of uses for it, including:

• New coupons are posted to your favorite retailer
• Reputation monitoring for sites that don’t provide RSS feeds
• New real estate listings
• Hard to find items on Craigslist

Any other cool uses you can think of?

Continued here:
Google Reader No Longer Just for RSS Feeds

Google Toobar Spying on Whitehouse.gov (and others)?

Written on January 26, 2010 by admin

Filed Under: marketing, seo

Now he’s an interesting discovery by Ben Edelman: disabling the Google Toolbar doesn’t actually prevent it from sending data back to Big Brother Google.

He ran some tests, with the Google Toolbar disabled and closed from view, and sure enough, the toolbar still transmitted URL information back to the search giant.

In his example, Edelman throws a little spice on his privacy concerns by visiting www.Whitehouse.gov to demonstrate the covert signal:

He notes that this only happens if you have the “Enhanced Features”–such as PageRank and Sidewiki–enabled, but he also points out just how hard it is to disable these features (you have to reinstall Google Toolbar).

Now, here’s the thing. If you’re an SEO of any kind, you probably already had a gut-feeling that simply not displaying the toolbar wasn’t really a way to stop Google from getting its grubby hands on your surfing habits–right? So consider this confirmation for most of us and a warning to anyone that had no idea.

So, what should Google do? Edelman suggests the following:

Google’s first step is simple: Fix the Toolbar so that X and Manage Add-Ons in fact do what they promise. When a user disables Google Toolbar, all Enhanced Features transmissions need to stop, immediately and without exception. This change must be deployed to all Google Toolbar users straightaway.

Will Google volunteer such a change, or will it take some European court to force its hand?

Here is the original:
Google Toobar Spying on Whitehouse.gov (and others)?