Friday’s Trip Around the Blogosphere

Kathy Sierra’s - Creating Passionate Users
You really ought to check out Kathy Sierra’s recent post about “outspending vs. outteaching”.

Is Google Acquiring G.CN ?

The China Search Engine View blog writes:

[W]hen you search the whois here, you may find there is one item more, “Registrant Organization: 北京刘元和君咨询有限公司” (Jan Liu & Associates), the attorney for Google’s case of googel.com.cn and googel.cn. Has Google really got g.cn?
This looks pretty realistic to me – and I must say that it’s an interesting branding play for Google China!

Speaking of Google – Aaron Wall has a great discussion about Google being and invisible hand in online marketing .

Aaron takes a look at the perception of trusted advertisers and how that affects your marketing spend and budget.

Their newest ad unit is an unmarked text link ad, which only displays any ad notification AFTER people hover over the link. Publishers who refuse to sell links directly will publish the ads, and if they spread anything like AdSense does, what happens to links to commercial sites? What happens when virtually nobody is willing to link to a commercial site unless it is through Google? What happens when their affiliate payouts are not high enough to solicit a review? And what happens to those businesses when Googlers decide they want that market for themselves, like real estate?

Yahoo Answers is a Political Campaigners Dream!

I noticed today on the front page of Yahoo a link to the Answers section of the site where they have featured Democratic hopeful Barak Obama with a question for everyone to answer.

How can we engage more people in the democratic process?
I will be asking questions to help create dialogue around this and many other important topics so please add me to your Answers Network so that we can begin exchanging ideas and hopefully make changes that will benefit the future.

This question was posed 6 days ago and there are 15 days left for you to lodge your own answer. The total number of answers is nearing 3k, being at 2,954 Yahoos that have answered Obama’s question.

This is a great way for a young candidate to reach out and have his policies be heard by young votes – this is the type of campaigning that will make a huge difference in the 2008 election, one that we may see social networking strategy be a huge part of the outcome!

So, What’s your Answer?